August 21, 2025 • 19 mins
This recap episode unpacks The Joe Rogan Experience with Michael Button, where he challenges conventional historical narratives. Button highlights new archaeological discoveries, such as 300,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains in Morocco and the 476,000-year-old wooden Columbo structure in Zambia, which suggest human intelligence and complex societies existed far earlier than traditionally believed. He also points to the Gobekli Tepe site in Turkey as evidence of sophisticated culture pre-dating the Neolithic Revolution, and questions mainstream archaeology's reluctance to integrate these findings, attributing it to academic ego and a narrow definition of civilisation. The discussion further covers ancient technologies like the Antikythera mechanism, anomalous structures such as the pyramids and underground cities, and speculations about lost civilisations potentially wiped out by cataclysms or climate change, emphasising the fragility of archaeological evidence over vast timescales.
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Joe Rogan recap here on The Dunk Dive.
Our mission is, well, pretty straightforward.
Cut through the noise. Connect the dots on complex
ideas. Yeah, basically give you a
shortcut to being genuinely wellinformed.
And today, Wow, we're diving into a conversation that really
shakes things up. It challenges some pretty
fundamental ideas about human history, ancient civilizations,
(00:23):
you know. That's right, our source
material for this deep dive comes straight from the powerful
JRE YouTube channel. Uh huh.
Specifically Joe Rogan Experience Hashtag 2368
featuring Michael Button. Michael Button.
He's a YouTube right? Relatively new channel but
getting a lot of attention. Yeah, less than a year old, but
he's gained serious traction. He he really digs deep into
(00:45):
ancient history rigorously. OK, so our mission for you today
is to unpack these huge questions he's raising about our
timeline, humanity's past. We'll look at evidence
suggesting, well, that our past is maybe far older and
definitely more mysterious than the standard story you usually
hear. The conventional narrative.
So let's get into it. Let's unpack this.
OK, so Michael Button's own journey here is pretty key.
(01:07):
He actually studied ancient history at university, spent
four years on it. Right, so he has an academic
background. Exactly.
But even with that grounding, hetalks about this core
disagreement he developed. Not with specific facts though.
No, not the individual facts necessarily, but more what he
calls the high level macro perspective, the the accepted
timeline, the big picture of ourancient past.
(01:30):
And what was the specific hang up?
What didn't sit right for him? It was this idea, he says, that
it seemed like nothing happened for vast stretches of time in
human history. Like long periods of just
static. Yeah.
And that seemed while counterintuitive, especially
when you look at discoveries like Jebel Earhode.
The Jebel Earhode discovery, Morocco, right?
(01:52):
That was a big one. Tell us about that.
Huge. Around 20/17/2018 they found
modern Homo sapiens remains there.
OK, but the age. This is the kicker.
Estimated at 315,000, maybe even360. 1000 years old. 300,000
Wow. Right, they were actually
mistaken for Neanderthal at first, just because, well,
anatomically modern humans weren't supposed to be around
(02:14):
that early according to the old models.
So that discovery alone pushes back the age of our species by
what, 100,000 years? Roughly, yeah, from the previous
sort of 200,000 year estimate, which is massive.
So if we've been, you know, anatomically modern for that
long, it really makes you wonder, as Button puts it, why
(02:34):
did this discovery kick up more of a fuss?
Exactly why does the conventional story still kind of
stick to this idea that nothing really happened until the last
10,000 years? You know, until the Neolithic
Revolution and farming popped up.
It's a really fundamental question.
It is, and it connects to something else.
Button studied a university module on cataclysms, natural
(02:55):
disasters, basically. Cataclysms.
How does that tie in? Well, it looked at how these
events in recorded history totally reshaped societies.
The classic example is the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Right. The Bronze Age collapse.
This was like multiple major civilizations hitting the wall
at almost the same time. Pretty much think about it
around. Well the source is 10,000 BC
(03:16):
which seems a bit off maybe for Bronze Age, but the point is
these powerful civilizations, Hittites, Assyrians, Mycenaean,
Greece, Egypt's New Kingdom. All seemingly at their peak.
Yeah, peak of human progress, asthe source puts it.
And they all crashed pretty muchsimultaneously within just 20 to
40 years. Just gone.
What's the theory there? The leading theory is, well, a
(03:40):
combination of climate factors, even a tiny shift like half a
degree Celsius. Half a degree, that's it.
Apparently enough to disrupt trade routes, cause shortages,
societal unrest, a domino effect.
OK, so if a minor climate changecould wreck advanced societies
in recorded history? Then Button asks the crucial
question, What about the much worse climate episodes way back
(04:00):
in prehistory? The big freezes?
