The Göbekli Tepe Debate - Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. So my final point is the falsifiability one. That is, what would it take to refute your hypothesis? Like for me the answer would be like if Go-Bekley Teppi 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 in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before. Perhaps writing isn't always an advance. Perhaps an oral tradition which records in memory, which enhances and uses the power of memory, may be a very effective way of dealing with information. We regard writing as an advance. And I can see lots of reasons why it is an advance, but if we put our self 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 a text in which he is questioned by a pharaoh 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 put them into context and what will happen to memory when people... So there might be a choice not to go that way. But then what do you mean by advance? When you say there used to be a lost advanced civilization before 10,000 years ago, what do you mean? Well 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. 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. 7,000 years before Stonehenge. So 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 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... 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 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 5,500 to 6,000 years old. Gigantea would push it close to 6,000 years old. There are no older sites than that and therefore the megalithic site is associated with a certain stage of neolithic development. Then along comes Gobekli Tepe, 7,000 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 50 times as much as they've already excavated 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 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 11,600 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 immediately a rather puzzling and interesting situation. And I would be remiss as an author and an inquirer into these matters if I didn't take great interest in that. The sudden appearance, 7,000 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 the mystery. To put it into perspective, that's more than 2,000 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 and the construction of the Great Pyramid, you're talking about 2,000 years earlier than that. And that is unbelievable when you're talking about 7,000 years before what we thought people were doing. Okay, 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 advanced, 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. So 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... Yes, that was the theory. So now what archaeologists are saying was, 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. After a very long 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 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 such an extraordinary idea. I get it that mainstream archaeology doesn't want to go there, but that's my job to go there. No, I don't think that's correct. 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? 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, D'Olivira and other such sites is very difficult. You have to be completely stupid to say that that's not a civilization. Gebecli Tepe is a bit more nuanced, you know. 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 patternicity thing. Well, I'm citing Klaus Schmidt, you know. Well, that's all right. But 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 dangerous for anybody, not just you. That's a good point. Who is Klaus Schmidt? Klaus Schmidt was the original excavator of Gebecli Tepe. He was the head of the German archaeological institute Digg at Gebecli Tepe. He kindly spent three days showing me around the site. And really, nobody's disputing the astronomical alignments of Gebecli Tepe. It's not particularly interesting to Klaus Schmidt, but they're there. And what is the alignment? Like, how is it established? Well, when you have a perfectly 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 as established today or with the procession of the equinoxes we talked about? True north is always true north. Okay. It's the rotation axis of our planet. Okay. So to this day, it points exactly in the same place where it was pointing? It always points to true north. Okay. But back to this, you know, they don't want to go. Sure, they want to go there. They would 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 130,000 years ago. This is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis days of 13,000. This was the mastodon bones they found that were smashed. Mastodon bones, yeah. 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. And then what happened? Well, there's been a massive reaction to that and lots of, lots of scathing remarks by other academics. But that's normal. That's how science works. You get, you get pushed back. You got to have a thick skin. It's just the way it goes. You 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 it. 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 the 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. He tappy means in the Turkish language pot bellied Hill. 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 go back to the template there. No one lived 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 lived there. Well, you're 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 field? 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 in every field. I completely agree. But isn't there some proof that 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 Goebekli Tepe? Yeah, to me, that's the stunning beauty of this find. It overturns ideas of primitive hunter-gatherers that could not do this. Apparently, they can. That's one possible assessment. 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 know that. That's right. But if it was, the big National Geographic article emphasized 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. Again, what do we mean by advanced? 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. Some of them are smaller with astronomical alignments. Klaus Schmidt called it a center of innovation. He was intrigued by the way that agriculture emerges around Gobekli Tepe at the same time that Gobekli Tepe 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 I don't see anything particularly – okay, the stone work is spectacular, but that's not any more advanced than a few millennium afterwards. But you're talking about something 20 feet tall, a meter of stone, by people that were hunter-gatherers? But a couple hundred people can move multi-ton stones. There's no mystery in moving the stones. They're still moving 20-ton stones in Indonesia today. And the 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 – But you know that means – But Lasko – But do you know what that means? But Lasko, at 30,000 years ago, has magnificent cave paintings with three-dimensional animals. But that's painting. You know that they – Well, but there's – But do you know – hold on a second. Do you know what I'm saying when I say three-dimensional carvings? Yeah, like the Venus, the Milo. No, the carvings were on the outside, meaning they didn't carve them into the rock. They carved away the rock around them, 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. It's the same brain. Do they go from stone tools to flying airplanes without somebody introducing them to airplanes? Exactly. Yeah, you're actually making his argument for them. No, no. It's not that much of a reach to carve stone. People have been carving stones for thousands of years. But the entire archaeological opinion on megalithic sites for decades before this was precisely that it was beyond their ability to do that. Right, and now the mainstream has changed its mind about this. Okay, but let's pause – Or at the very least, they said – 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 aliens. Yes, okay. He rejects the aliens. 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 some sign of some sort of civilization. I believe so, yeah. It is. It's a gigantic structure. Sure, I agree with Graham that we've, again, undersold who these people were. My friend Jared Diamond goes to Papua New Guinea. He talks in 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 from L.A. He wouldn't last an hour with his Papua New Guinean friends out there 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. They're very smart. Sure. 