Julian Dorey Podcast: #367 w/ Michael Button on 1 Million Yr-old Skulls (Transcript)

And then new evidence came to light — we’re 100,000 years old, and then 200,000 years old.

And then in 2018, we discovered these fossils in Morocco at the Jebel Irhoud site, which showed that modern Homo sapiens — anatomically modern, just like you and me — were 315,000 years old, potentially up to 360,000 years old. And that’s a super, super long time ago.

JULIAN DOREY: So you said we discovered it’s over 300,000 years old through that?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So the estimate is somewhere between about 300,000 to 360,000 years old, and they’re classified as modern Homo sapien remains. So the brain case is pretty much identical to ours, and that pushed back the age of our species by 100,000 years. It was a pretty paradigm-shifting discovery.

And that came out while I was at university, and that was kind of the spark that led me to go down this path — and not pursue a traditional career in academia. Instead, I started thinking about these ideas from a slightly alternative perspective, because I thought it was a really paradigm-shifting thing. Because when you look at how old human civilization is, the dawn of civilization, the very earliest time that civilization formed, is 5,000 years ago. So then what about the other 310,000 years? Prehistory is literally 98, 99% of our story, and yet it’s just a dark cloud — a shroud of mystery that we don’t really know anything about.

So that’s kind of where my whole interest in this stuff kicked off. And I make a lot of videos about prehistory, about that whole time. And then as you say, Neanderthals, other human species — they were all existing in this time.

The Million-Year-Old Human Skull Found in China

MICHAEL BUTTON: And then there was also this really interesting discovery that literally came out about a month ago. I don’t know if you’ve seen this — it’s about the human skull found in China that was a million years old. Did you see that? So it’s not Homo sapien, just to be clear.

JULIAN DOREY: But you said human skull.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s a human skull. So it’s classified as Homo longi, which is very similar to Denisovan. So it’s a different human species. But what they effectively are — yeah, there you go — it’s effectively like a sister species of ours. I mean, that’s not a very technical way of putting it, but it’s the most layman way of putting it. But effectively they’re large-brained humans, very similar to us — basically a sister species or a cousin species, not an ancestor, someone that’s alongside us.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh, not an ancestor.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not an ancestor, no. So like a sister species. Yeah. And pretty much the same brain size as us.

JULIAN DOREY: Which — does that suggest, maybe I’m reading too far into this — does that suggest therefore that in finding this, and it’s a million years old, that at the same time there were Homo sapiens that existed at that moment?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. So that’s what the scientists who did this study suggest. So one of the scientists is Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London, and he is quoted, I think maybe in this article, saying this basically suggests that Homo sapiens were around a million years ago, or at least the direct lineage of Homo sapiens — a distinct lineage of the humans that became Homo sapiens.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, here we go deep. Just found that the startling analysis has dramatically shifted the timeline of the evolution of large-brained humans back at least half a million years. According to Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, co-lead on the research, he said: “There are likely to be million-year-old fossils of Homo sapiens somewhere on our planet. We just haven’t found them yet.”

And what was the — this is where it gets way above my pay grade — but do you make that jump strictly by being able to say that the genetic evidence we found right here suggests that one would have been impossible without the other? Is that how they do it?

MICHAEL BUTTON: So they made that leap. The genetic evidence suggests that we’re younger than this. The genetic evidence suggests we diverged — so this is basically how it works. This Homo longi skull, or perhaps Denisovan skull, was found and reconstructed using CT scanning and classified as Homo longi, which is a sister species to us. That suggests that our last common ancestor was before then. So if these humans were walking around a million years ago, that means that our species diverged before that point — which means that whatever became Homo sapiens, potentially Homo sapiens, was around at this point. That’s what it suggests.

Obviously the dating may not be correct — it’s a reconstruction of an extremely old fossil — but it’s a very interesting discovery. And potentially extremely paradigm-shifting. And the reason I bring this up is because, you know, if we’re 300,000 years old, that’s crazy, but if we’re a million years old, then in my view, everything’s on the table. Like it’s such a vast length of time. It’s incredible.

Our Warped Perception of Deep Time

JULIAN DOREY: There’s a strange exponential curve with which we look at time, as far as the modern-day bias goes. I talked about this with Gnostic Informant when he was here. But it’s like when we look at the last 30 years, it seems like a pretty similar part of, you know, one thing came after another. Then you look a hundred years out and you’re like, “Wow, that was a while ago.” But now that you got to 100, when you go 200 years back, the distance between the hundred and 200 in your mind shrinks, and 200 to 400 shrinks, and 400 to a thousand shrinks. And suddenly you start to make a leap such that you can look at some history of a Roman emperor in 50 AD and look at another one in 400 AD — 350 years apart — and assume it’s like a very similar era.

So now extrapolate that to, “Oh, you know, we thought we were like 6,000 years old. By the way, nope, we’re actually 100,000. No, we’re 200,000. No, we’re 300,000. Oh wait, we’re a million.”

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: The jumps here that you’re making — think about all the extinctions that could have happened, that definitely happened, in between all those times as well. It’s like you are unearthing — no pun intended — so many different segments of history in one fell swoop, but treating it like one discovery. That’s so fascinating to me.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And I think the way, as you say, we look at the world — we have a very warped perception of time. We can only think in very short timescales, like our own life, you know, like 100 years at most. Or potentially if you’re looking at the whole history of civilizations, you can kind of sort of conceptualize it — like 5,000 years or whatever. But then once you get up to these massive, massive timescales — 100,000 years, 300,000 years, potentially up to a million years — our human brain can’t really think about that. It doesn’t really compute up there.

So I think that’s potentially where many people go wrong, and potentially why we have some kind of recency bias when we look at history. We think that everything that’s happened in the last few thousand years — the stuff we can see — is all that’s happened. We think that because we can see it, that’s the only sophisticated era of human history. We live at the pinnacle of human history. And we may do, but that doesn’t mean that nothing else happened in the 99% of human history that came before that, that we can’t see.

Think of all the human lives, all the stories, all the cultures, all the potential achievements that our species have made in that vast length of time that we have lost and can’t see anymore. And it’s fascinating to me. So yeah, that’s why I do what I do.

The Preservation Problem and Deep Human History

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, I wouldn’t say there’s evidence of this, but I would say it’s possible, because another thing when you get up to these huge timescales is the preservation problem, right? Like, what realistically is going to survive that long? If something — not maybe not like New York City, but some kind of settlement existed 100,000 years ago, right? What realistically would we expect to survive now 100,000 years in the future? Like, what’s going to be left?

It’s really hard for materials to survive that long. And especially if you think about the kind of things that humans were likely building with, which is the things they find in their environment — like wood or something, or plants or reeds or anything that they would find around them to build with — it’s just going to decay. Like, the Earth is an incredible recycling machine of destruction effectively. And we kind of underestimate, in my view, the sheer destructive nature of our planet when it comes to erasing our human past.

And I always think, humans like us, with a mind like us — and that’s a debatable point which I want to get into, the kind of history of intelligence and whether we did have a mind like us for this long — but in my view, we’ve had a mind like ours for at least 300,000 years, potentially much longer than that. What does that mean? Like, what could we have been doing in that time? And what would we realistically see left to prove it?

JULIAN DOREY: I want to get into that. But even before we go down that rabbit hole, it’s also like, what about population sizes too? Because if we have a brain that’s of this capacity, it’s one thing when you’re working in a population of, you know, 10,000 of us who aren’t even connected with the Internet or something like that. And now you’re working in a world of 8 billion people, 3 to 4 billion of which are connected on the Internet at any given time and can exchange ideas at the fastest rate in human history.

It’s like, may have the same power, but we have significantly more resources and scale to be able to, you know, put something like this in our hands or something like that. It doesn’t mean that they couldn’t come up with amazing things at a smaller population with this little thing popping around up there. You know what I mean?

Genetic Bottlenecks and Lost Populations

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good point, to be fair. Like, more people, you have more chance of a lone genius coming up with something, or people just being able to connect together and work together, especially in our connected society. But something I always think about when I look at past populations of humans is we don’t really know how high the population levels were, because we have these things called genetic bottlenecks.

So if you look throughout history, if you look at the genetics of our species, you have these moments in time where the population crashes and almost all of humans are wiped out. But what that means is only a very small amount of the kind of genetic information survives. So you can’t really tell. You can tell at this point there are only like, you know, 10,000 individuals left. So you only get their genes passing through. So you don’t know what you’ve lost, if that makes sense. Because if everyone’s dead or everyone’s been wiped out, you don’t have that genetic information pass through. You’ve only got the 10,000 people that survive through this bottleneck.

So there could be anything happening before. Genes die off. Exactly. So you can’t prove that there wasn’t, you know, millions of humans 200,000 years ago. Doesn’t mean there was. But you can’t prove that there wasn’t, which I always find really interesting. Because when you look at the climatic history of the Earth, there are these periods, these warm periods where humanity could easily have flourished. And then you look at the crashes — these moments in the Earth’s climatic history which had the potential to completely wipe out massive amounts of humans. And we know that that happened.

So it’s very interesting. And I always look at those warm periods and think, what could have happened in those warm periods? And what could have happened when those warm periods ended and we crashed into ice ages? And how must that have affected human populations? Yeah, it’s something I dwell on a lot and I find it very interesting.

The 300,000-Year Threshold of Human Intelligence

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, a lot of directions to go here. But I do want to touch on the point you made about you believing that it’s around 300,000 years that we’ve had this type of cranial ability. Why did you land on that specific time range?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, that’s the oldest modern human fossils, right? 300,000 years — the ones we were just speaking about. But then you have this skull here, which is not Homo sapiens, but it’s the same size brain case. It’s a large brain hominin, and that’s been around for, if these results are correct, for a million years. So it’s possible that humans with the brain the size of ours has been around for that amount of time.

Now there’s a big debate in anthropology and history of when intelligence emerged. So the traditional view was always that intelligence didn’t emerge till relatively recently. And the view always was, until the last few decades, that prehistoric humans were effectively stupid. So have you ever read the book —

JULIAN DOREY: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari?

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s the one, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve read the whole thing, but I’ve definitely read some of it because I’ve owned that for years on my Kindle.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s a good book and it does a really good job of speaking about the importance of symbolic intelligence to us as a species and why that’s been such an evolutionary advantage. But what it does do is it promotes this idea that this intelligence didn’t emerge until about 50,000 years ago.

JULIAN DOREY: And what does he base that on?

The Cognitive Revolution Debate

MICHAEL BUTTON: Basically, we have these cave paintings in Europe that were painted around that date, and that evidence — and it’s not just him. He’s kind of collecting the thoughts of academia and presenting it to a layman audience. So it’s not his argument, but he’s kind of presenting what used to be — I think this is changing now — but what used to be the mainstream argument for human intelligence, which is that it didn’t emerge until around 50,000 years ago when Homo sapiens apparently migrated out of Africa. At least that’s the current story. We migrated out of Africa at that point and we created all these beautiful cave paintings, which are undeniably incredible.

But my argument is, just because we see this evidence from 50,000 years ago of these incredible cave paintings doesn’t mean that’s when humans got smart, right? I mean, we’ve had this sized brain for at least 300,000 years based on fossil evidence, potentially up to a million years. Just because we see cave paintings of incredible sophistication from 50,000 years ago doesn’t mean that that’s when humans got smart.

So this is the cognitive revolution argument, right? That humans only got smart at this date. But I would argue that in recent decades, loads and loads of evidence has come out to suggest that humans have had these cognitive capabilities for way longer. And not just Homo sapiens, but also our sister species like Neanderthals and Denisovans. Because there’s so much evidence that these humans were doing incredible things.

Like, we have clear signs of symbolic behavior that are much older than this. There’s a site in South Africa called Blombos Cave which has these ornaments that humans created 100,000 years ago. So that’s almost twice as old as this so-called cognitive revolution. And there’s even older examples. There’s these eagle claw, talon jewelry — like necklaces made by Neanderthals from about 130,000 years ago that were found in Croatia. Neanderthals made these underground stone circles out of stalagmites. Why would you do that if you don’t have symbolic intelligence, right? You wouldn’t start building stone circles.

I feel like I need to probably explain what symbolic intelligence is and why that’s an important thing. And Sapiens does a really good job of explaining this — I’ll give Sapiens that. Because symbolic intelligence has allowed our species to thrive in many ways. So the idea is that because we can think in the abstract, right? We can create these concepts that aren’t real, but we all collectively agree on them.

So what’s an example? Maybe like a country, right? Like the United States. We’re in the United States right now, right? And we both believe that. We both believe in the existence of the United States, but the United States isn’t a real thing. You can’t — it’s a story.

JULIAN DOREY: Exactly. It’s a story.

MICHAEL BUTTON: You can’t touch the United States. If I go outside the studio right now and touch the ground, I’m not touching the United States, I’m just touching some ground. But because we all agree that the United States is a thing, it allows us to cooperate in massive groups. So you have like the whole of the US army, for example — yes, all believe in the United States. So they all cooperate in a huge group of humans. And that allows us to get things done. And so that’s the kind of power of symbolic intelligence. We believe these shared myths and that allows us to cooperate in massive groups.

And no other animal can really do that. You don’t get chimps that all believe in, like, the chimp nation and collectively cooperate in groups of thousands of chimps. Chimps can only really cooperate in bands of about 50 chimps. And then they split into different groups because they can’t create a myth to base themselves around and work in a massive group.

Symbolic Cooperation and the Limits of the Tribe

JULIAN DOREY: That’s interesting, though, just strictly on the symbolism of the math too. I can’t remember if it’s 50 or 100, but the difference is going to be minimal here. If you’ve ever read Tribe by Sebastian Junger, he talks about how there’s a certain mathematical number to which you can actually exist where the tribe all works together. And he was talking about humans in this case, so meaning when it goes beyond that, it starts to thread off into different ideologies and different people with different priorities.

And then you look at regular sociologists who are going to talk to you about the total number of real close relationships a human being is capable of having on an individual basis. It’s also somewhere in that neighborhood, like a hundred or something like that. And so the fact that chimps can’t cooperate beyond 50 is interesting because even if those numbers of like 50 to 100 for us humans to be able to either form relationships or stick in one tribe are similar, we are able to cooperate on a macro level — symbolically, to use your term — at a way bigger number, just to be able to agree, like, you know what, there’s a border here.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s our country. That’s pretty crazy. It’s basically just one revolution past where chimps are. That’s it. But it makes all the difference in the world.

The Symbolic Intelligence of Early Humans

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. And I really support that argument made by books like Sapiens that that is such an evolutionary advantage for our species because it’s everywhere. You look at companies like Apple. Apple has thousands, tens of thousands of people all over the globe all cooperating together because they all believe in the existence of the company Apple, which isn’t a real thing. You can’t f*ing touch Apple. There is no real thing Apple. Because we all believe in it, we can cooperate in these massive groups.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So that’s what symbolic intelligence is. That’s why it’s important. The theory always was that we didn’t have this until about 50 to 60,000 years ago. And the evidence of why that emerged at that point was purely based on these cave paintings.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, that’s kind of wild.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s not really much evidence, is it?

JULIAN DOREY: No. And it’s also like, that’s evidence that just was put in a place where it didn’t get destroyed. Think of all the things that have happened since then from a planetary level that could have destroyed basically all evidence and leave an outlier like that.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: So I wouldn’t measure it that way either. That’s interesting though — what’s the evidence that those cave paintings meant that those particular human beings, whether they were the oldest or not, sounds like they weren’t. But what’s the evidence, therefore, that those paintings were made shortly after those people left Africa? Like, how do we know that?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, that’s the date that we have for the mass migration out of Africa, which is around 60,000 years ago. So it’s called the out of Africa migration. And it’s when humans — now, this is the thing with out of Africa — there are Homo sapiens that we found that are older than this date outside Africa. But the idea is that that’s when we kind of came out of Africa and survived. Yeah, 60,000 years ago.

The Out of Africa Migration

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

JULIAN DOREY: The out of Africa migration is the theory that all modern humans originated in Africa and later spread to the rest of the world in multiple waves, with the most successful wave beginning around 60,000 years ago. Just like you said. This migration was likely driven by climate changes and followed routes through the Middle East, leading to the eventual settlement of Europe, Asia and Australia. Early migrants were adaptable hunter gatherers who used their skills to survive and spread across different environments.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

JULIAN DOREY: You know what, quick question. And this is like a very basic question for a guy like you, but I do think it helps reset the deck for idiots like me. When we’re talking and throwing around like Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, obviously these are different things, but they’re discussed in a light, in common parlance, where it’s like, oh, we’re talking about humankind in a way. If you had to outline the main differences — when they exist, obviously Homo sapiens still exist — and what the differences were between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, how would you explain that to like a fifth grader?

Neanderthals vs. Homo Sapiens: How Different Were We Really?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, you say that’s a simple question, but that’s not a simple question at all. That’s like the question — there is like no one really knows, and there’s so much debate around that. Like, what is the difference between Neanderthal and Homo sapien? How different really are we? Because we can’t have been that different because we bred with Neanderthals. We still have Neanderthal DNA in us, at least non-African people do. So me and you, as white people, we have Neanderthal DNA within us. So we can’t have been that different from them because you can’t breed with something that’s genetically too different.

