Debunking Ancient Myths: Flint Dibble on Archaeology, Conspiracy Theories & Graham Hancock

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:22:01
Unknown
We're talking about a conspiracy that pervades private industry, nonprofits and every single government in the world. What they are doing. These people who believe in free speech is exactly the opposite of free speech. What they are trying to do is shut me down so I can not respond, so that people on their side will not take me seriously.

00:00:22:04 - 00:00:41:09
Unknown
We don't get along with each other at all. We disagree with each other all the time. Sorry about what the reality of history is. They can kiss my ass. I'm not going to shut up. You think you're going to silence me? Like, kiss my ass? You guys are a bunch of flaming turds. If you think I'm going to shut up.

00:00:41:15 - 00:01:06:00
Unknown
I focused and spent hours of my time on Joe Rogan on those points. So they are just wrong. And they're misinterpreting the evidence. And, I don't know. That's just a bunch of weak. If you excuse my language. And we have very different viewpoints on many things, but a lot of these issues are American issues. They're not Republican or Democrat issues.

00:01:06:02 - 00:01:34:01
Unknown
Welcome back to Elevated Thoughts. We're here today with Flint Dibble, an archeologist and research fellow at Cardiff University, where he mostly studies ancient Greek civilizations. But you might know Flint best for his recent knockout debate with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan's podcast, where he totally dismantled the Atlantis myth by simply using facts. This guy is known for bringing the heat when it comes to calling out pseudoscience and archeology, and he is absolutely the real deal.

00:01:34:04 - 00:01:54:21
Unknown
So this is going to be a conversation. And you don't want to miss Flint. I'm so stoked to have you here with us today. How are you, brother? I'm doing okay. It's been a long week. I was traveling last weekend. This next weekend we have a big festival online. Real archeology. For anybody who's listening, I know this comes out after that, but everything should still be available online.

00:01:54:21 - 00:02:12:20
Unknown
Check us out at real Dash archeology. Dot com. And, yeah. So lots of lots of good stuff going on. Yeah. Well, Flint, just to give you a little bit of a background on myself, I am the case study for what you were trying to accomplish. Or so I think, on the Joe Rogan Experience. I'm someone who right leaning.

00:02:12:20 - 00:02:34:17
Unknown
I've loved listening to Joe Rogan all the time. I've listened to Graham Hancock on him before and never really was interested too much, but nodded along and said, oh, pretty interesting stuff. I wish archeologists would look into it. And when I stumbled upon your episode, I if that was a four hour conversation, Flint no exaggeration. Within 15 minutes I was totally converted just by the fact that you broke it down.

00:02:34:17 - 00:02:54:20
Unknown
So simple. Can you tell us a little bit about the experience that what is it like walking in to the Joe Rogan Experience? You know, just tell us a little bit about that. I mean, you know, it was all a blur, so I remember everything, that's for sure. It was certainly a wild experience in the sense that so many people saw me.

00:02:54:20 - 00:03:20:03
Unknown
I mean, I never kind of expected that, and I didn't expect to have the impact that it had. I wasn't actually necessarily trying to reach people that believed Graham. You know, like, I went in there thinking that people that believe him, they've consumed so much of his narrative that it's really difficult, to actually wedge in the real archeological perspective of real facts and evidence.

00:03:20:05 - 00:03:41:17
Unknown
And I would hope that it would have that effect on some people. But I was actually kind of surprised to see it have that kind of effect on so many of his former fans. I was actually just trying to mostly reach people who didn't really know, who did not know what to believe and what to expect, who weren't necessarily convinced of Graham Hancock's ideas, but wanted to hear what a real archeologist would say about them.

00:03:41:22 - 00:04:01:03
Unknown
Those were actually the audience that I expected to reach, and I think I did. And so I was actually shocked to reach so many people like you. I mean, very please don't get me wrong, very, very pleased. But at the same time, it was not what I expected to actually accomplish. And that sort of knocked my socks off and I think knocked the socks off of a lot of people.

00:04:01:05 - 00:04:16:06
Unknown
It was why it was such a shocker in a sense as well. I remember I wrote a review after watching that initial debate, and you had commented on it actually, and reposted it and said, well, hey, this wasn't even supposed to be a debate. I don't want to be seen as a winner or a or Graham as a loser.

00:04:16:08 - 00:04:33:18
Unknown
We just wanted to continue this conversation, like you said, elevate real facts. So no, we were totally great. Yeah. But and I mean, my role as well. Look, I'm a teacher. I'm an educator. My goal is to go out there and not have a debate, because that's not how you debate facts. You don't debate science in on a podcast.

00:04:33:23 - 00:04:56:18
Unknown
That's just it. No matter what was said on a podcast, it's going to have zero impact on actual scientific interpretation. If Graham actually wants to convince actual scientists he needs to publish stuff in a scientific venue, because that's where that discourse happens. And so, you know, that's why the idea of it as a debate is silly. It's a debate over public opinion on this, not over the truth of the past.

00:04:56:20 - 00:05:13:01
Unknown
Yeah. So let's contextualize some of your experience here. I usually prescribe. So you don't want to roll in the mud because that's where pigs like to play. Right? But, I noticed that you really have taken it head on. Kind of. I don't want to say disinformation, but just misinformation for folks who maybe just a little bit naive to what real archeology looks like.

00:05:13:04 - 00:05:31:11
Unknown
So. So taking into context, this battle that you've been waging online and I think very, very successfully, was it all worth it? Yeah. Of course. I mean, definitely, without a doubt. I think getting out the word and educating people about real archeology is 100% worthwhile. It's what we all need to be doing. People are interested in the past.

00:05:31:11 - 00:06:00:13
Unknown
And I mean, look, there's people say, oh, don't debate pseudo scientists. But the problem is we live in a world where pseudoscience, pseudo history, conspiracy theories and all this kind of fake stuff is just growing in popularity. And archeology is a perfect microcosm of this because, you know, like, well, anti-vaxxer stuff is not being, you know, pushed on Netflix or, or any legitimate sort of media platforms.

00:06:00:15 - 00:06:24:02
Unknown
Pseudo archeology is the History Channel has been pushing ancient aliens for over a decade, and now Netflix with ancient apocalypse. Amazon lists Graham Hancock books under the field of archeology, despite Graham Hancock saying quite prominently, I'm not an archeologist. Well, then why does Amazon put it in the archeology category? Why is it listed as a docu series on Netflix then?

00:06:24:02 - 00:06:47:18
Unknown
If he doesn't think that what he does has that veneer of legitimacy and that's why he is a pseudo archeologist, whether he calls himself an archeologist or not, he claims to be rewriting the paradigm of history and Netflix, IMDb, Amazon and whatnot, presented as if it's factual and not a single scholar who actually understands archeology. And not just scholars, not a single professional.

00:06:47:20 - 00:07:05:19
Unknown
You know, like there's plenty of professionals in the field of archeology who have an undergrad education. And they they go digging, they publish stuff, they they do real archeology. They're professionals that do most of the work in the field. And nobody agrees with Graham Hancock, if you're familiar with the evidence, not a single one. And so, you know, it sounds like he just doesn't like peer review.

00:07:05:19 - 00:07:32:04
Unknown
That's the problem. You know, he does not like critique, even though he's the one that pushed for a debate. He thought he'd be able to have a good time in his own venue and spin a narrative around. And I came prepared, you know, that's brings us, I mean, a little bit more recently, where he released season two on Netflix, despite the kind of smackdown that happened, despite the elevation of real archeology and scholarship to say, hey, Graham, this doesn't make any sense now.

00:07:32:04 - 00:07:49:22
Unknown
Season two came out about a week or now that this is two weeks ago, and he showed up again on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Graham solo this time and Flint, I, I can't imagine how you felt when you opened up your app and listened to just the first sentence out of Joe Rogan's mouth. What was your reaction?

00:07:49:22 - 00:08:11:16
Unknown
Because and maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about what he said. Well, I still don't have a full reaction yet, let's put it that way. It's still a little news to me, and I want to see if he invites me on to reply or not, because that also, impacts how I react because it shows whether Joe is fully siding with Graham or if he's open to hearing another perspective.