The mega drought. Could sophisticated human
cultures have risen, say, 20,050thousand maybe 100,000 years
ago, or even more? And then just been wiped out by
climate change or massive volcanoes or maybe even comet
impacts, leaving almost nothing behind.
It completely flips the script on this idea of smooth linear
(04:21):
progress for humanity. Absolutely.
And, you know, this kind of thinking leads directly to a
critique of what some might call, well, academic arrogance,
meaning the idea that some mainstream historians or
scientists sometimes talk as if they have the absolute truth
about what happened hundreds of thousands of years.
Ago, when really it's inherentlyunknowable to a large degree.
(04:43):
Right Button's point is that a lot more possibilities are
possible than what many people appreciate.
We should be more open. And probably the biggest piece
of physical evidence supporting this idea, this older, more
complex past, it has to be Gobekli Tepe.
Oh, Gobekli Tepe. Undeniably a game changer.
The biggest smoking gun, as Button calls it.
Remind us, how old is it 12? 1000 years old and it's got
(05:05):
these just incredible massive megalithic pillars, intricately
carved, arranged precisely. So its existence flat out proves
that sophisticated human culturewas present way earlier than the
conventional timeline suggests. No question.
None. It shows the toolkit for
civilization. You know, complex organization,
(05:26):
abstract thinking, serious engineering skills.
It was all there 12,000 years ago.
Which then makes that 6000 year gap until summer the traditional
first civilization seem really strange.
What was happening in between? Exactly, and it's not just
Gobekli Tepe and isolation, it'spart of this wider Tash Tepe
culture. There are like 14 or more
(05:46):
connected sites sharing symbolism megalithic stuff.
But they're still classified as built by hunter gatherers.
That's the paradox. If they built this, then our
definition of hunter gatherer needs a, well, a massive update.
It challenges everything. And we've only uncovered a tiny
fraction, right? It's like 5%.
Only 5%? Imagine what else is down there.
There's speculation about Pillar43 maybe being some kind of
(06:07):
cosmic calendar or even predicting an impact event that
that's debated. It just blows the lid off the
old models and it makes you question that narrow definition
of civilization itself. The 1 based mostly on
Mesopotamia on summer. Totally.
Humanity can and clearly did flourish in lots of different
ways, different places, different environments.
Which brings up another puzzle. Agriculture.
(06:29):
Ah yes, farming the cornerstone of the Neolithic revolution.
It seems to appear almost simultaneously all over the
world around that same time 12,000 years ago.
South America, Mesopotamia. Ancient China.
OK, so here's the question Button raises If farming was so
crucial, such a game changer, why did nobody invent it for the
(06:50):
first, what, 310,000 years that homo sapiens were around?
Right, only for it to suddenly pop up everywhere at once as the
source says, it just doesn't make sense.
The usual explanation connects it to the Holocene, our current
stable warm climate period. Yeah, but then you have to ask,
why didn't agriculture start during other warm periods?
There were like 4 distinct warm periods, each lasting over
10,000 years while modern humanswere definitely around.
(07:13):
Why not then? Good question.
It points towards maybe needing another trigger, or maybe the
knowledge was preserved somehow.It opens up possibilities and it
leads us right into the preservation problem.
Meaning how much stuff would actually survive from way back
then? Exactly.
And the answer is very little. Think about our cities now.
(07:33):
London. Manhattan.
Give them 100,000 years, what's left?
Dust, basically. Maybe some foundations?
Almost nothing, as button puts it.
Concrete crumbles, metal rusts away in thousands of years.
What lasts? Maybe deeply carved stone.
Maybe nuclear waste if they had it.
So how many sites do we actuallyhave from say older than 100,000
(07:55):
years? Get this, globally there are
only about 9 homo sapiens sites confirmed from that far back,
maybe up to 15 if you count debated 1.
Nine yeah out of hundreds of thousands of.
Years 9 confirmed glimpses, 9 snapshots.
Mostly caves, fire pits, some basic stone tools.
That's it for over 200,000 yearsof our history.
Wow, so finding only simple tools doesn't mean that's all
(08:17):
they have. Precisely.
Think about today. You've got Elon Musk sending
rockets to Mars, and at the sametime there are uncontacted
tribes living completely off thegrid.
Subsistence lifestyles. Finding stone tools in one place
doesn't mean advanced stuff didn't exist somewhere else.
Which brings us to the Colombo structure.
This sounds intriguing. Oh, this is extraordinary.
(08:39):
Found in modern day Zambia, it'spieces of wood.
Wood. How did that survive?
OK, so these aren't just random sticks.
They were deliberately cut in notches and connected together,
tapered and secured at right angles.
Looks like a platform, maybe part of a dwelling.
OK. And the age.
This is the mind blower 476,000 years old.
Wait. Half a million years, almost.