So we are very similar to Neanderthals. And the difference that people classify is like skull and brow ridge shape and stuff like that. But there’s also variety amongst Homo sapiens.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s what I’m saying. We have all different looking people around the world. I don’t look anything like a guy in China, but we’re both the same human race.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. So I mean, you can identify — they do identify Neanderthal skull and they claim, you know, they say it’s a different species, but the line of that is quite blurry. And yeah, it’s all kind of in flux. It’s always in debate really. And so it kind of depends where you land in that debate.

But my argument is that we are extremely similar to Neanderthals. And this is quite controversial, but I would say I’m not sure they’re any different from us in terms of intelligence. And that’s where I take these sites like them creating jewelry and say, look, they clearly had symbolic intelligence, right? They were clever.

And I think, to be honest, I think it’s a really outdated idea that they were dumb. Because what’s interesting is that we kind of put ourselves on this pedestal. So when Neanderthals were discovered — at the exact same time as Darwin’s theory of evolution, in the late 19th century — Darwin had this theory that we’re no different from animals, basically. And that was a huge paradigm shift in the scientific world because up until that point, humans had always been seen as the pinnacle of everything. We’re God’s children, right? We’re the smart ones. People that came from the Garden of Eden. We’re the clever ones.

But then Darwin came along and he was like, no, we’re just another animal. And that was a huge shock to everyone because suddenly we lost our special status. And at that exact same time, we discovered the first ever Neanderthal skeleton. And so it was like, hold on, we’re not even just another animal. We’re not even the only type of human.

So what basically happened was that we decided that, okay, we may not be any different from these animals, and we may not be the only human, but we’re the smart ones. And then we named ourselves Homo sapiens, which literally translates to “wise man.” So we were like, okay, we’re the smart ones then. We’ve given ourselves our special status again because we’ve lost this special status.

So that’s kind of where this idea came from that Neanderthals and other human species were dumb — because it was us basically trying to regain our special status on top of the food chain. But I don’t think that’s really scientific at all. I think that’s just us trying to big ourselves up. And I think since then, loads of evidence has come out to show that Neanderthals were just as smart as us and Denisovans were just as smart as us. And yeah, I don’t see any scientific basis for why we think that they were stupider than us, other than us trying to make ourselves look good.

The Mystery of the Denisovans

JULIAN DOREY: When was the last time we saw Denisovans on Earth? Is that what you just said?

MICHAEL BUTTON: When was the last time we saw them on Earth? I mean, we have hardly any evidence of Denisovans. We have like a tooth and a jawbone. And they just found — well, they just classified this skull called the Dragon Man skull as Denisovan. So they found Denisovans in Denisova Cave in Siberia relatively recently, like a decade ago. And they just classified it as a new species.

JULIAN DOREY: What made it different for them to be able to classify it? Like the literal shape of the skull and brows, similar to Neanderthals?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. Well, I mean, we hardly have anything. So as I say, we only have a tooth and a jawbone. And what’s interesting is they’re quite big as well. Like the Denisovan molar is way bigger than a sapien molar. And that leads to people who have theories that maybe they were giants or something. But they’re a distinct species because they’re so much bigger. We really don’t know very much about them because of the sheer lack of fossil evidence.

JULIAN DOREY: It sounds like there’s a lot on the bone there. No pun intended. Yeah, that’s going to be a rabbit hole for me. I’m very unfamiliar with that.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I mean, they’re relatively new in terms of our understanding of them as a human species.

When Did the Neanderthals Disappear?

JULIAN DOREY: Now, when was the last time — you said there’s Neanderthal DNA in some Homo sapiens — but when was the last time we saw them exist at scale, so to speak?

MICHAEL BUTTON: So they disappeared around this time of the out of Africa migration.

JULIAN DOREY: Right, the 50, 60,000.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, exactly. So that is, in my view, the biggest argument for the idea that we are smarter than them — that we effectively replaced them because, you know, we won. So maybe we are smarter.

But then that’s often an argument given like, okay, maybe they did all this symbolic stuff. Maybe they had symbolic intelligence. They had the same size brain as us. But we won. So we’re the smart ones. But there are loads of other reasons why we could have wiped them out.

I mean, firstly, did we wipe them out or did we just merge? Did we just breed with them and we kind of morphed into what we are now, and we’re both Sapien and Neanderthal? Or was it something like disease? Were these two populations clashing, and they died because we gave them some horrible pathogen? It’s not clear.

And this is the thing with prehistory — it’s presented as we know all the answers, right? We’ve worked it all out. In our modern age, we’re all so smart. In the space age, we know everything. But we don’t really. It’s just guesses based on extremely limited evidence.

Could Physical Size Have Played a Role?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, there’s a lot of possibilities that could be way different, to your point, than we’re just smarter than them. It’s also like — you think about warring populations. I’m just playing this out in my head. If I had Lane Johnson and Myles Garrett — you almost don’t know who they are. Lane Johnson is a left tackle on the Eagles. He’s f*ing huge, okay? And then Myles Garrett is the defensive end on the Cleveland Browns, for American football.

MICHAEL BUTTON: American football.

JULIAN DOREY: They’re both enormous, right? If I put them up next to Balon, who I just had in here, who’s like a f*ing genius neuroscientist, they’re going to kill him. No disrespect to Balon, he’s not their size. And they’re going to be able to wield any kind of blunt force weapon and kill him very quickly.

So maybe — and I’m really going beyond where I should here — but maybe there’s also a possibility that Homo sapiens had developed, based on what the world populations were at a time, to be able to wipe out the Neanderthals because they had more numbers and they were bigger, or a combination of that as well. Meaning it wouldn’t have to do with what they have up here to survive. Is that possible or is that a little beyond?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, I think Neanderthals are probably a little bit bigger than us in terms of physical anatomy. They’re probably slightly bigger than us. They had slightly bigger heads, but that doesn’t mean — and that’s an argument for us being more intelligent.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

Neanderthal Intelligence and Technology

MICHAEL BUTTON: But then there’s evidence coming out recently that Neanderthals had the same kind of technology as us. Like we recently found some arrowheads that were. I mean, to have an arrowhead, you mean you have a bow and arrow. That’s pretty sophisticated technology. We don’t really think of bows and arrows as technology, but it is, it is technology. And again, that was always thought to be a primarily safe and exclusively sapien technology, but now we know that Neanderthals. Yeah, there you go.

JULIAN DOREY: Very good, very good. Got it. All right. 880,000-year-old stones in Uzbekistan may be the world’s oldest arrowheads and they might have been made by Neanderthals. All right, let’s read a little bit of this.

“Tiny stone artifacts discovered in Uzbekistan may be the oldest known arrowheads. A new study suggests it remains unclear whether these stone tools were created by modern humans, Neanderthals or some other group. Archaeologists found the tools at the site of Obi Rahmat in northeastern Uzbekistan. Previous excavations uncovered a variety of stone tools at the site, such as thin and wide blades and smaller bladelets. But numerous small triangular points called microliths were overlooked in prior work because they were broken.”

Let me get a little more. Now, in a study published August 11 in the journal Plus One, the researchers argue that these micro points are too narrow to have fit into anything other than arrow-like shafts. The stones also display the kind of damage that would be expected from used arrowheads. Study co-author Hughes Pleissen, an associate scientist at the University of Bordeaux in France, told Live Science.

“These micro points, which are about 80,000 years old, may therefore be the oldest arrowheads in the world. Around 6,000 years older than 74,000-year-old artifacts unearthed in Ethiopia.”

Wow.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So not definitively Neanderthal, but likely Neanderthal. If you base the view of history around the out of Africa migration, then that’s almost certainly Neanderthal because that’s outside of Africa. And we know that Homo sapiens did go outside of Africa, but that’s probably why they’re saying they’re likely Neanderthal. But it’s more evidence that, if they are Neanderthal, they were as intelligent as us because they were developing technology such as arrowheads, sophisticated weapons technology. So were they stupider than us? I don’t know.

Neanderthal DNA and Interbreeding

JULIAN DOREY: Is there a possibility that there are offshoots of human species that exist in our DNA right now that we don’t know about? Similarly to how we do know about Neanderthal DNA in some of our DNA?

MICHAEL BUTTON: So what do you mean? You mean like traces of previous human species? Sure, yeah. There’s Denisovan DNA in — I think it’s Southeast Asian populations or other oceanic populations. Yeah, we interbred with these species. And this is why I say we must have been so similar, because you can’t breed with something that’s too different from you. So if we can breed with them, we’re not going to be crazy different to them.

JULIAN DOREY: I wonder where that line is. Like, what the percentage line for differences to be able to still breed. Because you can’t go breed with a horse or something like that, right?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. You can’t breed with a chimp or anything.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, you can’t breed with a chimp, which is a lot closer than a horse to human DNA. But Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were so close. Whether it’s 0.01 or 0.001, I don’t know, but we literally separate them in, like, species, but they’re so close that the average person would almost be like, that looks like the same thing.

It’s such a strange bar because then, like I said, we still live in a world where I’m the same species as someone in China, when we genetically look so different, and you can say that about anywhere in the world. And yet we accept ourselves as the same species. Sometimes that gets, you know, like, it makes all the sense in the world to me. But then I see we separate something off, like Neanderthal, and I’m like, would we separate that today? Like, if we looked at it?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I think there are some genetic differences between the species. But then, as you say, there are slight genetic differences between different races. But you get into tricky territory when you start talking about that kind of stuff. And then there’s a really interesting geneticist called David Reich who talks about this kind of stuff as well. But it’s not my expertise by any means, but it’s really interesting.

And basically the core point that I try to make is we are very similar, and we don’t really know what happened back then. We don’t know why we won. We don’t know how much we merged and how much we won. We don’t know where that line is. So yeah, I find it fascinating. And I think they had at least as much intelligence as us. Neanderthals had bigger brains than us. So yeah, maybe they were smart.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. Which a lot of times can point to more capability. But when we’re talking about all the different organs in our body and we find just some skeletal remains of a Neanderthal, is it possible to definitively prove that they definitely had a gallbladder right there?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I guess not. But it’s basically the same skeleton as us, so.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, so you would think.

MICHAEL BUTTON: You think so?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, but it’s possible that maybe there were a couple of organs that were different.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I guess so, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: I guess, technically. All right.

Michael Button’s Path Into Ancient History

JULIAN DOREY: How did you get into all this stuff, man? Like, before you went to school, were you always just fascinated by ancient civilizations growing up?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. I’ve always loved history, all types of history. I kind of veered towards the ancient stuff because I felt that’s where the most mystery was. I’m interested in all history all the way through, but when I got to the age of 17, 18, thinking about going to university, I decided to do ancient history as my degree because I felt that’s where the mystery is. That’s where we don’t know.

And then as I continued to do my degree, I was like, holy shit, we really don’t know. We know nothing. And there’s a huge, huge story here. A huge empty blank space in our understanding of our past that just no one really understands. So that’s how I got into it.

And yeah, my degree was good, man. I have a lot of respect for the people I went to university with and my professors and everything like that. I don’t want people to think I’m like anti-university or anti my course or anti the people that I met there. I learned a lot of things and I found it really interesting. But I did find myself growing more and more at odds with the perspective of human history that was put forward.

Not like the specific things we were taught, but more the higher level macro, wider perspective of human history that we were taught, which was basically that we’ve got it sorted, we may make a new discovery here or there, but we know what happened. We’ve got the timeline. It was hunter-gatherers all the way until around the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000 years ago, and then that led to civilizations developing. And I was not sure about that, to be honest. It’s such a vast length of time, anything could have happened. So yeah, that’s how I got into it.

JULIAN DOREY: Were you raising that point in class when you were in college? Were you like, well, we have found this, this or that, what do you think? And watching their brains like f*ing explode?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not so much, because I was only starting the journey myself in my own head. I did mention — so you know about Göbekli Tepe, right? I remember I brought that up because I was like, yeah, this is a site that clearly has severe implications for understanding of the development of human civilization. Surely this suggests that human civilization is far older and more complex than we think. And I was basically told, “That isn’t your course, mate. You do ancient history. This is archaeology.”

JULIAN DOREY: Wait, they made a distinction between the two?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, well, technically there is a distinction. So archaeology is everything before recorded history and ancient history is, you know, what we know. And I was like, really? Come on, man, I’m doing ancient history at university. Surely we can have this conversation.

JULIAN DOREY: But that’s a crazy distinction. I didn’t even know that.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I didn’t know it either until I was kind of told that. But yeah, ancient history, my course was only from the start of writing until the end of the Roman Empire.

JULIAN DOREY: Nothing new to see here, don’t ask any questions. That’s what it is, basically. That’s crazy. So you started to learn about Göbekli Tepe while you were in school, did you say? Or you had learned about that before?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I discovered it in my own time while I was at university. I wasn’t taught it. It wasn’t mentioned on my syllabus. And I was like, can we talk about this? And they were like, no, that’s not on the course. I was like, oh, come on.

Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler Culture

JULIAN DOREY: For people out there who need a refresher on Göbekli Tepe, or somehow haven’t heard a lot of guys talk about this because it is talked about all the time, can you just give a very broad explanation of where it was and what they found and what the potential implications are?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So Göbekli Tepe is a site in modern-day Turkey that is dated to around 11,600 years ago. And it’s this incredible site with these massive megalithic pillars and these vast circular enclosures. It’s something like 50 times larger than Stonehenge or something ridiculous like that. It has all these incredible intricate carvings on the pillars. They’ve only excavated about 5% of it.

But in my view, and in the view of many others, it’s a massively disruptive discovery for our understanding of human civilization. Because you just have to look at pictures of it. It looks like a civilization. How have you got the capability to construct such a site?

And it’s not the only one, right? There are like 14 or 15 other sites that they’re discovering in the region. They’re starting to call it the Taş Tepeler culture — very much emphasis on the word culture, not civilization, because it’s not deemed a civilization.

JULIAN DOREY: How do you make that distinction now? Like, how can you say one without the other? Like, do we talk about, like, shark culture? You know what I mean?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, they’ve got this checklist effectively on what a civilization is. And it’s basically based on Mesopotamia, on ancient Sumer, because that was the first civilization, or the earliest one that was discovered. So they were like, okay, ancient Sumer, this is the first civilization. And so if we want another civilization to meet the criteria of civilization, it has to hit this checklist of cities, agriculture, surplus, things like that.

And Göbekli Tepe — well, in my view, Taş Tepeler will be considered a civilization. It’s just going to take a while for people to get there. I think in a few decades, people are going to start calling it a civilization. It’s just that it’s so disruptive because it’s twice as old as the oldest civilization, right?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So to call it a civilization is going to be a big monkey wrench in our idea of human history. I think people will get there over time. But these sites are all connected, right. They have shared symbolism, which suggests a shared cultural identity, suggests trade. It suggests that this was a cohesive society that all built these massive megalithic sites. It really does sound like a civilization.

They just found residential buildings at Göbekli Tepe as well. And that was always an argument why it wasn’t a civilization. They always said this was built by hunter-gatherers and they kind of migrated to this site once a year or something to —

The Sophistication of Göbekli Tepe and the Dawn of Civilization

JULIAN DOREY: They just happened to be f*ing amazing artists.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. Well, that’s another thing. You need specialization to create a site like this and to become such a skilled craftsman, you need time to be doing that as your job. So you need other people to look after things. While we don’t have proof of agricultural surplus, the mere existence of Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe and all these other sites implies surplus. It implies people whose specialist trade was carving or megalithic construction or whatever you want to call it, because otherwise how did they have time to develop these skills?

JULIAN DOREY: It also lines up with right around the timescale of the Younger Dryas period. And what would happen. So is this like — I mean, this is a way over-generalization, but is this some sort of bunker-type idea? Or was it built shortly before that and then some people were able to survive in this area, or got wiped out all at once? Like, I guess it’s all still a possibility. And they’ve been excavating it, but you have so many obvious professionals doing this as well, and yet there’s obviously some sort of ivory tower effect, given that it’s so public and so many people can see — walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a f*ing duck. But yet they refuse to actually say that. Yeah, it’s kind of crazy.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And another thing is, as you say, it’s so old, but it’s almost — it’s not like they just woke up overnight and just knew how to do that, right?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: There has to be a kind of development here. So 11,600 years ago is the least long ago it possibly was that this civilization, culture, whatever you want to call it, was flourishing. But there has to be a whole kind of civilizational buildup. And that’s just the radiocarbon dates. It could be much older than that. That’s just the latest date we have, if you know what I mean.

The Taş Tepeler Culture and Population Estimates

JULIAN DOREY: With all the sites put together — I’m kind of putting you on the spot so we can Google this and see if they have it — but with all the sites that they’re finding put together, that they’re calling this, what was it? Culture.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Taş Tepeler.

JULIAN DOREY: Taş Tepeler culture. Do they have any approximation at this time, based on what they found, of what the total population of these hunter-gatherers would have been?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not that I’ve seen and not that I know, but I would suggest it implies a relatively large population, because otherwise, how are you doing this? And almost more importantly, why are you doing this? Because if you’re just a small band of hunter-gatherers, why do you need to go to such effort to create not just one, but 14 sites that are all interconnected and have shared symbolism, and creating these massive megalithic pillars and these incredibly intricate carvings? I’m not sure what the population estimates are. I reckon they’re probably higher than the estimates given, but yeah, I don’t know.

