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

Key Takeaway

Practice intellectual humility when evaluating extraordinary claims: separate the observation from the explanation, ask what evidence would change your mind, and seek independent lines of evidence rather than one compelling story. Today, pick one belief you hold strongly, write down its best alternative explanation, and identify one credible source that could challenge your view. The episode’s debate shows that productive skepticism is neither automatic dismissal nor automatic belief—it is a willingness to update as evidence improves.

Episode Overview

Joe Rogan convenes Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, and skeptic Michael Shermer to debate the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, Ice Age extinctions, Göbekli Tepe, the age of the Sphinx, Atlantis, and how scientific consensus changes. The conversation centers less on definitive answers than on competing explanations, standards of evidence, and the tension between open-minded inquiry and the burden of proof. Geologist Mark Defant and impact researcher Malcolm LeCompte join remotely to challenge and defend parts of the impact hypothesis.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Three, two. This is live, ladies and gentlemen. And this is a very unusual podcast we're going to have here in a very unusual discussion. I have to my left Michael Shurmer, very famous skeptic. Uh 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, uh, author also, uh, 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 Shurmer commented on it.

And it was all essentially on the um the the hypothesis that the great extinction that happened um with the North American land animals that happened somewhere around the end of the ice age and um the end of the ice age, the abrupt end of the ice age being caused, please correct me if I [ __ ] any of this up, being caused by uh a comet impact. Uh Michael Shurmer 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.

Uh 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 megapa. 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 uh one of the stone carvings rather on Gobecley and Graham you would probably be the best to describe that. Yeah, that was published in um Mediterranean Mediterranean archaeology and archaeometry peer-reviewed journal uh by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh and they are proposing an interpretation of uh the gobeci imagery.

There's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars, particularly one pillar, pillar 43 in enclosure D. And uh their deduction, what they take from their interpretation, of course, many will disagree with them, their interpretation is that those uh those images are speaking of um 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. uh we've documented it and detailed it in many in in many conversations that we've had on the podcast.

Uh yes, not I I I can't say that I'm that familiar with that article. I haven't had a chance to get into it. So, but this idea that the comet impact is the what 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 I'll pull this right up to you. It seems to fill gaps that were um at this point still unexplained.

Um 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 um one of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme climate changes between the b what's called the balling all alarod which was the rather gradual warming at the very end of the plea scene which was then followed by the younger dus which was the return to full glacial cold and then the end of the younger drius which is dated at about 11,600 which is considered now to be the the boundary of the hollesene post uh younger dus as pre-boreal it's called would be the beginning of the holene and it seems that most of the extinctions did occur between roughly 13,000 and 11,600 years ago although the dating has a widespread on it so you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event but I've always felt like that 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 um and to my opinion you can't um attribute that solely to Malanchankovich theories which is basically the changing solar um 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 um Wallace Breer pointed out uh years ago that possibly uh a major flood from the draining of Lake Agaze caused an interruption of the thermmoaline circulation which is the basically the circulation of the the North Atlantic Ocean and that this might have been what triggered the younger dus and then also contributed to the mass extinction events.

But now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agaze is too late for that and was probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred between roughly 14,600 and and about 11,000 years ago somewhere in there. we have to fit that mass extinction event and 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. Um 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 um scattered out throughout Asia and Europe at roughly the same time period when they do the core samples. Yes, it's most of it's dating to 12,800 to 13,000 years ago. These are called impact proxies. nano diamonds, melt 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 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 to the ideas of the what would be called the British neoc catastrophists, Victor Clue and William Napier and 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 uh William Napier addresses this in an interesting article I can pull up here pretty soon um that possibly around um 13,000 years ago Earth may have encountered some of the debris from a disintegrating comet which ultimately goes back to uh Fred Whipple who is one of the the godfathers of of cometary science.

Can I just come in on that for a second? I I mean specifically Bill Bill Napier, Victor Clube are are identifying the remnants of this comet uh with the torid 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, Rudiki, Ojiato and so on four or five km in diameter.

Uh, 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 code. Now, Michael, when you listened to that podcast, you had some questions. You are a professional skeptic, so of course you were skeptical. What What are your thoughts about all this? Uh, yeah, let me pull back and uh and give a bigger picture.

After the podcast, I went and got the book Magicians of the Gods. And uh and actually I listened to it on audio. So it's I don't know like 16 18 hours of of Graham reading with his 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 uh and Graham, you're a good writer. It's a very compelling story. Thank you. You're a great skeptic. and uh and um you know and so I 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 I prefer that to pseudoarchchaeology because that's a little bit of supposed to be a little bit of an insult. So alternative archaeology um 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? But but there isn't 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. U so just to rattle off a few, the lost tribes of Israel who col colonized the Americas, Mormon archaeology, explanation of Native Americans, uh the Kensington Runstones in Minnesota that the Vikings had come here, the black Egyptian hypothesis.

When I was in graduate school, this book called Black Athena was published that the Egyptians were actually black and that the you know sort of western white male dominance of history had written them out of the past. So, you know, this was a whole alternative history, alternative archaeology. Built down man, Thor Hyderall 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 statues seem to have like African features on them.

So, maybe Africans went directly across to South America. So there's lot, you know, Eric Van Donkin, uh, Zechariah Sitchin. Now, most of these Graham uh, rejects in in his book to to your credit. So, you're a good skeptic, too. Uh, but but for for an outsider to to an anthropologist from Mars who steps into this thing cold, doesn't know anything. It's like, well, they 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 we assume your hypothesis is not true. Not not just you, anybody's hypothesis like the uh the clue napier hypothesis that was widely published. It was widely covered in in mainstream uh scientific journals and popular science magazines like Scientific American and it has not fared that well over the last decade or so. It's it's still around. It's still debated, but that so you put it into the in the mainstream through peerreview journals and then you go to conferences and you have it out and 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 did the mainstream scientists think? So and the problem is is that uh so a couple of specific things like uh what I call patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. You know the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or whatever. Those are fun examples. But you know taking uh like um uh pecttophs pect pecttolyphs and then comparing them to constellations like you know 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 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years? So, this is a a field called archoastronomy, Edrup, uh, our director of the Griffith Observatory here in LA. This is what he does. And sometimes the pattern, he thinks the patterns mean something. Sometimes they're totally random. Uh, and uh, or you take something like the pyramids, you know, as as Graham knows, there's, you know, 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 um you know has he just can't deal with them all you know.

So just as one example I used in my book um why people believe we're 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 Hogland was like the best example of that, right? He would find these patterns in Mars and like and 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. Uh so like just take climate change. Uh 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 uh there 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 consilient 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. So that lifts our confidence that yeah, there's probably something to their theory such that there's now so much data converting to this, you'd have to deconstruct every one of those independent lines.

Um so then you have things like um 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, uh ufologists and me a skeptic agree that 90 to 95% of all the UFO sightings are explained by natural phenomenons, Venus, swamp gas, airplanes, geese, whatever. They they know that. And so we're really only talking about 5%. Like how do you explain that one right there in 1967 on June 3rd? You know, I don't know.

No one knows that one. And then from there they build. Well, that's my case. And if you can't explain that, then I I have a case. No, no, no. Well, that's very different than what we're talking about here. How is that relevant to us? It's totally relevant because I think almost all of your um argument is based on this residue of anomalies, uh 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 petetroglyph and I'm going to count that toward my compilation of data to support my hypothesis of a lost civilization.

But no one is saying that the scientists can't explain it. What what essentially particularly Randall with this series of images is 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 if you will. Well, well, 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 96, it was a very popular book called uh the Noah's flood. This was a serious book by two geologists that said uh it was the um rapid filling up of the Black Sea that swamped over the civilizations living on the uh edges of this and that that's where the noakian flood story comes from. Okay, so it it was widely debated and so on and since it hasn't paired that well, but that's fairly rapid. I mean, we're talking over the course of weeks or months or years.

Uh to a geologist, you know, thousands of years is rapid. Mhm. So, uh, you know, an impact by a comet, 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 Graham, the 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 all asteroidal impact. Yeah. All right. So my final point is is the falsifiability one that is uh what would it take to refute your hypothesis? Like for me the answer would be like if golette 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 the examples of writing?

Perhaps a decision was made not to use metal. Perhaps a decision was made that uh errors had taken place that that that in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before. Uh perhaps writing isn't always an advance. Uh perhaps perhaps uh an oral tradition which which records in memory which enhances and uses the power of memory may be a very effective way of 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 th 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? 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 Gobeclet is somewhere around 12,000 years. Is that correct? 11,600 years ago. The earliest they found so far, but a great deal of Gobecity 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 Stonehead.

So, when when that story broke, this is long before you you came along with your book. Uh 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 and so what the the response to archaeologists was, well, I guess we were wrong about hunter gathers. 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 Gigantia in Malta or Hagarim or Manra megalithic sites uh date to no older than 5 a half to 6,000 years old. G gigantia would push it close to 6,000 years old and there no older sites than that and therefore that the megalithic site is associated with a certain stage of Neolithic development.

Then along comes Gobecley, 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Incredibly sophisticated site, very large scale. I mean, Claus Smith, 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 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. Now, to me, that's that's rather well that we know of. But to me, that's a that's immediately a rather puzzling and an 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 7,000 years before Stonehenge of a megalithic site that dwarf Stonehenge. To me, that's a mystery and it's really worth inquiring into. 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 comp in comparison to us to then. Mhm. So between our time now in 2017 and the construction of the Great Pyramid, you're talking about 2,000 years earlier than that. I mean, that is unbelievable when you're talking about 7,000 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?