(09:00):
OK, that predates Homo sapiens. Exactly.
Attributed maybe to Homo heidelbergensis and the only
reason it survived. Fell into a bog, got preserved
in waterlogged sediment an. Extreme edge case scenario like
Button says. Totally, which implies how many
countless others just rotted away.
This fine massively disputes theidea that humans didn't build
complex things or settled down until like 12,000 years ago.
(09:23):
And it completely clashes with that cognitive revolution idea
from Harare sapiens, right? The idea we only got smart 50 or
60,000 years. Ago flies right in the face of
it, this suggests mainstream anthropology might have been off
by over 400,000 years, about when sophisticated behaviors
emerged. That's staggering, yeah.
And if that kind of evidence canbe lost so easily, think about
(09:44):
actual cataclysms erasing whole cultures.
Like the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, that
thing was immense. How bad was it?
Bad enough that it might have reduced the entire human
population to maybe just 3000 to10,000 individuals left on the
planet. A massive genetic bottleneck.
So imagine a civilization existed before Toba.
(10:06):
Gone, wiped out, leaving maybe no trace at all.
It shows how these great bottlenecks could just erase
chapters of our history. Like those lost cities in the
Amazon, they're finding out withLidar, once dismissed as myth.
Exactly. Or just look how fast nature
reclaims places like Detroit, Oregon, Chernobyl.
When humans leave, our footprintmight seem huge, but time and
nature are powerful forces. OK, so if the deep, deep past is
(10:29):
that hard to grasp, what about, well, places we think we know
better, like ancient Egypt? Egypt still full of mysteries
even if you take the conventional date for the Great
Pyramid like 2500 BC. They were just wildly ahead of
everyone else. And the official explanation for
how they built it? Wooden sledges, Copper chisels
on granite. It feels insufficient.
(10:53):
Doesn't make sense is how Buttonputs it, especially given the
precision and scale. And then there's the whole tomb
assumption for the Great Pyramid.
Right. They never actually found a
pharaoh's body inside it, did they?
Nope. Nobody.
Later Pharaoh's might have just reused much older structures, so
why the weird assumption it was built as a tomb?
Are there other theories like Christopher Dunn's idea about it
(11:14):
being a power plant? Yeah, that's mentioned.
And then there are these really wild claims from Italian
researchers using tomography. Tomography like ground
penetrating radar. Something like that, claiming
there are structures 2 kilometers deep beneath the
Great Pyramid. 2 kilometers? What kind of structures?
Hundreds of meters of pylons, these pillars in uniform
(11:36):
positions with some sort of a coil wrapped around them.
OK, that sounds pretty out there.
Yeah, yeah, Button acknowledges they sound like bonkers claims,
But he adds, there's the exciting possibility that
they're right. If they are, talk about the
greatest monkey wrench into history.
Wow. And then there's the Sphinx in
the water erosion debate. Right, Robert Shook's theory.
He argues the erosion patterns look like they were caused by
(11:58):
rain, heavy rainfall, not just wind and sand, which would make
it much older. Especially since the Sphinx gets
buried by sand so quickly. How does wind eroded if it's
covered half the time? Good point, and this ties into
the green Sahara idea. The Sahara used to be green.
Yeah, for like 9000 years. Lush Savannah, and then it
rapidly turned into desert at precisely the time that we're
(12:20):
told ancient Egypt emerged. So the theory is maybe a
civilization flourished in the green Sahara and as it dried out
they migrated to the Nile. That's one compelling idea, and
you've got Wadiyal Hitan, the Valley of the Whales nearby.
Hundreds of whale fossils 40 million years old found in the
desert. Just shows how drastically
landscapes change. And what about those artifacts?
(12:42):
The Super precise ones. Oh yeah, the vases, the statues
from early dynasties made from incredibly hard granite diorite.
With precision. Like was it a thousandth of a
human hair? Something like that.
Perfectly symmetrical. How did they do that with the
tools they supposedly had and the drill holes?
Chris Dunn talks about suggesting machinery far beyond
(13:02):
simple hand tools. It really does feel like things
just keep getting older the morewe look like the anti keithera
mechanism. The anti keithera mechanism is
just bananas found in a shipwreck look like a hunk of
shit. As Rogan might say, this is.
A corroded lump. Right.
Yeah, but when they scanned, it turned out to be this incredibly
complex system of gears, an ancient Greek computer,
(13:25):
basically. What did it do?
Tracked lunar cycles, planetary movements, even predicted
eclipses. Sophisticated astronomical
calculations from over 2000 years ago.
And nothing like it appeared again for centuries.
Nope, not until the 16th centuryreally.
Which fuels that idea. We are a species with amnesia.
