The Göbekli Tepe Debate - Joe Rogan Experience

hello freak [ __ ] so my final point is is the falsifiability one that is what would it take to refute your hypothesis like for me the answer would be like if gobekli tepe turned out to be what you think it might have been the place where advanced ancient civilization once inhabited or they used it where are the metal tools where are the writing the the examples of writing perhaps a decision was made not to use metal perhaps a decision was made that errors had taken place that that that in reinventing civilization we shouldn't perhaps go down quite the same route as before perhaps writing isn't always an advance perhaps perhaps an oral tradition which which records in memory which enhances and uses the power of memory may be a very effective way of dealing with information we regard writing as a as an advance and I can see lots of reasons why it is in advance but if we put our self into the heads of ancient peoples maybe it wasn't I mean there's a tradition from ancient Egypt that the god Thoth god of wisdom was the inventor of writing but we have we have a text in which he is questioned by a pharaoh who is who is saying well actually have you really done a good thing by introducing writing because then the words may roam around the world without wise advice to to put them into into context and what will happen to memory when people who saw so there might be a choice not to not go that way all right but but then what do you mean by advance when you say there used to be a lost advanced civilization before ten thousand years ago well it's just wait here for a second because what we know for a fact is that the carbon dating in all the area around gobekli tepe is somewhere around twelve thousand years that correct eleven thousand six hundred years ago the earliest they found so far but a great deal of Gobekli Tepe is still underground right so at least what we know is someone built some pretty impressive structures eleven thousand six hundred years ago seven thousand years before stone so when when that story broke this is long before you came along with your book it was controversial in the sense that we thought hunter-gatherers could not do something like this because to do that you need a large population with a division of labor and so forth and so what the response to archaeologists was well I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers maybe they can do more stuff than we gave them credit for so why is that not a reasonable hypothesis versus they were it was actually advance but we mean something completely different by advanced not writing and metal and technology we mean I don't know what you mean what do you mean well I mean we have we have a body of archeology which goes on for decades which is saying that megalithic sites for example gigantea in Malta or haggarium and Hydra megalithic sites date to no older than five and a half to six thousand years old GeeGee gigantea would push it close to 6,000 years old and they're no older sites than that and therefore that the megalithic site is associated with a certain stage of Neolithic development then along comes gobekli tepe 7,000 years older than Stonehenge incredibly sophisticated site very large scale I mean Klaus Schmidt sadly he's passed away I spent three days working the site with him he was very generous to me he showed me a lot he talked to me a lot and he said basically 50 times as much as they've already excavated is still is still under the ground that there's hundreds and hundreds of giant stone pillars that they've identified with ground-penetrating radar he's not even sure if they're ever if they're ever going to excavate them but by all accounts we are looking if we take what's still under the ground into account we're looking at the largest megalithic site that's ever been created on earth and it pops up eleven thousand six hundred years ago with no obvious background to it it just comes out of nowhere no tomatoes that's rather par that we know of but to me that's oh that's immediately a rather puzzling and an interesting situation and I would be remiss as as an author and an enquire into these matters if I didn't take great interest in that the sudden appearance seven thousand years before Stonehenge you have a megalithic site that Dwarfs Stonehenge to me that's a mystery and it's really worth inquiring into we love to put it into perspective that's more than two thousand years older than what we now consider to be the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza in comparison to us to then so between our time now in 2017 in the construction the Great Pyramid you're talking about two thousand years earlier than that and that is unbelievable when you're talking about seven thousand years before what we thought people were doing okay but but my point was that instead of before we go down the road of constructing a lost civilization that was super advanced but different from our idea of event why not just attribute to these fully modern hunter-gatherers who had the same size brains we have and so on that they were able to figure out and do this we just underestimated their abilities so why did Akio just tell us for so long hunter-gatherers couldn't do it and we needed agricultural nations that could generate surpluses that could pay for the specialists the theory but that was so now what archaeologists are saying was I guess we were wrong about hunter-gatherers well they might be wrong about hunter-gatherers or there might be another civilization that they had not discovered that has been on earth lost lost civilizations are not such an extraordinary idea I mean nobody knew that the Indus Valley Civilization existed at all until some railway work was done around more injured RO in in 1923 suddenly a whole civilization pops up out of the woodwork that's just never been taken into account before the 1920s we still can't read its script you know the idea that we that we come across that another turn of the Spade reveals information that causes us to reconsider not just was it hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists but perhaps something bigger than this is involved or in between there that's not that's not such an extraordinary idea I get it that mainstream archeology doesn't want to go there but that's my job I don't I don't think that that that's correct they would be happy to go there if there's evidence for it by what you just said they now fully accept the Indus Valley civilizations how did that happen if they were dogmatically close minded and I don't say that they were dogmatically close minded about bad the evidence the massive amount of evidence that came up with the discovery of Mohenjo daro harappa Dholavira and other and other such sites is very difficult you have to be completely stupid to say that that's not a civilization Quebec Lee tap is a bit more nuanced you know we have stone we have stone circles we have some interesting astronomical alignments the world's first patently north-south aligned building maybe no deaf again that's a pattern anything well I'm siding Klaus Schmidt you know well that's all right but I any of us who read back into history 10,000 years ago what we're thinking that they might have been thinking that's always a dangerous for anybody not just you all that's a good point who was Klaus Schmidt classmate was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe he was the head of the German archaeological Institute dig at gobekli tepe he kindly spent three days showing me around the site and and really nobody's disputing the astronomical alignments of gobekli tepe they weren't particularly interesting to clash MIT but they're there and what is the alignment like how is it when you have a perfectly north-south north-south aligned structure perfectly north-south to true north not magnetic north then you are dealing with astronomy by definition and there are other alignments of the sun's true north as established today or with the precession the equinoxes no it's all about okay it's the rotation axis of our planet okay so it to this day it points exactly the same place where it was pointing they'll always place the true north ok but back to this you know they don't want to go sure they want to go there they would happy be happy to go there case in point two weeks ago in the journal Nature the most prestigious scientific journal in the world there was published an article that humans are maybe Neanderthals lived in San Diego area a hundred and thirty thousand years ago this is an order of magnitude older than the Clovis days this was the Mastodon bones they found that so here's an example of how okay so clearly there's not some conspiracy to keep alternative people or fringe or or radical theories out it was published in peer-reviewed the most prestigious journal in the world there it is I'm bad what happened well there being a massive reaction to that and lots of lots of scathing remarks but that's normal that's how science works you get you get pushed back it's you gotta have a thick skin it's just the way it goes gotta have a thick skin that's that's for sure but maybe sometimes your skin is so thick that you just can't sense anything around well of course we don't want that either so what do you think is going on when you look at something like gobekli tepe that's covered covered up purposefully right well yes deliberately buried again I cite Klaus Schmidt he he's the authority on this he's the excavator he absolutely adamantly insists that that site was deliberately buried and finally covered with a hill which is what gobekli tepe means in the Turkish language pot-bellied Hill yeah and you're talking about something give me the perspective of how large they believe it is currently as a current what's excavated at the moment is on a scale of Stonehenge what's under the ground maybe as much as 50 times larger Jesus but Buckley template there no one lived there there's no tools there's no hole you're talking about but if it's buried it should be presumably pottery there's no pottery no writing no articles of clothing no one lived there were you saying nobody lived there so watch their pottery why should pottery be in the field but why they go along and break some pots and stick it in the artificial something their trash when they it's something that would indicate it's different a different kind of people than what we're used to seeing in the archaeological record well in other words one nation that they poured in its just stones and earth bits of it in other words Graham for you to gain support for your theory amongst mainstream archaeologists they want to see positive evidence to overturn the old theory in other words the burden of proof is on the person challenging the mainstream I completely agree in every field but isn't there some proof that the the mainstream idea of these hunters and gatherers never had anything in what the theory was that would indicate these people were capable of building something you remotely the size of Gobekli tended to me that's the stunning beauty of this find it overturns our ideas of primitive hunter-gatherer zit could not do this apparently they can it's that's one is possible yes that's right so this I call this somebody else the bigotry of low expectations you know it's like we had this kind of low expectations for these hunter-gatherers maybe we should jettison that idea and in my own other field of history of religion it also threw that off because this apparently was a kind of a spiritual religious that's the wrong word they would have used actually nobody can nobody can know that that's right so but if it was this is that the big National Geographic article emphasized that maybe this is the very first religious spiritual temple ever built because they didn't live there so they went there very isn't it also possible that this is signs that civilization was more advanced 12,000 years ago than we thought okay more advanced what again what do we mean by talking about the ability to be to construct an amazing structure well okay how big was it look how tall these asses don't some of them are 20 feet tall yeah but salad