That was the theory. But that was so now what archaeologists are saying well I guess we were wrong about hunter gathers. 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 so much lost civilizations are not such an extraordinary idea. I mean nobody knew that the indis valley civilization existed at all until some railway work was done around 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 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 to go there. I don't think that 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 Indis Valley civilizations. How did that happen if they were dogmatically closeed-minded? And I don't say that they were dogmatically close-edminded about that. The evidence, the massive amount of evidence that came up with the discovery of Mahenjodaro, Harapa, Dolera, and other and other such sites is very difficult. You have to be completely stupid to to to say that that's not a civilization. And golette 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 Clash Schmidt. You know, I 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 not just you, all of us. That's a good point. Who is Clausmid? Claus Schmidt was the original excavator of Geekbeci. He was the the head of the German Archaeological Institute dig at Gobecé.

He kindly spent three days showing me uh around the site and and really nobody's disputing the astronomical alignments of Gobeci. They weren't particularly interesting to Clausmid but they're there and what is the alignment like how is it established? When you have a a perfectly north south 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 stone true north as established today or with the procession of the equinox about 12 it's the rotation axis of our planet okay so it to this day it points exact in the same place where it was pointing it always points to the true north but but back to this you know they don't want to go they want to go there they would happy be happy to go there case in Two weeks ago in the journal Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, there was published an article that humans or maybe nanors lived in San Diego area 130,000 years ago.

This is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis D. The mastadon bones they found that were smashed bones. Yes. 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. Two years. And then what happened? Well, hasn't hasn't there been a massive reaction to that and lots of lots of scathing remarks by other academics. Yes. And that's 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 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 Dbeckley Tappe that's covered covered up purposefully right yes deliberately buried again I cite Claus 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 goppepy 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 moment is on a scale of Stonehenge.

What's under the ground may be as much as 50 times larger. Jesus. But but go Buckley Templey there. No one live there. There's no tools. There's no Well, you're talking about 12,000. But if it's buried, it should be pres 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 f? 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. 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 for you to gain uh 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 completely in every field. But isn't there some proof that the 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 Gobeckley tender.

Yeah. To me that's the stunning beauty of this find. It it overturns our ideas of primitive hunter gatherers that could not do this. Apparently they can. That's one possible assessment. 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 gathers. 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 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. What do we again? What do we mean by we're talking about the ability to to construct an amazing structure?

Well, okay. How big was it? Like how tall were these stones? Some of them are 20 ft tall. Some of them are smaller with with with astronomical alignments. Clash Smith called it a center of innovation. He was intrigued by the way that agriculture emerges around Gobeclete at the same time that Gobeclete is is is created. I mean he 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 credul. 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 cent a few millennium afterwards. But you're talking about something 20 feet tall made of stone people that were hunters. 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. But megalithic culture still exists. You also know that the carving on the outside is extremely complex.

It's threedimensional carving. Okay. But I mean, but you know that means that but Lasco at 30,000 years ago has magnificent cave paintings with threedimensional animals. But that's painting. You know that you know, hold on a second. Do you know what I'm saying when I say threedimensional carvings? Yeah. Like the the Venus, 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 they couldn't have figured this out. We know from modern societies where say Australian aboriges uh 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 you're actually making his argument for him. No, no, it's not that much of a reach to carve stone. It people have been carving stones for 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 its mind about or at the very least a little shift. Let's pause for a moment. So for sure we all agree human beings made this. Yes. Not aliens. Even the argument 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 is some sign of some sort of civilization. I mean, I believe so. Yeah. It it is it's a gigantic structure.

Sure. I agree with Graham that we've we've again undersold who these people were. My friend Jared Diamond goes to Papa New Guinea. He talks at the in the opening chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel how smart these people are that live out there in nature and what it takes to survive. He wouldn't last an hour, you know, from LA. He wouldn't last an hour with his Papa Naginian 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. Karahepe, you've got you've got the T-shaped pillars sticking out the side of a hill in a 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. But but then before you okay, why not just say we don't know this is a spectacular mystery and leave it at that, right?

Why write a book that says you guys 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 strikes me as a gigantic [ __ ] mystery and a mystery that is worthy of exploration from a point of view that may not satisfy you.

Oh, well, it does you don't have to satisfy me, 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. But like your opening chapter with Schmidt, I thought I really love the um the 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 Columbomo like wait I have just one more qu 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. What? Whatever you want to call them.

Well, we know humans made it. That's right. We know humans made it. So, whatever you want to call it. 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 of the contrary. This is evidence to the contrary. I agreed. So, you agree that there weren't 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 Gobecley is a gigantic stage.

Well, we don't Okay, they didn't live there. So, we we have to figure out where where were they living and what was there. So, that that has to be excavated. Well, they only excavated 10%. 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 a speculation. Seems more of a reach. Okay, but not okay. They may they may be more than hunter gatherers.

They they may have been partially settled. There's you can have any kind of number of state 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, their fingerprints are 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 there's something screw trash and tools.

We've got golette. 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 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 g Sorry, that's okay.

It was like, well, again, if we place this back particularly within that that climate zone at 11,6 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 it's a pretty good way to make a living actually. They have a better varied diet than we have. This is the, you know, the Neanderl diet, right? They have a better varied 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 sites.

But we're we're looking at time to do it where 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 seastand low of about 400 ft up to the present level. We also know that that biotas were shifting dramatically all over the planet. The the the effects of the younger dus 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 dus.

So what we're doing is we're placing 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 allconsuming 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 well Randall we don't even know the motives of the Easter Islanders and how 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 him but let's get back to teppy so we so let's just be real clear here we know they were 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 they didn't have structures and they didn't have agriculture after they did so the fact that they 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, 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 and creating sorry and creating the largest megalithic site that's ever been built on Earth.

I think there's a huge difference between those two. I mean, nobody would compare the construction effort on on Stonehenge or or Gigantia with 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 Alaska, we have invented nothing. I mean they were this that was that modern human mind symbolic mind at 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 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 uh 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 like tapping.

Yeah. Or at least comparable. I think that's absolutely ridiculous to convey three-dimensionality on a 2D uh plane that 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, 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. I don't think it's remotely but I don't think it's even remotely smart. What I'm saying is that it it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to think these people were pretty smart.

They had we know that they were smart. We know that they were smart just because of the fact that those construction projects were done by who? By whoever. We know that they were smart. Whoever built Gobecu 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 erecting 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 not necessarily the case because they could have been animals.

But my point Joe is that these paintings are like say 30 40,000 years old to Quebec. there's tens of thousands of years to develop more that we that we're very likely to find more archaeological sites and yet 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 paleithic cave art and goleeppe if I could see the gradual evolution and development of skills I wouldn't need to invoke uh a lost civilization the survivors of a lost civilization who've mastered those skills elsewhere way to come in and teach those skills at Gobecé TV.

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 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 ste stepping out of the hunter gather stage. Now your guy Schmid as you show in your book, he he did not go as far as you you guys. Certainly not. 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 rather humorous thing which I have to say. Actually, I might even ask Jamie 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 Quebec and the headline, civilization is much older and much more mysterious than we than we thought. Fair enough. Okay, fair enough. And and and and scientists do do this. I mean, I followed paleo anthropology 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, right? And 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 Harvard prof. 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 there's Terrence McKenna. Pretty obvious it was psychedelics. Yeah, that's Terrence McKenna.

Not that made the brain bigger, but that switch the brain. This is the old Julian um the uh Julian James. No, the bicameal mind. Not at all. This is David Lewis Williams who's professor of anthropology at the University of Waters in South Africa. His neuroscychological theory of cave art. Uh all cudos to Terrence McKenna and food of the gods. He what a brilliant thinker what a brilliant alternative thinker but David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwadrand 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 uh 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 Rangham's theory. He's this is a highly regarded um scientist at Harvard. So he's the meat eating guy that you know it's cooking meat. 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 maybe 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 Gobeclette 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 Graham 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 geologist. So, by 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 the I think the end of summer issue comes out. I hope that Mark Deant 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 [ __ ] statements about me which are demonstrabably false.

Well, he he's on Yeah, he's there and I'm happy to engage with those with those particular issues. Well, I'll have to put on my reading glasses and that whatever article's 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 20ou 2017 edition of Skeptic Magazine. So, pull it up, Graham, and and give you a chance to have your time in court. Let's let Graham go over first and then we'll have Mark on to refute what he 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 it is. conjuring up a lost civilization from nothing. 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 Defant's article, uh he's accusing me of duping the public. He's saying that I'm public enemy. Number one, he's accusing me of armwaving. I admit I do wave by arms.

Uh pontificating. Well, my grandfather was a pre minister of the church. Uh little interest in peer-reviewed research. claimed that no academic would debate. That's utter [ __ ] I had a debate with Zahi Hawas. He's a leading Egyptian Egyptologist back in 2015. It 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 Awas lambasting me and then walking out and refusing to debate further. So, it's [ __ ] 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, Ben, would you like some further? Bear with me because I just have to scroll down and I don't have a mouse. So, Hancock and Carlson claimed that several times acade no academic would debate them. Not true. Um, uh, I'm accused of doing an about face, uh, since, uh, since Fingerprints of the Gods. are my I mean are my views not allowed to evolve uh 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 Jesus Gamara um and and and and accuses me of not real not having the scientific knowledge to is deal with issues of gravitation. Now it's true that Jesus Gamara who is a descendant of the Incas who has worked 70 years on the megaliths of Sakiwaman whose father before him Alfredo Gamarra worked 70 years is 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 ades etc etc. Defant doesn't cite that. He just presents me as buying what Jesus Gamarra 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 Gobeclet, uh, he contends that Gobecé 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 different? Getting aware. 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. Hanok 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. If he wants to represent me, if he accuses me of cherrypicking, he shouldn't cherryick my statements. He should quote on this. Let's get it right. Well, it's out there on the internet. Well, you still work and then here's a beautiful one. I didn't know it was online. Here's a beautiful one.