Did we lose something? It's a powerful thought, and it
(13:48):
seems the potential timeline keeps stretching back further
and further with some of these anomalies.
Like the fossilized cart ruts inTurkey.
Yeah, tell me about those. They look like tracks from some
kind of, well, terrain vehicle, but they're apparently embedded
in rock. Dated by a doctor.
Cultipin to 12:14 million years old.
Million. OK, that's deep time.
(14:08):
Deep time. If that's accurate, it implies
some kind of technology, some kind of civilization.
Way, way before anything we conceive of.
And wasn't there something abouta wheel?
A wheel like object found in a coal mine estimated age around
300 million years old, and it apparently looks remarkably like
a wheel spokes and all three. 100 million.
(14:29):
I mean, if these are real, that's not even human history
anymore. That's something else.
Potentially a non human industrial society millions of
years ago. Echoes of the current
hypothesis. An ancient advanced civilization
on Earth that vanished. Which is a wild bridge to the
the tridactyl mummies from Peru.You sound controversial.
Very controversial, discussed byJesse Michaels on Rogan.
(14:52):
These are mummified bodies foundin Peru.
What's different about them? They have reportedly fully
intact bone structure, but only three fingers, three toes and a
different shaped head compared to humans.
Elongated skulls, different proportions.
How old are they dated? Between 700 and 1700 years old,
so relatively recent compared tosome things we've discussed.
(15:15):
And the evidence is just visual.They claim X-rays show an extra
digit or joint in the fingers, distinct skull anatomy, making
it harder to just dismiss as a crude hoax apparently.
And there's artwork. Yeah, ancient artwork in the
region apparently depicts similar beings. 3 finger, 3 toed
people with big heads. Wow.
OK. And then there's this really
(15:35):
eerie connection Button mentionsto the Virginia UFO incident in
Brazil 1996. Virginia.
What happened there? Reports of a crashed craft and
creatures seen that match the long head.
Three fingers, three toes. A soldier who supposedly handled
one died from a mysterious infection.
OK, that's a lot to take in. And this is the same region of
the Nazca Lines. Roughly, yeah.
(15:58):
The Nazca Lines, only visible from the sky.
One figure looks uncannily like a space suit.
So the question becomes, what are these Peruvian mummies, if
they're real? That's the provocative thought.
What if these are real creaturesthat existed alongside us?
What if they are not human? It opens up totally new
possibilities, unknown branches of Earth life, maybe even, as
(16:22):
some speculate, beings from other dimensions.
It's. Just fundamentally challenges
our place in the universe or even on this planet.
Definitely. Which brings us back to how we
process this information. There's this critique of
academic gatekeeping and ego. The resistance from mainstream
science. Yeah, the idea that some
established figures protect the narratives they've built their
careers on. They resist new evidence
(16:43):
because, well, ego gets in the way.
Is there an example of that? The Clovis first debate in North
America is a classic one. For decades, the consensus was
humans arrived around 13,000 years ago.
Clovis culture, right? Right scientists like I think
Button mentions Jack Ma who proposed earlier dates were
basically destroyed professionally, but then they
found those 22,000 year old footprints in White Sands, New
(17:06):
Mexico proved the critics wrong.So the resistance held back
progress. For decades and Button makes the
point your students are not going to hate you if you say
listen I wrote a whole book on this but I was so wrong they
would respect you more. It's about intellectual honesty.
Which is maybe easier now with how information spreads.
(17:26):
That's the hope the Internet platforms like YouTube shows
like Rogan's, these deep dives, they've democratized the access
to information so. Theories that might have been
squashed before can get out there.
Exactly, theories that potentially wouldn't have been
able to get out there in the preInternet age can reach millions
now. Sure, there's potential for
nonsense too, of course. Needs critical thinking.
(17:49):
Absolutely. But it allows for actual debate,
it speeds up the process hopefully of getting new valid
ideas accepted and looked into properly, it feels.
Like we're circling back to the core theme now.
Which is. Fundamentally, we don't know
what's going on now, so how can we know what's going on 5000
years ago or 50,000 or 500,000? Yeah, that quote really
(18:10):
resonates. We are a species with amnesia.
We've potentially forgotten vastparts of our own story.
But it doesn't have to be a downer, right?
It's actually kind of exciting. Totally, Button says.
It's a really exciting time to find things out.
We have new tools, AI, better scanning tech, Lidar genetics,
plus this open flow of information.
(18:31):
Our understanding of history isn't some finished book, it's
this massive puzzle. And we keep finding new pieces.
Pieces that make us rethink the whole picture.
Precisely. So maybe the thought to leave
you with is this What incrediblediscovery is waiting just around
the corner? What piece of evidence might
totally rewrite our past and maybe even reshape how we see
(18:52):
our future? Definitely something to think
about. We really encourage you.