00:08:11:21 - 00:08:26:22
Unknown
And right now, it looks like he has Donald Trump going on later this week. So I'm going to assume he's not going to get in touch for at least a week. And in which case there's no reason to really reply to Joe's claims, because what he's heard is Graham's side of the story. And Graham and him are obviously old friends, and so that carries a lot of weight.

00:08:27:04 - 00:08:46:08
Unknown
But I got along quite well with Joe when I was there, so I was obviously disappointed to hear him just take Graham's side of view and, and so far to not have had such an invitation come my way. The reactions online have been very mixed. I've noticed that a lot of Joe Rogan fans are still on my side.

00:08:46:10 - 00:09:10:04
Unknown
You can go through the subreddit on, on of Joe Rogan subreddit, and I would say it's fairly evenly mixed, despite the fact that Joe Rogan very much voiced, he agreed with Graham's accusations of me and lying. And we'll talk about that in a second. But but the fact that Joe Rogan said he very strongly agrees with Graham and clearly is not swayed all of his fans, well, he he very clearly accused you of twisting the facts.

00:09:10:04 - 00:09:32:06
Unknown
And when you look at what they're claiming and during that episode, it was it was shocking because what they're even claiming was like fairy dust at best, it was something that didn't even have an a material effect on the conversation. Right? It was something about the number of shipwrecks that. Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely silly. I mean, like, I showed up with about 250 slides prepared.

00:09:32:11 - 00:10:09:01
Unknown
Each of those slides had at least one citation on them. Some had up to like ten citations on them. Right. So I came with hundreds of sizable facts and evidence and data sets. And in fact, by data set, I presented millions of data points on the various maps that I showed and the various data sets that I highlighted that showed what archeology is based upon and their entire critique of me playing fast and loose with the facts rests on what two claims that I a use the wrong number of shipwrecks, which I acknowledged months ago that I misread that article.

00:10:09:01 - 00:10:35:06
Unknown
That article said there's an estimate of 3 million shipwrecks. I thought that was an estimate of the number that have been documented. It's actually an estimate extrapolating from the number that have been documented, which is still 300,000 or so shipwrecks. So, you know, whether it's 3 million or 300,000, there's been a lot of underwater archeology done to document not just shipwrecks, but everything that's on the submerged continental shelves relating to humans.

00:10:35:12 - 00:11:03:05
Unknown
And so, you know, whether I got that number right or wrong doesn't change anything. The other quibble that they have is that I somehow misrepresented ice core data and metals and ice cores, and I have responded to that. I have not misrepresented that at all. Ice cores have been extensively studied going back millions of years into the earth's, climate history and environmental history, and as well more recently into understanding human impacts on the environment.

00:11:03:09 - 00:11:26:17
Unknown
And what I presented was where several examples of where ice cores have documented metallurgy in more recent history, ancient history and prehistory. And we can see that clearly in a number of different ice cores and the types of metals that show up. And then the isotopic studies of them. What I didn't feel like I had to do is go into much detail on the stuff from pre-history, meaning from 10,000 years ago or earlier.

00:11:26:21 - 00:11:50:15
Unknown
As I just said quickly, none of that evidence, all the evidence that is there shows that it's all natural. And that is very true. If you go look at the evidence, the articles that Ice core scientists have published stretching back into the Pleistocene and into the Ice Age, they document different trace elements in ice core layers from those periods, and they demonstrate how they all have to deal with natural changes in Earth's.

00:11:50:15 - 00:12:12:18
Unknown
The Earth's environment and climate. And not a single one talks about metallurgy. And in fact, they've done the exact same tests, the exact same type of isotopic tests that tell you where those trace elements come from, that were used to document mining in the Roman and medieval periods. And so all of those articles for the Ice Age say that that materials introduced naturally.

00:12:12:18 - 00:12:34:01
Unknown
It was even on the title of the article these people used to critique me. So they are just wrong, and they're misinterpreting the evidence. And what they've not addressed were the two disproves. If you remember, in my introduction on Joe Rogan, I said I'm coming here with two disproves. One of them is the whole range of evidence for hunter gatherers in the Ice Age itself.

00:12:34:03 - 00:12:57:07
Unknown
And the second one is the well dated evidence for the development of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals. I focused and spent hours of my time on Joe Rogan on those points. They have no critique for them. On the other hand, two different slides that I brought up for about a total of three minutes. They say that that shows that I'm a liar and, I don't know, that's just a bunch of weak.

00:12:57:09 - 00:13:16:02
Unknown
If you excuse my language, I think, I think it's important to talk about how they rely on the inability to prove the negative, because you can't find the evidence of what I'm talking about. Then you have to always consider this positive. And and it's an important theme that you always speak about is we have to start from what we know, and then you build a record and out from there.

00:13:16:02 - 00:13:33:07
Unknown
So maybe you can highlight this theme for our viewers because I think it is crucially important. Yeah, I think that's really important. I mean, you know, there's this idea that you can't prove a negative. And frankly, again, to use that language, that's because to prove a negative, what you need to do is prove a positive that's mutually exclusive with that negative.

00:13:33:09 - 00:14:06:02
Unknown
So when Graham Hancock says there's a global civilization that occupied the coasts during the ice age that are now submerged, well, to look at that, we can actually go look at Ice Age coastlines. And I did that right. I went and I saw that there are multiple places where ice age coastlines are not submerged today. So, for example, I highlighted research done by my colleague, professor Tom Strasser on Crete, where the south coast of Crete, because of tectonic uplift, the African tectonic plate is going underneath the European one.

00:14:06:05 - 00:14:28:10
Unknown
It's pushing up the coastline, of southern Crete and southern Greece even. And we actually can explore that ice age coastline. And we have found evidence for human hunter gatherers. And what they do and excavated it. And I've been to the site that Tom Strasser has excavated, for example, and we know that it's hunter gatherers and there's no advanced Ice Age civilization there.

00:14:28:16 - 00:14:49:06
Unknown
Another reason why Ice Age coastlines might be available is due to isostatic rebound. What that is, is the land is being pushed down by the weight of all the ice on top. So as that ice melts, yes, the ocean levels are rising, but there's less weight from the from the glaciers in the North Pole near the North Pole that's weighing down on the Arctic.

00:14:49:06 - 00:15:10:09
Unknown
And so some of that land is rebounding up. And so archeologists have actually focused on that area over the last few decades. Not to test Graham Hancock's hypothesis, though coincidentally, it does test Graham Hancock hypothesis. And what it helps us understand is the peopling of the Americas early on. And it helps us understand hunter gatherers that lived in those regions at the end of the Ice age.

00:15:10:09 - 00:15:39:15
Unknown
And we have a femoral traces, for example, footprints. We have stone tools, we have campsites, we have dozens, if not hundreds. I think hundreds of these sites from that region in the Pacific Northwest that document what people are doing. And another region I highlighted is areas where the continental shelf is not too far from the existing coastline. And so in those cases, just because of the geomorphology of that area, the coastline is not actually shifting very much just by like a few, maybe a kilometer or two, you know, a mile or two tops.

00:15:39:20 - 00:16:00:05
Unknown
So in which case there really isn't any room for some sort of advanced civilization and occupying those coasts. So we have three different areas where we can test above ground, still above water, still today for what's going on. And in all those cases, all around the world, what we have is hunter gatherers. So there's no room for some sort of advanced civilization living on those coasts.

00:16:00:10 - 00:16:26:02
Unknown
The second, the second thing we have is actual underwater archeology and underwater archeology is now doing a much better job of targeting sites that date to the end of the Ice age. And so I have a video on my YouTube with, Doctor Jessica Cook Hale. She's done a lot of this research in the Americas and now in Europe doing targeting where to dive based on the geomorphology underwater of what would have been where you can find this material just based on the geology, if you see what I mean.

00:16:26:05 - 00:16:49:17
Unknown
So you can be strategic and target that period because it's exposed for research in your dives. And she's targeted this and she's found Ice Age sites. And again they are all occupied by hunter gatherers. So we can prove this positive that hunter gatherers occupied all the face of the planet except for Antarctica during the Ice Age. And we can prove that with targeting each of these different regions.

00:16:49:17 - 00:17:10:22
Unknown
And I also brought up desserts. My dad actually directed a survey in the upper desert of Egypt, and what he did is he just like Jessica Cook, hail. He targeted wadis. Wadis are a dried up river valleys that would have been fertile and lush during the ice age, when the climate was different and so he targeted that, saying, these are areas where people might have been occupied.

