Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble
Uploaded: 2024-04-16T17:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-04-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-04-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble

All right, well this took a lot of time to organize but I'm very excited and I'm
happy you're both here. Thank you. Flint, please introduce yourself to
everybody what you do.
Yeah, hi my name is Flint and I'm an archaeologist. I've done archaeology my
whole life. My dad was an archaeologist and I'm just very passionate about
sharing
archaeology and what we do. I find in general that people don't really
understand what modern archaeology is about and so I'm gonna try to get that
across while here you know that's that's my goal. Fantastic. Take that
microphone and try to keep it about a fifth from your fist from your face.
One second, we have to. His HDMI is not working. It's not going through.
All right, we had a bit of a technical issue but we're up. So Flint, you were
just
explaining how your passion is archaeologists, you're an archaeologist and
you have this opportunity to sort of educate people on how archaeology is done.
Yeah, that's my goal is to try to share what we do, why we do it and what our
goals
are with it. Yeah. Okay, terrific. And Graham, everybody knows you. We've been
on this podcast about ten times.
Largely thanks to you, Joe. Oh, I'm very happy. Happy to introduce the world to
it. Are we okay, Flint, with the HDMI?
I think we've been doing shows together since 2011. You, I think, were one of
my
first real guests. You might be the first real guest because before that it was
just my friends,
just comedians. Yeah, yeah. And it was all in my house and we ate pizza. It was.
Yeah. It's fantastic.
Jamie's setting everything up, making sure we're good to go. Okay. The way we'd
agree to do this is, Flint, you wanted to open and you wanted to do about ten
minutes and just sort of explain things.
Yeah. And so we'll let you do that and then, Graham, you'll have an opportunity
to respond.
Yeah, thank you. Um, Jamie, do you mind pulling up my screen?
Here we go. All right. So look, one of the things that I see when I'm online
and or in person sharing archaeology is I find it's tough to get across what it
is. And so I wanted to start with a fun example.
Okay. So I understand that maybe not everybody is can see the screen. So Joe,
do you mind actually just kind of describing what this artifact is?
Oh, you're putting this on me, buddy. Yeah, exactly.
Well, this is a Athenian red figure from 470 B.C. And it is two people having
sex. It's a man on top of a woman. You see his penis. You see, it's, uh, yeah,
it's very graphic.
It is very graphic. So what do you think this shares about what archaeology is?
Any ideas?
Well, I mean, you're finding artwork and parts of civilization that were left
behind and, you know, have been around in this case since over 2000 years.
Yeah. And for a long time, scholars thought that a piece like this described
sort of life in Athens and they connected to Athenian texts, sort of like Plato
describing people having sex even. Right.
And on the other hand, however, every single piece of Athenian artwork with
graphic sex like this, couples actually fucking with penises and stuff like
that,
ends up in Italy. It's part of an Athenian pornographic export market and
Kathleen Lynch and Sean Lewis and others have published on this.
And so the real point is, is that what we're looking at is, is the painters are
designing something for consumers in Italy and particularly in Etruria.
And this instead fits better in with telling us about life in Etruscans and the
kind of stuff that they show in their tombs, sort of romance between people or
the kind of sexual scenes that they design themselves in Italy as well.
And the whole point here is that archaeology is not really about an artifact.
It's not about a monument. It's about our patterns.
And so when we sort of look at how much archaeology there is in the world, this
is a map that shows the Horn of Africa with every single archaeological site
that's been surveyed there.
And there's a hundred and seventy one thousand of that's incredible. Yeah, it's
just and this is just because of the terrain.
Most of the many of these are tombs, for example, Islamic and pre-Islamic tombs,
and so they're visible on the surface.
And so in many ways, when we think about archaeology today in the 21st century,
we're thinking about big data sets and trying to analyze them statistically and
understand the kind of patterns they put together.
And we use innovative technology, sort of LiDAR, lasers from the sky to see
these things underground.
For example, here are this publication by Canuto in 2018 records 61,480
structures still to be excavated, found with LiDAR and surface survey, right?
And so at the same time. And this is it for people listening, it says ancient
lowland Maya complex as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern
Guatemala.
That's amazing. Yeah. And so, I mean, we have this huge data set.
And with it, we get high resolution, for example, the bottom image in red, it
shows Luter's trenches, because while there's a lot of archaeology, because
people have been everywhere,
there's it's very fragile and it's at risk. And that's something I also want to
take some time to get across a bit while I'm here.
And my own research is very much big data oriented, too.
I've studied nearly a million animal bones and teeth and horn fragments from
ancient Greece, like this pile here from the island of Crete, from Azoria.
And in particular, I also want to get across the kind of precision we have.
Right now, I do what's called isotope analysis.
I look at oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of these animals.
And by taking multiple samples on different parts of the teeth, you can see the
different areas that I've drilled on that tooth on the right, right?
And what that does is it lets me understand the diet of the animal and where it's
moving in the landscape seasonally.
So in different seasons of the year, I can understand the kind of ways that
people are raising animals.