If this stark your interest. Check out Michael Button's
YouTube channel. Look into some of the
researchers and topics we touched.
On Yeah, Keep Exploring. Your engagement with these big,
complex ideas is fantastic. It shows people are hungry for
this stuff. Absolutely.
Remember, our grasp of history isn't fixed, it's alive, it's
unfolding, and there are so manymysteries still out there.
(19:14):
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.
Welcome to the Joe Rogan recap here on The Dunk Dive.
Our mission is, well, pretty straightforward.
Cut through the noise. Connect the dots on complex
ideas. Yeah, basically give you a
shortcut to being genuinely wellinformed.
And today, Wow, we're diving into a conversation that really
shakes things up. It challenges some pretty
fundamental ideas about human history, ancient civilizations,
(00:23):
you know. That's right, our source
material for this deep dive comes straight from the powerful
JRE YouTube channel. Uh huh.
Specifically Joe Rogan Experience Hashtag 2368
featuring Michael Button. Michael Button.
He's a YouTube right? Relatively new channel but
getting a lot of attention. Yeah, less than a year old, but
he's gained serious traction. He he really digs deep into
(00:45):
ancient history rigorously. OK, so our mission for you today
is to unpack these huge questions he's raising about our
timeline, humanity's past. We'll look at evidence
suggesting, well, that our past is maybe far older and
definitely more mysterious than the standard story you usually
hear. The conventional narrative.
So let's get into it. Let's unpack this.
OK, so Michael Button's own journey here is pretty key.
(01:07):
He actually studied ancient history at university, spent
four years on it. Right, so he has an academic
background. Exactly.
But even with that grounding, hetalks about this core
disagreement he developed. Not with specific facts though.
No, not the individual facts necessarily, but more what he
calls the high level macro perspective, the the accepted
timeline, the big picture of ourancient past.
(01:30):
And what was the specific hang up?
What didn't sit right for him? It was this idea, he says, that
it seemed like nothing happened for vast stretches of time in
human history. Like long periods of just
static. Yeah.
And that seemed while counterintuitive, especially
when you look at discoveries like Jebel Earhode.
The Jebel Earhode discovery, Morocco, right?
(01:52):
That was a big one. Tell us about that.
Huge. Around 20/17/2018 they found
modern Homo sapiens remains there.
OK, but the age. This is the kicker.
Estimated at 315,000, maybe even360. 1000 years old. 300,000
Wow. Right, they were actually
mistaken for Neanderthal at first, just because, well,
anatomically modern humans weren't supposed to be around
(02:14):
that early according to the old models.
So that discovery alone pushes back the age of our species by
what, 100,000 years? Roughly, yeah, from the previous
sort of 200,000 year estimate, which is massive.
So if we've been, you know, anatomically modern for that
long, it really makes you wonder, as Button puts it, why
(02:34):
did this discovery kick up more of a fuss?
Exactly why does the conventional story still kind of
stick to this idea that nothing really happened until the last
10,000 years? You know, until the Neolithic
Revolution and farming popped up.
It's a really fundamental question.
It is, and it connects to something else.
Button studied a university module on cataclysms, natural
(02:55):
disasters, basically. Cataclysms.
How does that tie in? Well, it looked at how these
events in recorded history totally reshaped societies.
The classic example is the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Right. The Bronze Age collapse.
This was like multiple major civilizations hitting the wall
at almost the same time. Pretty much think about it
around. Well the source is 10,000 BC
(03:16):
which seems a bit off maybe for Bronze Age, but the point is
these powerful civilizations, Hittites, Assyrians, Mycenaean,
Greece, Egypt's New Kingdom. All seemingly at their peak.
Yeah, peak of human progress, asthe source puts it.
And they all crashed pretty muchsimultaneously within just 20 to
40 years. Just gone.
What's the theory there? The leading theory is, well, a
(03:40):
combination of climate factors, even a tiny shift like half a
degree Celsius. Half a degree, that's it.
Apparently enough to disrupt trade routes, cause shortages,
societal unrest, a domino effect.
OK, so if a minor climate changecould wreck advanced societies
in recorded history? Then Button asks the crucial
question, What about the much worse climate episodes way back
(04:00):
in prehistory? The big freezes?
The mega drought. Could sophisticated human
cultures have risen, say, 20,050thousand maybe 100,000 years
ago, or even more? And then just been wiped out by
climate change or massive volcanoes or maybe even comet
impacts, leaving almost nothing behind.
It completely flips the script on this idea of smooth linear
(04:21):
progress for humanity. Absolutely.
And, you know, this kind of thinking leads directly to a
critique of what some might call, well, academic arrogance,
meaning the idea that some mainstream historians or
scientists sometimes talk as if they have the absolute truth
about what happened hundreds of thousands of years.