He cites um Claus Schmidt um on the on on the character Schmidt makes a salient point almost as if he anticipated Hanok's book. quote, "Fabulous or mythical cre 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, [ __ ] You've just been talking about the painted caves. Go to Chauveet cave, you will see a lion man, Holenstein startle, lion man carved out of mammoth ivory.

Go to go to Chauveet bison man straddling lion woman. her right arm is transferring uh is trans 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 yeah. Okay. So he's he's taking issue with me because I suggest that the vulture on pillar 43 in enclosure D uh 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 quoted again the uh 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 credentialed 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 minuti because they've already been dismissed by a study by Litzis and Vafiadu.

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 3,600 BC that the work was done or as early in some cases as 1,000 BC. I don't think that study proves anything. And 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 lost civilization instructed them on the use of metals? I don't know. I don't see evidence for that. Go back. 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 that's saying, "Okay, I understand. But but why all I require your defant to do is to state that Hanok is citing the book of Enoch.

He didn't do that. That's that is what's the word disingenuous? Is that the polite word you guys use?" But uh it seems more than disingenuous. It's it's a character assassination. But what the question is is why would what's the context of including that in your book? I forget. Well, the the context is that actually I was I was criticizing Zachariah Sitchin. That's primarily what I was doing. So you don't think that a lost civilization instructed the people who built Gobeclet on the use of metals and tools?

I see no evidence for that. I see Gobeclete. 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. So what did they do? We don't know. They generated agriculture. They created a center of excellence around which not they not the they who built Quebec the lost 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're probably quite have some survival skills. I I don't have many. I mean, if uh if we were to have a comet 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 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 Zachariah Sitchens? Well, the aliens advised it. Well, different I think it's massively different, especially since Zachariah Sitchin has his aliens arriving here in 1970s NASA technology. Weirdly, he wrote his book in the 1970s. I mean, I don't uh I I I don't go there.

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. But 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 it's online though? How does something get online if it's not Why is 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 lost civilization exists. Only the I'm not saying that. I'm saying fingerprints of their their influence on later peoples we do know existed. I'm saying there are physical objects. I say golette is one of them. I say the sphinx is another. But see, this is that argument from either ignorance or personal incredul. 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. They're just sphinx is older. Uh I do go with Robert Shock'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 Crup's criticism of the Orion correlation and why he says it's up upside down. I can talk to you about that. You know, we do.

I mean, I I know Ed Cup's argument about that. That was from the '9s, I think. What's your thoughts on Robert Shock's conclusions? I don't that's not something I know much about. Well, you should huge factor. It's a huge factor because knows about shock and he rejects him on the basis of that paper 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? Libertus and Vafi. And then why why do mainstream archaeologists not accept the older date for the Sphinx? And and the answer is because they have a whole bunch of other evidence that points to the the date that they think. The answer is very to your question is very simple. Mark Laner and Zahi Hawas put it on record back in 1992 when John Anthony West and Robert Shock first presented the rainfall erosion evidence on the Sphinx. And what Later and Has 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 goes. 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 of the Sphinx? And Dr. Robert Shock from Boston University who's a geologist. What was his conclusion? What Shock is saying is that the Sphinx and the trench out of which the Sphinx is cut uh 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 it's difficult for people to even see the core body of the sphinx today. Uh but it's these you can see the vertical fishes even down at the back of there that is that is what shock 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 4 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 Chock independently of of your conclusions. totally independently. Shock disagrees with me on many things as a as a matter of fact. Uh 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 Pyramid of Giza was constructed about 2,500 BC. Right. There's absolutely no doubt that a huge project went on at Giza around 2,500 BC. 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 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 Zeppi 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 000 years ago that that that was when the site was laid out because there's intriguing astronomical alignments of the great pyramids to the belt of Orion.

I know Ed Crop 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 would align with the geological evidence that Robert Chock concludes. It aligns with the geological evidence thousand years. Age of Leo pretty much exactly spans the younger Dryus 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 ago.

Correct. And then Crup said that the that the Orion correlation wasn't real uh because it was upside down. I mean 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 or the layout for the whole thing is built in uh you know say 10 11,000 years ago 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 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 tradition traditions lasting for thousands of years within a religious system shouldn't be too absurd to us.

I mean, Judaism is is is dealing with ideas that are already best part of 4,000 years old if we go back to of the childies and so on and so forth. So, that's all I'm suggesting really that that the idea is preserved maintained that the the survivors of the surv 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 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 Zos 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 how I would think about that. U there's a lot of perhaps and may be because Yes. Well, so you have uh 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 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. Well, we're talking about different structures, though. There's not a lot of evidence that points to the Sphinx being from a particular time period. Well, he's saying like 12,000, right? I'm saying the rainfall evidence suggests that, but other evidence at its alignment with the constellation of Leo housing the sun 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 2,500 BC.

Do you know what constellation is housing the sun in 2,500 BC? I haven't run the little program. Well, it's the constellation of Taurus. So, logically, if you're creating an equinox, and the ancient Egyptians were not shy about making images of bulls, plenty of them. If you're making an equinoxual marker in 2,500 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'd say that and your colleagues will say that too. And so now and then we have a gap of about five or 6 thousand years where there's nothing. There's no Let me interject there. Can I interject? Yeah, please do. I'm going to refer back to several articles that were published in the 80s and 90s. This one is from uh from nature early 80s late quernary 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. Um it says between 20,000 and 12,000 years before present when timberline in the headwaters was lower, vegetation cover more open than today, the Nile was a highly seasonal braided river which brought mixed course and fine sediments down to Egypt and Sudan. This cold dry interval had enter ended by 12,500 years before present when overflow from Lake Victoria and higher rainfall in Ethiopia sent extraordinary floods down the ma main.

And those floods have been documented to have been 120 ft above the modern flood plane 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 uh since the early 80s. But the point is made is that because of a major hydraological 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. Um it's very likely too that these events uh could have also decimated the population at the time leaving um basically no workforce.

And then over a period of 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years, you find that that there's enough of a recovery that these kind of monumental structures can be renewed. Um but it's clear from this and a lot of other studies studies in the eastern Mediterranean showing that there are sap repropel layers um 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 of water flow.

Um actually forcing so much water that there was a freshwater lid on the eastern Mediterranean that uh caused a sessation in the um 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 fresh water 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 Gobecley during this time range would have been that their that their activity would have been interrupted to the extent that it might have taken millennia to to recover to get the get the labor force necessary to undertake major monumental programs on the Giza plateau.

So, so I think that that the if we assume this gradualistic scenario, yeah, that's a fair question to ask were 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 a ton of sense. Well, it does it because does it not? O only if you have to have the Sphinx in conjunction with 12,000 years ago in the lost civilization. If if you just say that rainwater erosion on the Sphinx uh is 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 lots of evidence other than a lot of assumptions and a lot of 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 site a single contemporary inscription contemporary from ancient contemporary to the date that Egyptologists ascribed to the Sphinx?

In other words, to the reign of Kufu. Can you cite me a single inscription that talks about the Sphinx being built? This is not 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. It's a giant project. It's 270 ft long. It's 70 ft high. It's carved out of solid rock. Nothing. 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 and inscriptions.

So, but you've already said that the pyramids were built at the time we think they were built, not thousands of years. that a great deal of work was done on the pyramids at the time of 2,500 BC. I think the ground plan was laid out early and we have like the step pyramid which is crudder 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, not right. And and you've been to Giza though? No, I've never been to Giza. Oh dear. Well, they do make a very different impact. I mean, I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times. And I I mean, you're dealing with something orders of magnitude different in terms of what's required. I mean, this thing weighs 6 million tons. It's 481 ft high. It consists of 2 1/2 million individual blocks of stone. It's aligned to true north within 360s of a single degree. I mean, to compare that to Zoser uh 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 Pepe, go to Teti at Sakara. These are a 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 Egypt devolve so rapidly? Uh why how do we explain this pristine amazing work that's done on the Great Pyramid unless there's a legacy of knowledge being attached to it?

Okay. So, every archaeologist, E Egypt, Egyptian archaeologist and Egyptian knows everything you just said and 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 close-minded and they follow Zahas and they never think for themselves. You want to see a closed mind? I'll play you a one and a half minute video of Zahash refusing to debate with me. But but but all of them, every one of the Egyptologists and archaeologists over the last two centuries and so on, they all they're all dogmatically close-minded and they can't see the arguments as clear as 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 uh 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 and 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 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 Cardiff 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. Uh he was impressed by my work. It did him a lot of harm in his degree. And and if all this was true, uh then eventually you haven't answered my point. You haven't answered my point. If you go against the mainstream view, your career does not progress as an Egyptologist. I disagree. I mean, how give me an example. How is it that we know anything that we know about Egypt?

Give me an example from Egyptology of somebody who's gone against the mainstream view and been lorded for so doing. Well, look, we don't believe everything about it that we believe two centuries ago at, say, Napoleon's time, right? How did all that knowledge come about? How did all the change in that science? really begins with Champolon and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone. How was he able to do that against the mainstream? There was no mainstream that he was against. There was no The mainstream has taken time to form and it's a very solid now.

Egyptologists all sing from the same hymbook. You'll find very little disagreement amongst true in 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. No, that's that's a valid comparison. Einstein and archaeology. All right. Well, take paleo anthropology. 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 and that's a new idea that like, you know, where 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 terms of archaeology. We're in in the middle of that. We're essentially in the middle of that with things like Gobekly Tappy with Forbes publishing an article about the younger dus possibly being impacted by comets and that being one of the causes of a mass extinction, right?

And when these are all mainstream ideas now and then 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 takes time. Well, but what was the key turning point? People are challenging that wasn't the key turning point the finding of the crater. That's what that's what made the difference. Yeah, hard to argue with that. So again, where's your crater? Well, this is where perhaps we need to bring in our phone friend, you know, Malcolm LMP, one of the younger dest impact scientists.