00:17:11:03 - 00:17:33:07
Unknown
And he surveyed hundreds and thousands of sites filled with material from hunter gatherers. And, you know, they they, they had to camp in really harsh conditions. He has an article about how they survived on batteries. Literally the entire camp was run on car batteries. It was about how to run an excavation in a camp for weeks in a high desert, tough climate conditions with car batteries.

00:17:33:07 - 00:18:02:11
Unknown
And so we are actively as a as a field and a discipline exploring all these regions and every excavation. We do test Gram's hypotheses and every single one. The millions of excavations that have happened have proven him wrong. I read some statistic where it's like 80% of car crashes happen within one mile of your own house. And I think when you talk about ancient civilizations being seafarers, which is a big claim of Graham Hancock, and maybe you could speak to that as well, because I'm not familiar that humans even go back to 50,000 years, which is what he says.

00:18:02:13 - 00:18:20:07
Unknown
But the truth is that you would think you'd find shipwrecks. You the map is on the screen right now, or I will it you where are the shipwrecks? They would be right there. Right. And that's not what we find. So it's wild. So that was one of the other claims was when when you were in the debate, what you had said was there was a shipwreck that was recently found.

00:18:20:07 - 00:18:35:18
Unknown
It was between 5 and 6000 years old, I think you might've said six and 7000 years old. And this is what they're really also seizing on saying, well, when we look into what that ship is, it's totally disintegrated. All the wood has gone away from it, and all that's left is the pottery, because that wouldn't disintegrate under the water.

00:18:35:18 - 00:18:57:19
Unknown
And, it's something that you would also said during the, debate. And I really liked that comment and actually had spoken with Mike about it a few times how when things are buried or when they're underwater, it actually helps to preserve those things. I heard you on the bridges podcast with Destiny and you were talking about landfills, so I just want to make a note, Mike, let's come back to landfills, because that's in Mike's wheelhouse.

00:18:57:21 - 00:19:12:04
Unknown
But can you tell us a little bit about that boat that you were referencing? And I believe I saw that you might have been referencing a canoe off the coast of Italy. Is that the one? Yeah. So I, I right before I was there, there was this headline like a month or two ago before about the oldest shipwreck.

00:19:12:04 - 00:19:39:03
Unknown
And it was this, I guess, a canoe. I don't remember it was it doesn't matter because we call a wreck a shipwreck, regardless of what type of boat it is. We don't have maps of canoe wrecks that contrast with shipwrecks. This is some social media person who doesn't even have much influence. Quibbling with me over terminology in a way that riles up a fan base because, a preserved boat is a preserved boat.

00:19:39:08 - 00:20:03:21
Unknown
Let's just be honest. And yes, underwater environments are where organic remains can preserve, and it depends on the specific environment that these things are buried in and found in. But we have wood, human modified wood going back several hundred thousand years from Africa. That's also a recent headline, that people can look up. And waterlogged environments, specifically anaerobic environments are where this kind of stuff can preserve.

00:20:03:23 - 00:20:23:13
Unknown
And so that's really important. But yes, at the same time, a lot of shipwrecks are documented based on other types of materials that are found, whether it's stone or pottery or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Stuff that is found on the A cluster on the bottom of the seafloor, or ocean floor or lakebed or riverbed or any of these options underwater.

00:20:23:13 - 00:20:46:14
Unknown
Right. And so that's also then stems. Well, okay. Fine. You want to say wood doesn't preserve underwater a that's wrong in a lot of environments. It does. But be okay if there is a global seafaring ocean going civilization that's large and advanced. If they're going across the Atlantic, like Graham Hancock mentioned, the peopling of Cyprus and the people of Australia.

00:20:46:19 - 00:21:08:13
Unknown
Okay, obviously an important undertaking where we don't have any boats, but this is maximum a few dozen kilometers that they're traveling a couple dozen miles. Right. And we're presuming that they're using rafts and canoes because we have evidence for those types of boats early on. We're not talking about that 5000km it takes to go across the Atlantic. Okay?

00:21:08:18 - 00:21:31:17
Unknown
To be able to do that is a totally different type of technology, a totally different type of ship, and a huge number of supplies to be able to a make sure all your sailors survive that long trip and be had probably, presumably have goods or something that you're trading across that kind of distance. And so, you know, some sort of navigational goal or navigational technology, right?

00:21:31:17 - 00:21:47:21
Unknown
You don't just get crossed by accident. And so, you know, and on top of it, we're not talking about a 1 or 2 time crossing to Cyprus or Australia to populate for people that are settling, because we don't know how or how many waves there were of migration, we just know there were people there. Not very many, though.

00:21:48:03 - 00:22:25:19
Unknown
Not very many at all. A small population of hunter gatherers in both of those regions. He's talking about a globally advanced civilization that apparently traverses the oceans repeatedly and has mapped them out explicitly, in which case we're not talking about a few rafts. We're talking about a large number of oceangoing vessels filled with supplies and people. So and then the other reason which always gets lost is the quote that I pulled out from Graham is where he's criticizing archeology, and he's saying underwater archeology only focuses on all the shipwrecks that exist and does not look for settlements from the Pleistocene, from the Ice Age, and that's what's wrong here.

00:22:25:19 - 00:22:51:20
Unknown
Underwater archeologists are surveying and looking for whatever they find, and the majority of what's available to be found are these shipwrecks. There are no pyramids from his civilization or the monuments, the megaliths that we should be expecting from his civilization. Where are those? Well, besides the Bimini Road. But I'm just kidding. Yes, besides natural features that are not archeological and have no artifacts.

00:22:51:20 - 00:23:11:05
Unknown
Yeah, so another claimant that I want to address, that they put forth is that there's this orthodoxy now amongst archeology that silences any voices that don't fit into a specific paradigm. And, to give a little context, my degrees in psychology, I had the privilege of, when I was in high school of, doing an internship at Stony Brook University.

00:23:11:07 - 00:23:29:03
Unknown
So I did a little bit of genetics work. I know how boring, tedious, and disappointing science can be sometimes, but how willing the community is to embrace new information. But there is such a thing as peer review. What they like to do is they like to avoid that whole process. And I I'm trying to keep an open mind, although it's very difficult.

00:23:29:03 - 00:23:44:12
Unknown
I tried to watch the first episode of season two of Ancient Apocalypse, and when they do a soil sample and they just grab some, you know, random bits of soil without any kind of archeology remains and try to throw a 20,000 year old date is like all they found was old soil. They didn't really prove any kind of structures.

00:23:44:16 - 00:23:59:07
Unknown
And that's what makes scientific methods and design so difficult, is you have to be careful, careful. These, you know, confounding variables. So tell us a little bit what about real archeology is like the, the, you know, investigative and the laboratory work that really goes on behind the scenes to make sure we're not just talking out of our bums.

00:23:59:07 - 00:24:15:00
Unknown
And, you know, there's not this great orthodox, you know, orthodoxy that resists change. It's just a matter of you have to bring your proof, you know, to forward to do so. Yeah. I mean, if anything, every single scholar in the field is not trying to resist change. We're all trying to actually present new ideas and new evidence.

00:24:15:03 - 00:24:40:07
Unknown
That is what science is about. Every single publication we put out in a peer reviewed journal is actually rewriting history because we find something new or we have a new method to do it. And so this idea that we are, I don't know, trying to cover something up, that's the definition of why this is a conspiracy theory. There's a belief that every single archeologist around the world is trying to hide history or pre-history.

00:24:40:09 - 00:25:04:15
Unknown
That's a conspiracy there. And I just want to highlight how ludicrous that idea is. We're talking about archeologists in every single country in the world, and we're talking about archeologists, some of which are employed by governments, some of which are employed by nonprofits or universities, and some of which are employed by commercial firms that go in and excavate before, a construction or infrastructure is constructed.

00:25:04:17 - 00:25:28:18
Unknown
And so we're talking about a conspiracy that pervades private industry, non-profits and every single government in the world. It's to protect that fat paycheck that you receive all the time, and you show up and that paycheck. And I mean, you know, the other part is, if you think about the history of the field and we don't get along with each other at all, we disagree with each other all the time.