em are smaller with with with astronomical alignments Klaus Schmidt called it a center of innovation he was intrigued by the way that agriculture emerges around gobekli tepe at the same time that Gobekli Tepe is created I mean he went on record with me perhaps he's not right but he went on record with me as saying that was the first agriculture these were the people who invented agriculture now to me the notion that a group of hunter-gatherers wake up one morning and invents megalithic architecture the world's largest megalithic site and at the same moment invent agriculture stretches credulity a bit and I think I would prefer to propose and I have proposed that what we're looking at is evidence of some kind of transfer of technology that people came into that area who had other knowledge and but that was applied and perhaps they mobilized the local population around this site perhaps that's precisely why we see agriculture developing there so perhaps that's the skill that's being passed on but I don't see anything particularly ok the stonework is spectacular but that that's not any more advanced and a few Center a few millennium afterwards but you're talking about something 20 feet tall stone that we know were 100 gallons a couple hundred people can move multi-ton stones there's no mystery in moving the stones they start moving 20-ton stones in Indonesia today but maybe that culture still exists you also know that the carving on the outside is extremely complex is three-dimensional carving okay but you know that means that Laz do you know that means at Lascaux at 30,000 years ago has magnificent cave paintings with three dimensions but that's painting you know the thing hold on a second do you know what I'm saying when I say three-dimensional carvings like the Venus no the carvings were on the outside meaning they didn't carve them into the rock they carved away the rock around them which is pretty sophisticated stuff for hunter-gatherers and they're doing this on these 20 foot tall stone columns I mean it's pretty impressive stuff okay but they're the assumption is that they couldn't have figured this out we know from modern societies where say Australian Aborigines in one generation they go from stone tools to fly in airplanes the brains are quite capable of doing these amazing things defying airplanes without somebody introducing an airplane yeah you're actually making his argument for him no no it's not that much of a reach to carve stone people have been carving stones for the entire archeological opinion on megalithic sites for decades before this was precisely that it was beyond their ability and now the mainstream has changed okay well it's let's learn the very least little shift let's pause for a moment let's pause for a moment so for sure we all agree human beings made this yes so the argument is not whether or not aliens made it the argument is whether or not humans made it that were sophisticated well they're clearly sophisticated enough to make this incredible structure that is is some sign of some sort of civilization and my belief so yeah it is it's a gigantic structure I agree with grin that we've again undersold who these people were my friend Jared Diamond goes to Papua New Guinea he talks at the opening chapter of Guns Germs and Steel how smart these people are that live out there in nature and what it takes to survive I'm sure he wouldn't last an hour you know from LA he would last an hour with his Papua New Guinean friends out there in the in the wild because he doesn't know how to survive and they've been the information generation after generation very smart okay so it's not warm it's not a problem of intelligence and is there okay so here's the other thing we don't know is that there might be lots more of these sites and where there's there are visited one of them Quran Tepe you've got you've got the t-shaped pillars sticking out the side of a hill in the farmers backyard I mean I I think we're actually at the beginning of opening up this inquiry not at the end of it okay see before you okay why not just say we don't know this is a spectacular mystery you leave it at that right why write a book well you guys aren't gonna fulfill it all again you guys on the mainstream side won't speculate and won't explore I don't claim to be an archaeologist I'm not a scientist I'm an author it's my job to offer an alternative point of view and to offer a coherent Lee argued alternative point of view and I must say Bakley Tepe strikes me as a gigantic [ __ ] mystery and a mystery that is worthy of exploration from a point of view that may not satisfy you well you have to satisfy me you and your you and your colleagues and I don't I don't I certainly don't have to satisfy you or them like you're opening chapter with Schmidt I thought I really loved the the kind of conversational style you had with Schmidt in the book where he's dialoguing where Schmidt goes and look at this and then he says but but but what wait what's that again that is like a little bit like Columbo like wait I have just one more quick just one more question and you know that mystery kind of thickens that's perfectly okay that's great I mean that's that's what science is all about is uncovering mysteries that we then have to figure out so there's always more mysteries but that doesn't mean that's not positive and it's in favor of a particular theory like a lost civilization it's just we can't explain this full-stop yeah we certainly can't explain it and you can't explain it by saying that we underestimated hunter and gatherer well why not we know they made it whatever you want to call him well we know humans made it that's right we know he owns me but whatever you want to climb but why do they believe that people were only hunters and gatherers 12,000 years ago because they didn't have any evidence the contrary right this is evidence to the contrary I agree so you agree that there weren't other hunter and gatherers ok but there's there's several stages in between just you know 12 people living out in the jungle by themselves for us you know there's