JULIAN DOREY: Well, let’s see what Wikipedia says right here. I got this pulled up while Joe’s out of here for a sec. By the way, I don’t know if you’ve seen any Matt Lacroix stuff in the past, but he’s made some inroads with another group of people as well. He’s done some interesting excavations out on Lake Van in this region. People can refer to the episodes to listen to him explaining with the pictures of everything they found. Some of the things they’re finding in some cases way down below in the bottom of that lake are so clearly advanced that this wasn’t made by a rock and mortar kind of caveman or something like that. And it’s just more evidence in the same region of the world.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I listened to him on here.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh, awesome.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And he was talking — I mean, I don’t know too much about it other than what I heard him talk about. But yeah, same region of the world. Clearly a sophisticated construction, at least what they know about it. He’s doing some expedition there, right? Isn’t he?

JULIAN DOREY: He keeps going back. Matt is so passionate about all this stuff. There’s some stuff when he looks at ancient history where I’m like, all right, slow down, slow down. Like, you were great till here and then you went a little too far. But the stuff that he’s working on on the ground there, there’s no doubt that they are onto something — historically, but onto something as far as new discoveries go. No question about it. What the extent of that is going to be, I’m not sure, and how much percentage overlap it has with Göbekli Tepe and that civilization, to me seems to be certainly along the same lines. But that’ll be determined as well. There’s no doubt that there’s something special there. I really do believe that. I hope I’m not biased with it, but the evidence that he’s had for that in that particular case is pretty good.

So I just pulled it up. The Taş Tepeler — is that how we say it?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I say Taş Tepeler, but I’m obviously not Turkish.

JULIAN DOREY: Call us out in the comments. I’m sure we got it wrong. But the Taş Tepeler are a group — this is what they’re writing on Wikipedia — are a group of Neolithic archaeological sites in Upper Mesopotamia near the city of Urfa in modern-day Turkey. They are the remains of a number of settlements dating to the pre-pottery Neolithic period, 9500–7000 BC. Sounds like they even moved up that timeline — or actually no, that lines up. 9,500 BC would be around 11,600 years ago. During transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural communities in the region. That’s interesting. So in the byline they’re literally calling it like the transition between —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. And so is that not just another way of saying the dawn of civilization?

Economy, Culture, and the Definition of Civilization

JULIAN DOREY: That’s what I would think. So let’s see what they have under economy and culture. The first segment is called not “economy and civilization.” The societies of Taş Tepeler still had not yet developed the herding of animals or agriculture. Their subsistence depended on hunting and selective harvesting of wild cereal grasses. Before I go on, is there evidence contradicting that?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I don’t think so, not yet. But it could well have been built by people that lived in that manner. This again comes back to this extremely narrow definition of civilization that we have. We say it can’t be a civilization because they didn’t have mass agriculture as far as we know. But why does that mean that there can’t be a civilization?

JULIAN DOREY: Right, yeah. They could have found another way to be able to eat.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. And I mean, we’ll probably get onto this later, but just quickly — if you look at what they’re discovering in the Amazon, those people clearly had a civilization. They didn’t use agriculture. They used quite sophisticated forms of agroforestry, like living off the land. That’s not agriculture, yet they had civilization. So why is agriculture one of the check marks of civilization?

JULIAN DOREY: Definitely put a pin in the Amazon stuff. I love that topic and I love that you’re so deep in it. You and Luke Caverns are like the guys doing that. I hope you guys continue to go all the way with it because it’s one of the most undercovered — probably the most undercovered place in the world in my opinion — considering the levels of ancient history that could go to. So we’re definitely going to talk about that.

I just want to finish this so we have the full context. Man’s domestication of animals seems to have started within the broad region of the Taş Tepeler culture, which would also point to something very civilizational. And early efforts at animal management, especially symbolic representations and entrapment methods — that’s a fancy way of saying hunting, I guess — seem to broadly coincide with the development of Göbekli Tepe as shown in its animal art.

The earliest dates for actual domestication of animals are 9,000 BC for goats and sheep, 8,500 BC for pigs — took them another 500 years to do pigs, interesting — and 8,000 BC for cattle. All in the area of northern Mesopotamia. Çayönü Tepe, for example, may be where some of the first animal domestication occurred, as the pig may have been first domesticated there in 8,500 BC.

One more paragraph here. Sites such as Çayönü Tepe developed from the cultural tradition of Göbekli Tepe and started to implement agriculture from the 9th millennium BC, as well as other sites such as Nevalı Çori, Körtik Tepe, Hallan Çemi, Abu Hureyra, and Jerf el-Ahmar. I’m definitely saying all these wrong. That sounds like a lot of civilization talk to me. And I’m not going to read the next parts, but they have a section called religion. There are a lot of very human civilization things going on here, but that’s just me, Michael.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. So what do we even mean by civilization? Why have we drawn this arbitrary line? They say no civilization until after they invented writing in ancient Sumer around 3000 BC. But in my view — and is it even that important, what you call it? — it’s clearly an incredibly sophisticated culture with megalithic building, shared symbolism, religion. I think, as I say, over time it’s going to become more and more accepted that the story of human civilization is far deeper, far more complex, and just far older than we’ve traditionally thought.

The Next Generation and the Evolution of Ancient History

JULIAN DOREY: I think it’s going to be this generation of ancient civilization-educated people, both in school and not in school. Especially when you’re looking at the ones who go inside the academic institution — the thing is, they do bring their Wi-Fi connection with them. You did bring that. So you can refer to some things that go outside the scope of what the dude teaching the class from the textbook in front of you can infer.

What’s going to happen is the next generation — you guys are going to be teaching it. I do have faith in that part of it. It’ll evolve with the times because we’re only 18, 19 years into legit social media at this point. We’re just going to college with social media. Imagine when they’re in the growth generation of running things when they’re 40 to 60 years old, and we’ve had that. Now we’re in the AI age and all that. But I do think that’ll change.

Now, when we look at finding evidence like this — obviously it was a shocking discovery when they first found Göbekli Tepe, and as we laid out, they found a bunch of other sites in Turkey around there — have we since been able to find any sort of evidence, be it text or some sort of storytelling, and symbols in other parts of the world that may refer to something like Göbekli Tepe? Like, in Egypt, were they talking about something where it’s like, “Oh, that could be Göbekli Tepe?”

Global Connections and Shared Symbolism

MICHAEL BUTTON: I wouldn’t say anything solid. I mean, I’m sure some people probably make that connection, and that doesn’t mean that connection doesn’t exist. But I’m not sure there’s solid evidence of people knowing about or referencing Göbekli Tepe. There are interesting things you can say, there are links between things. But again, you could also say that’s just pattern bias or whatever that’s called — you see something that’s similar.

Easter Island, for example — completely opposite culture, opposite side of the world, so distant in time — but there are weird similarities with Göbekli Tepe. You have these statues that look quite similar, but that doesn’t mean there was a connection. But it’s interesting. There’s this guy called Archaic Lens on X, and he’s basically been around the whole world — shout out to him — documenting this style of statue where they have their hands around their navel, and there’s the same statue all over the world. There are some in Easter Island that look very similar to ones they found — not at Göbekli Tepe, but at Karahan Tepe. Yeah, there he is. He’s got his picture. There you go. Exactly.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh, wow. With the map pointing to all the places these similar statues are found. Look at that.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. I mean, you could just argue it’s a common human pose, but —

JULIAN DOREY: Or it could be the aliens.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, but he argues it’s a sign of some kind of cultural connection between all these places, which is an interesting theory, but —

Pyramid Connections and Shared Knowledge

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, that’s whenever it comes to the pyramids, that’s where I mean, we can get into, of course, the logistics of building them, the stone, how difficult it would be to move certain type of stone from a part of Egypt to the thousand miles away where they built it and stuff like that.

But when you look at all these different places around the world that clearly made structures thousands of years ago that are just so similar, you can’t tell me it’s like born in the human DNA that they’re going to make a, you know, perfect looking thing to the sky that’s the same design without some sort of shared knowledge. And you wonder, oh, was there like an underground railroad of rafts going from one place to another for 30 years with two people stuck surviving just to get off and go, “Oh, here’s how you build a pyramid,” and croaking and dying. I don’t know, maybe, but that seems a little crazy to me. It seems like something else was going on there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, there are a lot of weird connections like that. And again, it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, it doesn’t prove anything.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: But it’s interesting. I mean, one of — I love the connection or the similarities between the walls in South America in Cusco and the stonework on the Menkaure — pronunciation, again, probably terribly wrong — but the Menkaure Pyramid in Egypt. So they have these — I don’t know if you’ve seen the walls — these polygonal walls. Again, this could just be coincidence. It could be people dealing with the same problem.

JULIAN DOREY: I’ll be the judge.

MICHAEL BUTTON: But it’s remarkably similar. So if you look at the Cusco Wall and then the Menkaure Pyramid stonework, it’s very similar. It might be quite hard to find.

JULIAN DOREY: We got it. Okay, here we go.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, so that’s —

JULIAN DOREY: Is this what you’re looking for?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And then you need the Menkaure Pyramid.

JULIAN DOREY: I ain’t going to try to spell that.

MICHAEL BUTTON: M, E, N, K, A, U, R, E, maybe.

JULIAN DOREY: So you’re so worried about pronunciations and stuff. But that’s the thing — British people, you guys make everything sound smart that you get forgiven.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly.

JULIAN DOREY: Whereas I say it and they’re like, “What a —”

MICHAEL BUTTON: So you need the wall that’s at the entrance of the Menkaure Pyramid. It might be quite hard to find.

JULIAN DOREY: The wall of the entrance. Yeah, period.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It might be quite hard to find a picture that actually displays it. But you had the pyramid up, but you just need the specific bit of the pyramid. Sorry, this is a very specific thing to bring up. I probably should have brought up —

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, I’m one of those guys, by the way. You’re going to have to bear with me on the pyramids. I’ve done probably like five podcasts where we go deep on the Egyptian pyramids and I watch videos late at night about them and I still always get the goddamn name. Which one’s Khufu.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Which one’s Menkaure. You know, so if you look at that picture there and then you look at the actual —

JULIAN DOREY: This is the one you want, though, Michael. Yeah, yeah, this is what we’re looking at right there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So again, it could just be dealing with the same problem and coming up with a very similar thing, but it is just a startling similarity between the two walls. So these cultures that are separated by an absolute age in both distance and time.

The Cusco Wall and Menkaure Pyramid Stonework

JULIAN DOREY: So a similar — so what I’m looking at here —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: Looks like what seems to be a certain type of stone that’s formulating the foundation of a structure. And so you’re saying because of the way that foundation is laid and how similar the stone looks in that foundation, it would suggest that it’s like — I’m going to make a dumb relation here — but similarly to how in a neighborhood where it’s all the same model house, they have the same kind of established looking base in modern day.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, yeah, effectively. I mean, so I would argue that it’s not evidence of connection. I would argue that it’s dealing with a similar problem and coming to a remarkably similar conclusion. Because humans — yeah, there’s only a certain way you can do something. People maybe come to the same result.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: But they’re remarkably similar and the stonework looks really similar. And so it’s just one of those weird things.

JULIAN DOREY: If you had to put aside your academic rigor for a minute and absolute pure evidence, and more focused on like an educated guess hypothesis, would you say that there’s a strange connection that we haven’t yet figured out between the civilizations that built pyramids? Let’s just start simply there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I would say that could be.

JULIAN DOREY: Could be.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. I mean, why not? But I wouldn’t say there’s any solid evidence. And I try —

JULIAN DOREY: That’s a good answer, dude.

MICHAEL BUTTON: You know, I try — that’s kind of my whole perspective on things. It’s like, this could be possible, but I’m only going to really push it if I see serious evidence.

The Problem with Closed Minds in Academia

JULIAN DOREY: And that’s the difference. We got to be careful because when you look at like the worst of academia where they’re like, “Shut down anything that doesn’t have a PhD,” when you start running around with theories and posing it completely as evidence and saying, “I’m 100% confident about this,” with something that’s clearly just disprovable on the base fact that it doesn’t have any evidence at the moment, you kind of give those people exactly what they want. You know what I mean?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And I think that’s a big problem in many ways. Like, we decide something doesn’t exist so we don’t look for it. But you can’t — you know, that’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. Do you know what I mean? Like, if you’ve decided that something cannot exist, you therefore don’t look for it. And therefore, because you don’t find any evidence of it, because you haven’t looked for it, that’s proof that it doesn’t exist. It’s like a circle. Do you know what I mean? That’s probably not the best way of explaining that.

JULIAN DOREY: No, that’s good.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And I think we have that problem a lot throughout history, like even just in the wide idea of lost civilizations. Right. We’ve decided civilization didn’t begin until this date. So we don’t really look. I mean, I guess we do kind of look, but because we have this idea that civilization didn’t emerge until — even if you count Göbekli Tepe as a civilization, if we’re talking about way in the deep past, no one would ever argue in an academic setting that civilization could have existed 200,000 years ago. So that possibility isn’t explored seriously. And then because that possibility isn’t explored seriously, there’s absolutely nothing to showcase it.

JULIAN DOREY: So I just don’t understand how then academic type people find a skull from a million years ago and that doesn’t open up a conversation. That’s what has never — and I posed this question, this rhetorical question or whatever it is, a million times on a lot of different podcasts. And it’s just insulting to my intelligence that we would ever think that we’ve reached the limit of something.

We’ve run into this problem in science too, where people are like, “Oh, yeah, no, it’s just scientific law.” The whole point of science is to disprove the latest thing and get to a higher truth. You don’t solve science until you know who God is. You don’t solve religion until you know who God is. But people — it’s almost like they just, they’re like, “I don’t want to know anymore. It’s good. We got enough. It’s fine. I just want to carry on with my life and we’ll figure it out later.”

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. I would argue it’s a completely unscientific way of viewing things. Right. You’ve got to push the boundaries, because otherwise you’re never going to discover anything new. If you’re not open to those possibilities, you’re always going to stay inside your box, and that’s not how science should work, because you should be pushing every single button and then maybe one of those buttons will light up and you’ll be like, “Holy — this is completely — no one was looking for this.” But if you don’t look, you’re never going to find. So that’s kind of where I come from in all this.

And that’s why I’m not on an academic career. That’s why I’m not doing the career that was laid out for me — you know, do a PhD. That’s why I went independent, because that’s my viewpoint on the world.

Going Independent and Building the Channel

JULIAN DOREY: You were — for at least a few years, though, you were doing completely other things before going independent into this. So you had decided then by the end of college, “I’m not going that route.” And then you ended up going this route. Why didn’t you do it, like, right away to go make content?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Honestly, I was kind of just a bit sick of it, to be honest. I was sick of just the mindset that I was in, and I didn’t really think it was possible, to be honest. I was just like, “I’m not really vibing with this worldview, to be honest. So I’m just not going to go down this path.” But it never left me, you know, it was always in my head, in the back of my head. I was like, “You know, I kind of been quite interested in this kind of stuff.”

So then I decided to make my YouTube channel about a year ago and, yeah, been a crazy journey since then because I just have always had that in my head — so interested in these ideas and felt I had a relatively unique perspective on them with my traditional education. And felt like I could give my opinions in quite a good way, both because of the education — also what the education did give me, which is the ability to construct arguments and put forward evidence and construct a compelling narrative, I guess, which is what all history is.

And I almost feel like that’s — people don’t really realize that the mainstream historians are doing the same thing. They’re taking the evidence and they’re creating a narrative. And that’s fine. But I don’t get it when they attack people for doing the same thing but with a slightly different viewpoint.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, the last five letters of that word are quite interesting and very subjective.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: You know what I mean? But the other thing is, like, your channel is awesome. You do a scope of ancient history around the world — and I mean this as a compliment — you’re like a generalist with a lot of different things, which I love. So we’ll have that link down below so that people can go check it out. I would highly recommend it.

But also, I think, you know, a guy like you, as you grow here, it’s going to go up an entirely new level when you’re traveling to all these places too, and seeing it and making your own conclusions. Also, I’m sure doing content at these different places so you can bring your audience with you. Like, it’s amazing the scope of knowledge you have. We were talking off camera about all the places you haven’t been to yet. The scope you have without having gone and seen it, or got to sit with it, you know, kind of feel the ghosts around it and whatever. So I do think it’ll be even better.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, it’s definitely something I want to do. That’s kind of the dream, in a way, of this channel that I guess I’m on the verge of realizing, which is to actually go to these places in person and be able to create content around that. Because, yeah, as you say, most of the places I talk about, I haven’t really been to, just because of —

JULIAN DOREY: You know, financial reasons. So go join Michael’s members only. Actually, I heard Joe Rogan has some money. Maybe he can throw you, like, 100 bands, get you started here.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, possibly.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, he’s probably got that lying around in his trailers.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, he’s already got it on the way.

JULIAN DOREY: I’m sure that was pretty cool, though. That was like your first podcast, doing Rogan, or one of your first?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, it was. Yeah, my first — well, I mean, I did a couple of, like, Zoom ones, but yeah, that was my first, like, actual podcast, which was just nuts.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s insane.