I mean, the the point the point being made is the following. Firstly, that the primary impacts were on ice. Uh 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 and will be looked at by the team in the in the coming months whether it includes the Corissol crater, the Quebec Quebec 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 mile deep ice and you know one of the biggest strewn fields in the world which is the Australian strewn tectite strewn field there's no crater associated with that but everybody accepts the impact proxies. There's enough of them to to to justify that and that's what's going on around this impact hypothesis. So on a related uh question to that is not the lost civilizations and the demise of humans but the megaponal extinction of North American mammals.

So this has been long debated 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 the 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 fair 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 why the selected species the kinds of species that humans would hunt are the ones that went extinct whereas these others didn't.

Why would humans be hunting the largest? I 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 Lach 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 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 paleoindian hunters probably in bands of no more than two or three dozen.

Have you ever been to a head smashed in buffalo site? Yes, 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 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. What does it mean by massive? There's global versus, you know, local. So for example, there's 52 mamalian 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 dry 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 what what is being demonstrated from examining the lifeways of of uh the Paleoindian 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 the cave bears, the shortfaced bears, the camelops, the the the giant beavers, the giant armadillos, the American place to lion, the the the the ground sloths that were the size of giraffes.

Um, four species of of probosidians, 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 mour well that's controversial also um I mean they drove the uh mal birds extinct in past eagle well that's an assumption there between that and people with adelattles killing off all the saber-tooth tigers but 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. 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 pong horn analopee. Prong horn analopee. uh Dan Flores who's a wildlife historian uh wrote an amazing book uh um on it and we when he was talking about the uh American savannah during you know like 15,000 plus years ago they 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 pong horn analopes 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. Mhm. 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 young window because I think you'd agree that now the whole story of the peopleing of 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 envision these Clovis hunters coming in across the Bearing Landbridge going down the icefree 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. You mean from evidence in Siberia? I I don't only mean from evidence in Siberia. I I mean I can cite you from from Nature magazine just recently.

Huge huge number. I don't think the Yukon is in Siberia. Is it? No. Okay. I think the Yukon's in North America. Jacank Mars, you know, the excavator of the bluefish caves in the Yukon back in the 1970s were propo was proposing that human beings had been in the Americas 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.

Jacm Mars was right all along." And Tom Dillah, you know, with his work in Monte Verde, the [ __ ] that he had to take. Uh, I think we're we're in a very interesting time. The peopleing of the Americas is is really a paradigm that has absolutely been overthrown. The notion of first, well, you disagree with Smithsonian then, which is fine. I'm I do. No, the Mavery, you know, it's an isol again, it's an anomaly. It's an isolated site. What do you Where are all the sites between Clovis and Montaver Verdict?

You think Clovis was still first for thousands and thousands of years? Come on, Michael. You think Clovis was still first? Where are all the people between Clovis and Mont? Not my problem. Not it is your problem. No, it's not my problem. They're there in Monte Verde and they're there in North America. Go figure. More likely that. Go figure why there's a Dennis trace in South American Indians and not in North American Indian. It's like it's like the nature paper I brought. people cross the ocean that uh that there were Neanderls or 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're trying to quibble the evidence of earlier human presence. That's right. You're trying to quibble it. Well, not quibble. Just Well, you're quibbling it. You're quibbling it. And you got every right to say. 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. It's massively it's massively accepted say Mesa Verde for example. Okay. I have to bring up an image. Why don't they accept Mesa Verde? They do accept Mesa Verde as it is accepted now. Michael, are you sure about this? As what 24,000 years 15 plus possibly possibly significantly. Yeah. Significantly older. So 15 is kind of the the outside of the window that humans came across the Bearing Straight. That's possible. not 24,000 open first.

Not 130,000 years ago. Now, if it turns out that that nature paper is right and that's confirmed, then 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? Okay, I'll just give you I quote the Smithsonian. I ask professionals. 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 mastadons in Washington state, dined on desert parley in Oregon, made allpurpose stone tools that were ice age version of the exact 13,000.

That's not 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 didn't 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 archaeologists accept You should be skeptical of tens of thou. 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 that. I haven't seen this article.

Well, now that you have seen it, not my problem. Now that you have either your problem and you're here opposing this and you're saying there's no evidence, you haven't even read the [ __ ] article. Okay. I'm not opposing anything. I'm saying you certainly are. This is the reason why scientists accept these dates here cuz there's lots and lots of evidence for that is scientist 10,000 11,000 12,000 scientist 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 you're arguing this without really doing any research about it and then and then I I the article is titled what happens when an archaeologist challenges mainstream thinking um and thisithth Onian in the month of March.

Okay. Jack sank 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 shift to the evidence, etc., etc., etc. 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. Uh, 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 he 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. So essentially you're quoting a friend for 50 years. 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 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. Why argue against it? I'm not arguing against it. You certainly were. No, I'm just saying that well this is wrong. I I feel you were arguing against it and saying that it's not the case and it 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 advocate first. 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 uh the Siberian Straits into North America 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago that they definitely did then.

They definitely did then. Did they before? What could push it back much earlier would be if they came by boat. Okay, so like where I live in Santa Barbara, 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 and expensive 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 is still mainly looking at shipwrecks you know. Well, okay. They do that because it's it's you know it's like where 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 oppose the Smithsonian's position on this and there has been no paradigm shift?

I will look at this. I haven't seen the Smithsonian thing. All right. I'm not aware of the horse fine from 24,000 years ago. I am aware of the 130,000 year date from the nature paper tool. We have a slide on that, too. Uh and and and if Okay. But the stone 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 130,000y old site.

130,000. Talking about the San Diego. We don't we don't need to talk about that. That that raises interesting questions. Was it Neanderthalss? Was it Denisovvens? Was it anatomically modern humans 130,000 years? It raises interesting questions. Or was it a misinterpreted site? Because they aren't stone tools. I'm not I'm not pinning anything to that. I'm just I'm I'm saying yes, that report was published in just about the stone tools. It's about how the bones were shattered. And they believe the bones were shattered deliberately, indicating that someone was trying to get out the marrow, indicating Yeah, maybe.

Or a tractor rolled over it, you know, a couple years ago. No, no, no. No one no one had excavated. That's just speculation on your part on my part. This was one of the 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. 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 to change.

Nature published it and the artic the idea is being quibbled and the nature certainly would not have published it if the evidence were not strong. I accept that nature is 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 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 Neanderthalss or Denisovvens 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 [ __ ] 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 uh 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 and DNA. I'm sure you're well up on that. I mean, can you explain why we have a strong signal of Dennisovven DNA in certain groups of South American Indians and in Australian aboriges and and Melanesians? But that that Dennis DNA doesn't crop up in North American Indians. How would we explain that if they all came through the bearing straight? 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 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 people of America that that area uh 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 5,000y year gap with the Egyptian complex. Where are the sites? If it's true we they didn't fly there. So how' they get there and there must be a trail somewhere that we could find unless they came by boat and then that's evidence is gone. 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.

And well, you can you can do the coast. That that's not quite as you don't need a you know big ocean going. No, you don't need an ocean going. But that's one hypothesis that that you know that's proposed is that they came across by boat just following the shore. You just same area as the bearing straight. Yeah, you're just 100 ft offshore. You go in and and and uh most likely both, right? And one of the issues, of course, was the uh shortfaced bear was so formidable, according to Dan Flores, that it would have been a huge impediment for people crossing on foot anyway.

And the shortfaced 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, I don't accept the evidence for here. That okay, that's fine. Scientists do that all the time. What evidence? What do you Well, let's let's speak 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. You just keep saying this all the 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. You're essentially pissing in the pool. No, no. The Clovis thing, for example, Gobecy, the pyramids, all of these. What's been disproved? No. Okay, I'm making a slightly different point that that's the problem is that you're 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 130,000y 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 you see the problem is that when you have a very strong paradigm like Clover's 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 Dillah like Jacqu 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 Vikilo excavations in in in Mexico uh where there 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 hypothes we don't like to think that that scientists do that they do that are you familiar with Michael Ko'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 uh 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 you know but 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 Crimo. That's not why I'm sitting at this table. I understand but my point is that Michael Krimo is not me. That's right. So but but there's lots of alternative archaeology was 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, Kramer's evidence is similar to his. It's mostly negative evidence that I don't accept the data this there is this peculiar sort of footprint looking thing in the mud. Ko refers specifically to the knowledge filter. The most useful thing about that book is the publication of uh reports, archaeological reports which are no longer available to the public which which do suggest an alternative point of view. 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 I mean he's he's pointing to like some pretty significant evidence like this the Sphinx thing is is a geologist from Boston University proposed this 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 like that's not a lack of evidence. I I understand but why do no no other archae geologist or archaeologist 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 that appears and is preserved on the quarry walls around the Sphinx.

The Sphinx itself, as Graeme 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, um, no longer have that. I mean they have now they have a textbook profile uh parabolic profile that would be consistent with sheet flooding which would be both dissolution because carbonate rocks dissolve in um acidic waters and what's called corrosion which would be the effects of uh water loaded with uh sand sediment which would make it very rough.

So, if you've got the sand sediment um 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 a very rounded profile like you see there. And you would also see where the fissurers in the rock would be selectively widened and opened by the water penetrating those fissurers. I mean, it it has all of the earmarks of a very um 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 he, of course, he doesn't say he has no evidence. He has a 900page book full of evidence. It's the quality of the evidence. When you What about the quality of that evidence? It 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 and go, "He's right." But they do.

That's listening. They do. They all do. No, they don't all do. Some geologists who 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 from this matter has been in public domain since 1992. It hasn't gone away. 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 credentialed 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 dryers.

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 the actual evolution of humans. But you're talking about someone who's saying that human beings how many millions of years old? Tens of millions. Well, we know for a fact, right, as far if you pay attention to evolution, right, that that's 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 Graham Hanco. I know, but my point was that so here you have the mainstream scientists and and so it's like there's Graham. 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. You seem reasonable. The subtext is that I'm not.