00:25:28:20 - 00:25:53:19
Unknown
Sorry about what what the reality of history is, right. And what the reality of what happened in the past is. But there are certain clear facts that are that are just really without doubt. And, you know, when we get radiocarbon dates or thermal luminescence dates or when we put together the stratigraphy that we can document through soil studies, or when we map out the genome of an individual that's fairly irrefutable.

00:25:53:19 - 00:26:16:23
Unknown
There might be new methods we can use to do some tweaks on those. So, you know, we keep updating the radiocarbon calibration curves, but that doesn't change like a date from 12,000 years ago to a date from 1000 years ago. That changes a date from 12,500 years ago to 12,100 years ago. Right? That's not actually making that giant of a change.

00:26:16:23 - 00:26:40:03
Unknown
And we have millions now of these radiocarbon dates that have been published from all over the world. I think I cited on Joe Rogan, I forgot the Paleolithic radiocarbon database for Europe, which I think actually extends all the way to Siberia. I think it had something like 13,000 different localities within its database. So sites, let alone all the different specific samples from each of those sites.

00:26:40:03 - 00:26:57:14
Unknown
Right? Some of them might have had one, but some of them have hundreds. And so, you know, like we're talking about a huge amount of evidence that is really incontrovertible and irrefutable that we all agree on. And some of this really radiocarbon is the perfect example. I'm actually teaching a class right now here at Cardiff on the history of archeology and archeological thought.

00:26:57:16 - 00:27:27:03
Unknown
And, you know, for a long time a lot of archeology really was very speculative. And this is something that pseudo archeologists and their fans always say archeology is just speculation. And what was the giant fact check on archeological narratives was the development of radiocarbon dating. And so what happened was all of a sudden with the, you know, scholars and antiquarians and hobbyists, they worked really hard to try to say, oh, we have this Egyptian scarab in this level on the island of Crete.

00:27:27:03 - 00:27:55:20
Unknown
So therefore that pottery must date to the same period. But of course, sometimes things get mixed up stratigraphic if you don't have geologists there to explain it to you. And so all these dates sort of ended up slightly off until and sometimes very off until radiocarbon dates came around. And one of the good ones is megaliths. So for a long time it was believed throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century that the megaliths, these monumental tombs started in areas like Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, you know, just a few thousand years ago.

00:27:55:20 - 00:28:18:09
Unknown
And then they slowly spread up until that you had Stonehenge in northwest Europe. As soon as we started doing radiocarbon dates, we realized that actually, that's not true at all. There's not this diffusion of megalithic technology. It shows up in different times at different places. So in fact, Stonehenge is was built much earlier than the monumental tombs that we find in Greece, those solo tombs by thousands of years.

00:28:18:14 - 00:28:42:18
Unknown
And so all these assumptions were flipped on their head. And by the way, do you know that there's two different archeologists that have won the Nobel Prize? One of them was the inventor of radiocarbon, Willard Libby. The second one was, the the individual who sequenced, Neanderthal genomes. And Svante, Svante. Paabo. And so those are the only two archeologists that have ever won Nobel Prizes.

00:28:42:18 - 00:29:01:06
Unknown
In both of those, the development of both of those methods have have been so revolutionary that they've really changed and updated our understanding of the past. We integrate new data and new evidence, and with that is how we rewrite our narratives. Yeah. Well, the conspiracy theory that archeologists worldwide are keeping out any one else is totally, patently absurd to me.

00:29:01:09 - 00:29:18:04
Unknown
And even Graham Hancock's own experience is disprove that the guy traveled to find the Lost Ark in Ethiopia. The guy's been to every chamber in the Great Pyramids. I mean, he's been to go back a a likely and I just saw a video by, maybe you can remind me of her name. She's, I think a Swedish archeologist.

00:29:18:04 - 00:29:39:00
Unknown
Kaylee something. And she posted a video. Yeah, yeah. And she posted a video saying, here's a video today of archeology and excavation being done at Gobekli Teppei. So what are you going to say about that? Or, you know, you said it or an excavation site? Can you talk a little bit about that site, specifically what the significance is in real archeology and then what their claims might be as well?

00:29:39:02 - 00:29:56:17
Unknown
Yeah. But before I get to that, I get to go back to Taipei. But I also want to emphasize that we warmly embrace ordinary people coming in and working with us. There's all sorts of community excavations that you can go volunteer on no matter where you live in the world. If you look up local museums, local excavations, you could probably volunteer and do archeology yourself.

00:29:56:22 - 00:30:21:10
Unknown
I have worked myself with a wide range of amateurs and enthusiasts. Anything from a French hairdresser in Athens, Greece, who came into the lab once a week just because she wanted to to do some archeology to plentiful wool, retired people, students and others who have volunteered on projects. And they are phenomenal archeologists. We we really try to work hard to incorporate people and to share what we know with people.

00:30:21:10 - 00:30:48:20
Unknown
It's just we don't have the platforms that some of these guys have because we're just making real claims based off of real evidence. So Gobekli Tepe is a great example of, of of something that did to some degree overturn, a scholarly understanding of the past, particularly in the Near East, but not as much as people think, you know, so, so when it was found, people at first, the first excavators there, Klaus Schmidt, good archeologists.

00:30:48:20 - 00:31:21:09
Unknown
But he like to sometimes overemphasize or exaggerate some of his claims in the press. And he before having the materials study to actually make this claim meaning before the animal bones and the seeds from the site were studied. He claimed that this was the sign of of early farmers building these monumental buildings, and Graham Hancock and others took that early assumption and ran with it and popularized it, when in fact, now that thousands of seeds and animal bones have been studied, it turns out that they're all from wild animals and wild plants.

00:31:21:14 - 00:31:38:11
Unknown
So therefore, this was not constructed by people who were agriculturalists. It was constructed by hunter gatherers. They found an extremely productive niche in the environment where they could live there for at least half of the year, maybe longer, and they could settle down during that time. And it's a debate right now whether they were there year round or not.

00:31:38:11 - 00:31:57:03
Unknown
They were certainly there at least half the year, because we can look at when they harvested these wild crops and when those animals, migrated through the mountain pass nearby that they hunted mostly gazelle. Am I right on that? Yeah. Gazelle. And so, yeah. Wild gazelle is what they mostly have there. They also potentially brewed beer.

00:31:57:05 - 00:32:12:23
Unknown
And so that's one way to store your, your, your calories, if you see what I mean by fermenting them. And so, so this is where it's nuanced, our understanding of the past. Like I said, every single excavation updates our understanding of the past and go back to the top is just a high profile example of that.

00:32:13:04 - 00:32:33:06
Unknown
And what it showed was in, in the in the southwest Asia, in this area of the Near East, the Fertile Crescent, not only where there agricultural communities that were settling down and building monumental architecture, we've known that for 70 years or so when Kathleen Kenyon excavated the site. This, this most well known as Jericho, but we now usually refer to it as tell us, Sultan.

00:32:33:07 - 00:33:05:06
Unknown
And so there there's monumental architecture, a giant tower dating to within the same period as Gobekli Tepe has monumental architecture dates. So we knew there was monumental architecture being built in that region. What we now know is that hunter gatherers were also engaging in that kind of activity. So there's different pathways that people were taking at that same time, and it adds to the complexity of what's going on when agriculture and sedentary lifestyles are being adopted around that, that region really.

00:33:05:08 - 00:33:26:05
Unknown
We did already know that hunter gatherers were capable of building monumental architecture that's been well known for decades. As well, for example, like places that Graham actually went to an ancient apocalypse season one, poverty Point in Louisiana is a really good example of an extremely monumental mound built by people that were hunter gatherers. You know, they they found a productive niche.

00:33:26:05 - 00:33:47:05
Unknown
They were able to stay there long enough and to, you know, monumental size, that kind of landscape. And similarly, we found monumental structures built even further back into the Ice Age, sort of these monumental, structure. I don't even know the right word, these circles of sort of mammoth, bones that have been constructed in Siberia and all across Asia.

00:33:47:05 - 00:34:08:23
Unknown
We have a dozen or so, maybe not that many examples of these kind of, I think in Ukraine as well, these monumental mammoth structures, if you will. And so, so monumental architecture, it's not something new, but we're getting more complex, the nuance to this perspective on our human past, if you see what I mean, and go back, which is great for that, it's phenomenal.