Graham Hancock’s Influence & The Journey Into Alternative History

MICHAEL BUTTON: So insane. Like, how did he find you? He found me so early on, mate. Like, no one watched my channel for, like, six, seven months. And then around March this year, I had a couple of videos that started doing proper numbers, like 100K. And then he, like, saw the second one that did well. And then he shouted me out on his show.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh, wow.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And that blew my mind. I was like, how is, like, I have, like, two videos that have any views at all. And this guy’s talking about me on this show and, yeah, that was mental. So I don’t know how he found me. I guess he’s just interested in this stuff.

JULIAN DOREY: He’s definitely interested in it.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So he shouted me out and then a few months later, he got me on and I was very grateful for that. Of course, it was an incredible opportunity, but I was, you know, kind of nervous myself to go on that show.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, he did great. It’s really cool to see that as well, because he can king make pretty much anyone, but if he’s looking at a channel that might be smaller coming along, and he’s like, “Wow, that guy’s great,” it can kind of just be like plucking you out of the crowd and being like, “Here you go.” And now you’re running with it, which is awesome to see. But it’s like we also have to have the next generation now coming up. Like, he’s a guy who also got a lot more attention on a guy who already had attention, like Graham Hancock or like a Randall Carlson, who have helped move forward the conversation. And you were telling me off camera that Graham Hancock was a big influence for you. Was that growing up? Did you like him?

The Late Bronze Age Collapse & A New Perspective on Ancient History

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not so much. So I didn’t really get into any of this stuff until about midway through my degree. I wasn’t aware of the alternative view of history until, at some point during my degree, when I was starting to look around for other explanations, really.

What kind of happened was I did this module on my university course called Catastrophe, which was all about how natural disaster had massively impacted human societies during recorded history. And I found that really interesting. They did this study on the late Bronze Age collapse, which was when all these powerful civilizations around 1000 BC all came crashing down simultaneously within like a few decades of each other. So this was the Hittite Empire, the palaces of Mycenaean Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, a few others. And these were like the most powerful civilizations in the world, the most prosperous places in the entire world at that point. And they all came crashing down at the exact same time as each other, and no one really knew why.

The best known theory, and probably the correct theory — I agree with this theory — is that it was climate change. It was a small change in climate which then had this cascading effect. So the climate changed by a few degrees. That led to drought. Drought led to huge civil unrest in these societies, that led to kind of rebellions. These societies were all interconnected through trade. Trade collapsed. And so they all came crashing down one after another.

And I found that so interesting. I was like, that’s ridiculous how such a small change in climate, something that really fluctuates all the time, can just bring all these societies down. So then I started looking into that more and I started looking at the climatic history of the earth and I was like, holy, the earth has gone through some crazy stuff while humans have been around.

This was the same time the Jebel Irhoud remains came out that showed we are 300,000 years old. And I was looking at the climatic history through this whole time and I was like, yeah, we’ve been through some crazy stuff, way worse than what happened in the Bronze Age collapse, and what could that potentially have meant for humans at that time? And that’s what sent me on the journey.

Then I started looking into alternative points of view because that wasn’t spoken about on my course — it was only recorded history. And I was like, yeah, what about what could have happened way before then? So then I started looking at people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson and I was, enthralled by that, and that’s what sent me on the journey. But yeah, he’s a really interesting guy. I spoke to him recently and it was quite a surreal moment to speak to him. Yeah, he’s a cool guy.

The Amazon’s Ancient Civilizations & The Danger of Misleading Headlines

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, he’s definitely — when I think of the people that have really given a voice to that side of things, I don’t think there’s anyone who’s been more consequential than him, especially over the past like 20 years. But it’s opened up the conversation.

We were actually looking at it right before — in your Peru video, I liked how you put it with looking at what the lidar scans in South America could tell us about older civilizations potentially living there. But one of the things Graham has said in the past that then turns into these headlines — and this is kind of to his discredit, by the way, like it’s not his fault — is that there’s evidence for some man-made things in the ancient Amazon jungle. And what happens with the headlines is they’ll start to come out saying like, “Ancient historian: Amazon is man-made,” which is not fair to Graham because that’s not what he’s saying.

But it creates this narrative that the Amazon, which is under constant threat and destruction and potentially poses an enormous risk climate-wise and oxygen-wise to the earth if it were destroyed to a certain level — it makes the idea get planted in people’s heads that, like, “Oh, people made the Amazon, so we could make it again, no problem.”

I bring this up because a good friend of mine is Paul Rosolie. He’s a guy who’s largely responsible for me sitting here right now. He really helped blow up my podcast when he came on. He’s been down there for 20 years and it drives him nuts when people will send him a headline saying, “Hey, look, the Amazon’s man-made. We can kind of fix it.” Because the evidence for man-made stuff is like a one-off thing here or a one-off thing there, some of which Paul will dispute. Other things he’s like, it doesn’t matter.

And so when you’re talking about this subject matter, I think it’s really important that you separate the two and say, like, “Look, here’s this amazing creation of the earth — this full, almost United States-sized area of the earth that’s just dense jungle that provides all this oxygen. And then by the way, there are a few cool things that happened in there because ancient civilizations existed, and because they existed maybe farther back than we initially thought.”

So let’s start with your actual video you made here, where we’re going through the evidence, unearthing that there were some older civilizations that had a different name than the ones we talked about, found specifically in Peru. Who were they and when did they exist?

Caral-Supe & The Lost Civilizations of the Amazon

MICHAEL BUTTON: So as in, you mean like Caral-Supe and stuff like that?

JULIAN DOREY: Yes.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So the traditional view of South America was always that civilization emerged there quite late in terms of the rest of the world, with the Incas being the kind of first true civilization that emerged in that region. But in recent years, quite a few discoveries have come out to show that civilization there is just as old as the Old World, perhaps even older.

The Inca are from something like 1100 AD or something. But then they’ve been discovering these places like the Caral-Supe civilization, which is from about 3000 BC. So that’s 4,000 years earlier than the Inca and shows that civilization in South America is far, far older than the traditional view was. And then they recently discovered another city called Penico in this region that they think is a continuation of that culture.

These cultures are really sophisticated things. They built pyramids, they had these vast urban layouts, they had symbolism — they’re really sophisticated civilizations. And then you link that to the discoveries that have been made in the Amazon recently.

That’s always been like the classic lost civilization theory — the lost civilizations of the Amazon. That’s always been the thing that people would laugh at for hundreds of years, ever since the Spanish first got there. There was — I can’t remember his name — Francesco? I think he was the one that reported seeing vast cities in the jungle.

JULIAN DOREY: Allegedly. Like an El Dorado kind of thing.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So then he came back to Europe and he was like, “Yo, I’ve seen all these vast civilizations.”

JULIAN DOREY: Gold.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And everyone laughed at him. They were like, “What are you talking about? That doesn’t exist.” And then people came back 100 years later and they couldn’t find anything. And so that’s always been thought, you know, that guy made it up.

But in recent years, they’ve been doing all this lidar scanning of the Amazon jungle, and they’ve been seeing these vast, geometric earthworks come up from these lidar scans, and they’re starting to think that maybe this guy wasn’t lying and maybe these civilizations did exist and then they collapsed in the hundred years between these two visits. Which sounds crazy, but then when you think about what happened when Europeans reached South America, it was a big collapse of the indigenous population for various reasons — perhaps primarily disease, but also, you know, what happens when people conquer new lands is that people get killed, and that’s what happens.

So people always laughed at Orellana — I don’t know how to pronounce that name — and said he made that up. And it’s always been seen as a conspiracy theory that there were lost civilizations of the Amazon rainforest. But it’s starting to come out with these new scans and stuff that there are vast mysteries there that we don’t really know about.

And I think that’s possibly one of the biggest frontiers in ancient history — learning about the populations of the Amazon, learning about how sophisticated their civilizations were. And I think it plays into discoveries such as Caral-Supe, because it’s proof that civilization in South America is far older and far more complex than was traditionally thought. So once you appreciate that, it doesn’t become such a crazy idea that, yeah, there were civilizations flourishing in the Amazon, and now we have pretty solid evidence that there was.

So now it’s a matter of going in and excavating that, which is probably harder than — oh yeah, easier said than done, obviously. And you don’t want to destroy the whole Amazon rainforest and stuff. But I think there could be some really, really interesting stuff there and I’d love to see it.

The Sheer Scale of the Amazon & Uncontacted Tribes

JULIAN DOREY: There are still significant parts of the Amazon jungle that have never been seen, period, by anyone. And like I was telling you, I went down there last year for a couple of weeks with Paul, and when you get underneath that canopy — you don’t even have to go underneath the canopy. You could be right out on the river and you just look around and you’re like, “Holy, I am a speck out here.”

Like, just literally imagine mainland America, except the entire thing is covered by 100, 150-foot trees and filled with, equator-level ancient species and plant life and God, who knows — spirits and voodoos, I don’t even know. But even out there to this day, there’s an accepted fact that there are uncontacted tribes living there now. They know what their name implies — they’re uncontacted. If you see them, you’re probably dead.

And it’s like, the idea that there wouldn’t be ancient civilizations emanating from this place, who would have figured out on a very unique plot of land — if that’s what you want to call it — I mean, you’re talking about a place that has a completely different type of agriculture if you’re going to do it. Most of it’s obviously not on an ocean, it’s on a river that runs through it and a bunch of tributaries. Like, the room for innovation that is way different than what we would see in other ancient civilizations around the world is vast.

Ancient Civilizations of South America

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, and that’s what I was alluding to earlier. The Amazon and what we’re discovering there just shows that civilization doesn’t have to follow this path that we’ve decided it has to follow. It doesn’t have to follow the Mesopotamian model. It can be done in so many different ways. It doesn’t have to be mass agriculture. It’s completely dependent on the environment that these people were living in.

And these what look to be civilizations in South America probably did it in a vastly different way to the civilizations of the old world. And that just shows that human ingenuity is a really variable thing. We’re such an adaptable species. We can just do different things depending on our environment, depending on the challenges and the pressures that we face. We can adapt and flourish in so many different ways. And the Amazon is testament to that.

And that kind of points to a further point about the whole world. We’re looking for these civilizations that are based on this model, but they don’t have to look like that. They can be so many different models of civilization. And we shouldn’t just cancel something out because it doesn’t fit this checklist. There’s so many different ways that it can happen.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. And if you just break it down to the base case of what we talk about civilization wise, like what’s accepted parlance — Incas, I’m just talking South America in general right now. Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs. I know there’s some others, but those are the main ones that people talk about. And these are all civilizations that exist far outside, let’s say the center of the Amazon jungle.

You got the Incas on the west coast, you got the Mayans in between Mexico and Guatemala and that area roughly — correct me in the comments — you got the Aztecs up in Mexico. I don’t remember where. Where were the Olmecs?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I think — I’m not an expert — I think around the Mexico kind of region. Yeah, I might be wrong as well on that stuff. Let’s just. Yeah, that’s Luke’s stuff. You need to get Luke in here for that one.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, Southern Mexico, right. So then you have this whole vast area of land where it’s like, “Oh, we never really wrote down a story of who was in there,” as if there wouldn’t be anyone in there.

And by the way, you bring up Orellana and that journey that he then dictated — I believe, if I remember correctly, and we could pull this up to check me — but the diary, so to speak, was taken by the priest that was with him, or the monk that was with him, who also is a known name. I don’t know if we can find that. But he was the one that was writing down what they saw. They basically started on the west coast and then traveled all the way across to the Atlantic Ocean down the river, and they passed these — quote unquote — this city of gold with gold pyramids and people and lights and action.

And I just don’t understand why historians wouldn’t be open to the fact that something like that would exist. Yep, there it is. The most famous example is Bartolomé de las Casas, a priest who documented the actions of conquistadors, though he was not a conquistador himself and his work was critical of their brutality. Is that the same one, or can we type in Francisco de Orellana, priest? Let’s do that. That might be the same one. It’s de Orellana. Yeah. Who was the guy? Father Gas. Yeah. Gaspar. De Carvajal. That’s it. Carvajal. He was the one who documented it.

So you’re getting it from multiple sources in that way. He had men on this journey with him, I think, who corroborated that. And now we have these stories as well. To this day, people talk about El Dorado and where it could be. There’s a famous one — Percy Fawcett died trying to go find it. Greatest explorer probably in modern history right there. Have you looked at that case very much?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not really.

JULIAN DOREY: No Percy Fawcett thing? No. That’s so fascinating to me. He just — that dude was about the action. Went down there with his son and his son’s friend, and then they never came back on the last journey they took.

But the other thing people don’t think appreciate is that there’s not like hiking trails or walking trails in the Amazon. You want to go into the Amazon, you bring a machete and you have to break trees in front of you. To go a mile is like walking 20 miles somewhere else, maybe even more. So the ability to explore this, and all the things you can run into — that’s why governments who technically have parts of these lands, whether it be Brazil or Peru or whatever, they’re not coming out there to police. You know what happens to people out there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: You don’t even call the military. There’s no one to call. It’s just like, “I’m sorry, you gotta sort it out.”

The Mystery of South American Megalithic Sites

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. I think part of the problem with South America is because of what happened when the Europeans came — we don’t really have a recorded history like we do in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and stuff like that. We don’t have that continuous history, that tradition, because it basically got wiped out. And that means that it’s just a vast, vast mystery there that isn’t quite the same in the Old World.

And there’s so much fascinating stuff in South America that doesn’t quite make sense. Like, you look at so much of the megalithic stonework, and then you look at the culture that mainstream archaeology says built it, and it just doesn’t line up at all. If we’re talking about some of the sites in Peru — places like Ollantaytambo and Sacsayhuamán and stuff — these incredible sites with these massive megalithic constructions. And then you look at what they say about the Inca, and it’s like, “This doesn’t line up. How are they doing this?”

Like, I don’t know so much about this site, but there’s the site Ollantaytambo. Again, pronunciation is probably horrifically wrong, but it’s up a mountain, right? And they’ve transported these incredibly massive stones and positioned them on top of this mountain, but the quarry is on the side of another mountain. So they’ve quarried these stones, they’ve transported them all the way down this mountain, through a valley, across a river, then up another mountain. And it’s like, “How have they done that?” Because when we look at Incan technology, it’s just like — yeah, chisels and ropes.

JULIAN DOREY: And how much are we talking weight-wise again on these things?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I don’t know off the top of my head, but they’re very big.

JULIAN DOREY: Like total tons.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, yeah. Very, very big. And —

JULIAN DOREY: And we’re talking about potential hundreds of miles they’re taking them.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not necessarily hundreds of miles — maybe in some cases — but the terrain up a mountain, down a mountain, across rivers. How are you doing that? Why are you doing that? It just doesn’t line up with what we know about the Incan civilization.

And then there’s sites like Tiwanaku in Bolivia, which has these incredible precision-cut blocks and stuff. And it’s like, “How are they doing that?” There’s no explanation for that. And just because we know the Inca existed, we’re like, “It was the Inca. The Inca existed in this region, so they built this.” How did they do it? “Well, they just did it.”

JULIAN DOREY: They just did it.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Don’t ask questions.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. I mean, there’s one right there. Whoa.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I’m not sure if that’s attributed to the Inca.

JULIAN DOREY: But look how big that goddamn thing is though.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It doesn’t line up with the known capabilities of the civilizations of the region. That’s the point I’m making, which is interesting.

JULIAN DOREY: I’m going to go outside academics with this question. But do you ever just sit there, staring at the screen, and then you sit back and you go, “It must have been aliens”?

Human Ingenuity vs. the Alien Theory

MICHAEL BUTTON: I don’t usually go to aliens. I usually go to humans, because I think humans are really incredible. Yeah, I don’t usually go to aliens because I just think humans are really incredible. And it probably was humans that did it. I just think the humans were far more sophisticated, and there’s so much that we’ve lost. We just assume that what we have is all that there was.

We know that the Inca existed, so we think it was the Inca. But I think there could be vastly more civilizations, especially in South America, that we just don’t know about. We have no history of many of these South American cultures that we do know of. They recorded all their history orally, and then obviously when they all died, that was all lost. And so we just don’t know.

JULIAN DOREY: Do we know why they didn’t write it down?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I don’t know. But that’s another thing about these cultures — they didn’t even have a written script. And apparently that’s one of the hallmarks of civilization. But the Inca didn’t have a written script. They had this — they used ropes. I can’t remember what it’s called. Like quipu — that’s probably wrong. But they used ropes to kind of record-keep effectively, and really sophisticated, don’t get me wrong. But they didn’t have a written script, and yet they’re considered a civilization. So why do people always say, “Oh, they didn’t have a written script — not a civilization”?

JULIAN DOREY: Subjective. It’s completely subjective.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, quipu. Yeah, something like that. Close enough.

The Khipu: Sophisticated Record-Keeping

JULIAN DOREY: All right, can we go back to that? That’s what it looks like. So Khipu are record-keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the Central Andes of South America, and prominently by the Inca Empire. Khipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber cords and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order, and number. The Inca in particular used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in Khipu cords. Depending on its use and the amount of information stored, a given Khipu may have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords.

So it’s extremely sophisticated. It’s not just like tying one rope and saying, “Look, we did something.” It’s extremely sophisticated. It’s just a totally different form of writing. It’s not writing, but you know what I mean.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Oh, yeah, no, it’s really sophisticated. I don’t want to take anything away from the Inca. They were an incredible civilization and very sophisticated in many ways. But my argument is they’re just the ones we know about. What about everything that came before them? We don’t really know about that, so we just assume there was nothing.