And then there's 50 like me. This is more patronizing, arrogant. I don't mean deeply unpleasant and personal approach. Graham, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to sound like that. I really don't. Okay. Okay. I have a larger point that accepted. Yeah. That when you're faced with a bunch of different alternative theories that are coming in and it's not like take take physics. I mean, every physicist like you just had Lawrence Krauss, he gets these letters daily of people saying, "I think I figured out why Einstein was wrong." And 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. I feel that's not my problem. And if there are alternative the 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 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.

Um, and that there are no dogmas that are being um 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 the comet idea. Um, you know, I mean, I don't know what constitutes the mainstream n 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, there 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, um something from space.

There's no uh consensus as to exactly what that was, which would be normal because it these discoveries are in 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 and new mysteries have been opened up uh as the evidence comes in and the claim is being made. Well, there's no um consistent um interpretation of this evidence and therefore we've debunked it. I mean an example is Pinter's reququiam for the younger dus impact hypothesis.

I mean publish a paper in PNAS saying reququiam suggesting that the impact hypothesis is already dead. That was in 2011. Every single one of Pinter's points have been responded to. Those who are critical of the younger drius impact hypothesis rarely cite the fact that the so-called reputations 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 reputations, I very rarely see that that that referred to or commented upon at all. Again, your your colleague Deant has, you know, dismissed the younger Dryus 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 different that's from one of the critical papers. You know, there's another side to this argument.

So, he needs to be listening to what the other side would say. That's the point where maybe we should have Mark Defant come on and maybe we should have Malcolm Lacmpt come on as well because Malcolm Lacmpt is actually one of those 63 young impact scientist. What is explain to people that are just listening to this what is this graph that you're showing? Well, this is the um carbon 14 uh date ranges from samples taken from the younger dest 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 Yep. Absolutely. For sure. At every site it comes in right there is that they bounce around a lot here. So now maybe Mark, this is, you know, his area, he could come on and Skype here and 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 grid? 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 day. We're talking about a stretch of thousands of years and multiple impacts. Runs 1,200 years. Randall, please give me your your because you're the expert at this. Well, these are dates for the younger dest. There's a big spread obviously, but there's also a lot of possibilities for introducing um uh 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. Um 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 Basian chronological analysis consistent with synchronous age of 12,835 to 12,735 calibrated years before present for younger dest boundary on four continents.

That's a reputation of precisely what you're It is. It's a reputation of this. But Mark Defant 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 [ __ ] around. 167 slides. There we go. A cosmic impact event at 12,800 calibrated years before present formed the younger dest boundary layer containing peak abundances in multiple high temperature impact related proxies including spirals, milk glass and nano diamonds by Asian statistical analysis of 354 dates from 23 sedimentary sequences over four continents.

Established a model younger dest boundary age of 12,835 calibrated years before present. supporting a synchronity of the younger dus boundary layer at high probability 95% this range overlaps that of a platinum peak recorded in the Greenland ice sheet and of the onset of the younger dus climate episode in six key records suggesting a causal connection between the impact event and the younger dus due to its rarity and distinctive characteristics the younger dus boundary layer is proposed as a widespread correlation datim and Randall if I can remember what you said correctly you believe that there was probably more than one significant impact act 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 the let's be clear. The suggestion is that 12,800 years ago, uh there was comets 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 Dryus impact hypothesis that we're dealing with a giant comet that broke up into multiple fragments that orbits in the Torid meteor stream. And that four of those fragments, that's the the the suggestion, four largest fragments fell out of the torid 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 impactors then continue across the Atlantic Ocean.

There's a suggestion of impacts in Belgium and indeed as far east as Abuhera 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 dry 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 Hy back in the 1980s was puzzled by the sudden temperature increase at the end of the younger drius and he suggested preciently I would say that this may have been caused by a comet impact in an ocean. So maybe other bits of the torid 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 extraordinary solar activity being responsible for that warming. We don't absolutely know, but that that's broadly the the suggestion.

We have the beginning and the end. Certainly impacts at the beginning, possibly impacts or other things at the at the end. Well, Clue and Napier and others, Duncan 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 Torid meteor stream twice each year.

once in late June and um once in uh late October, early November. And we know that the uh Tungusa event of 1908, which is not speculative. I mean that happened, it occurred on June 30th, which would have been the peak of the Torid meteor shower. It also came from the direction of the sun. it its 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 torid meteor stream radiant.

So it's very possible that the that the Tongusa 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 Tor 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 multip multiple objects still within it.

Um, comet Enenki is the best known. That's a fragment. That's a fragment of the original giant. 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 Kubernet Napier and their suggestion that the torid meteor stream is actually [ __ ] dangerous and that we should be paying attention to it that it has 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 torid meteor stream if any filaments are on an earth 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 I'm accused of being sort of a doomer 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 torid meteor stream and the possibility that we may face further impacts from it in the future that's not woo woo 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 very real 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 dest period well so I uh just on a technical question you had your slide was 12,800 on there and so Gbeckley ti you know the oldest C14 dates are what 90 so 11,000 all right so so that's a 1200 year gap Go a slow catastrophe.

Well, no. GoP to be very clear about about the younger dry. 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 uh 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 drius are cataclysmic. And it's at the recent end of the younger drius 11,600 years ago that we see Gobeclet 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, 9,000 years before the time of Solon, which happens to coincide with meltwater pulse 1b and the end of the younger drius, 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 homaly 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 them 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 9,000 years before the time of Solon.

That is a date. That is 9,600 BC. 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 Isis. I'm not against that idea. I mean the idea that say the parting of the Red Sea happened because of some impact. That's not I'm not proposing that. Please don't go there. Waste of time. Okay. But but there are people that think that okay or or that the plagues of the Bible can be explained.

Waste of time. 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 bicose, being too warlike, and that this is not good for where we're going. That's my opinion. And the the fact that he picks a date that coincides with the geologically significant date of flooding is not really going to change your opinion.

I think Well, I think again that's it's a pretty amazing coincidence, is it? I mean it we're finding the connection, not Plato. I mean we're 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.

Mhm. So where is this place this Atlantis? I mean so as you know there's a long there's 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 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 it 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 Gibralar and he places this in the essentially in the mid-Atlantic um I I think it was Crantor, one of the comp the the um um commentators on on him that said it was something like 3 or 4 days sail west.

Uh 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 Azor's plateau underwent an isoatic 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 1,000 to possibly 1,500 ft.

Well, if you if you do a comparable isostatic adjustment of the Mid-Atlantic ridge, you'll find that the Azor's 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 Manowans 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, forest, savannah, and grasslands.

Um, like Graham said, um, with the lowered sea level, there were, uh, 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. then 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 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 Manowans 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 techn quasi technological culture coexisted with hunter gatherers isn't too strange.

I mean 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 why a priority that's just an impossible idea to look at. Am I misremembering that you uh in your book you mentioned Indonesia as a site for Atlantis? I mentioned I mentioned Gunnong Padang not as a site for Atlantis. That's Danny Hillman Natuaja 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 Gunnong Padang, which he's been involved in investigating uh is a site from Atlantean Times. Danny has Danny has proposed that. Now, what's interesting about Indonesia uh 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 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, uh 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 largecale 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. Just as 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 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 guys on standby, get them involved.

What is your geologist your geologist since you're by yourself and there's two of them. Um what is it's only fair, right? What is your geologist oppose to what uh Randall and Graham are proposing? I I think it's the uh on the impact hypothesis versus the um multiple um glacial dams that burst over periods of time like that. I have that slide. Um okay. Well, 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 uh instant floods in in North America from in each individual ice dams. And what separates these dates? 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 long. Oh yes. Mark's on the line. U what is this Mark? What Mark? Can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. Mark Def. Mark Defant, thank you very much for doing this.

We really appreciate uh 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, no. You haven't dist 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 me accurately. Let me go ahead and and answer his question because I know we're getting short on time. No, no, no. We have plenty of time. Okay. Well, first of all, could I would you allow me just to address uh Gobecy 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, Graham? Well, the qu I I I read out on air various passages in your article where you misrepresent me.

Um No, I didn't. Sorry. No, I didn't misrepresent you. You didn't misrepresent me. Okay. So, in fact, you you said that I uh that I said that uh uh that I was actually talking about someone in Indonesia when I said you didn't understand Newton's physics. You made No, I didn't say I'm sorry. I didn't say you were talking about someone in Indonesia. I said you were talking about Jesusian mechanics. Jesus Gamara in um uh in Peru is who I was talking about. And Jesus Gamara 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 is is work. You pick on that. You're 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 state 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 state mass and the inverse of what?

What do you mean? I don't state that. Jesus Gamara states that and I say I disagree with it. Come on. I say I disagree with it. 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 quote me as these words from my text when you say that I buy the gravity thing of Jesus Gamara. Why don't you quote me when I say hold on 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 Jesus Gamarra'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. 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. I'm not talking scientist. If you don't understand Newton's simple physics, the laws of Newton. If I if I wished to make an argument about gravity, I wouldn't go saying that that isn't the part of Jesus Gamarra's theory that I'm interested in.

I'm interested in the other aspect of his work, his observations through years of field. Wasn't that my point was simply to point out that you didn't understand Newton mechanics. Talking about this guy wasting time here. Okay, Grant. We the way the article is. Hold on a second. Hold on. Let these guys talk about we did we did misrepresent him. We did the way the sentence is structured. Uh it's clearly out of context. We we're ch we're going to change that. I was taken out of context and that's what I'm objecting.