00:34:08:23 - 00:34:30:04
Unknown
And now that it's been identified there, it was not the first site like it in that region. Klaus Schmidt himself found another one earlier, but now that it's been identified, archeologists have been targeting the region for more investigation. And they found a number of other similar sites that belong to this temple culture. And the excavations still continue at Gobekli Tepe with the a combined German Turkish team.

00:34:30:04 - 00:34:46:10
Unknown
Yeah. I talked to Lee Claire. The field director, on my YouTube. The videos up there, it's my most watched YouTube video actually. Oh, nice. We're going to link that here. I think Gobekli Tepe is a good example of where Hancock likes to cherry pick certain evidence, but I think there's two other things we want to tie in here with this question here.

00:34:46:12 - 00:35:04:17
Unknown
He uses a lot of recycled ideas. So it's not that he's making groundbreaking work. He likes to cherry pick certain ideas that support this. You know, seafaring, ancient civilization. But then also the big R word, right. So I know there's some controversy online, you know, to steal the line from the article in, in the, archeology journal of yours.

00:35:04:19 - 00:35:27:06
Unknown
You know, these these are old racist ideas. And it's not to say that gram is necessarily a racist and be very, very clear. It's not. We're not engaging in ad hominem. It's just merely that he's using old ideas that certain people manipulated for, you know, justifying, you know, certain heinous actions in the past. So I look for an opportunity for you to kind of clarify that also, but give some people, you know, understanding about this because it is a little nuanced.

00:35:27:08 - 00:35:49:03
Unknown
Yeah. And I mean, a lot of it actually comes down to the history of archeology itself. Look, a lot of archeology in the 19th century was horrendous by our standards. It was extremely colonialist. It was extremely racist. It even, you know, it basically, forced indigenous people to work and dig so that, you know, Western countries could then plunder that material and take it back to their museums.

00:35:49:05 - 00:36:13:15
Unknown
It also plentiful examples of actual grave robbing of indigenous cemeteries. And so a lot of archeology at that time was very horrendously colonialist and racist. And so arguing that the collection practices of the British Museum were racist and colonialist, which is indisputably true, does not make the current director of the British Museum a racist. And so the same thing is true for some of the ideas that Graham is citing.

00:36:13:21 - 00:36:37:20
Unknown
He is, for example, citing this trope of white saviors where there were these gods that were had white skin and beards and were described as bringing civilization to the Aztecs or the Maya or the Inca or whatever. When in fact, all of our evidence for these white savior tropes, they come from Spanish colonial sources. And so this is a real problem.

00:36:37:20 - 00:37:00:12
Unknown
There's a problem with using that evidence. And if you look at the evidence we have from pre-colonial sources, which, yes, we do not every single Mayan Aztec codex was destroyed. There's a couple dozen of them that are left. And figures like Quetzal Co-opt are depicted on there with dark skin, not with white skin, as a Spanish colonial source describes them.

00:37:00:15 - 00:37:19:20
Unknown
And so we can fact check that and show how these Spanish colonial sources are actually biased, and we can actually understand the milieu within which they were understood. Cortez, in his letters, like to claim he was being treated as a god and the idea was, was disseminated that he was the second coming of this ketzel quote, this white skin figure.

00:37:20:02 - 00:37:39:08
Unknown
And so, you know, this is very much clearly a myth propagated by the Spanish. And they even use the myth of Atlantis and the Greek myth of the Hesperides to say, we have claim on this land, it's our ancestors that were here first. And it was it's been misused for hundreds of years, the same exact trope of a lost civilization.

00:37:39:12 - 00:38:02:13
Unknown
And so, for example, the Trail of Tears. We all learn about that in the US, right where Andrew Jackson's government dispossessed tens of thousands of indigenous people from their land. Written into the law was this idea that there was an earlier civilization there that was responsible for those mounds, those monumental mounds that were constructed and saying that it was not the indigenous people that were responsible.

00:38:02:13 - 00:38:25:09
Unknown
So therefore they have no claim to this land, so we can kick them off. And so this trope, this pervasive trope that the indigenous people were not responsible for their own heritage, has been used for real harm in the past as well. And so, look, I'm an archeologist and a historian. I study not just archeology. What I dig up, I need to engage with the history of these ideas as well.

00:38:25:14 - 00:38:49:06
Unknown
You know, that's what archeologists do. We put together, a literature review at the start of an article or a book. We explain the different ways that this sort of evidence has been interpreted. And so we have to come to grips with the ways that people in the 19th or 18th century, interpreted some of the evidence. And then we say, no, this is a this is a better way that takes that takes account of all the new methods and evidence that we have today.

00:38:49:08 - 00:39:10:01
Unknown
And so, you know, critiquing Graham is certainly not calling him a racist, just like critiquing the British Museum, which I do also on podcasts. It's not saying that the director of the British Museum is racist. This is just people not able to have a complicated adult conversation is how I see it. And, so if you want to have an adult conversation, we can have a conversation about the history of ideas.

00:39:10:06 - 00:39:36:00
Unknown
And I think that's also really important. Like you said, a lot of what he says is not new, and that's really important. People think that his ideas in the way he presents them, as if they're original to him, when in fact his his books cite these 19th century ideas. They explicitly include them as sources and inspiration for them, and we can trace the history of these ideas and show how they've been proven wrong time and time again.

00:39:36:00 - 00:39:56:03
Unknown
This is not something new. Archeology has had to contend with. Believers in Atlantis for hundreds of years. So it's been, you know, like any science, what we do is we take hypotheses and we reject them. That's how you come across the truth. You say, here's our evidence. What potential hypotheses could explain it? How can we then test those hypotheses to reject them until we're left with only one?

00:39:56:05 - 00:40:17:11
Unknown
And that's how we explain the past. Well, that rejection actually brings me to the next topic that I wanted to talk about, because it sounds like that word rejection is maybe too harsh when you're someone like Graham Hancock because you say, you're canceling me, you're canceling me. Despite his half a million followers on Twitter and his two series on Netflix now or two seasons, I should say.

00:40:17:13 - 00:40:49:17
Unknown
And so maybe you could talk to us a little bit about your interpretation or your personal experience over the last couple of months with what the other side is calling cancel culture? I mean, look, let's just be honest, in 2024, being canceled is just a talking term to get more views. What people like to do is say, I've been canceled so that therefore they have something to talk about on social media, and it fits into the culture wars that they're for, gets one group of people on your side and then another group of people against you.

00:40:49:19 - 00:41:13:05
Unknown
That is just how this works in our world. And Graham Hancock is an expert at this. He has been saying he's been canceled since the 1990s. He is very good at playing the victim. He's sued the BBC when they produced, documentary critiquing his first book, fingerprints of the gods. He lost every single point in that lawsuit except for one.

00:41:13:09 - 00:41:28:14
Unknown
And they had to cut out about 30s from their documentary and republish it. Something like that. A 30s to a minute, you'd have to talk with Chris Hale. He was the publisher on that documentary. I actually hope to have him on my YouTube at some point. And so it's sort of like it's the same thing with my debate with Rogan.

00:41:28:17 - 00:41:50:14
Unknown
They found one point that I spent 30s on, and he's trying to say that I've lied or whatever or misrepresented it or something ballocks like that. And so he is an expert at going on and saying, oh my God, archeologists are attacking me. To be honest, I think until ancient apocalypse season one came out, very few archeologists knew who he was.

00:41:50:17 - 00:42:12:01
Unknown
And I can promise you that almost no archeologists knew what he talked about. They had no idea what his claims were. They thought he was just rejecting pyramids because that's what he's oftentimes been on social media talking about. I my dad was an ice age archeologist. He's passed away. I don't know what he thought of Graham Hancock, but I know that his colleagues, when I told them I was doing this, they're like, what does that have to do with the Ice age?

00:42:12:01 - 00:42:33:07
Unknown
I thought he was into pyramids. And I'm like, no, he's such. And they were like, we had no idea. Nobody ever knew because he never actually discusses any Ice Age evidence. He just ignores it and instead focuses on pyramids like that. And so like, this is the other issue is nobody really knew what he talked about. He was just some figure that spouted other random stuff.