Ago, when really it's inherentlyunknowable to a large degree.
(04:43):
Right Button's point is that a lot more possibilities are
possible than what many people appreciate.
We should be more open. And probably the biggest piece
of physical evidence supporting this idea, this older, more
complex past, it has to be Gobekli Tepe.
Oh, Gobekli Tepe. Undeniably a game changer.
The biggest smoking gun, as Button calls it.
Remind us, how old is it 12? 1000 years old and it's got
(05:05):
these just incredible massive megalithic pillars, intricately
carved, arranged precisely. So its existence flat out proves
that sophisticated human culturewas present way earlier than the
conventional timeline suggests. No question.
None. It shows the toolkit for
civilization. You know, complex organization,
(05:26):
abstract thinking, serious engineering skills.
It was all there 12,000 years ago.
Which then makes that 6000 year gap until summer the traditional
first civilization seem really strange.
What was happening in between? Exactly, and it's not just
Gobekli Tepe and isolation, it'spart of this wider Tash Tepe
culture. There are like 14 or more
(05:46):
connected sites sharing symbolism megalithic stuff.
But they're still classified as built by hunter gatherers.
That's the paradox. If they built this, then our
definition of hunter gatherer needs a, well, a massive update.
It challenges everything. And we've only uncovered a tiny
fraction, right? It's like 5%.
Only 5%? Imagine what else is down there.
There's speculation about Pillar43 maybe being some kind of
(06:07):
cosmic calendar or even predicting an impact event that
that's debated. It just blows the lid off the
old models and it makes you question that narrow definition
of civilization itself. The 1 based mostly on
Mesopotamia on summer. Totally.
Humanity can and clearly did flourish in lots of different
ways, different places, different environments.
Which brings up another puzzle. Agriculture.
(06:29):
Ah yes, farming the cornerstone of the Neolithic revolution.
It seems to appear almost simultaneously all over the
world around that same time 12,000 years ago.
South America, Mesopotamia. Ancient China.
OK, so here's the question Button raises If farming was so
crucial, such a game changer, why did nobody invent it for the
(06:50):
first, what, 310,000 years that homo sapiens were around?
Right, only for it to suddenly pop up everywhere at once as the
source says, it just doesn't make sense.
The usual explanation connects it to the Holocene, our current
stable warm climate period. Yeah, but then you have to ask,
why didn't agriculture start during other warm periods?
There were like 4 distinct warm periods, each lasting over
10,000 years while modern humanswere definitely around.
(07:13):
Why not then? Good question.
It points towards maybe needing another trigger, or maybe the
knowledge was preserved somehow.It opens up possibilities and it
leads us right into the preservation problem.
Meaning how much stuff would actually survive from way back
then? Exactly.
And the answer is very little. Think about our cities now.
(07:33):
London. Manhattan.
Give them 100,000 years, what's left?
Dust, basically. Maybe some foundations?
Almost nothing, as button puts it.
Concrete crumbles, metal rusts away in thousands of years.
What lasts? Maybe deeply carved stone.
Maybe nuclear waste if they had it.
So how many sites do we actuallyhave from say older than 100,000
(07:55):
years? Get this, globally there are
only about 9 homo sapiens sites confirmed from that far back,
maybe up to 15 if you count debated 1.
Nine yeah out of hundreds of thousands of.
Years 9 confirmed glimpses, 9 snapshots.
Mostly caves, fire pits, some basic stone tools.
That's it for over 200,000 yearsof our history.
Wow, so finding only simple tools doesn't mean that's all
(08:17):
they have. Precisely.
Think about today. You've got Elon Musk sending
rockets to Mars, and at the sametime there are uncontacted
tribes living completely off thegrid.
Subsistence lifestyles. Finding stone tools in one place
doesn't mean advanced stuff didn't exist somewhere else.
Which brings us to the Colombo structure.
This sounds intriguing. Oh, this is extraordinary.
(08:39):
Found in modern day Zambia, it'spieces of wood.
Wood. How did that survive?
OK, so these aren't just random sticks.
They were deliberately cut in notches and connected together,
tapered and secured at right angles.
Looks like a platform, maybe part of a dwelling.
OK. And the age.
This is the mind blower 476,000 years old.
Wait. Half a million years, almost.
(09:00):
OK, that predates Homo sapiens. Exactly.
Attributed maybe to Homo heidelbergensis and the only
reason it survived. Fell into a bog, got preserved
in waterlogged sediment an. Extreme edge case scenario like
Button says. Totally, which implies how many
countless others just rotted away.
This fine massively disputes theidea that humans didn't build
complex things or settled down until like 12,000 years ago.