Mark, 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. May maybe we could get straight to the the flooding thing that that was talking about. Graham is fine with that. I mean, Graham, I know there was something else. Yeah. The other the other thing that I I find to be misrepresenting is that there's the statement yet Hancock 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 Defant 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's saying that's the book of Enoch. Graham, we'll fix that. Okay. Otherwise, let's get let's get back to the main meat of this for God's sake. Okay, just give me the list of things that you know and I'll fix we'll fix them. Yeah, because that's not the point of that. Um well, Mark, you're obviously very critical of Graham's work and u maybe erroneously so, but let's let's get to what you think about what you've heard so far.

All right, Mr. Rogan. 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. Graham in his first Mr. Hancock in his first book, please call me Graham. Fingerprints. Please call me Graham. Okay. Graham in his first book in fingerprints uh suggested that that there was a a a continent uh where this civilization lived and through some machinations this continent uh went south and 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 to kill this this famous civilization that's supposed to exist. This is duping people. I don't know if he means to do it, but he certainly seems to be duping people. Mark, all my work is in print and online. I mean, I see 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 to the degree that you're misrepresenting. So, they need the superior knowledge of Mark Defant in order to understand. I think they need the knowledge of science 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'd 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, "What ever 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 implying that there are a lot of people out there that 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, Mark. 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? We could all be dead by now if we believed you. I have absolutely changed my mind on the Mayan calendar.

Uh I regard the Mayan calendar as an interesting technological artifact with uh a better estimate of the length of the solar year than the estimate that we have with uh 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 80year window when the sun sits a stride 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 procession means. Yes, I know exactly what procession means. Okay. Well, all of this stuff that you claim is on a procession. A procession is the is the the Earth spinning like a top to do with running through comet 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 that's what Victor Club and Bill Napier and Alio Spedicato say.

I'm writing this on a reporter. You're the one that said it in your book. You just got all over Mr. Sher Michael Shurmer for for saying the same things about other people. I want to know what you think. You tell me what you think. I am a reporter and I make it very clear in You can't cop out on it. You're science. You're talking about science, Mark. We got to we can't talk over each other like this. I am a reporter and it is my job to report the work of other people.

And I report the work of Victor Clube, Bill Napier, and Emilio Spedicato. All of whom draw attention to the torid 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 torid meteor stream in the next 30 years that is going to be very bad for our civilization. It's not my to do with precision. Procession. When when did I say it had anything to do with procession? You have a whole section of procession in Magicians of the indeed as a clock, as a timer, as a way of going back through the ages.

But I'm not saying procession is causing this encounter with the Torid meteor stream. And go find the paragraph where I say that. No, 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, "Uhoh, 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." You didn't say doomed in 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 referenced on that issue.

The procession has nothing to do with that. And it's not even on that cycle. It has a cycle of about about 21,000 years. 25 cycles are a procession. 25,920 years actually for a procession. One degree every 72 years, give or take a small margin. That is the procession. You're really you're really teaching grandma 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 it to you and say, "Oh, no.

You can't say that because it's 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 the work of Victor Clue, Bill Napierre, and Emilio Spedicato. And I also I also indicate that I strongly support that work. That's as far as I go with this. Mark, if if I could stop you here. You so you think that this comet wiping out all the ice age megapona 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 are getting hit pretty hard. What do you take of what do you make of the latest platinum paper in Nature Scientific Reports, the platinum anomaly across North America and its 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 Clovis, he has platinum concentrations that are that that are seemingly not matching up.

They're outside the the the younger dus. Uh, they're inside the younger dus. I'd like to I'd like you to show those because let's bring hard to understand what he's trying to say. It doesn't refute the common hypothesis. Let's bring Malcolm on since he's one of the co-authors of the um Platinum paper. This is going to get super complicated. Let's try one caller at a time. We can only do one caller at a time apparently. Well, I think Malcolm, you know, should should should have his voice.

Well, I don't want to criticize him if he can't be here. What I'd like to do is go to talk a little bit if I may about uh go Beckley because I've read uh Schmidt. I I know that Schmidt never uh ever found anything to suggest that there were anything in the early part of Gobecley 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.

He never found any domesticated animals. He never found any domesticated grain. The he found tons of bones of animals. So we know that about 100 to 200 people were probably working on Gobeclet 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 at Gothbi? How can you possibly? Again, I'm not saying that the word magicians of the gods comes from the upcalloo in ancient Sumer and they were considered to have superior powers and they were considered to be magicians of a sort. I should I not report that because it's there in the Sumerian text. I think you should tell us what Michael's been asking all day is what were their superpowers. I'm not saying that they had superpowers. It's the Sumerianss who said that.

I simply report that. You can regard that as a copout if you like, but I am a [ __ ] talking book magicians of the gods because that's the direct implication of the abcaloo. They were the magicians of the gods. Sounds 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 that had 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 there building those megaliths. If you went to if you went to Easter Island and you found the the moi and and and you said, "Oh my gosh, there must have been some secret civilization that made these moi because stupid hunter gathers couldn't possibly make these." Well, we know that there were no special people on Easter Island. It had to be made by hunter gathers. Why would you poo poo uh the frankly champion and have to call a superior civilization?

Are you seriously saying that the inhabitants of Easter Island were hunter gatherers? Well, absolutely. And in a matter of fact, we can see that of the Pacific Ocean agriculture into the Pacific Ocean until about 1,000 years ago. I mean into eastern until about 1,000 years ago. What do you think they were? They certainly weren't a a big civilization. Mark, please let him respond. Go ahead. Well, first of all, have you met Cl did you meet Clashmid? 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 did record my interviews with him uh with his agreement and and what he states clearly, I don't disagree with you that the people around Gobeclete were hunter gatherers when Gobeclete was started. What precisely intrigued Klaus Smith was the possibility, his phrase not mine, that Gobecley was a center of innovation, a place where new ideas were deliberately seeded and spread out in the population. I have Claus Schmidt 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 Gobeclet at the time that goleeppe is functioning.

What do you mean by suddenly? Can I add to that? What I mean by what I mean by suddenly is Claus Schmidt stated very clearly that these are the people the very same people who made Gobeclete in Clausmid's view are the people who quote unquote invented agriculture. If you don't mind me interrupting here for a second what what about Easter Island? Was Easter Island established by hunter gatherers or not? You were saying not. 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 it 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 there to hunt and gather on that? Oh, no. You're misunderstanding my point. My point is that these are not sophisticated people. Okay. I agree with you on both goppy. Uh I think that you've 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't understand is how this ties into some some magnificent civilization. There's nothing there that indicates that they were influenced by some other civilization. They started out as hunter gathers and then they evolved into um agricultural 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, 7,000 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 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 Gobecley. And there probably several other I can see them on maps. Yeah, we need to get to the Got a wonderful amount of work to do there. You bet. So I think Graham, we're in good agreement on this. Okay. So you guys 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 exists.

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 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 use the word con. Well, you did use the word conning. Actually, it's in the very last paragraph of your article cuz I got it right here in front of me. We will fix that. You did use the word con, Michael. This was the first uh thing I wrote. I just put it up for my students. Well, it's there. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. Hold on. Exact words. I am left with what I am left with is that Hancock hang 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 Hanok has a real knack for conning a hellacious number of people into buying his books. I mean that's a direct ad hominemm insult. It's online in your article. Do you stand by it or not? Uh listen I apologize to you for the use of that language. Is that not what you want to hear? Because I do. But why would you say I'm 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 to say that 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. You've been incorrect. I haven't been proven incorrect. Well, you have. You misquote me. You don't you don't give the context. And even Michael 2012 and even Michael has said that the skeptic article will not will not reflect these outofc 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 and the younger dus 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? Um, we need to map You guys can get into 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, Oregon. Yeah. Okay. Jamie will put it up. And and by the way, u 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 and look at that like you 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. But anyway, let's go. Why is it okay to just put that up online for your students? 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, maybe I think I stand by everything I said except for the the personal comment at the end.

Well, we'll see if 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 I have to emphasize that that the scab lands 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 Colombia Lake and the other one on the far right o over in Montana uh that's Lake Msula.

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 Brett's, you know, original idea was that there was just one flooding. But then Brett's 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.

They're 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 a entire continent? Why would you say that this is evidence for a comet strike, comet strike? Not even the comet guys are saying that this flooding out here is related to a comet because there are a large number of area a very small number of 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 We're gonna bring that up. But, uh, let's let Randall 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 confine 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 Kihu 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 Agaze. 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 Dells.

Um there are the Fingerlakes in New York that probably were created by uh massive floods emanating off of were scoured. Scoured. Exactly right. They were scoured. And they were probably scoured by subglacial floods that were coming under uh high pressure because you know you have the Drumland fields that are just to the south of them. And I you've probably seen the work of John Sha uh Claire Beanie and Bruce Rainey and those out of Canada about Drummonds is crazy. Well, why why would that be? Why would How do you propose the Drumlands then were formed?

Oh, easily. uh the the glaciers came forward and topped topped the the the the terminal marine and and spread the the marines out to into drones and but how I mean you've got you've got features that look like they're totally fluy produced. You have they look like inverted boats. You look at the internal stratification. How does glaciers create internal stratification? I've looked at at numerous drumlands um from in Canada. I've looked at drumlands in New York State. I've looked at drumlands 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 uh deformable substrate, how is it that they produce anything other than a a a chaotic jumble of glacial tail? 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 to me before you do that because I'm not disagreeing with you. Okay. A drumman 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 mis you're misidentifying them as drumlins. No, I am not misidentifying drumlins. I know very clearly the difference between an escer and a drumland. I've looked at many escars. I've hiked on them. I've I've flown over them in airplanes. The Fingerlakes are gouged. They are gouged. Yes. But 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 to the bigger picture. But hold on a second. What's your point about that? 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 going to 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 gr the finger lakes is they're gouged out. They're parallel to one another. if 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 n in the '9s uh that water uh 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 up there. What he backed off of was the the idea that the draining of glacial lake Agaze triggered the younger dus because the the the dating of the draining of glacial lake Agaze was post younger dus. And so that's what he backed off of. He didn't necessarily back off. Look, we know that there were somewhere marines have been carefully uh they've been carefully mapped.