00:42:33:12 - 00:42:51:16
Unknown
And that also led to increasing his popularity, because archeologists would then respond to him and in the media or whatever. And they would assume, since Ancient Aliens was popular through the 20 tens, that and he was on Ancient Aliens a few times that his beliefs were ancient aliens, when in fact his beliefs are about a lost civilization from the Ice Age.

00:42:51:21 - 00:43:14:08
Unknown
And so they would say, oh, he's just talking about aliens when he isn't. And then that would lead to his fans saying, see, they don't they don't know what he's talking about. Maybe he is right. And it led to increasing his popularity. And so that's that's definitely a problem as well. And so I think that, he really likes to play up this victim mentality and in some scholarship has referred to it as stigmatized knowledge.

00:43:14:11 - 00:43:35:01
Unknown
As soon as you say, well, they don't want me talking about this, that converts people into thinking, that gives it validity. Right. That's a great point. But you've also experienced then the backlash right of appearing here and all of his sycophantic followers have come towards your page and called you this liar and parroted some of the stuff that everyone else has been saying.

00:43:35:03 - 00:43:52:19
Unknown
Can you talk a little bit about that and the, the repercussions or lack thereof that you've experienced of this? Yeah, I mean, I've had thousands of people come at me. There are people who don't want to pay attention to what I have to say. So they're very easy to ignore. They whine when I block them from posting on my YouTube, but it's like what you're posting is irrelevant.

00:43:52:19 - 00:44:11:00
Unknown
You've clearly not listened to the video, so I'm sorry. Goodbye. I have a small YouTube channel that's educational, and I'm not going to let it be swarmed by trolls because Graham Hancock and Joe Rogan have a giant platform of people who don't want to listen to me. So, you know, I'm sorry, but this is not my my forum is not a place for debate.

00:44:11:00 - 00:44:32:17
Unknown
It's a place for education. So yeah, I've experienced, lots of harassment and trolling, by the thousands. I don't know how many thousands. At the same time, I've also experienced lots of positive comments by the thousands, around thousands, including surely close to a thousand comments or emails or posts from people who used to be Graham Hancock fans.

00:44:32:19 - 00:44:49:01
Unknown
So, you know, look, this is just the world we live in. It's the same thing when teaching a class. Look, not every student is going to listen to you, and that's just life. I try to make what I say is interesting and understandable as possible, to reach as many people as possible, because I want to reach every single student in my classroom so that they learn.

00:44:49:03 - 00:45:09:05
Unknown
But the reality is, is people are people, and I'm happy to just shrug it off as best as I can, though it is. It does take a lot of time and obviously emotional energy at times. So at the same time, I've had lots of people calling up to get me fired, from my job. In fact, Graham Hancock promoted a video by someone who's written on his blog.

00:45:09:05 - 00:45:26:14
Unknown
So an ally of his, where in that video, that person was not just calling for me to get fired, but saying even if we email Cardiff University to get him fired, it might not get him fired. But if we all do it and enough of us do it, some person there's going to take us seriously enough to tell him to shut up.

00:45:26:16 - 00:45:45:10
Unknown
That's a direct quote. Shut up. And so if you want to talk about actual cancel culture, actual cancel culture is when you do the stuff to people that don't have platforms and support. When someone is a legit celebrity, all they have to do is go around saying, I've been canceled, I've been canceled, and then they get people on their side to pay attention.

00:45:45:14 - 00:46:02:12
Unknown
It gets them views, it gets them eyeballs. It's drama. It sells books. It sells TV shows. When there's someone like a scholar or someone with a minor platform, what that does is it floods them out and makes it so that if you Google my name, which is fairly recognizable, a bunch of the top results are about me being a liar.

00:46:02:14 - 00:46:24:19
Unknown
And so this actually has a real impact on real, ordinary people who are not celebrities. I'm hopeful that at this point I can ride this storm. I have enough support. I'm hopefully just enough of a minor celebrity that that will carry the day, and those facts will actually be at the top of the Google search results. And I think they still are by and large.

00:46:24:21 - 00:46:44:15
Unknown
But it certainly has an impact. And I am definitely a precarious scholar. I have a part time contract here at Cardiff University. I've been recovering from cancer, so I'm not willing to go fully on the job market right now. And now I could be seen as a liability to different employers in academia. And so it's just sort of like what they are doing.

00:46:44:16 - 00:47:09:08
Unknown
These people who believe in free speech is exactly the opposite of free speech. What they are trying to do is shut me down so I can not respond, so that people on their side will not take me seriously. And all I can say is, look man, I just stared death in the face. On a year of chemo, I was sliced from bicep to pectoral to remove all my lymph nodes.

00:47:09:08 - 00:47:29:22
Unknown
They can kiss my ass. I'm not going to shut up. You think you're going to silence me? Like, kiss my ass? You guys are a bunch of flaming turds. If you think I'm going to shut up. The reality is, is I've woken up a lot of people to what archeology has to say, and I will continue educating people and sharing my perspective on the field with it, because that's what I do.

00:47:30:04 - 00:47:46:19
Unknown
I'm very thankful for that. So, you know, no offense, but you know, I had not, known about your end and your participation in archeology. I'm kind of an Egyptology nerd. If I was to, you know, say my interest were. But I'm very thankful that you go out and do the work that you do and try to communicate science and archeology.

00:47:46:19 - 00:48:04:23
Unknown
I hate to see you suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune like you do, but it's it's really important, I think, what you do because I wouldn't have known about your work or what you do if you had not gone on to Joe Rogan and and taken on the task of a four hour debate about not really knowing what you're going in there with and just hoping that you do the best.

00:48:04:23 - 00:48:21:12
Unknown
So I do want to kind of turn this into a more positive note instead of just saying cancel culture this and they're trying to do this thing. So but what inspired you to get into your archeology? I know your father obviously was a prominent member of the community, but I guess also two was what inspires you to continue to do so that magic, that thirst for knowledge.

00:48:21:12 - 00:48:38:16
Unknown
Right. So what would you say to inspire the next generation of folks thinking about this? Yeah, I mean, look, archeology is a hell of a lot of fun. Some archeologists say it's the most fun you can have with your pants on. I've seen people write that right. And so it's it's a real interesting challenge. It's it's a weird field.

00:48:38:16 - 00:48:57:07
Unknown
For one, I actually didn't want to do archeology until I was about 20, partly because my dad was doing it right. I didn't want to be like a nepo baby. And what I discovered is that in in the US archeology, there is no departments of archeology, there's departments of anthropology and then departments of like classics or history or Near Eastern Studies, where they employ archeologists.

00:48:57:07 - 00:49:18:00
Unknown
And so I realized since my dad was well known in the anthropology circles, I could do more historical periods, and I wouldn't have professors who knew who my dad was. So therefore I could feel like I'm pioneering my own path, if you see what I mean. Without that kind of, leg up from just following in my dad's footsteps, a lot of archeologists who are in the same family as another are scholars.

00:49:18:00 - 00:49:33:02
Unknown
Even they do the exact same thing. Right? You know, you have the Leakey, the Leakey clan. They all do human evolution, and they're all great. I'm not trying to diss them. They're a real legit archeological dynasty. But I really wanted to make sure I did my own kind of thing so that I because I, you know, I have a chip on my shoulder.

00:49:33:02 - 00:49:54:07
Unknown
My brother George chip. My dad loves our teeth. Yeah. And so my dad loves archeology. And he was just as engaging and laid back and informal as I am and as good a communicator as I was. And he passed away suddenly from cancer about six years ago and, like, really suddenly he actually only got the final diagnosis of what kind of cancer it was the day before he died.

00:49:54:09 - 00:50:27:01
Unknown
And so so that's how sudden it was. And, so I get that from him. My way of explaining things and some of my perspective on archeology as a field. And so I realized I wanted to do archeology. I was a history major at the time, and I sort of said, you know what? Why we should be taking this kind of scientific, prehistoric approach and be applying it to historical periods, because even in historical periods, so much of the day to day of what we actually dig up is still piecing together a voiceless history of the past.

00:50:27:05 - 00:50:56:10
Unknown
And that gets into what archeology actually is. Archeology is in many ways very menial. You're cataloging millions of broken up animal bones or pot sherds, or you're mapping out thousands of walls or bits of architecture and different phases within that wall. And then you have to take those pieces of the puzzle and actually align them all up. And we have a wide variety of tools, all of which are very scientific and very objective, not subjective in how we line them all up in time and space.