And then this all plays into the idea that we’ve had around the history of the Americas. We always thought that human history in the Americas was extremely recent. And that’s kind of built into this argument that these were the first civilizations in the Americas, because humans weren’t in the Americas for very long. So the traditional argument was Clovis First. You know about Clovis First?

JULIAN DOREY: Remind me.

The Clovis First Theory

MICHAEL BUTTON: So Clovis First was the argument for a long time about the first humans — any type of humans — to reach the Americas. And this was that humans didn’t reach the Americas until about 13,000 years ago, which is incredibly recent if you think about how old our species is. And this was the paradigm. This was a fiercely defended paradigm for a long, long time. People lost their careers over trying to dispute this. For the whole of the 20th century, this was the accepted idea — that humans didn’t reach the Americas until 13,000 years ago.

JULIAN DOREY: What’s this called? Clovis — what again?

MICHAEL BUTTON: So the culture is called the Clovis culture. The idea was called the Clovis First theory. So the Clovis people were the first in the Americas.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, I want to pull that up. We have a different guy named Clovis right now up here.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Oh yeah, that’s some like —

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, it keeps bringing up some moringa vine.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Some Frank King. Yeah, yeah, not him. You want to type in “the Clovis culture”?

The Clovis First Theory and Pre-Clovis Sites

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, I don’t think we’ve talked about this on the POD before. I’ve heard that term, but I don’t think we talked about this. The Clovis first theory was the long held belief that the Clovis people were the first humans in the Americas, arriving around 13,500 years ago by crossing a land bridge from Siberia and spreading south through an ice free corridor. The theory is now largely rejected because of the discovery of pre-Clovis archaeological sites such as the Monteverde in Chile and Paisley Caves in Oregon, which show evidence of human presence in the Americas at least a thousand years earlier.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, and so this is a great example of the dogma of archaeology. This is why people usually bring this up, because archaeology basically suppressed — or North American archaeology basically suppressed — this find, a lot of these finds. So sites like Monteverde in Chile were dated to around 15,000 years ago, potentially up to 20,000 years ago. So that’s obviously before Clovis. Lots of people were not happy about that when that was discovered in the 1970s by a guy called Tom Dillahay, I think.

And honestly, he basically almost had his career destroyed because he had these dates of this site. I know that Dan Duncan — I don’t know if you’ve heard about that guy — he always talks about how North American archaeologists basically tried to get this guy almost killed because he was making these statements. So they wrote a letter. So he lived in — this is in Chile, and Chile was run by a dictator at that point. What’s his name? Can’t remember his name. Pico, something like that. Anyway, people can search. What years are we talking? So this was in the 80s, and the site he dated to around 14,000 years ago.

JULIAN DOREY: I know the name.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I can’t remember. What I gave was wrong. There was a dictator, something like Pinochet or something?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, yeah, that’s the one.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I had the P. So yeah, so this archaeologist even wrote a letter to them saying that Tom Dillahay was a CIA plant, which is a really dangerous thing to do, man. Like, he could have been killed for that. Because they were so against this find, because it made them look really stupid. Right? Because they were all behind this paradigm — Clovis first, 13,000 years ago — and this guy’s here saying he’s got evidence that it’s way older than that.

Anyway, long story short, he was eventually proven right. There was another cave, another site in Canada called Bluefish Caves, which was even older.

JULIAN DOREY: Bluefish Caves.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Bluefish Caves, yeah. So this was an archaeologist called — what’s his name? I’ve got his name. Jacques. Jacques Cinq-Mars. That’s his name.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, there it is.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: The site was first excavated by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars. Can we scroll down? It’s right there. Between 1977 and 1987, and the initial radiocarbon dating suggested an age of 24,000 before present. This was considered controversial in contrast with the Clovis first theory. Yada, yada, yada. Can you go up? I just want to grab this. So Bluefish Caves is a site in Yukon, Canada, located 54 km southwest of the Vin Tut Gwichin community of Old Crow. I have no idea where that is, but hopefully people do. It has been suggested that human occupation — yeah, we already read that part. Okay.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So yeah, I mean, this guy was vilified for this.

JULIAN DOREY: Like, he was finding something.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And his career was destroyed, and he didn’t have a career because he found this.

JULIAN DOREY: Isn’t that crazy?

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s so crazy. And he was eventually vindicated, like recently, like in the last 15 or 20 years.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s nice. Is he dead now?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I think so. Yeah. I think he is dead.

JULIAN DOREY: Don’t you love when we do that? Someone lives their whole life going, “I’m telling the truth.” “No, you’re not.” And then they die, and you’re like, “Oh, sorry.”

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. Dead. See?

JULIAN DOREY: Died in 2021.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So he probably lived just long enough to see himself vindicated, but his career was ruined.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s unbelievable.

MICHAEL BUTTON: For doing what he was supposed to do and making an incredible discovery and proving archaeology wrong, but his career was destroyed, basically. And there are a few examples like that.

But the point I’m making is that we don’t know anymore how old human history in the Americas is. We have no idea, because Clovis first is overruled. And there’s an even older site called the White Sands Footprints in New Mexico, where they discovered these footprints that are dated to around 23,000 years old. Very solid dating. So that shows that humans have been here for at least 23,000 years, which is 10,000 years older than Clovis. Yeah, there you go. Undisputed.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh, yeah. Those are human feet.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So that’s the oldest accepted evidence. But there are loads of other sites that are way older that are a bit more controversial. But my argument is that we really do not know how long human beings have been in the Americas.

Ancient South America and the Question of Age

JULIAN DOREY: And that’s also, like, when you’re looking at South America — forget North America for a second, which certainly has a lot of great arguments as well — but you’re talking about climates that are near or on the equator. So if you’re most concerned about ice periods where people can’t survive because there’s no agriculture and everything’s frozen, well, that’s the least likely place for that to be the case.

That’s why when we look at ancient civilizations in other places, a lot of times — not always, but like the ones we talk about, like Egypt — they’re not too far from the equator. You’re looking at places that have warmer climates and therefore have more potential to survive. That’s a broad way of putting it. But it’s like, why would you assume that, forget even the Clovis first period — why would you assume that the oldest human species we know about in South America might be a few thousand years old and not older than that? It doesn’t even make sense. It would be an amazing climate to live in.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, the best. Especially South America, as you say. But then there are other sites. There’s a site called the Cerutti Mastodon site. Have you heard of that?

JULIAN DOREY: Cerutti Mastodon.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Cerutti Mastodon. Cerutti.

JULIAN DOREY: I think Lucas talked about this, but let’s bring it up.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I’m sure he has. Yeah. I mean, this is very controversial, but there was a paper published in Nature, which is the most prestigious mainstream journal there is. So they found these broken mastodon bones that look like they’ve been broken by humans — some kind of humans. And this site is dated to 130,000 years ago.

JULIAN DOREY: 130,000. Oh, so it’s a — Rudy Mastodon site is a paleontological and possible archaeological site in San Diego County, California. In 2017, broken mastodon bones at the site were dated at around 130,700 years ago. The bones were found with cobblestones displaying use wear and impact marks among the otherwise fine-grained sands. Researchers have proposed that these marks were caused by the intentional breakage of the broken bones by hominins using the cobblestones. If true, that would be older by far than the scientific consensus for the habit. Yeah, that’s — you already nailed all this. I don’t know why the f* I’m reading.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Because, you know what I mean? If that’s true, that would push back human history in America by another hundred thousand years.

JULIAN DOREY: Like, work, you know.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. That’s like four or five times longer than we think. And so what does that suggest? This all buys into the argument of my channel, basically, which is that human history everywhere is far older — of course it is — than we think.

JULIAN DOREY: Of course it is.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And there are other sites as well, but there’s just a lot.

The Most Intriguing Civilizations in South America

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, it sounds like you could go on for days. I mean, it’s great. What is, though, of the ones that we talk about — which could include, by the way, some older ones that now have evidence to be found — what’s the most intriguing civilization in South America that you’ve studied?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Depends what you mean by civilization. I mean, I find the civilizations that we accept in South America really interesting. The Aztecs, like, it’s really interesting stuff. But I don’t really focus on that because I focus on the older stuff. I focus on the controversy. But that’s not to say these things aren’t interesting. And people often get that confused with me. I think people criticize me a lot because they’re like, “You’re downplaying the sophistication of these civilizations.” It’s like, I’m not doing that. I think they’re really interesting. It’s just that I have no beef with how they’re presented. My beef is with this idea that it’s all been cut off at this point and then nothing happened before then. So that’s what I’m really going hard at.

I mean, I don’t know. I find them all interesting. I have no favorites. I don’t choose. But yeah, I mean, there is a super fascinating place. I think South America is so interesting because we know so little. It’s not like my area of expertise — as you say, I’m a bit of a generalist. I kind of just hop all over the place wherever I find something interesting. But I think there’s a lot of mystery there.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, you seem to store all of it, though. You’ve got a memory with it. What was the site you were telling me about right before the new one in Mexico? I think you just made a video on this, or were making a video on it.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I think you mean — wait, I can’t pronounce it. It’s all right. Hueyatlaco, or Wayatlaco, or something like that.

JULIAN DOREY: Do you know what the first letter of how it’s spelled?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, it’s spelled H, U, E, Y, A, T, L, A, C, O.

JULIAN DOREY: Okay. I purposely didn’t ask you about this when you mentioned it, because I wanted to be surprised on here. But what was going on here?

Hueyatlaco: A 250,000-Year-Old Mystery in Mexico

MICHAEL BUTTON: So this site is super interesting because, basically, in the 1960s, a Mexican archaeologist found some artifacts here — this is in Mexico, I believe, near Puebla. And he found these artifacts. And then a whole team of American archaeologists came in and they discovered more artifacts. And then they got a team of geologists in to date the rocks and the sediments around it.

And there was this layer of volcanic ash that was above the artifacts. And they sent this ash off for testing. And they were expecting it to be, like, 15,000 years old, because this was in the time of the Clovis first theory. So they were expecting it to kind of align with that theory. And then this ash came back with dating of around 250,000 years old. And the artifacts were below this layer. And the artifacts were in an undisturbed context. Right. So they hadn’t been corrupted or anything. They hadn’t slipped down there or anything. They’d been there since before this ash was deposited.

And this ash was deposited, according to their testing — and they did multiple tests on this in various techniques — to at least 250,000 years ago. Some of their tests were like 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. So if that’s correct, that means that there was some kind of human making tools in Mexico, so in the Americas, 250,000 years ago at least. Which is just ridiculous. And this was in the time of Clovis first.

And then this is another example of archaeological dogma, because people weren’t happy with that. This guy got his whole artifact collection seized, the site seized by the government. By the Mexican government. Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. They’re real. Not corrupt.

The Cerutti Mastodon Site Cover-Up

MICHAEL BUTTON: They weren’t happy with it. And according to the archaeologist’s own testimony, or the geologist’s own testimony, I should say, the site was cornered off by, effectively, the Mexican army or armed guards. And they came there, they seized the artifact collection, and they said, you can’t do this. The work that they produced wasn’t published. They couldn’t get it published in archaeological journals.

And then when people came back to the site about 10 years later to be like, we’re going to sort this out once and for all, it had all been raised flat, and there was nothing there anymore. So the artifacts are gone and the site is gone. So we just have these stories and this dating that suggests that these tools were in the Americas 250,000 years ago. You can’t prove it because it’s all gone now.

But these geologists were very certain about their dates. And there’s been some more recent testing on the ash, I think, which aligns with these dates. I can’t remember who did it or what the testing method was. There’s a really cool video by this guy called Will Brown. His channel is called Incredible History. He did a great job — shout out Will Brown, he’s awesome. He did a great job of kind of outlaying it. I did a video on it too, but I point people to his video because he goes more in depth on it. Can we pull that up?

JULIAN DOREY: Give him—

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, give him some props, man. He’s good.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. Will Brown, what’s the channel called?

MICHAEL BUTTON: His channel’s called Incredible History.

JULIAN DOREY: Incredible.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And his video on it, I feel—

JULIAN DOREY: —like I’ve seen that.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, he’s great. His video on Hueyatlaco, or however you say it, is—

JULIAN DOREY: That’s, that’s how it looks to me.

MICHAEL BUTTON: All the comments on my video are like, “This guy can’t pronounce this thing.” Which is fair enough, but it’s for engagement. Yeah, this, this is the video.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

JULIAN DOREY: Yes. I have seen this guy before.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, he’s good. He does a really good job of kind of outlining the dating, the controversy about the cover-up and what it could potentially suggest about a vastly older human presence in the Americas.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

So then when you start to look at all these things adding up, it’s like, how long have we been in the Americas, man? Like, how long have human beings been there? And thus, why are we against the idea of civilization there being far, far older than the Inca obviously. But even Caral-Supe and Pinco and these civilizations we’re finding recently — how far back does it go?

Why Isn’t This Being Covered?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, and you’re pointing out a lot of things that were found years ago in many cases and just didn’t get attention. You don’t want to just make your head go conspiracy on everything like that, but you would wonder why Walter Cronkite wouldn’t have wanted to cover this on CBS. Like, finding something like this — I think that’s very interesting. Six o’clock news. If I’m going back in—

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s not even like, conspiracy. Like, it’s—

JULIAN DOREY: It’s not. I’m saying the conspiracy of people not covering it, but it’s—

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s — I don’t even think that’s a conspiracy. I think they deliberately — they literally covered it up because they were not happy. You have it with Monteverde, you have it with Bluefish Caves. They wanted to suppress this because North American archaeologists in the 20th century had built their whole careers around Clovis First. They’d written the textbooks, they taught the lessons. They kind of constructed their whole identity around being the source of information on North America.

And then you have these people coming out like, “This is not just wrong, but this is almost ridiculously wrong. You could be hundreds of thousands of years out here.” So they weren’t happy about that.

Could Intelligence Agencies Be Involved in Suppressing Ancient History?

JULIAN DOREY: But do you ever wonder if — let me explain this so I can ask the question properly — but like, if the intelligence agencies had the technology, and there’s very good evidence that they do, to kind of simulate the effect of things on society. Like, if you told society that a truth that they had accepted for a long time wasn’t a truth, how would they react on a mass scale and things like that?

Do you ever wonder if intelligence agencies could have some involvement when it comes to ancient history? Because perhaps there have been things found that would so shake the structure of maybe every world religion that’s ever existed, or people’s basic meaning of life, that they’re like, “Oh, that would crash society and people can’t know about it.” Do you ever wonder that?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I do wonder that. I think it would have to be something really crazy, like aliens or something, or just like a really, really advanced civilization back in the past. I don’t personally believe that. A lot of people in this space push the idea that this has all been hidden from us and there’s this elite that know our true past. I don’t buy into that at all.

I think it’s more, when things are covered up, it’s more like a human idea of, “Oh, I’m wrong about my job, my whole identity, so I’m not going to push this.” I don’t think we have evidence of an advanced civilization from way back in history that people know about and are hiding. I don’t think the intelligence agencies would — if it was something like aliens, then maybe. But I don’t think if it was a human civilization, I don’t think that would put people out too much. But yeah, maybe it would. I don’t know.

JULIAN DOREY: But yeah, the aliens thing, I think, is a whole different level. And I could — as much as I want to know — I could see why something like that might not be disclosed. And that’s also when guys from the government, including some people who have come on my show before, it makes me wonder, like, “All right, why are you here talking about this?” This is probably not the true thing. It’s probably something else. Like, I feel like you wouldn’t be telling us this.

But it’s interesting because if we don’t even know what happened on our planet, and every day it doesn’t get blown up by like 6,000 years like Göbekli Tepe — it gets blown up by a million years sometimes, like the one in China — well, what else don’t we know about the galaxy around us and how we could have gotten here? I mean, it’s strange to even think about why we’re alive or what caused it. We’re all like a 1 in 4 trillion chance of just being born in the first place. Let’s start with that.

Your mind can go to crazy places thinking about this stuff, but I like talking with guys like you that are focused on the history that we can find on our Earth and kind of starting there. Because if we don’t even understand the basics of what we have here, how the f* are we going to understand what we got going on up there other than looking at the planets?

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s almost the point I make all the time — we don’t know as much as we think we know about anything: about human history, about our existence, about the universe. We think we’ve got it all figured out, but we don’t. We don’t even know who we are. We don’t know what was going on in our heads. So yeah, I think there’s so much still to be discovered, and I just hope we can do it before everything falls apart.

Optimism, Social Media, and the Future

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, I’d like to have an optimistic view. I think we’re in some weird times right now, but things will come together. We’re still young with social media even. I do have hope we’ll figure out how to use these tools and this access we have to each other a little more constructively before we all kill each other. That’s the downside here.

But you were also telling me before that you’re interested in a lot of different things in history. I love this when guys like you are known publicly for having one expertise, but then you’re like, “Yeah, I also do this too.” You were saying you would maybe eventually, if not on this channel, on a separate channel, cover things like World War I or stuff like this. What are your other favorite parts of history that aren’t ancient, so to speak?

A Fascination With World War I

MICHAEL BUTTON: I love it all, mate. I love all of history. That’s why I did it at university. That’s why I do what I do. But yeah, things like World War I — I have such a huge fascination with World War I. Maybe it’s partly because I’m British, but I think World War I was such a pivotal moment. It kind of almost was the beginning of the modern world. It was the end of the old society which was run by kings and empires and stuff.