You can watch the Olympide glacier move back marine after marine and there are no holes in that marine that that suggest flooding. There's no change in the lake level of Lake Agassy. There's no evidence there uh Randall 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 Agaze. H how is that possible? I mean, as the ice receded, the glacial lake Agaze expanded and at some point it finally breached uh right there at at by Big Stone Lake in Minnesota and and basically carved out uh the Minnesota River Valley, which geological studies have confirmed, they call GLA uh River Warren, and have confirmed that essentially it was carrying its p 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 it, which that creates copious amounts of water. I think you guys referred to it the last time as a tsunami. There's no evidence of a tsunami in North America.

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 flooding in North America and somehow this relates to uh a destruction of Atlantis in some lost civilization? That's not what I'm talking about right now. I'm not talking about that. We know there was a phenocandian ice sheet. We know there was a cordieran ice sheet. We know there was a Laurentide ice sheet.

We know they all melted. We know that there was somewhere around 6 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 scablands. I've been going back to the scablands and the area of glacial m Lake Missoula 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 you're cherrypicking. Look at the map. You've shown some pictures. You know, we can measure those current ripple marks that you showed. We can measure how much water went over them. All you have to do is measure the current ripples. You can go into Cameas Prairie and you've got a current ripple field there that is about 7 mi long. The Oh, I know. Oh, I know it very well.

Okay. And the high water mark in there is at 4,200 ft above sea level. The floor of Cameas Prairie is just 1,400 ft lower than that. So, we know that there were 1,400 ft of water that passed through Cameas Prairie and down into the Flathead River. No. No, we don't. Are you disregarding are you disregarding the high water marks? From the bottom of 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 4,000 ft of water here." I'm not talking about a canyon. I'm talking about Cameas 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 Cameas 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 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 ft cord lengths and say that that wasn't a catastrophic flow. Maybe it wasn't. It was it was a catastrophic flood, but it wasn't like a tsunami. Well, then how would you characterize there?

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. You're obviously not familiar. You're not familiar with the work then of Victor Baker or Russell Bunker or a number of others that have challenged the 40 floods hypothesis. And and are you going to tell me that those current ripples in Cameas Prairie are created? They're the product of 40 separate floods.

Oh, absolutely. In fact, when you showed one of your pictures, I could see the flow changes in that. Oh, don't give me the the you're incredulous stuff. Being incredulous doesn't mean you're right. You You do the incredulous all the time, Mark. Well, so that's because you say some pretty incredulous things. 40 floods created the Cameas Prairie. I That's what you're saying. That's for That's the product of 40 separate floods. Those currently floods have been in there. I know that there are they they're going they're counting them and I and I last read something to the effect of 40 somewhere around.

Yeah, that's based on the work of Richard White goes back to the to the early 80s and I think he's got No, go go go to go to his graph. Can we go to his graph? Whose 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. Well, I I I think we're I hopefully hopefully we're disagreeing uh in a as comrades here rather than fighting each other.

I'm just trying to give you some data here. Look at those uh those are Missoula floods. Uh Lake Lake Missoula. He's got them dated. You're seeing the dates. He's got standard deviations, one and two standard deviations 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. Yes. So I don't understand why you're 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. What's going on? I'm 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, entrained into flood waters, and then redeposited.

So, you know, that that's that's a major problem with radiocarbon dating. Anytime you look at flood sentiments, and I do believe there were multiple floods, that's, 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. Sorry we couldn't 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 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 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 Fingerlakes 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 moring that are at the south end of uh the Fingerlakes 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 that 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, Rand, I couldn't have said that better. It was well very well articulated. Let me go back to the big picture if I could just for a minute because I want us to to address something that Graham said earlier and and that is that Graham seems to have this idea that that comets break up all the time, but but people that understand um I I think comets and meteorites understand that the the the comet Schumer Levy or whatever it was that broke up, it broke up because of the gravitation of Jupiter.

Uh we would not expect these comets to break up uh entering into the atmosphere. It's one of the problems that the comet people have had. 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 um that the studies are showing that you're not going to be able to do this without leaving some marks. and and so far nobody's been able to find a crater. Do you know that that they're suggesting that a 4 km comet, if it could break up, it would generate 1 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. Malcolm LMP has been to have a huge comet strike. Malcolm LMPT has been standing by for 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 is 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. Do you think I really appreciate you having me on, Joe? I appreciate you coming on, too. And I'm glad you guys uh especially you and Randall seem to have uh ironed out a lot of your ideas. I think there's Rand'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 in 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 you imparting your knowledge on us. Mark, if if at 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'm not sure why. I'm not either because if I would have seen that, I definitely would have responded. So I have a website. Please send me. I'd love to. We'll definitely connect you guys um after this uh is over.

And thank you once again, Mark. Really, really appreciate you calling in. just say I I do hope you'll revisit your article and just have a look at the context in which you present me there. Absolutely. Never meant to insult you. Thank you, Mark. Okay. Now uh we are going to call caller number two. This is this is a fascinating podcast though. And uh your friend who's waiting is Malcolm LMPT. 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 I regard it highly significant paper uh finding a platinum anomaly across North America. Uh and I would hope he might begin with with addressing uh why that might indicate a comet impact. Right. Is Malcolm on? You should be. Malcolm, can you hear us? I I can hear. Can you hear me? 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 Graham 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 what was it exactly?

Platinum 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. The the whole range of proxies of impact proxies. Now M 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. Welcome. I think there's an issue. Seems to be a bit Can you get Oh, I I know what is going on.

I've got a uh feedback. I've got to turn off this. Okay. Oh, 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. Yeah. You're going to get you're you're getting us on like a 40 second delay or something. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. We cool now. Actually, I was very interested to hear Mark's 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 I consider it. 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 comet 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 microsphererals. Uh 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 comet 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 could conceive of a rubble pile that somehow became uh disassociated although there'd be me there have to be a mechanism or a model for that and I don't think we have a model for that. Uh asteroids come in many flavors and uh 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 u 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.

If you look at the nano diamonds, which may be the most controversial of the bunch of of the evidence lines, that's been that's been replicated by four different groups independent. Uh five different studies, the magnetic microsphererals, which were initially uh treated very hostily because they didn't understand what we were talking about. And some of that was a self-inflicted wound on a part of the initial study uh which didn't show what we what we really were finding. and uh that's been corrected and there yet this the same objection or criticism is being made.

Magnetic microsphererals are typically very well they're melted and then they're quenched. Uh they 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 uh including many of the same sites that uh that were originally disputed. So, then the the disputation has been largely based upon the failure to do the most basic part of the of the protocol which is to uh to do the the scanning electron microscopic analysis of the sphererals.

Okay, that that is the uh the microsphererals and the and the nano diamonds. The other is the discovery of platinum, aridium or osmium which are the platinum group elements which are characteristic of an asteroid impact. And we found some evidence of of aridium not not a lot but there have been certain sites that are rich in aridium at the and once again this is at the younger driest boundary not above not below it's there at that boundary so that date seems to be pretty solid and aridium 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 aridium. There are now 11 studies by independent groups that have confirmed the uh the occurrence of platinum osmium or aridium. So it looks to me like the evidence is piling up. Uh the most recent one of course is the platinum study by Moore that just came out uh a few months ago. Now, Randall Carlson just I'm sorry to interrupt you, but Randall Carlson just had us pull up uh some images that we're looking at. Randall, please explain what this is.

Well, this is from uh Malcolm's 2012 um independent evaluation of conflicting microsphereral results from different investigations. This is his uh supplementary in uh information figure 4. 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 microsphererals. So, so we've got up on the screen here um supplementary uh information figure 4 where you've got the microsphererals from Topper, Blackwater Draw, and Pawpa 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 to actually see these what we call dendritic structures or or uh almost like a carpet weave. Uh 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 uh that's what I'm trying to do here. But uh yeah the uh the fact that these are enhanced these these things are quite enhanced at the emberas and really depleted above and below.

Now there are sphirerals throughout the column. Any column of of soil uh when you go down vertically uh deeper you find sphirerals but those sphirerals are typically what we call orthogenic which means that 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 a framboidal sphero, 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 this 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 u the what we call impact sphererals or magnetic microsphererals and they occur much more frequently. I mean I've I've got sites that have tens of thousands of these things in every couple of centimeters of of sediment. So you've got to separate the uh the the impact sphererals or the magnetic microsphererals 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 all these pro what we call proxies the the impact sphererals the 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 then that's that would seem to be the case that or uh disingenuous in that regard. So I would say that that uh because typically what we see is that the the opposition literature does not site the studies that have come out. Yeah. We try and cite both the critical studies and ours and give reasons why our studies supplant theirs and that's but I wish they would share but uh could you go that 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 could 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.

Uh so we have figure uh from supplementary information uh six the light photo microraphs of magnetic and glassy sphirerals from Melrose Pennsylvania and it shows the the the wide variety of shapes which includes sphirerals, 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 sphirerals. Um and then like particularly uh I don't I not sure if you were co-author of this paper or not. Um 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 sphererals. One clear silicon rich and the other opaque ironrich that have been fused together. And that's that's pretty convincing evidence of the of the energy that's involved in these phenomena um that you actually have these fused sphererals like this. And then Jamie, if you go down to the next image uh which is a scanning electron microscope images comparing younger drive boundary sphererals on the top row with known impact sphirerals on the bottom row.

This is a very interesting comparison because and I you've probably seen this one, Malcolm. A uh 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 spiral and just below it is a younger dus sparrow from Lake Kutzio 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 Tungusa air burst and then D is younger driest boundary from Lingen Germany which dates to 12,800 years before present.