We can do this with human remains, too, and we can get this high level of
resolution and precision that people don't always realize that we have.
Right. And so in this case, I'm here to try to discuss with Graham and to test
his lost civilization hypothesis.
He has this he's written about it in many books and he's given many talks here
and on Netflix, and he's talked about this idea of a lost advanced civilization
from the Ice Age and advanced civilization that's around the globe.
Right. And in particular, he thinks there was a global cataclysm at that time
and the survivors introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy and arts to
hunter gatherers.
And so I'm trying to tackle this with an open mind, and I want to tackle this
with the perspective of my own experience and my own expertise.
And so in that sense, if you think about what Carl Sagan says, extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence.
Graham is in many ways the first person to admit that the evidence he has is
fingerprints.
It's kind of what he thinks is this technological transmission to hunter gatherers,
but he does not have any direct dated evidence of this civilization.
It's after all a lost civilization. Right. And so what I've been thinking
through is how can my own experience and expertise kind of test this hypothesis
in a fair way?
That's kind of my goal here while here. And so I'm here doing a lot of research.
I'm here to present what I see are two clear disproofs of a lost advanced Ice
Age civilization.
And I mean, archaeologists, we're fairly sure this does not exist. We've been
looking for this kind of civilization for several hundred years.
It's this idea of a pre-flood civilization has been around for several hundred
years.
And so what I want to do is focus on where my own experience and expertise is.
My dad was an Ice Age archaeologist. He studied Neanderthal caves.
And so I want to dig into some of the stuff that he's excavated and surveyed.
These are, for example, 100,000 year old stone tools from Egypt.
And so we have just so much Ice Age evidence. And Graham usually ignores it.
And he claims that his civilization...
Do you have your notifications on or something?
I don't know what that is.
I think it's the dongle.
The dongle is doing that?
Sorry.
If you hit mute, maybe it might stop it.
Yeah, I just muted it.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
Okay.
So your claim was that Graham ignores this?
My claim is that he ignores most of the evidence for hunter-gatherers in the
Ice Age, which is...
Is that he ignores it or that he doesn't focus on it as much as he's focused on
ancient, advanced civilization?
I mean, I think that's one and the same. I think if you're going to look at the
Ice Age, we need to look at the totality of evidence to understand what's there.
And so, for example, he proposes the reason why the Ice Age civilization isn't
there is because it's underwater.
It's been, you know, we've had 200 feet of sea level rise since the Younger Dryas,
and therefore it's not accessible.
And so I really want to focus on Ice Age coastlines, evidence from Ice Age
coastlines and excavations, underwater evidence from the Ice Age, things like
that.
These areas where he says that archaeologists don't look, but we are looking.
And what we find is the ephemeral traces of hunter-gatherers rather than some
sort of advanced civilization.
And so that's one thing I want to show. I want to share this kind of evidence.
Some of it's new, some of it's not, but I think it's the kind of thing that has
a direct bearing on looking for such an Ice Age civilization.
When you're studying these coastal areas where these Ice Age people lived and
you're studying these underwater, whatever, what would you call them?
Are they cities? Are they towns? Are they villages?
No, these are, so in this case, this is a really brand new find from like a
month ago. It's actually a hunting wall off the coast of Germany.
So it's where they have their camp?
Yeah, or maybe just where they drove game along to hunt them. But most of what's
underwater are lithic scatters, scatters of stone tools.
Stuff like this.
What do you have there?
I have a series of different stone tools. I'll show them off a little later.
Let me touch on them.
Yeah, sure.
How old is this?
These are all modern replicas made by archaeologists. Some of them made by my
dad and some of them have been made by...
I thought you could hook us up with some real stuff.
Sorry, no, I can't bring real stuff.
I have a real arrowhead. It's from here.
I do have an ancient corncob right here.
Oh, that's not nearly as interesting.
From about 1200 years ago from the Southern Methodist University Archaeology
Collection.
And I'll explain why this is here in a bit.
My question for you though was how much of the ground do you think has actually
been studied?
When you're looking at these ancient Ice Age Neanderthal populations, were they
Homo sapiens as well?
These are Homo sapiens. This is from, you know, right at the end of the Ice Age.
So this is modern humans, yeah.
So when you're finding remnants of ancient hunter-gatherers, how much evidence,
how much of the ground do you think you've studied?
We've definitely not studied most of the ground.
But as I'll show, we've studied a lot and we actually put together predictive
models on how to find this stuff.
Because it's really expensive to go diving, right?
And how many dives do you think have been done? Like how many times?
Thousands.
Thousands?
Yeah, oh yeah. And lots of different sites have been found from all over the
world.
And specifically it was done to try to locate these ancient civilizations?
To try to locate Stone Age, Ice Age stuff, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then my second thing I'd like to focus on is food.
I am an archaeologist who studies ancient food.
I'm an environmental archaeologist.
I've studied millions of animal bones from the past.
I've helped collect thousands and thousands of seeds like these.
And it's something that people don't realize we can get.
We've developed sampling methods and we now at this point have