And then it was like this age of such illustrious, almost hedonism that all came to a head. These people had so much money and these empires were so flourishing that they just didn’t know what to do. So they just ended up creating the worst inferno ever, and everyone died, basically.

It’s almost like the beginning of the end of Britain, I think. Britain was obviously the most powerful country in the world at the turn of the 20th century and had so much money and so much influence and so much power that it almost didn’t really realize where it was. And then you have this new upstart country in Germany coming along and trying to take the crown.

The fact that all these societies just basically mass-industrialized and poured the entire society’s resources into death, and everyone got slaughtered — I just find that whole period so interesting. And then what came out of that, which was the transfer of power across the Atlantic to you guys in America, and then obviously all the implications in Europe, which led to the rise of Nazism in Germany and led to the Second World War, which led to the Cold War, which led to the modern world.

JULIAN DOREY: So the domino—

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, exactly. World War I — one bullet led to everything, in a way.

The Christmas Truce and the Tragedy of Trench Warfare

JULIAN DOREY: It’s also actually very sad to me how ignored World War I is specifically, because then you had World War II, which is now more recent comparatively speaking, happen just over 20 years later and break out. But you had some of the most brutal warfare ever in World War I with the trench warfare — just pure savagery, behind-the-scenes suits paying for everyone else to kill each other.

I think probably the wildest story that paints that picture is — I’m sure you’re familiar with this — when there were too many wolves in one battle and they had to call a ceasefire for a few days. The Germans and the British and the French were playing pickup soccer together.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, exactly.

JULIAN DOREY: And then they had to go back into their trenches two days later, same guys, and shoot each other. Like, that’s nuts.

World War I: The Pointless Industrial War

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, so nuts. That whole conflict is because the whole point of the war, there was no point for that war. That’s what makes it so ridiculous in my opinion, because at least when you look at World War II, you can see there was a reason behind that. Hitler was taking over the whole of Europe. He had these crazy, crazy genocidal ambitions. He wanted to take over the world and exterminate everyone who wasn’t like him, and clearly a bad guy. Let’s fight that guy. It’s a just war, right?

World War I, there was no reason to do it. It was just these stupid alliances that all kind of led to a domino effect which led to the entirety of Europe declaring war on each other. And it was the first industrial war. I think that’s what makes it so interesting and so tragic because you had all these societies that thought about war in the traditional sense. They thought it was this romantic thing because Europe had been at peace for 100 years basically up until the 20th century.

So war was this far off, distant thing that they thought about in Napoleonic times, basically, like these men in fancy coats riding horses and going to glory. And there were these little skirmishes and then you trade a little province here with me and then the war’s over. So that was the idea of war. So they were like, okay, we’ll have a little war. But it wasn’t. The world had changed. There were these mass industrial societies. They had the ability to call up millions and millions and millions of men. They had weapons like the machine gun and like massive artillery. And it just led to this horrific stalemate where the whole of Europe was just trench warfare with just pouring millions of men into this zone of death and slaughtering them all.

For what? Because you’re allied with me and I’m allied with you and he’s allied with him and he shot him in Sarajevo. So that means that he has to attack him so you have to attack me. It’s just ridiculous. And yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: How many people deep. Can we google this? How many people died in World War I? Because it’s an obviously horrific number.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Millions and millions of millions.

JULIAN DOREY: People always talk about World War II, but World War I, over 37 million casualties. So that’s 15 to 22 million deaths and 23 million wounded. Military personnel and civilians combined over like a four year period.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: That is absolutely absurd. 8.5 million military, as in deaths, 13 million civilians and then total. Wow.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

Dan Carlin, the Treaty of Versailles, and the Seeds of World War II

JULIAN DOREY: I remember, that’s probably like six or seven years ago, I listened to Dan Carlin’s —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Blueprint for Armageddon.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh my God, that’s my favorite history content. Pound for pound incredible. And you’re like, how are we ignoring this? And then to your point, the way that it closed up is what set the stage. You had everything from the Treaty of Versailles which then basically completely hamstrung Germany and allowed for a vacuum to suck up with their economy, for someone like Hitler to then seize power, all the way to — I hope I get the name right — the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which just carved up the Middle East, set up just like willy nilly, you know, a bunch of dudes in an office in Europe like, “Oh, this will work.”

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. You can trace back the whole current Middle East conflict to that basically.

Historical Revisionism and the Danger of Incomplete Narratives

JULIAN DOREY: Exactly. The Balfour Declaration was back then too. It’s absurd. And then World War II. I’d love your perspective on this. History is written by the victors. There’s no history ever that’s 100% right. It’s just a fact of life. I always cite the American Revolution as an amazing example. I studied the hell out of that war. It’s amazing. There are literally things that are actually written in the history books that you’ll read, whether it be H.W. Brands or some other brilliant historian from that era, that when the war is talked about, when the documentary is made, they don’t really mention. And that stuff I’m referring to will be things that are negative towards the revolutionaries in the United States. Meaning, yeah, we did some stuff wrong in that war too.

But I’m not one of these, like, it’s everything or nothing, or like 5% is wrong so we’re going to throw out the 100% baby out with the bath water. But I can look at it and say, okay, I’m very glad, all due respect to your people, that we did this revolution and we were able to form this great country. And these guys were amazing and they came up with amazing things. But yeah, they did a few things during the war as well that probably wasn’t totally fair to the British for sure. And that certainly happened a lot in the other direction. And then yeah, like in the Constitution, they f*ed that up and didn’t abolish slavery. Meaning you can point to things and call it nuance without excoriating the entire thing.

And what’s really concerning me about society now with history in general, but I think we’ve seen a major aspect of it formulate around World War II, is that we’re looking at narratives that have been told to us before, and people are plucking on that 1% that might be a little different than it was written. And then they’re pulling out that bottom card from the house of cards and saying, “Look, the whole thing comes down, it’s actually all fake.” And they’ll say — you will literally hear people say things sometimes like, “Hitler wasn’t great, but it was actually Churchill that was the bad guy.”

And you should be able to discuss anything. You should be able to hash things out. I don’t want to shut down conversation. But when people are running away with narratives like that, and suddenly using the Internet and algorithms to push them and suddenly report them as truth, do you ever get concerned about how we’re discussing even modern history?

Churchill, Chamberlain, and the Weight of Wartime Decisions

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I mean, historical revisionism, it’s worth exploring for sure, as you say. But you do have to be careful because as you say, when you start taking these narratives, you can say, “This means this,” and then the whole thing falls down. Was Churchill the bad guy of World War II? No. He wasn’t a perfect guy, but he was a man of his era, right? He grew up at the end of the 19th century when Britain had the British Empire and was oppressing everyone around the world. The British Empire had positives, but also there was definitely a mindset amongst especially the elite of Britain that they were better than everyone else. And Churchill was a product of that. And you could point to many things that he did that were not great. And the guy clearly thought that white British men were the best thing in the world. But at the same time, more than almost anyone else in the world, I think, he was instrumental in stopping Hitler.

JULIAN DOREY: Right?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Because if Britain had surrendered — and Britain was extremely close to surrendering to Germany in 1940 — Churchill was basically the guy that stopped that happening. The British government, or factions of the British government, wanted to surrender when France fell, for good reason. People always forget the context of World War I. Britain and France and Germany had been through the most horrific traumatic experience only less than 20 years, or just over 20 years, prior. So all these people were still alive. All these people could still remember an entire generation of men being slaughtered, their kids or their brothers or their friends wiped out dead. And you’re thinking, “F*ing hell, lads, the last thing we want to do is do this all over again.” And yeah, it’s happening, let’s just call it quits. Like this Hitler guy, yeah, he’s a bit of a nutter, but is it worth wiping out another 3 million men from our population?

But Churchill was the one guy that was like, “No, we’re not having this. We’re going to fight this guy, we’re going to beat this guy.” So when people say Churchill was the villain of World War II because he didn’t continue with the policy of appeasement or whatever, he clearly wasn’t. And he clearly, more than anyone else, was the guy that kept Britain in the war and thus enabled the Allied cause to keep going, thus enabled America to eventually join the war, and thus enabled the Allies to win the war, and thus enabled Nazism and fascism to lose. And for Western democracy, America to become the prominent power, at least with the Soviet Union, then eventually defeat the Soviet Union, which is a preferable outcome to fascism.

JULIAN DOREY: And you’re underlining an amazing point here, which is that a lot of people who will look at this, I find, with revisionism, want to assume the world is a perfectly balanced place where the logical outcome is always going to win. And then when they see an outcome that involves using logic where something has to lose, they cannot accept that that’s the case.

And what I mean is, in this context, Churchill made a decision that the fastest growing GDP in the world, which was fascist Nazi Germany, that was starting a war on multiple fronts and taking over countries by the day — he made a decision that that was the worst immediate problem. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t think the Communists were a problem, of course. In fact, he protested the whole time, like, “Oh, we’ve got to work with this f*ing Stalin guy.” He knew that was a huge issue. He’s the guy who coined the Iron Curtain and all that. But he made the best of two bad decisions at the time.

That, unfortunately, yes, World War II is the bloodiest conflict ever. Tens of millions of people died. That’s terrible. I hate that that happened. The alternative of the United States never getting into the war and me speaking German right now — yeah, that’s worse. I’m sorry. It is. And maybe eventually that would have fallen, but there would have been even more destruction on the way.

And there are even misunderstandings of how Churchill eventually viewed Chamberlain. He disagreed with what Chamberlain did. But Chamberlain gets more s in history than he should. He tried for peace. He did it the wrong way. It didn’t work out. Hitler was not a guy you should listen to. But he made the effort. And then what did he say? He’s like, “If you break this, I’m going to be forced to declare war on you.” And he fing did.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: You know, that’s what it is. And also people ignore the fact that Churchill gave the eulogy at Chamberlain’s funeral in 1940 or 1941. And he talked about, you know, “This guy’s going to be misunderstood in history. We had some disagreements, but he tried.”

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: And now this is what it is. People, you have to live in reality, and reality sucks sometimes. But when you’re looking at history, you also have the advantage of having some hindsight. Don’t use that the wrong way and assume you could have magically solved the problem back then.

MICHAEL BUTTON: You can completely understand Chamberlain’s position, as I said, because of the First World War, because of the trauma. You think, “Let’s do anything to stop this happening again.” But at a certain point, Hitler’s just going for it, mate. He’s ignoring all the deals you make with him. He’s attacking all these countries. You’ve got to fight him eventually. And Chamberlain did come round to that, but at the end, he was the wrong guy. Churchill came in. Churchill was instrumental in keeping Britain —

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: — in the war. Because if Britain had sued for peace, which factions of the government really wanted to do, then Churchill wouldn’t have remained in power. It probably would have been — have you ever heard of Oswald Mosley?

JULIAN DOREY: I don’t think so.

MICHAEL BUTTON: He was the fascist leader — well, the leader of the British Fascist Party at the time. So it probably would have been someone like Mosley.

JULIAN DOREY: Okay.

MICHAEL BUTTON: He’s actually in Peaky Blinders, which — I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, it probably would have been someone like him who would have been put in place in Britain, because Britain would have then presumably had good ties with Nazi Germany. So then you might have had a fascist Britain, a whole fascist Europe.

JULIAN DOREY: Like Hitler.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. I think he’s probably modeling himself on Hitler because Hitler, I guess, was his ideological hero.

JULIAN DOREY: Wow.

World War II: The Eastern Front and Britain’s Role

MICHAEL BUTTON: You know, Britain, we weren’t. It wasn’t. People think of fascism now as, oh, it’s evil, but it hadn’t happened yet, so people were just seeing that as an alternative. And it’s like, well, Mussolini’s doing pretty well in Italy. Hitler’s smashing it in Europe. Why don’t we try this Mosley guy? So someone like Churchill was the guy that kind of stopped that and led to democracy winning.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah. So also, shout out to the Brits, too, dude. Because that was one part of World War II I hadn’t done a huge deep dive on. I’ve looked at it my whole life. It’s so fascinating to me. But the Battle of Britain and that year, which is all prior to Pearl Harbor, by the way, and not just Churchill, but the whole context of the bombing raids back and forth between Britain and Germany on each other. Insane, man.

There were a lot of times where Britain could have folded there. And like you said, because of Churchill and obviously a lot of other brave people, they didn’t. And when you really look at, between that and the evacuation at Dunkirk and everything, being able to keep a standing army together, and you look at the pivot of being able to be like, “All right, let’s have a foot to stand on to win this war.” That’s really. They deserve a ton of credit for that.

The Invention of Radar and the Battle of Britain

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So interesting how history can pivot on such tiny things and a tiny amount of individuals. Because Britain’s always been, throughout history, Britain was always a naval power. So that kept Britain secure and we could rule the seas through having the best navy. And that’s what led to the British Empire being what it was and everything like that. But by the time you get to the 1940s, that’s kind of redundant because of air power. So Britain had this amazing navy, but the Luftwaffe could just dive bomb it and destroy it.

So Britain was like, “How do we defend ourselves now?” So they invented radar effectively. And because they invented radar, and radar was literally being invented at the time that World War II broke out, the first test of British defense radar system was the Battle of Britain. And if they didn’t have this invention, they wouldn’t know when the bombers were coming. They wouldn’t know where to send the very few fighters that Britain had to intercept these bombers.

And the bombers were targeting all the airfields. And if the Luftwaffe bombers had wiped out the RAF, then the Luftwaffe could then wipe out the Royal Navy. And then Germany has free reign on Britain. So without the invention of radar at the exact time, by, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but there was like one or two people.

JULIAN DOREY: Invention of radar. We’ll get it.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So the radar, I think radar was a little bit older, but the development of the technology into a sophisticated defense system literally happened because of necessity at that exact time. And if that hadn’t happened, then the RAF would have been wiped out. And obviously the bravery of the RAF.

JULIAN DOREY: They had a lot of inventions around World War II in the nick of time. You talking about Robert Watson Watt?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I’m not sure, I’m not sure of the name.

JULIAN DOREY: The British invention of radar. So that was the initial invention you’re talking about, when they figured out how to use it. The British invention of radar, led by Sir Robert Watson Watt, played a pivotal role in winning the Battle of Britain. The Chain Home system was the world’s first early warning radar network, providing the Royal Air Force with crucial advance notice of German air raids, allowing them to scramble their fighters and effectively direct them to intercept the incoming bombers. Without radar, it is highly unlikely the RAF could have defeated the Luftwaffe. And the system could detect approaching aircraft from up to 80 miles away. That’s amazing.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And if that technology hadn’t been just at that exact point where it was possible to do that, the whole history of the world would look different. And if these people hadn’t managed to do it.

American Isolationism and Pearl Harbor

JULIAN DOREY: And that’s the thing. You make an amazing point about how this was only like 20 years after World War I. So people in Britain, they had fathers, sons, brothers, friends who died in that war. People knew the cost, the most brutal cost of war. So totally understandable there were some isolationist feelings. And then the war breaks out and Britain is getting attacked, so they’re forced to not be isolationist.

But one of the things that I really didn’t understand, just how deep it went, was how isolationist we were in America. I read this book when I was telling you I was looking into this a couple years ago called The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, which is about the one year of basically the bombing of Britain. And he talks about the relationship — it’s basically from Churchill’s perspective — he talks about the relationship between Churchill and FDR.

And FDR knew this was all a problem. But beginning with the May 1940 bombings, when Churchill was like, “Please help,” FDR had an election on November 5, 1940, and he was telling Churchill, “Bro, I agree with you, but my opponent is running complete isolationism. Stay out of this. So I have to try to run in his direction just to win an election. I don’t think you understand. The whole country doesn’t support getting involved, so I can’t really help.”

He couldn’t even give Churchill a couple totally broken boats that Congress was about to vote on to destroy. They were floating in the Caribbean. Useless. And Churchill’s like, “I’ll take them.” FDR had to come up with some backhanded, secret deal to try to even get them there. It was that isolationist. And so Churchill was begging for a year. And then it took Pearl Harbor to get the United States involved.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Do you think Pearl Harbor was a false flag?

JULIAN DOREY: Unfortunately, absolutely. I’ve had West Point f*ing commandos sitting there openly saying that as if it’s common parlance. I’ve had a dude who wrote a book on the entire thing, and the dude who was in the building that this picture on the wall is taken from, which is Rockefeller Center, from MI6 during the build up to World War II, whose sole job was to try to get the United States involved. There are cables that show that FDR knew it was coming and that, you know, that’s what it was.

And the ultimate poison pill there is that, hindsight 20/20, funny, because I’ve never looked at a false flag before and been like, “Well, that was a good idea.” It was horrible. You wonder, though, if that hadn’t happened, if the world would look a lot different, because they knew it would force Hitler’s hand — because he was such a big dog guy — to declare war, because the war was only declared on Japan, but they knew that would get Hitler involved and give him an excuse to be like, “Okay, well, we’re coming in too.” That’s a tough one, man.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. I mean, it’s very plausible, I think, not that it was a false flag, but that they allowed it to happen.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, yeah. There’s also financial things related to that with what they did with the oil. I forget it off the top of my head, but the oil exports, I think involving Asia, that would have forced Japan’s hand. Fix me in the comments on that. I’m hazy, but there were a lot of things going on there and it gets weird. But you should talk about all these things for sure. No war is ever 100% on the up and up and all that.