And there you can see very clearly the the the the rapid quench melt uh texture on the surface between the two comparisoning comparing Tungusa air burst 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 dus boundary sphireral from Abu Hara 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 dus 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 ACB and D uh pictures are very similar to the material that I'm taking out of the underest boundary at the sites that I've been looking at. Uhhuh. Malcolm, what evidence, if any, uh, do are you aware of about what is that nuclear glass material called? Tri tritinite. Trinitite, that's how you say it. What I, from what I understand, there's quite a bit of that that also appears in the 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 sight specific. And 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 uh Ted Bunch uh would call skorlike 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 dryest boundary sediment. And is this trinit this material only produced in this manner or it's also produced through 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 or a fulgarite could do it uh a fulgarite is is what's produced by a uh a lightning strike could produce u a uh sphirerals it could produce all the high temperature products that you see at 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 was going to say about the uh the melt glass is that in in the the material we're looking at, you see evidence of of melted uh zirkons, melted chromite, all of which are very high temperature uh features indicating a very high temperature that was experienced by that particular object. Are are you seeing the image we have up here? Yeah. Yes, I am.

Oh, great. Okay, good. Yeah, there a is from Meteor Crater and B is from the Trinity nuclear test. So, and then uh with a 22 kiloton yield and then C is from one of the Soviet era nuclear tests and D is again a Scoriaike object from Abuhura. So, yeah. So, and then if we go to uh let's see um you gotta love that it says Stalinite. Yeah, go go goalike objects the uh the mel glass or skoria like objects has only been found in about half a dozen sites to this point.

Uh, 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, then maybe there's more more legitimacy to uh to a primary impact site. Uh, right now, we just don't know. You know, we're still we're still working that out. All right, we got another nice slide from from the Bunch article here.

Uh the beautiful slide calcium oxide rich skorlike object created by the melting of carbonate and silica rich precursor rocks. The yellow areas the calcium oxide the white areas lhatalite and dark areas are iron oxide. So that's a really niceite. Yeah, I've been struggling with getting that pronunciation down. Um, and then Jamie, if you go to the next one, we will see uh there's a skoria 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 when I in the sites that produce Mel glass, that's what I'm seeing. Yeah. Those two those two types of uh particulates. And how much of this material are you finding in these sites? Well, you don't find 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. Uh unless you know that it'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 it. And uh the layer that we we typically try and just limit our investigation to layers that have been dated to the ever driest boundary or contain the ever dryest 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 a lot of 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 just as 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 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 we're 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 it things in Syria. We haven't looked elsewhere. We've seen it out in the Pacific Ocean. We've seen it uh in Europe. So, I mean, where does it end? Right now, we haven't found an end to it yet. And it's all at the younger Dryus boundary. That's correct. Yeah. What have you found in the Pacific Ocean? Uh, well, Chararma has found some there's 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 sight of deposition of osmium resulting from dust from dust cloud following a meteorite impact at 12 12,000 kiloms plus or - 4,000. So right in that ballpark, Chararma says that uh he found osmium and I believe he's he's come up with microsphererals from 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 a 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 I have I haven't regarded as particularly high high quality. M Malcolm Michael Shurmer here just uh um do you have an opinion on uh the the association of the impact with the megapana 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 megapona goes, I I think that uh I guess I 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 with the Clovis point and the uh the atal and the spear u the uh the replaceable uh spear tip that u must have been devastating to the fauna. But the the idea of attacking a a a Probaccinian 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 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 megapona may have been as much related to religion as something else.

There may have been a religion built around the extinction of the megapona. Um how so? That's well that you 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 adeladdle. Adeladdle is less effective. You get less range, but uh people hunt with not just modern compound bows, which are very powerful, which would allow you to shoot it from 100 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 Willoolly Mammoth was that they would go after the females apparently according to uh Dan Flores who wrote American Serengeti and that the females would keep the young in their body. Their gestation period was very long. Like I believe he said it was 2 years. Is that correct? I think he said it was 2 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 wipe them out, the Blitz Creek hypothesis, there's a lot of holes in that theory according to uh a lot of people that have studied it. Well, I think if you have a, you know, if you have an environmental impact uh or a uh 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 megapona 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 probiscinians. when the 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 omega is going to suffer. So, I think it's a combination of factors, not necessarily just one. Yeah, I think that's very reasonable.

Uh Malcolm, is there anything else that 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 scablands from from flying over them when I was a young naval officer that uh 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, Mark, 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 just without someone like you presenting hard data and 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 going to let you go. Okay. Take it easy buddy. Sound down. Time for your nap. Malcolm. That's a lot of energy. So these podcasts are long. I mean four hours. This 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 cuz that is pretty amazing stuff. And Randall, 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 mastadon. Mastadon, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I want to see those. So, let's go to the scablands 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 uh Scablands on uh on Google and you could see this. Describe it to us, Randall. Well, here this is um textbook scab land right here. Um let's see what this is. probably Rock Lake or Sprag Lake in the Cheney Paloo scab lands. Um yeah, you see the potholes there. That's a sign of turbulence, extreme turbulence uh within the water. Um culking is then is what the process is called where you get it's so turbulent that it actually produces vortexes, highintensity 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. Uh that's Paloo Falls which was is 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 Paloo 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. R E X Rex. Okay. And I thought you were saying wreck like a car wreck. Well, that's it's a play on words. Oh, okay. See? Um, so yeah, we are talking about that. Okay. But, um, yeah, and we got some great drone footage on there. Did we show that last time I was? I don't believe we did. We might have. Did we? I think we showed a bit of the um the Kas 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 was uh Yeah, here we go. Um, this is the drone footage. Wow. Incredible. Yeah. And and let's see. Be ready to pause you if we need to. Here. Um, 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 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 um recessional cataract very similar to dryfalls. 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.

This is in eastern Washington. This is on the eastern rim of Quincy 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 Wan that Wisconsin uh Wisconsin Washington. Um so basically what we had here was you know plucking uh quarrying as the water poured over this ridge. This is the Babcock Ridge and behind us is the Quincy 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. Yeah, 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 Macedons? 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 plea scene on the which I just should have given you. That sounds like a amusement park. Yeah, the world of the place. 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 doing that, right? Yeah. I don't know how plausible it is, but that seems like a terrible idea. The lost world of the wrong. Nothing. It's not as any diseases.

Well, that's one of the big concerns about climate change, right? That we're going to release some 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? I mean, Jesus Christ, man. Go to slide 6,222. 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 perafrost around the rivers collapses, it exposes these huge deposits of bones which have been buried in the perafrost.

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. Um because this pile Yeah. Because is it possible that this I mean this is not necessarily at the bottom of a cliff, right? Cuz you know that they pushed a lot of them off cliffs and Yeah. No, no, this this is stuff that when the the river floods it erodess the banks and then this stuff falls out of the river banks, right?

So it's it's been locked into the perafrost 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 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 the to the right uh 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 they literally couldn't even eat all of them like head smashed in buffalo head smashed in. They would they would run so many of them off cliffs that Yeah. But but here's the thing.

Here's the thing. When you look at at at the 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, taffanomic 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 perafrost 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 mastadon 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-tonon 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 uh 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 honches 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 ready. 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 for 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-tonon mammoth because the contents of his stomach, according to the studies, had not really even been putrified yet, which implies that the entire carcass had been frozen through and through probably in less than 10 hours.

Um, well, like I see the iceman, 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 All right. In in the uh in a museum in Russia showing what the the uh mammoth the circumstances under which he was found.

If you go to, let's see, and by the way, as a sidebar on Usie 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 and laboratory stuff 10 years before that came out. Yeah. Fascinating. So 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 uh 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 what would do it for me would you know the boats that they sent the emissaries out on the wood carbon 14 dated um in 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 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 in an effective and and and hopefully thoroughly 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, totally self-taught autodidc. They called you an autodid. 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.

So Harland Brett is a good example of that. You know, a high school teacher, right? And how about Randall Carlson? He's a good example of that, too. Absolutely. Exent. Well, listen. You still want to look at this real quick? The mastadon. I got it right here. Let's do it. He could go for days. That's what I love about Randall. He never gets tired of this stuff. If you could bottle your enthusiasm, it' be an awesome pill. Well, maybe we can talk about that. Put it in the memory focus there.

Yeah. All right. We're going to we're going to look at this this mastadon here. Um 125. 125. Yeah. So, this is a mastadon 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 1 ft in thickness. um when the m 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 ft from the skull near a portion of the pelvis. In spite of the wide dislocation of the parts, the Now, this is where it 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 Macedon. We don't have dating on this. Um but it it likely was ve at the very end probably right in that younger dus 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 femurss that's been busted squarely across. Um they go on to say that uh 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 mastadon that got smashed into the into the ground. Wow. the the forces there were strong powerful sheer 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 I once went digging with Jack her 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 just from the force of the water and then piling up at the at the of a wall. And so if you could do it to a dinosaur Wow.

Right. 8 85 85 is an interesting slide because what it shows is the London ivory docks which over a period of about two centuries. Whoa. This was um this was mammoth ivory that's being dug out of the Siberian perafrost. 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. 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 that I Yeah. That was made out of mammoth ivory. Yeah. And it's 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 cuz they're Exactly. It's it's a kind of a loophole. In this case though, what we have is tus that are being again dug out of the perafrost, right?

So, how did they get there? That becomes the question. 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 perafrost? 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 us. My pleasure. It was a treat. Can I do a quick shout out? I want to thank Brad Young, Cameron Wilshshire, my brother Rowan, my wife Julie for helping all make this possible. Uh, I also want to have people go to the Geocosmic Rex website and the Sacred Geometry International website for a lot more of this kind of stuff. Then I'm going to thank my beloved partner and wife, Samantha, 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 Sherman, 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 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 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. Interesting guest. 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.