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 where there's... There are. I visited one of them, Karah and Tepe. You've got the T-shaped pillars sticking out the side of a hill in a farmer's backyard. I mean, 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... Why write a book that says, I'm going to 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, Gobekli Tepe 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, you don't have to satisfy me. You and your colleagues. And I don't... I certainly don't have to satisfy you or them. That's not my project. But like your opening chapter with Schmidt, I thought I really loved 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 wait, what's that again? He's a little bit like Colombo. Like, wait, I have just one more question. And, you know, that mystery kind of thickens. That's perfectly okay. That's great. I mean, 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? Because they didn't have any evidence the contrary. This is evidence the contrary. I agree. So you agree that there weren't other hunter and gatherers. Okay. But 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 Gobekli Tepe is a gigantic stage. Well, we don't. Okay, they didn't live there. So we have to figure out where were they living and what was there. So that has to be excavated. Well, they only excavated 10 percent of it. Meanwhile, what you're saying is that we shouldn't speculate at all because I mean, mainstream archaeology is speculating. Mainstream archaeology is speculating when saying it's definitely was hunter gatherers who did this. That's also speculation. That seems more of a reach. Okay, but not. Okay. They may be more than hunter gatherers. They may have been partially settled. 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 were 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. That's a long time. 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? Well, homes. I'm not sure. They're trash. They're tools. There's something. Well, what would be trash and tools? We've got go back to tappy. 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. That's all I've done. It seems to me that to say hunter gatherers could build this. I'm not wouldn't be opposed to 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. Oh, sorry. It's okay. Well, again, if we place this back, particularly within 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 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, I find it the idea sort of 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, you know, the infrastructure of, of, of large machines and so forth. But to do it by hand, it would be an enormous undertaking. 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 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 Neanderthal diet, right? They have a better buried diet and a lot more free time. Yeah, but that's a lot more stress. We knew that all along about hunt together is when we were saying they couldn't build megalithic science. But we're looking at a time 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 phenomenon, 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, or random, we don't even know the motives of the Easter Islanders. No, we don't. And why they raised these huge, but we know they did it. But hasn't that become a central question, though, what something had to have motivated? But let's get back to the, to Beckley, 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 in agriculture? Before Go Back to Tepe, they didn't have structures and they didn't have agriculture. After 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. 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. I don't think so. I mean, the painting is even more sophisticated. Sorry, I'm 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 Stonehenge or Gigantea with cave paintings. I agree with you. The cave paintings are magnificent. I've had the privilege to visit many of the painted caves. Stunning work. And as Picasso said, when he came out of Lascaux, we have invented nothing. I mean, 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 project. It's not like huts. It's hundreds and hundreds of very, very large megalithic pillars, which have to be mobilized, brought to the place. Organizing a workforce in order to do that, even that requires preparation and time and learning and practice. It's not something that you wake up one morning and just can do overnight. You think that the paintings are more impressive than Goebecli Tappi? Yeah. Or at least comparable. I think that's absolutely ridiculous. Because to convey three dimensionality on a 2D plane, that's what Picasso meant. It's like, wow, that's incredible. It's like developing perspective. And to use the natural shape of the wall to create a three dimensional perspective look, that's pretty abstract. You're comparing apples and pears. It's not a construction project. I don't think it's even remotely impressive. But I don't think it's even remotely as impressive. But what I'm saying is that it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to think, these people were pretty smart. Well, we know that they were smart. We know what they were smart because of the fact that those construction projects were done by who, by whoever. We know that they were smart. Whoever built Goebecli Tappi 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 a rectified 20 foot stone columns with three dimensional carvings on them of a lot of animals that weren't even native to the region. Is that debatable? Not necessarily the case. Because they could have been... No. The animals were native to the region. But my point, Joe, is that these paintings are, say, 30,000, 40,000 years old to Goebecli Tappi. So there's tens of thousands of years to develop more that we're very likely to find more archaeological sites. And yet, up till now, we haven't found that. We haven't found all of that intermediate material, which is... See, if I could actually see that intermediate material between the Upper Paleolithic Cave art and Goebecli Tappi, 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 at Goebecli Tappi. 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. Right. 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 imagine so. 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-gatherer stage. Now, you guys, Schmitt, as you show in your book, he did not go as far as you go. Certainly not, Schmitt. But he admitted it's a mystery. Okay. That would be the scientific approach. I don't know what it is. Great mystery. Let's just wait and see. Versus, 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 you've mentioned. There's a rather humorous thing, which I have to say. Actually, I might even ask Jamie to pull up the couple of images of Fingerprints of the Gods. That's the book I'm best known for. And when I 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 it as a cover story, picture of Gobekli Tepe and the headline, that civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we thought. Fair enough. Okay, fair enough. 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, say, what chimps can do? No one knows. The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, right? And because no one knows, every couple of years there's a new book out. It's climate change. The throwing arm, cooking food. That's right. Cooking meat. You know, meat is another big one, a Harvard-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 McKenna's theory. It's pretty obvious it was psychedelics. Yeah, that's Terence McKenna's story theory. Not the main brain begging about that switch the brain on. Oh, it's the old Julian, the... Julian Jaynes, no. The bicameral mind, not at all. This is David Lewis Williams, who's professor of anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. His neuropsychological theory of cave art. All kudos to Terence McKenna and food of the gods. He... What a brilliant thinker. What a brilliant alternative thinker. But David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand had been working on this problem since 1973. And 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. 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 Richard Rangum's theory. He's a highly regarded scientist at Harvard. So he's the meat eating guy. It's cooking meat. 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 pluses on his side. He's Harvard and already respected. And even so, his book was like, eh, maybe... Well, it's probably a series of different events and a bunch of different factors. That's right. It could be a number of different things.