(09:23):
And it completely clashes with that cognitive revolution idea
from Harare sapiens, right? The idea we only got smart 50 or
60,000 years. Ago flies right in the face of
it, this suggests mainstream anthropology might have been off
by over 400,000 years, about when sophisticated behaviors
emerged. That's staggering, yeah.
And if that kind of evidence canbe lost so easily, think about
(09:44):
actual cataclysms erasing whole cultures.
Like the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, that
thing was immense. How bad was it?
Bad enough that it might have reduced the entire human
population to maybe just 3000 to10,000 individuals left on the
planet. A massive genetic bottleneck.
So imagine a civilization existed before Toba.
(10:06):
Gone, wiped out, leaving maybe no trace at all.
It shows how these great bottlenecks could just erase
chapters of our history. Like those lost cities in the
Amazon, they're finding out withLidar, once dismissed as myth.
Exactly. Or just look how fast nature
reclaims places like Detroit, Oregon, Chernobyl.
When humans leave, our footprintmight seem huge, but time and
nature are powerful forces. OK, so if the deep, deep past is
(10:29):
that hard to grasp, what about, well, places we think we know
better, like ancient Egypt? Egypt still full of mysteries
even if you take the conventional date for the Great
Pyramid like 2500 BC. They were just wildly ahead of
everyone else. And the official explanation for
how they built it? Wooden sledges, Copper chisels
on granite. It feels insufficient.
(10:53):
Doesn't make sense is how Buttonputs it, especially given the
precision and scale. And then there's the whole tomb
assumption for the Great Pyramid.
Right. They never actually found a
pharaoh's body inside it, did they?
Nope. Nobody.
Later Pharaoh's might have just reused much older structures, so
why the weird assumption it was built as a tomb?
Are there other theories like Christopher Dunn's idea about it
(11:14):
being a power plant? Yeah, that's mentioned.
And then there are these really wild claims from Italian
researchers using tomography. Tomography like ground
penetrating radar. Something like that, claiming
there are structures 2 kilometers deep beneath the
Great Pyramid. 2 kilometers? What kind of structures?
Hundreds of meters of pylons, these pillars in uniform
(11:36):
positions with some sort of a coil wrapped around them.
OK, that sounds pretty out there.
Yeah, yeah, Button acknowledges they sound like bonkers claims,
But he adds, there's the exciting possibility that
they're right. If they are, talk about the
greatest monkey wrench into history.
Wow. And then there's the Sphinx in
the water erosion debate. Right, Robert Shook's theory.
He argues the erosion patterns look like they were caused by
(11:58):
rain, heavy rainfall, not just wind and sand, which would make
it much older. Especially since the Sphinx gets
buried by sand so quickly. How does wind eroded if it's
covered half the time? Good point, and this ties into
the green Sahara idea. The Sahara used to be green.
Yeah, for like 9000 years. Lush Savannah, and then it
rapidly turned into desert at precisely the time that we're
(12:20):
told ancient Egypt emerged. So the theory is maybe a
civilization flourished in the green Sahara and as it dried out
they migrated to the Nile. That's one compelling idea, and
you've got Wadiyal Hitan, the Valley of the Whales nearby.
Hundreds of whale fossils 40 million years old found in the
desert. Just shows how drastically
landscapes change. And what about those artifacts?
(12:42):
The Super precise ones. Oh yeah, the vases, the statues
from early dynasties made from incredibly hard granite diorite.
With precision. Like was it a thousandth of a
human hair? Something like that.
Perfectly symmetrical. How did they do that with the
tools they supposedly had and the drill holes?
Chris Dunn talks about suggesting machinery far beyond
(13:02):
simple hand tools. It really does feel like things
just keep getting older the morewe look like the anti keithera
mechanism. The anti keithera mechanism is
just bananas found in a shipwreck look like a hunk of
shit. As Rogan might say, this is.
A corroded lump. Right.
Yeah, but when they scanned, it turned out to be this incredibly
complex system of gears, an ancient Greek computer,
(13:25):
basically. What did it do?
Tracked lunar cycles, planetary movements, even predicted
eclipses. Sophisticated astronomical
calculations from over 2000 years ago.
And nothing like it appeared again for centuries.
Nope, not until the 16th centuryreally.
Which fuels that idea. We are a species with amnesia.
Did we lose something? It's a powerful thought, and it
(13:48):
seems the potential timeline keeps stretching back further
and further with some of these anomalies.
Like the fossilized cart ruts inTurkey.
Yeah, tell me about those. They look like tracks from some
kind of, well, terrain vehicle, but they're apparently embedded
in rock. Dated by a doctor.
Cultipin to 12:14 million years old.
Million. OK, that's deep time.
(14:08):
Deep time. If that's accurate, it implies
some kind of technology, some kind of civilization.