00:50:56:15 - 00:51:19:14
Unknown
And then from that, to try to give voice to these people from the past that we don't have their voice anymore. Right? We don't have these historical texts from them. Even if you're excavating, say, colonial, Village in Virginia from the 18th century, chances are we don't have any texts from that settlement. And so this is still a voiceless history that we are writing.

00:51:19:14 - 00:51:37:02
Unknown
We're trying to give these people a voice, to tell the stories of what they did, what their activities and behavior was. And in that sense, it really is like kind of putting together an interesting puzzle. And you have to collaborate with a wide range of people in today's world, in particular archeology is not what it used to be.

00:51:37:02 - 00:51:59:16
Unknown
It used to be any sort of, article was written by one person. Now that's becoming rarer and rarer. We all have all of our different subdisciplines and different, methods that we use and different expertise that we have. And so we all have to come together and figure out how it all slots together. And so it's very much a cooperative, collaborative discipline where we are working with people.

00:51:59:16 - 00:52:21:06
Unknown
And every single what I always tell my students is, can you name one discipline, scholarly discipline or expertise that is not relevant to the study of archeology? And they'll come at me with everything, right? And I mean everything. They'll be like, what about space exploration? And it's like, nope, I know somebody that studies the archeology of the International Space Station.

00:52:21:10 - 00:52:42:21
Unknown
I know somebody that studies the Anthropocene of the moon. Right. And we can actually say that they'll say hairstylists and it's like, nope, I actually know of an actual hairstylist who is not an archeology by training who published an archeologist with, I'm sorry, who published an article with archeologist and art historians about hairstyles in ancient Rome from statues.

00:52:42:23 - 00:53:10:09
Unknown
And so you can really go on any single discipline or skill set in the world, whether it's from languages and art and humanities through to economic and politics and anthropology, the social sciences through to the hard sciences like physics and chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. they are all applied to archeology, as is all of our sort of practical skills, whether it's computer information systems and digital techniques and methods.

00:53:10:11 - 00:53:35:18
Unknown
To map out stuff or to create databases and do large data analyzes to statistics and mathematics to engineering. We I've worked with somebody who designed Arc skyscrapers in Dubai. That was his main job, and on his holidays, he worked with archeologists to help us understand the architecture. And he collaborated with us. We respected his his knowledge, and he respected our knowledge because that's what archeology is.

00:53:35:18 - 00:53:55:02
Unknown
It is as interest, more interdisciplinary. It's the most interdisciplinary field in the world because it studies humans in the past and uses every tool set to be able to do so. Yeah, that is awesome, Flint. And it's so well said. It really has to be this collaborative effort. And I don't think that having a skeptic on the excavation site is really the part of a productive part of that team.

00:53:55:02 - 00:54:14:03
Unknown
So I can see why it's been very frustrating for you. Yeah. Okay. But before we wrap it up here, I did want to put something in front of you. That's interesting. I have this Twitter base and I sometimes can get controversial on it. And, you know, when you rage bait, of course you get more attention. So there's one tweet I wanted to ask you about because the attention that it got was definitely outsized.

00:54:14:03 - 00:54:35:19
Unknown
And it relates to these earlier civilizations, and I'm probably even saying that wrong. But the tweet that I wrote was my ethnicity question mark. I'm American, and this created a massive stir. Hundreds if not thousands of people coming at me saying, you are not. You've got to be from Scotland or Ireland or you know, you've got to be from the UK or Italy.

00:54:35:19 - 00:54:51:21
Unknown
And I said, well, what about when they came across from the Bering land bridge and there was only one continent of Pangea? How far back do we go? I was calling them Euro supremacists. And I know now the word Euro centric. So when you see something like that, I'm appreciate that you're laughing at it. But because it is a joke obviously.

00:54:51:21 - 00:55:09:04
Unknown
But what is your response and how can you explain that to a layman like me? Where how do we pick what era of history determines and ethnicity in that way? There's no hard and fast rules for that. Cooper or Cooper, you go by, right? Cooper. Yes. Cooper. My parents, bless them. They gave me two first names. Charles Cooper.

00:55:09:05 - 00:55:37:15
Unknown
So. Yeah, exactly. So look, there's no hard and fast rule to this. This has been one of the major revelations of sequencing human genomes. So the very first full sequenced human genome was at this point, less than 30 years ago. I think it's the late 90s, I think was when I first sequenced them. And now that we've started to be able to put together genomes of people around the world, as well as many ancient genomes, what we realize is that scientifically, there's no such thing as a race or an ethnicity.

00:55:37:17 - 00:56:01:07
Unknown
We are all fairly closely related to one another. We have way too much overlap in our DNA. If we want to classify people based on how they look or what they claim, based on their identity and their history as, say, African versus European, there is more difference, genetically speaking, between different subgroups in Africa or different subgroups in Europe.

00:56:01:11 - 00:56:29:06
Unknown
Then there is between being European or African. Like that is that is just how it goes. These, these identities of ethnicity and race. The reality is, is that humans have mingled a whole heck of a lot. And as we understand more about human evolution, there's this idea, this idea of a, a family tree. I just talked about this in a class, too, so it's fresh in my brain, this family tree where we sort of have these ancestral roots, we branch out and one of them is ours, and that's humanity and persist.

00:56:29:06 - 00:56:53:03
Unknown
Right? We've realized now that we've found so many more fossils than we had 50 years ago or 20 years ago. Even now that we've sequenced far more genomes and we can understand the history of, of, of of population relatedness is really how we think of it. Kinship rather than ethnicity or race. Now that we understand that, we've seen that actually thinking of it as a family tree, where we all diverge is wrong.

00:56:53:06 - 00:57:16:01
Unknown
Instead it's more like a braided stream, different channels diverge, but then they reintegrate together. And so that's what we're seeing. Think of like a river delta where the river starts splitting up and then braiding back together. And we're starting to see it's just like how we all know that everybody in the planet has Neanderthal DNA in them. Everybody on the planet, no matter what continent you're from your part, Neanderthal.

00:57:16:06 - 00:57:39:15
Unknown
Everybody on the planet is also part Denisovan. And you know, when this was first realized, geneticists got this wrong. They thought people from Africa weren't, however, because of populations coming back to Africa and all the intermingling that happened, we now know with a closer look that every single African also has Neanderthal DNA in Denisovan DNA. What's different is how much a percentage of our DNA comes from those, groups.

00:57:39:20 - 00:58:01:19
Unknown
And so we very much are a braided stream, all of these different lineages of hominids and hominins, many of them re, reemerged back together. And so it's the same thing with ethnicity and race. We see this as these splits, when in fact, on a scientific level, what we can establish is that we're all much more closely related than we think.

00:58:01:21 - 00:58:27:07
Unknown
Is actually surprising. And this is all fairly new. We've only really been able to sequence large numbers of, of ancient human genomes recently with what's called next generation sequencing. So really everything that people, including me, understand about ancient human DNA, it is one publication at a time, being flipped on its head and so we are learning so much more, and it's happening very rapidly as it becomes more affordable and doable on older genomes.

00:58:27:07 - 00:58:44:12
Unknown
Yeah. Despite my saying that my tweet was provocative, I based on your answer, I do feel vindicated for it. So thanks I always yeah look, I always feel frustrated when people claim, oh, I have German ancestry. And it's like Germany didn't exist until 1871. So how far back are you really tracking? Right. That's that's what I always find.

00:58:44:13 - 00:59:09:01
Unknown
And that's the whole point. This idea is more about identity and in which case that's fine. Everybody should have their own identity and understanding. There's nothing wrong with having that identity and understanding. But I also think that people really should understand how, modern scholars, whether they're scientists or historians, understand the past. And I think that's important to be able to you know, one of the complaints I always have is everybody everybody thinks they know history.

00:59:09:01 - 00:59:31:00
Unknown
It's something we all learn all the time, and therefore we're all justified to do it. And that's fine. Everybody go do what you want. But there is expertise involved here. Knowledge of a lot of evidence. There's there is a reality to what archeologists and other scholars and historians are doing. And go do your own research, but at the same time have a little bit of respect for the hard work and experience we have.