like a whole bunch of different I would say that Gobekli Tepe is a gigantic stage well we don't okay they didn't live there so we have to figure out well where where were they living and what was there so that that has to be excavated well they only I mean while what you're saying is that we shouldn't speculate at all because I mean mainstream archeology mainstream archaeologists evacuating when saying it's definitely was hunter-gatherers who did this that's also see much more of a reach okay but not okay it may they may be more than hunter-gatherers they may have been partially settled there's you can have any kind of number of state what you can't apparently have is the possibility of a transfer of technology from people who are really masters of that technology already when they came in but where are these people where's well you're dealing with twelve thousand years ago everything fits in there let's find their homes I don't know I don't know that their homes matter with their homes even survived after twelve thousand years I'm not sure trapped by what surprise there's something - its trash and tools we've got gobekli tepe it confronts us it challenges the mainstream model I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that there was something more than just hunter-gatherers involved here in creating this extraordinary place that's all I've done it seems to me that to say hunter-gatherers could build this I'm not be opposed the idea that they're hunting and gathering but it does certainly imply a lot of leisure time yes a lot of leisure time well we know hundred sorry that's okay loosely well again if we place this back particularly within that that climate zone at eleven thousand six to twelve thousand thirteen thousand years ago whatever it turns out to be we're dealing with an extremely demanding and challenging climate which which wouldn't necessarily to my mind be conducive to the emergence of a settled culture that would be capable of undertaking a project on this scale and as somebody who's built a lot of things and moved quite a few heavy weights in my time I I find it the the idea sort of perplexing to me that they would be what I had what I would have to ask is what is their motive what is their motive for undertaking a project on this scale because it's an enormous project and to move a 20-ton block of stone is really a challenging task to undertake today today well without without you know you know the infrastructure of of large machines and so forth but to do it by hand it would be an enormous undertaking and and I you know to me it's like when are they having time to hunt and gather when you're engaged in a project of this scale but we know hunter-gatherers have way more free time than modern society people do that's the one thing we've learned is that it's a pretty good way to make a living actually they have a better berry diet than we have this is the you know and it's all diet right they have a better berry diet and a lot more free time yeah but that's a lot less stress we knew that all along about hunter-gatherers when we were saying they couldn't build megalithic science but we weren't were the environment is undergoing rapid changes to which adaptations would be extremely challenging and we know those changes are going on all over the planet we know that sea levels are right rapidly rising over a period of a few thousand years from from a c-stand low of about four hundred feet up to the present level we also know that that by otis were shifting dramatically all over the planet the effects of the Younger Dryas were global pretty much that is I think the emerging consensus now that that both hemispheres North and South were being affected by the climate changes of the Younger Dryas so what we're doing is replacing this this phenomena this this project within this context of these extremely challenging times in which you know adaptation to the environmental changes could easily be the the all-consuming challenge of the times I'm just finding it difficult to imagine a disconnect to see this disconnect between a project of this magnitude and the motive for doing it during a time when obviously the environment could be posing serious constraints upon people's ability to function in that well Randall we don't even know the motives of the Easter Islanders and no we don't raise these huge but we know they did it but Dad become a central question know what something had to have motivated but let's get back to tobacco Kappa P so we so let's just be real clear we know there are humans we know that it's at least 12,000 years old and we know that the real dispute here the real question is did these people have structures and did they have agriculture we know that there were human beings they were essentially modern human beings so were they hunter-gatherers or did they have structures before exactly Tepe they didn't have structures and they didn't have agriculture tapi they did so the fact that they were able to build something so monumental what kind of a leap is it at all to think that these people could figure out how to plant food and figure out how to make a house well I mean again if you look back thirty thousand years forty thousand years to these cave paintings these are pretty sophisticated yes beautiful well clearly they had abstract reasoning they could think from the concrete to the abstract and so on it's not a big reach to go from that to moving stones around I'd say there's a big difference between painting and engraving on the cave walls creating the largest megalithic site that's ever been built on earth I think there's a bit huge difference between those two I mean nobody would compare the construction effort on on Stonehenge or gigantea with with cave paintings I agree with you the cave paintings are magnificent I've had the privilege to visit many of the painted caves stunning work and as Picasso said when he came out of Alaska we have invented nothing I mean they were this that was that modern human mind symbolic mind at work there but this is another matter this is a large-scale