The Eastern Front: The True Turning Point of World War II

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting time. But I mean, I think one thing that’s probably underestimated in the west is that World War II was basically won and lost on the Eastern Front. I think, at least, agree with you.

JULIAN DOREY: Yes.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Because that’s where it turns out. Yep. Because if Hitler had taken Moscow, if Hitler had knocked out the Soviet Union, he’s in such a strong position, even with America. But because Stalingrad happened, because it turned on the Eastern Front, that allowed the Allies to win effectively.

And I think the Soviet Union probably don’t get enough credit in the west, probably because they’re so ideologically opposed to us and they also became the enemy. But without that contribution, Hitler probably would have won, or at least wouldn’t have lost, and there would have been some weird stalemate. Maybe they would have sued for peace, although probably that goes against Nazi ideology. But.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I think that’s underestimated in the west because we have this narrative, like Britain and America together, we won the war, we defeated Hitler. But the real war was the Eastern Front. Right.

JULIAN DOREY: So it was all three. And there’s no doubt that the Russians, because the war literally ended up coming onto their land, civilians and military alike, threw the most bodies at the problem. I mean, that’s by a lot, and that absolutely is true.

And again, it comes back to that — you kind of had to pick the lesser two evils to work with. And at the time, the Cold War wasn’t great and all that, but didn’t drop 45 million bodies in that way on battlefields and with the civilians in the middle in a four year period or anything like that. Obviously a lot of people died and there was destruction within the Cold War. I don’t want to underestimate that. But these are the decisions that have to get made at the time and you can sit there and analyze them to death afterwards. And I still think the right overall decision was made by the Allies and it was what it was.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, it had to be done. It was the only logical decision at the time. But yeah, it’s just crazy how recent this was as well. I think people forget that this is only like 60, 70 years ago.

JULIAN DOREY: Shaped our entire modern world.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Like our grandparents’ generation lived through this.

JULIAN DOREY: Had two guys sitting in that chair who fought in it.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Really?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s cool.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’ll tell my grandkids about and pull up the video and be like, “Look at that.” But that shows you it’s not too long ago. Real quick, Michael, this is going great. I just gotta go to the bathroom and then we’ll come right back. We gotta talk some Egypt and stuff.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, we do. I need to go.

Pre-Roman Britain and Queen Boudicca

JULIAN DOREY: Cool. You know, one thing I also — I was just thinking about this on the bathroom break — one thing I’ve never really looked at: there was this video I saw when I was going through a hardcore ancient Rome phase maybe like a year ago, where it showed a CGI recreation of Britain since the ancient Rome times. And it takes you through each era. But I’ve never really looked at the history of your country before ancient Rome and who was there. Have you done a lot of work on that?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not so much. But I mean, the Romans came to our country and basically made it good for a long time. And then they left and we went straight back to, I guess, the Dark Ages. But Britain before Rome was basically just Celtic tribes in just different locations. There was no unification really. I mean, have you ever heard of Queen Boudicca?

JULIAN DOREY: I don’t think so.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So she’s pretty famous in Britain because she’s kind of seen as like a heroine of British identity, which is kind of a bit silly because we’re not really the same.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, there you go.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And she was like this warlord, and obviously she’s a woman, so that made it like ridiculous because they were

JULIAN DOREY: Ahead of the times.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Very ahead of the times. Yeah. And she led some British tribe and she almost unified all the British tribes against the Roman forces in Britain, and she almost won. That’s the crazy thing. She almost took out the Roman occupation of Britain.

JULIAN DOREY: Was she around — I didn’t look at the years there — was she around when Caesar was actually leading the armies there, or was this just after?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I think. What’s the date here? AD 60? Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh yeah. That would mean he’s dead. He’s like 53 or something.

Ancient Rome: Republic to Empire

MICHAEL BUTTON: He’s B.C. He’s like, when did he die? He died like 40 B.C. or something like that. So this is just in the start of the Roman Empire. So that’s maybe this is just after Augustus. Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: 44 BC, March 15th. 44.

MICHAEL BUTTON: What did I say? I was pretty close there, wasn’t I?

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, you’re right. I think I said 43.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, right there. Pretty impressive.

JULIAN DOREY: It’s up there, bro. You got an encyclopedia. It’s great. So this lady was trying to unify all the tribes against the constantly incoming Roman army, but the Romans at this point would have already been occupying. Right?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, so yeah, I guess less is known about Britain before the Romans. Because you know, it wasn’t — we weren’t really with it. We were just some random island on the edge of the known world. Like Britain was not a relevant place until quite recently in terms of historical.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, like the last thousand years.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, even less than that, like 800. Britain was always just this outcrop on the edge of the known world, like this crazy island where these tribal people lived and no one went. Like the Romans hated Britain because it was such a hard place to run because it was so far away from their central power and it was this place that you had to cross the sea to get there and full of crazy Celts and stuff like that. So yeah, a bunch of —

JULIAN DOREY: Conor McGregor is coming at you.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Basically.

JULIAN DOREY: Terrible accent, but whatever, we’ll go with it. Are you someone that’s also fascinated with ancient Rome? Do you study that a lot or —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, so basically that was my degree, was a lot about ancient Rome. I’m really interested by Rome because it’s just a fascinating civilization. Right. Like, the whole Roman Empire is so interesting. Yeah. So I know a lot about it. I find the period from the transition from Republic to Empire very fascinating.

JULIAN DOREY: How so?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Because it was just a crazy time in world history.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Where Caesar — so do you know the story of it?

JULIAN DOREY: Of Caesar getting whacked?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And like, then the whole beef that happened after that and then what led to the formation —

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, it was like — now it’s been a while, but that was like when they had the tripartite thing.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, you know your stuff. Yeah, exactly. So I find that whole period of history so fascinating because you had this Roman Republic and they were very proud about their identity of not having kings. You can almost make the comparison to the modern day with the no kings protest against Trump, but not quite the same thing — not quite the same thing, to be clear.

But they were terrified of dictators because they used to have kings way back in the very early days of Rome. And then they became this republic and they were like, “We’re never going to have a king again.” And then eventually they had these more and more powerful individuals, and Caesar was one of them. And Caesar effectively wanted to take control of all of Rome. He had basically conquered all of Gaul. And you could say he almost conducted a holocaust in Gaul, but maybe that’s a different topic of conversation.

But he was amassing all this power, and they were terrified of him in the Senate because they didn’t want a king, and he was acting like a king. So they were like, “You can’t come back here with an army. You’ve got to stay out there.” And then he crossed the — what’s it called?

JULIAN DOREY: The Rubicon.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, that’s it. It’s like a famous phrase, and I forgot the name of the river, but he crossed the Rubicon with his army, and that was basically him declaring war on Rome. And then there was this big civil war which he eventually won. And then he wasn’t an emperor, but he was almost the first emperor in spirit because he kind of took control of Rome.

But then obviously people weren’t happy about that. And so then he was assassinated by all the senators, and that’s that famous story. And it’s like “Et tu, Brute?” which I don’t think he ever said, but that’s a Shakespeare line.

JULIAN DOREY: Hey, it’s a good line.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s a good line. Exactly. So you might as well just take it as a —

JULIAN DOREY: Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. So he was assassinated. Then you had this power vacuum and you had his adopted son who was Octavian. You had Mark Antony, who was Caesar’s right hand man.

JULIAN DOREY: And also banging Cleopatra. Right?

MICHAEL BUTTON: They were both banging Cleopatra.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Different times. But they were both banging Cleopatra. Fair play. And then you had Mark Antony and then I think — Lepidus.

JULIAN DOREY: I think that’s right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Something like that.

JULIAN DOREY: Sounds familiar. Mark Antony, Octavian and third guy. That should bring it up. AI Google AI should be smart enough. Grok will definitely be smart enough.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Was it Lepidus? Yeah. God, I should have more confidence in myself. That’s fine. Yeah. So they basically had this massive civil war which Octavian eventually won at the Battle of Actium. And then that led to Mark Antony and Cleopatra committing suicide. Lepidus got knocked out earlier on. He was a bit of an irrelevant. And then Octavian became Augustus. Yeah. And he was like, “I am the first emperor.” And he ruled for ages — like 60 years. Yeah. And it was a very peaceful and prosperous period and he became the first emperor.

Yeah, it’s just a fascinating time because it’s a transition of how they structured their society from republic to empire. And then that was the Roman Empire from then on. And it lasted for quite a while in a good way. But then it did kind of go south later on.

But fascinating period. I’m not sure too many people understand the distinction there, but it was a very different society I think once it became an empire because the power was all concentrated in this one guy, this emperor who ruled basically the entire known world, which is an incredible thing to do — so much power. And he had some pretty bad emperors as well that really abused that power and led to Rome eventually collapsing. But you also had some good ones as well. Like you have Meditations up in your little —

JULIAN DOREY: Marcus Aurelius.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Exactly. He was a good one.

JULIAN DOREY: But the brilliance — I actually legit read those like once a day and you’re like, oh my God.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Bar, bar, bar.

JULIAN DOREY: Like every single thing, it makes you look at yourself and be like, “He’s right, he’s right.” Like, that guy was amazing.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yes. You had some real wise ones like him, but then you had some crazy people like Caligula, the guy that made his horse a senator. And then also Nero, who was a bit of a crazy dude. Yeah. Fascinating period of history.

All Roads Lead to Rome

JULIAN DOREY: It’s one of those things — there was a trend a couple years ago, maybe this was worldwide, it was in America so it’s probably in the UK too, where it’s like, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” And I remember when it came up, I was like, all the time, actually. I don’t know if that’s a weird thing to say, but I think about it all the time.

There’s a map — I always ask for this and I never have it ready to go — the map of Europe that shows blood veins from the ancient Roman Empire. It’s one of my favorite visuals ever, because it basically shows how the cradle of modern civilization in the developed world all leads to Rome. It literally looks like a human body, but it starts in Rome and then leads out like a bunch of veins, goes all the way to England and all the way to the east and stretches far and wide.

Sorry, I should have had it ready. If you — it’s like a Twitter — you found it. No, it’s a human body. That’s close enough. Yeah, I mean, it gets the visual across. If people have seen it on Twitter, Google “All roads lead to Rome veins.” Let’s see if that does it. I don’t know. We’ll give it one crack. But I’m a real visual person. Yep, there it is. Boom. All right, pull that bad boy up over.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, that’s right. I’m using that.

JULIAN DOREY: You see what I mean?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Oh, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: It’s like — damn it. There it is. That’s fine. It’s like a symbol of humanity itself.

MICHAEL BUTTON: That —

JULIAN DOREY: That was built right there, and obviously there’s been empire since then. It fell. And that’s a whole story in and of itself. But what we know of — you got to

MICHAEL BUTTON: be careful how you say these things these days.

JULIAN DOREY: But like, “world order,” if you will, kind of emanates from some of the examples that they set. And also, to be very fair, there’s a lot from ancient Greece too. There’s a lot from a lot of different civilizations. It’s just this one kind of amalgamated it altogether, if you know what I mean. And it’s truly incredible to me.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, they kind of were the first to almost unify Europe, I guess. I think that’s probably a fair thing to say, which is an incredible achievement at such a time. But obviously it was a really hard thing to maintain because just for obvious reasons, and that’s I guess eventually why it fell. But they had a good run, mate. They had a good run. So very interesting civilization.

But yeah, they were heavily inspired by the Greeks, I think. Heavily inspired. Like they really saw themselves as the inheritors of the Greek legacy and Greek culture. And the Greeks then saw themselves as the inheritors of Egyptian civilization in many ways. And obviously both Greece and Rome ruled Egypt for many, many centuries. And yeah, it’s quite an interesting continuity there.

New Discoveries at the Egyptian Pyramids

JULIAN DOREY: They were both pretty obsessed with Egypt. Like it’s documented, obviously — it became a part of the Roman Empire at one point and everything too. But they looked at Egypt the way that we look at them. Yeah, in a lot of ways it’s kind of like the 30,000 foot view of the 30,000 foot view, which is always pretty cool to me.

But actually on that note, we said we were going to do this before the break, so let’s get to it. In Egypt, Ben Van Kerkwijk, I know, has been making waves recently on a bunch of podcasts. I think he went on Joe Rogan and some others as well with some new information on the pyramids. I have seen absolutely none of it yet. I haven’t gotten around to it. So what exactly — you were talking about this — what exactly apparently has been found here and what does it tell us?

The Lost Labyrinth of Ancient Egypt

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, so it’s not the Giza pyramids, it’s a different pyramid called Hawara which is further south in the country. So what Ben has been talking about, and he’s done a great job talking about and I recommend everyone watch his video on his channel and he spoke about on Rogan, so a lot of people would have heard of it.

So there’s always been this almost tale of the labyrinth of ancient Egypt, the lost labyrinth of Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Writers from Greece and Rome wrote about it and visited it. So the most, the first example is Herodotus. Have you heard of Herodotus? Greek historian, wrote the very famous histories. Almost seen as the father of history, the first historian, in many ways. He claimed to have visited the lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt at Hawara. And he said some pretty outlandish things about it. Like he said it was greater than anything that his people, the Greeks, had ever achieved, both in grandeur and in expense, which is quite a mad thing. He also said it surpassed the pyramids of Giza in terms of its achievement.

So, you know, the great pyramids of Giza are perhaps the most impressive construction in all of antiquity, right? And they still confuse us to this day. Like, how were they built? Why are they so big? Why are they so precise? What were they for? They’re just massive and they’re ridiculously impressive. And he said that this labyrinth surpassed that in grandeur. So it’s a more impressive achievement than the Egyptian pyramids, which is a big thing to say.

So he went there and he said, you know, all this, and he said he went in it and had a detailed description of all of it. But he wasn’t the only one. There was also the Greek geographer Strabo who said he went there, said it was incredibly impressive. There were a few Roman writers like Diodorus Sicily who went there, and Pliny the Elder who went there. Pliny the Elder made the interesting claim that the labyrinth was constructed over 3,600 years before his time. So I believe he was writing in the era of Augustus, as we were just talking about the start of the Roman Empire. So 3,600 years before his time would put it before the first dynasties of ancient Egypt, so before the Egyptian civilization, dynastic Egypt arose.

So that’s something. That’s quite a confusing thing. How are they constructing something that surpasses the pyramids in grandeur before the beginning of Egyptian civilization? That’s a pretty crazy thing. So we have all these classical authors that say they visited the labyrinth, say that it was like this incredible construction, but that was it. And then it kind of faded away into obscurity. And everyone thought it was just, you know, this legend, and these ancient writers were talking about it.

Napoleon, Petrie, and the Modern Search

So then you fast forward to the modern day and you get the European explorers visiting Hawara. First notable one, I guess, is Napoleon Bonaparte, you know, the famous French general. He was obsessed with ancient Egypt. He loved ancient Egypt. He once spent a night in the king’s chamber of the Great Pyramid, and said, we never spoke about it, but apparently he was quite shocked by his experience in there, which is a weird thing, but he spent a night in the king’s chamber, which is pretty crazy.

And he brought teams of scientists and scholars to Egypt, and some of them went to Hawara and they said that they could see some foundations and some ruins at the base of the pyramid there. And that was kind of the first modern identification of the labyrinth’s potential location. But that’s kind of all it was.

And then you fast forward to some British explorers, like, most notably Flinders Petrie, who’s the famous British Egyptologist. He was the first one to kind of conduct any serious excavation there. And so he drilled into the pyramid and under the base there, and he came across this kind of base that he assumed was the foundation of the labyrinth. That was all that was left of it. And he had this massive base. And he was like, okay, the labyrinth was here, and I found all that’s left of it, this massive base. So the labyrinth was real. These ancient writers weren’t making it up, but it’s gone now. There’s nothing left of it other than this base.

And that kind of was the theory forever, basically, about this labyrinth — that it was real, these writers weren’t making it up, Petrie found the base of it. That’s the end of the story, right? And that was the case forever.

The Mataha Expedition and Ground-Penetrating Radar

In recent years, in the 21st century, a couple of independent researchers have thought maybe that’s not the full extent of the story. So there’s this interesting expedition in 2008, I believe, called the Mataha Expedition, which was led by a Belgian researcher called Louis de Cordier. And he went to Hawara with the permission of the Council of Antiquities in Egypt, the Egyptian authorities, led by Dr. Zahi Hawass, who I’m sure you’ve heard of a few times.

So they went there and they had the permission of Hawass and the Egyptian authorities, and they basically tried to conduct some scans using, I think, ground penetrating radar. But what they discovered was not that the labyrinth was gone, but that the labyrinth was still there. And they came back with these results that showed these vast subterranean grids beneath the sand of Hawara, completely untouched and still existing.

And they wanted to release this, right? Because obviously that’s an incredible find. Like, you found the lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt, this elusive discovery that’s been known about since antiquity, but no one’s ever found. But apparently, according to Louis de Cordier and his team, Hawass and others didn’t want to release it. They were like, “You can’t put this out there.” They said it was a national security issue to release this data. And they basically kept finding themselves getting blocked. And eventually, after years and years of this, they were like, “You know what, f* this, I’m putting it out independently.” So they released the scan data to the world on a website that he made.