Way, way before anything we conceive of.
And wasn't there something abouta wheel?
A wheel like object found in a coal mine estimated age around
300 million years old, and it apparently looks remarkably like
a wheel spokes and all three. 100 million.
(14:29):
I mean, if these are real, that's not even human history
anymore. That's something else.
Potentially a non human industrial society millions of
years ago. Echoes of the current
hypothesis. An ancient advanced civilization
on Earth that vanished. Which is a wild bridge to the
the tridactyl mummies from Peru.You sound controversial.
Very controversial, discussed byJesse Michaels on Rogan.
(14:52):
These are mummified bodies foundin Peru.
What's different about them? They have reportedly fully
intact bone structure, but only three fingers, three toes and a
different shaped head compared to humans.
Elongated skulls, different proportions.
How old are they dated? Between 700 and 1700 years old,
so relatively recent compared tosome things we've discussed.
(15:15):
And the evidence is just visual.They claim X-rays show an extra
digit or joint in the fingers, distinct skull anatomy, making
it harder to just dismiss as a crude hoax apparently.
And there's artwork. Yeah, ancient artwork in the
region apparently depicts similar beings. 3 finger, 3 toed
people with big heads. Wow.
OK. And then there's this really
(15:35):
eerie connection Button mentionsto the Virginia UFO incident in
Brazil 1996. Virginia.
What happened there? Reports of a crashed craft and
creatures seen that match the long head.
Three fingers, three toes. A soldier who supposedly handled
one died from a mysterious infection.
OK, that's a lot to take in. And this is the same region of
the Nazca Lines. Roughly, yeah.
(15:58):
The Nazca Lines, only visible from the sky.
One figure looks uncannily like a space suit.
So the question becomes, what are these Peruvian mummies, if
they're real? That's the provocative thought.
What if these are real creaturesthat existed alongside us?
What if they are not human? It opens up totally new
possibilities, unknown branches of Earth life, maybe even, as
(16:22):
some speculate, beings from other dimensions.
It's. Just fundamentally challenges
our place in the universe or even on this planet.
Definitely. Which brings us back to how we
process this information. There's this critique of
academic gatekeeping and ego. The resistance from mainstream
science. Yeah, the idea that some
established figures protect the narratives they've built their
careers on. They resist new evidence
(16:43):
because, well, ego gets in the way.
Is there an example of that? The Clovis first debate in North
America is a classic one. For decades, the consensus was
humans arrived around 13,000 years ago.
Clovis culture, right? Right scientists like I think
Button mentions Jack Ma who proposed earlier dates were
basically destroyed professionally, but then they
found those 22,000 year old footprints in White Sands, New
(17:06):
Mexico proved the critics wrong.So the resistance held back
progress. For decades and Button makes the
point your students are not going to hate you if you say
listen I wrote a whole book on this but I was so wrong they
would respect you more. It's about intellectual honesty.
Which is maybe easier now with how information spreads.
(17:26):
That's the hope the Internet platforms like YouTube shows
like Rogan's, these deep dives, they've democratized the access
to information so. Theories that might have been
squashed before can get out there.
Exactly, theories that potentially wouldn't have been
able to get out there in the preInternet age can reach millions
now. Sure, there's potential for
nonsense too, of course. Needs critical thinking.
(17:49):
Absolutely. But it allows for actual debate,
it speeds up the process hopefully of getting new valid
ideas accepted and looked into properly, it feels.
Like we're circling back to the core theme now.
Which is. Fundamentally, we don't know
what's going on now, so how can we know what's going on 5000
years ago or 50,000 or 500,000? Yeah, that quote really
(18:10):
resonates. We are a species with amnesia.
We've potentially forgotten vastparts of our own story.
But it doesn't have to be a downer, right?
It's actually kind of exciting. Totally, Button says.
It's a really exciting time to find things out.
We have new tools, AI, better scanning tech, Lidar genetics,
plus this open flow of information.
(18:31):
Our understanding of history isn't some finished book, it's
this massive puzzle. And we keep finding new pieces.
Pieces that make us rethink the whole picture.
Precisely. So maybe the thought to leave
you with is this What incrediblediscovery is waiting just around
the corner? What piece of evidence might
totally rewrite our past and maybe even reshape how we see
(18:52):
our future? Definitely something to think
about. We really encourage you.
If this stark your interest. Check out Michael Button's
YouTube channel. Look into some of the
researchers and topics we touched.
On Yeah, Keep Exploring. Your engagement with these big,
complex ideas is fantastic. It shows people are hungry for
this stuff. Absolutely.
Remember, our grasp of history isn't fixed, it's alive, it's
unfolding, and there are so manymysteries still out there.
(19:14):
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.
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