construction project that's going on and it's not just a construction person it's like huts it's hundreds and hundreds of very very large megalithic pillars which have to be mobilized brought to the place you know organizing a workforce in order to do that even that requires preparation and time and learning in practice is not something that you wake up one morning it just can do overnight you think that the paintings are more impressive than gobekli tepe yeah or at least comparable I think that's absolutely ridiculous to convey three dimensionality on a 2d plane that that's what Picasso am is like wow that's a crow it's like developing perspective and to use the natural shape it's it's but it's not create a three dimensional perspective look is it that's pretty abstract comparing apples and pears it's not a construction project I don't know but I don't think it's even remotely what I'm saying is that it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to think these people were pretty smart they know that they were smart we know what they're smart just because the fact that those construction projects were done by who by whoever we know that they were smart whoever built Gobekli Tepe was clearly intelligent whoever made those 3d carvings clearly they were intelligent but to think that someone drawing on cave paintings is more impressive not corrected twenty foot stone columns with three-dimensional carvings on them of a lot of animals that weren't even native to the to the region that's the case is that these paintings are like say thirty forty thousand years old to Quebec Lee Tepe so there's tens of thousands of years to develop more that we were very likely to find more archaeological and yet up till now we haven't found that we haven't we haven't found all of that intermediate material which see if I if I could actually see that intermediate material between the Upper Paleolithic cave art and gobekli tepe if I could see the gradual evolution and development of skills I wouldn't need to invoke a lost civilization the survivors of a lost civilization who've mastered those skills elsewhere to come in and teach those skills at gobekli tepe but it still looks to me like a transfer of technology unless you can show me that evolutionary process whereby I can understand how this group of hunter-gatherers became equipped to create this giant site where they practiced where they learn the skills to move the stones to organize the workforce to feed and water the workforce in a rather dry place all of that is actually quite a logistical challenge yep and obviously somebody met it somehow some humans yes so the question is did they have structures did they have agriculture did they have some sort of a community where they lived on the location I would I would imagine so with that would push back the time where we thought that there was a civilization that would push them back into a realm of at least stead stepping out of the hunter-gatherer stage now your guys MIT as you show in your book he did not go as far as you do that you certainly know right now buddy you admitted it's a mystery okay what that would be the scientific approach I don't know what it is great mystery let's just wait and see versus I'm gonna postulate a lost civilization nothing wrong with that cramp it's a free country and scientists do this all the time as you've mentioned there's a there's a rather humorous thing which I have to say actually I might even ask Jamie to pull up the the couple of images of fingerprints of the gods that's the book I'm best known for and when I published fingerprints of the gods in 1995 essentially I was saying civilization is much older much more mysterious than we thought and I was ridiculed for proposing that 2013 one of the magazines that ridiculed me New Scientist magazine in Britain publishes as a cover story picture of Gobekli Tepe and the headline civilization is much older and much more mysterious okay fair enough and and scientists do do this I mean I'd followed paleoanthropology for my whole adult life and one of the big mysteries is how did we get a big brain how do we get to abstract reasoning from from say what chimps can do no one knows the doubling of the human brain size over period two million years because no one knows every couple years there's a new book out it's climate change it was throwing arm meat you know meat is another big one at Harvard perfect meat okay and these books come and go and some of them have legs some of them don't and it's just the way it goes and then there's Terence Mckenna it's pretty obvious it was psychedelics yeah that's that switch the brains the old Julian the Julian James no bicameral mind not at all this is David Lewis Williams who's professor of anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa his neuropsychological theory of cave art all kudos had Terence Mckenna and food of the gods he what a brilliant thank you what a brilliant alternative thinking but David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand had been working on this problem since 1973 and his his argument is that the remarkable similarities that we see in rock and cave art all around the world are explained that we're dealing with a shamanistic art shamanism involves altered states of consciousness this is typical visions of altered states of consciousness and it seems to have a company to great leap forward in human behavior and you've covered this in your book I covered it in supernatural natural those did you know Richard Rams theory he's a highly regarded scientist at Harvard so it is the meat-eating guy that you know it's taking me writing the protein that's what gives you the energy to build a huge brain all right so now this guy is starting with 10 10 pluses on his side he's Harvard and already respected and even so his buck was like well it's probably a series of different events and a bunch of different characters that's right it could be a lot of different things [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 29min 9sec (1749 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2017