00:59:31:05 - 00:59:48:12
Unknown
You know, it's because we do a lot of work. We're not just listening. No, it's very clear. Yeah, yeah. And actually, I know we're at our hour now and I want to let you go, but I want to ask if you have just five more minutes when we proceed into the future. You've done an awesome job at encapsulating our past.

00:59:48:17 - 01:00:10:16
Unknown
I want to know in 100 years. In 1000 years, when people go and excavate Manhattan, which is a pile of rubble, or they excavate southern Virginia, which might never have been even that populated, what exactly are we going to see, and what are people going to find when they're in your position in a thousand years? I mean, so it all varies based on what happens.

01:00:10:16 - 01:00:27:09
Unknown
So I know that sounds like a weird copout, but me just plain and this is on Russia, is this actually, it actually is really interesting because it's also one of the key things that I didn't have time to go in on Joe Rogan for why Graham Hancock is surely wrong. And part of that is that destruction is an archeologist best friend.

01:00:27:11 - 01:00:56:10
Unknown
So when things get destroyed suddenly, whether it's a volcanic eruption like at Pompeii or Herculaneum or Santorini or an earthquake level in a city, or some invaders coming in and tearing down and burning down buildings, that actually produces a lot of rubble, that makes that preserves material in space for archeologists the future to find destruction. We always joke about in our classes that the destruction is our best friend, right?

01:00:56:10 - 01:01:19:09
Unknown
And it sucks for the people in the past. Don't get me wrong, when some sort of major destruction event happens. But when Pompeii burns in place. Yeah, but for archeologists. God, that's lovely. That's what we want. So in that sense, if New York or Manhattan is destroyed, suddenly we're going to find a snapshot in time that tells us about that period when it was destroyed.

01:01:19:13 - 01:01:42:07
Unknown
I study ancient Athens when the Persians destroyed Athens in 480 BC. That is one of our best snapshots of life in Athens, because they have even though they they've rebuilt and they renovated, we have these deposits related to that destruction. It's often times in renovation sort of deposits, they're building a new building. They tear down in rubble and level it out.

01:01:42:10 - 01:02:07:01
Unknown
And buried right there is the remnants of what was going on in, say, 600 BC for it. Well, 600 to 400 BC. And so, so that's like one of our best snapshots around 400 BC of Athens. So on the other hand, when you have constant renovations happening because people are constantly living there and rebuilding and re renovating and things like that, that destroys evidence for what was happening in that building recently.

01:02:07:02 - 01:02:29:21
Unknown
Right. And so you're, you're not seeing stuff is clearly from a continuously occupied settlement, except for snapshots when something gets razed to the ground and then rebuilt, and then you get that phase or whatever. Sometimes you can date different renovations and things like that on a building. Depends on what they are now. And so, you know, that's actually what matters is what's the state of preservation.

01:02:30:02 - 01:02:49:23
Unknown
Our landfills will be really interesting because our landfills are all rapidly deposited. We produce way too much trash, and it's causing lots of problems on our planet. But in in areas where we have landfills, we see this deposition in layers, and we actually already have GA biology already exists, and modern archeologists are currently studying know our own landfills.

01:02:49:23 - 01:03:11:08
Unknown
In fact, in the 90s when this really started taking off and it was a major revelation that things aren't decomposing as fast as we think they are, and it's to an archeologist that's not actually a major revelation. Because like I said, when things get buried rapidly because of destruction, they survive. Well, I will say future archeologists are going to rip their hair out when they make it to Staten Island, New York, because that place was a landfill.

01:03:11:08 - 01:03:29:06
Unknown
And now it's a city. Now it's residences like, oh my God, I can't imagine having to figure that out. Well, correct me if I'm wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's the every day artifacts, the day to day things that we would use that are the most interesting and not the ideal culture, which is, you know, what an imperial administration might preserve in those records, although they are important for context.

01:03:29:06 - 01:03:45:07
Unknown
Right, or some monolith. Right, right, right. We want to know what the people were doing day to day and what tools and, you know, even just, you know, personal effects that they had that really tells more of the culture that we want to know about, isn't it? Right? Yeah. I mean, it depends on what your questions are. I think we're trying to do both and we can do both is the reality.

01:03:45:07 - 01:04:01:01
Unknown
I mean, for a long time, archeology was the study and history. You when you when we learned history when we were young. It's like this king followed by that king of this president, followed by that president. But now we're starting to learn more social history, what we're or what was life like for ordinary people? What was the different ways that people live their lives?

01:04:01:06 - 01:04:21:00
Unknown
And so archeology has both. And so I think both are extremely important. And I think that's a way that we should use to get people interested in the past, because if you're only interested in just the hoity toity wealthy elites and the celebrities, well, then that's a pretty boring picture of the past. It's like if all we do is pay attention to Elon Musk and, other celebrities and wealthy people like him.

01:04:21:05 - 01:04:39:00
Unknown
And it's like, man, the part of what makes social media so phenomenal is, yes, it's sort of dominated by some of these celebrities, but you also get to look up scholars and ordinary people that are doing stuff and have interesting stories to tell. And so, like, what's so amazing? Yeah. And I think that's what we're interested in today is that kind of stuff.

01:04:39:00 - 01:05:04:02
Unknown
That's why celebrity has really changed in its way. And I mean, you know, it's like still amazes me the amount of celebrity and attention that came down in this last week to try to discredit me. It's like, yeah, you can see how challenged Graham Hancock was to have to get people with huge platforms to try to discredit me, someone who has a minor platform at precarious employment and all this stuff.

01:05:04:02 - 01:05:20:14
Unknown
And it's like I have these really powerful people trying to cancel me. It's like, you must be, I'm coming my nose at you. Yeah, well, you are certainly the most famous archeologist in pop culture today. And that's why I'm just so grateful that you came on our show, man. And I don't mean that sarcastically or facetiously. I mean that truly.

01:05:20:14 - 01:05:41:08
Unknown
You done a remarkable job stopping in to the wolf, standing here with the person that says, I'm going to decimate you and you politely, respectfully explained. That's not correct, sir. And it blew me away. So I am again the case study of someone where my feed was filled with election misinformation and filled with, right wing politics out of Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk.

01:05:41:08 - 01:06:00:00
Unknown
And now I really refresh to see excavation. I go back to type A, and I've said it wrong every single time I've said it. But it's been really cool, honestly, to be thrust into this world. And actually, I've already been in touch with your colleague. Doctor hopes, and we're going to have him on next month as well to talk about other cool stuff, but more of a focus on the science and the archeology as well.

01:06:00:02 - 01:06:16:11
Unknown
Greg Flint, thank you so much. Where can people go to find you? Where do you want to direct people? Primarily to my YouTube. I think that's where I do most of my public engagement there, where I put effort in, meaning I interview colleagues about what's going on in real archeology, and I put out scripted videos or replies and things like that.

01:06:16:17 - 01:06:40:20
Unknown
So YouTube is archeology of Flint Dibble. My handle is flint dibble. I'm on a wide range of other social media, typically under Flint Dibble as well. And so you can find me on X or whatever really. And but but most of my serious effort is going to be on YouTube. I think that archeology works better by showing people the evidence we have in that visual, conversational way of going about it on YouTube is, I think, very effective.

01:06:41:01 - 01:07:10:12
Unknown
And I want to continue building that, because I think I firmly believe archeology is growing in popularity right now, and it's the right time to try to share the real perspective. One thing I didn't get to go into, which I always like to bring up, is I tend to think that, editors and producers, they are they for whatever reason, they want to rewrite our narratives so that the narratives of what 21st century archeologists do can't get out there because they think the public is interested in a B, x, y narrative and when.

01:07:10:12 - 01:07:29:19
Unknown
And so it makes it really challenging for us to get our own narratives out there. And so what I'm always trying to do is to actually share the kind of narratives that archeologists in the 21st century are creating, and it's not what people think it is. You know, it's it's actually what we're doing. You've been tremendously successful at making it engaging, interesting and accessible.

01:07:29:19 - 01:07:45:06
Unknown
So thank you to you. Thank you to your colleagues who are doing the right thing. And, thanks for joining us today. Yeah. Thank you so much. This has been elevated thoughts.