At the same time, a different team from a company called Merlin Burrows and a man called Tim Akers also conducted, I think, satellite scans of the area. So Tim Akers was — he’s dead now, but he was an ex-British military satellite scanning specialist. So a legit guy, worked with the British military, knows this stuff. They conducted scans of the same area and it came back with similar results.

JULIAN DOREY: Yes.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Still intact, hidden beneath the sand. And combine that with the results from the Mataha Expedition and you start to think, you know, there could be something incredible down here. This could be like the most shocking and important discovery in archaeology of our generation, right? If it’s true.

They also made the interesting claim that they found an object in there that was shaped like a Tic Tac and gave off a metallic signature, which is a pretty extraordinary thing to say.

JULIAN DOREY: That feels a little, shall we say, not earthly, but.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, well, exactly. Especially when you combine it with all the kind of UAP stuff and.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So, I mean, obviously this is what they’re saying. I’m just kind of reporting what they’re saying. But these are serious people saying this, and they can’t really explain it. They didn’t know what it was. They’re just like, “Yeah, there’s this object that’s shaped like a Tic Tac down there in this labyrinth that’s possibly metallic because it gives off a weird signature.” And to the radar-trained eye, it looks like not stone, it looks possibly metallic, which is an interesting thing to say.

Water, Preservation, and the Mystery of “Dippy”

And that’s kind of where we are with it, because no excavation is allowed there. The Egyptian authorities don’t want to do it. There’s also the problem of water. So the whole area is flooded. In Victorian times they dug an irrigation canal through the area basically for agricultural reasons for local farmers and stuff. And there’s big flooding around the area, and there was always the worry that the labyrinth had been flooded and if there was anything left, it’s destroyed by water damage and stuff.

But these scans seem to suggest that while there’s water damage at a certain level, the labyrinth is beneath that level. So the water damage is above the foundation — or the roof that Petrie thought was a foundation, which is actually maybe a roof — and the water’s above that, but the labyrinth is below. And whatever this Tic Tac object, which they nicknamed “Dippy” after the skeleton in the Natural History Museum in London, they think that that’s still intact and that whatever is in this labyrinth is possibly still preserved since antiquity.

And that raises a whole load of possibilities, right? At the very least, it could be an incredibly important discovery for our understanding of Egyptian civilization and Egyptian construction, and could be an extremely important discovery just within the mainstream narrative of Egyptology. At the very most, it could be a completely paradigm-shifting discovery. Like, how was this thing built so long ago? How was it built before the Egyptian dynasties? If Pliny the Elder is correct with this date, what the f* is Dippy, this potentially metallic object that’s a Tic Tac shape? So it’s very exciting. That’s kind of where the story is at the moment.

JULIAN DOREY: But they’re not allowed to go try to excavate because the government’s stopping them, so you can’t even.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, well, the government, the Egyptian authorities don’t really want to. I think probably because of cost rather than any kind of conspiracy, let’s-cover-it-up kind of thing. I think it would be very expensive to get all the water out. You’d have to redirect that canal, and it would have serious implications for local farmers and stuff like that. So it would be a tough thing to do. But the archaeological potential of the site is extremely interesting.

Construction Mysteries and Ancient Testimonies

JULIAN DOREY: Have they talked at all, or do we even have enough to be able to ask questions about the ability to build it where they did? And what I mean by that is, when you look at the Pyramid of Giza and some of the other pyramids, there’s a lot of evidence to state that the stone that’s used would have had to come from X number of miles away, it weighed this much, how the f* could they have even gotten it there, it would have taken this much time if they even could have physically at the time. Is there anything about this that also runs into those problems?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Well, yeah, the fact that it’s underground. I mean, how would you construct something so sophisticated underground? Because when you start looking at the ancient testimonies with this data and you say, okay, this is real, and their descriptions of it are incredible — they’re like, I can’t remember off the top of my head, but what they say about it is that it’s like this vast maze with these huge columns and pillars, and it’s a really incredible thing. And so I can’t remember their quotes off the top of my head, but people should watch Ben’s video, or I did a video on it as well. And the things they say about it just make it sound like an incredible construction. The fact that it was all done under the earth implies some seriously sophisticated construction techniques.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Because how do you do that underground? If you, pre-dynastic Egypt, they’re not supposed to have had anything close to this kind of level of technology, if it really is that old. So certainly a very interesting site.

What Herodotus Wrote

JULIAN DOREY: Just found what Herodotus wrote about this. I’ll read this for people. And this would have been, you know, between 484 and 425 BC when he was alive.

“The Egyptians made a labyrinth which surpasses even the pyramids. It has 12 roofed courts with doors facing each other. Six face north and six south and two continuous lines all within one outer wall. There are also double sets of chambers, 3000 altogether, 1500 above and the same number underground. We learned through conversation about the labyrinth underground chambers. Through conversation, the Egyptian caretakers would by no means show them, as they said the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. The upper we saw for ourselves. And they are creations greater than human.”

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s a crazy quote.

The Egyptian Labyrinth: Underground Chambers and Construction Mysteries

JULIAN DOREY: That’s a. Yeah, that’s like a. I want to put like a JZ after that. “The exits of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us overall. This is a roof made of stone like the walls. And the walls are covered with cut figures. And every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together near the corner where the labyrinth ends. Stands a pyramid 240ft high, on which great figures are cut. A passage to this has been made underground.”

So I was thinking about this when you were saying the underground labyrinth and how it’s underground, that’s really hard. Am I thinking about this totally wrong, and that they could have dug a giant hole and then built from there and then kind of covered it up? Is that them?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, maybe. But that would have been a pretty sophisticated construction project for a society that was apparently just coming out.

JULIAN DOREY: They didn’t have any caterpillar cranes and. Interesting. Did he say — can we go back to that quote real fast? He said he learned it through conversation. Right, we learned through conversation about the labyrinth’s underground chambers.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. So he wasn’t allowed into the actual underground part of the labyrinth.

JULIAN DOREY: Right. Okay. He says the upper we saw for ourselves. Okay, that makes sense.

MICHAEL BUTTON: So he saw the upper and thought that was ridiculous, not even human. And he wasn’t even allowed into the potentially more impressive bit, which was the subterranean part. So it’s interesting. And then you have these classical accounts and then they align perfectly with the modern data that shows that there potentially is still elaborate structure down there. And you think, yo, this is a potentially crazy archaeological discovery that we could make if the will is there to do such a thing, if the funding is there. And that’s why what Ben does is such important work, because he’s bringing this to light. He’s bringing this to the masses. And absolutely, yeah, it’s exciting.

JULIAN DOREY: And Ben does it in a very calm, collected, evidence-driven, kind of sober way, which I really like, because I think that it’s going to be really important when you try to bridge these divides between the academics and people actually trying to uncover some things here. The way you say it and the way you present the evidence I think is very important. And he’s, to me, I remember when he first went on Danny Jones’ podcast — he’s just a cool customer and I think that’s great.

And it’s another guy, by the way, who was inspired by other people that came before him to get into this. He was a normal dude and really started studying it and has made some amazing claims and some pretty impressive discoveries about what we don’t know down there. That’s now — it’s cool to see Joe Rogan bring that to the mainstream so that people can hear about it.

But I had Luke in here November 2024. We didn’t put out the episodes until the end of January, and then beginning of February we did a couple of episodes — one recording where it basically turned into the 27,000 year history of Egypt. And when you start to really — I think I literally called it like “20,000 year history of Egypt part one” and then part two — it’s really amazing stuff. But when you start to actually go through the full length of what we know, and then they inject in the pyramids kind of out of nowhere — and I’m going to up the years, so I’m not going to try to be exact with the years — but then talk about how quickly they could have made some of these structures. We already mentioned how difficult it would be to get some of the stone from the river all the way to where the pyramid is and everything. It’s like, you don’t need to run right away to, “Oh, the aliens did it” or something like that. But outside of that, what other explanations are there for something like the pyramid of Giza being able to be built in the time period and the length of time it took to actually build it to what it was built into?

The Giza Plateau: Construction Timelines and the Sphinx

MICHAEL BUTTON: I would argue that the conventional explanation for the construction of the entire Giza plateau doesn’t really make sense. According to the conventional argument, the Giza pyramid was constructed in at most 20 years, which I think is ridiculous. And then if you do the maths of how many stones there are, it’s something like they had to — I can’t remember the exact maths, but it’s a crazy figure — place a stone like every three minutes for 24 hours a day for that entire 20-year period. And transport the stone, quarry the stone, transport the stone, lift the stone precisely, place the stone — like every four minutes for 24 hours a day. I’m not sure that’s the correct maths, but it’s something like that.

JULIAN DOREY: There was an AI video last year that showed a bunch of giants lifting the stones. I thought that made a lot of sense.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Something like that, I’m sure. But yes, it doesn’t make sense. And then if you extrapolate out to the entire Giza plateau, according to the conventional explanation, it was all constructed within the reigns of a couple of pharaohs over a 60 to 70 year period. And it’s like, really? Because they had to level the whole thing flat, which is a ridiculous thing in itself. And then build the three pyramids and the Sphinx. And yeah, it’s very odd. And then there’s the whole question about the dating of the Sphinx and the water erosion hypothesis, which is really interesting.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, do you want to dig into that a little bit? I’ve talked about that with Matt Lacroix and Luke in the past a bunch. But yeah, some of the pictures there —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, I mean, it looks like water erosion. But the paradox there is that there was no rainfall in Egypt since the time of the green Sahara, which was a lot earlier — or at least the level of rainfall would have been a lot earlier — which suggests that the Sphinx is a lot older, because otherwise how would that weathering occur?

And the conventional explanation is no, it’s just wind and sand. But I don’t know, it doesn’t really look like wind and sand. Obviously I’m not a geologist, but there are geologists who have looked at it, like Dr. Robert Schoch, and they say that is water erosion — that’s clear signs of water erosion. And then there’s also the fact that the Sphinx was buried by sand for the vast majority of its history. When Napoleon discovered it and other people discovered it, it was buried in sand. Even the Egyptians excavated the Sphinx when it was covered in sand. So if it was covered in sand, then how did the wind and sand erode it when it was covered in sand? I’ve never really seen an explanation for that either.

JULIAN DOREY: But isn’t that the one where there’s a secret entrance that’s blocked off too, or a couple of them?

MICHAEL BUTTON: What, underneath the Sphinx?

JULIAN DOREY: I think there’s one like up top too.

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s what I’m saying.

JULIAN DOREY: I’m remembering that right. There was a picture we looked at. I want to say that was episode 153 with Matt Lacroix. I did 153 and 154 with him. I feel like there was a picture towards the end of that first podcast that we looked at. Maybe I’m mixing some things together, but maybe it’s a picture where Zahi Hawass is standing outside of it or something. But there’s a picture — I’m seeing it in my head — towards the top of the Sphinx where there’s like a manhole. And you can’t go there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Oh, yeah, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: Can you Google “aerial shot Sphinx entrance”? Let’s try that. I might be misremembering this. Refer to episode 153. I remember Matt talked about this and had some images. Might be that first one. I want to say that’s it, but I also don’t want to say for sure. I don’t know. Refer to episode 153.

But there’s something weird there where they won’t let people into certain areas. And again, it could be an explanation like the other thing we’re talking about, where they’re like, “Oh, it’d be too much money” or “stuff’s got to get moved” or “there’s too much water” — whatever it might be. But it’s also not a good look, because it makes you look like you’re hiding something or it makes you look like something’s going to be different.

And I don’t know, maybe I’m looking at this way too simply, but I’ve always thought, if there’s more insane history at a place, that’s a lot more tourist dollars that are going to come into your economy if you can prove something like that. So why wouldn’t you? I mean, maybe I’m thinking too much —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Dollars and cents, but you think so, wouldn’t you? Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe the more mystery the better. Maybe they don’t want to rule it out so people keep coming back. I don’t know. But yeah, there’s so much mystery in Egypt, so much mystery at Giza, and hopefully as the generations go past — there’s that quote from Max Planck, the physicist: “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, no, that’s good. I’ve heard that one before.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Once the old generation die off, maybe these things will change. But we’ll see.

JULIAN DOREY: We shall see.

Atlantis, the Flood Myth, and Lost Civilizations

JULIAN DOREY: Do you believe Atlantis existed?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I believe Atlantis is a very interesting story in relation to the wider flood myth. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I don’t necessarily say it existed. I think in conjunction with the flood myth — which is a consistent story across cultures all across the world — Atlantis is yet another one of them. Another famous story of a flood wiping everything out, which so many cultures across the world have. And it’s interesting because Plato puts the date of Atlantis, as many people have said, during the Younger Dryas. He says it’s 9,000 years before his time. Either way, if you do the calculations, it’s during the Younger Dryas, which is interesting. I wouldn’t rule out Atlantis existing, but that would then be the lost civilization. So yeah, you can’t say there’s evidence of it, but it’s an interesting story for sure.

JULIAN DOREY: What do you think of Jimmy Corsetti’s Richat Structure theory? I always pronounce that wrong.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s a good one. I really like how he does it. I really like the videos. I’ve watched the videos on it. It’s really interesting because it matches up in so many ways to Plato’s description.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: But again, is there any evidence, or is it just a good way of putting the story together? But it’s fun. I really enjoy his videos. I really enjoy the way he does it. And I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m not sure you can say that that definitely is Atlantis.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, I’d like to think something like that existed. And obviously there are a lot of writings in ancient Greece among some of the philosophers where they refer to it. I wonder sometimes, though, if it’s really like some of the — clearly not true — stories from the Bible. Think of a dude being swallowed by a whale and then living there and being spit out. Stuff like that. Was that Job? I mean —

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: But I wonder if it’s something like that, that’s more supposed to be a mirror for ourselves as a civilization to look in and aspire to be, rather than something that’s real. Whereas it seems like there’s significant evidence for something like El Dorado that exists based on written history and what would make sense over there. But Atlantis — they don’t even know. It could be here, it could be there, it could be this, it could be that. It’s all over the place. So I don’t know, but that’s one I always like to riff on, because it could be a lot of things.

The Genetic Bottleneck & Closing Thoughts

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. Well, I mean, the conventional idea is that Plato was just creating an allegory to talk about his own civilization. But that doesn’t mean there’s no truth behind it. And Plato isn’t the one who came up with the idea. He got it from Solon, who was — it was passed down through his family from Solon to Plato. And Solon got it from Egypt. And Egypt’s this mysterious place, and apparently these Egyptian priests were telling him about this civilization that existed and was wiped out in a single day and night. It’s an interesting story.

JULIAN DOREY: It certainly is. Are you working on any cool videos right now? On some places around the world, yeah.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I mean, I’ve got a few in the pipeline.

JULIAN DOREY: Where are you looking?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I just done a video that’s not come out yet, which is about this genetic bottleneck we see. It’ll be out by the time this episode comes out. But this genetic bottleneck we see in the late Neolithic, so around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, where basically 95% of men were wiped out, but no women. Which is really interesting because we see this massive bottleneck in the Y chromosome, which is the line that was passed down from father to son.

JULIAN DOREY: Luckiest 5% of all time.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, but that’s who we’re all descended from.

JULIAN DOREY: Right.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Because they were the survivors of what the conventional explanation is was a massive culture of violence in the late Neolithic — basically mass prehistoric war where all the men were going around killing everyone else and taking the women. So there’s no bottleneck in the mitochondrial DNA, which is the mother, but 95% of the men were wiped out in this period.

JULIAN DOREY: Where’s the evidence that they found this?

MICHAEL BUTTON: In genetics. It’s in our genes.

JULIAN DOREY: Oh, that’s it. So they’re just looking at our genes saying, oh, that had to be at that period right there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. And you can see the bottleneck. We literally drop right down to 5%. 95% of men were wiped out in this period, but the females were unconnected. And then you align it with archaeological finds, and there’s all these massive pits of bodies with weapon wounds and horrible injuries and people being slaughtered. And it’s quite an interesting period.

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, I haven’t heard that. Can we Google this genetic bottleneck? 95% of men exterminated.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: What, 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, you said?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I think so, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s also a wide range, too. So it happened over time.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah. But it’s across all of Asia, Africa and Europe. So the whole of the world, except for the Americas.

JULIAN DOREY: How large was the population of Homo Sapiens at the time, approximately?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Not sure off the top of my head, but it was getting big because this was after the agricultural revolution. And that’s the theory of what it is — we apparently settled down and — yeah, there you go, 95.

JULIAN DOREY: Here we go.

MICHAEL BUTTON: We settled down and we had something to fight for. We had property rights for the first — oh, potentially for the first time in history. Yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: Okay, so — “The forgotten prehistoric war that killed 95% of all men. How a brutal conflict 7,000 years ago left only 1 in 20 men alive. Within every single one of us lies a biological time capsule. 3.16 billion base pairs of DNA. These strands don’t just dictate eye color or height. They hide dark, twisted secrets from humanity’s past. One of the most chilling — a forgotten prehistoric war so catastrophic it nearly wiped out men entirely, leaving women outnumbering them 17 to 1. This wasn’t a minor skirmish or a regional feud. It was a global slaughter spanning continents, reshaping our genetic code and burying evidence of its horrors in mass graves. Until now.

The story begins with a genetic mystery. Researchers analyzing modern human genomes stumbled upon a shocking anomaly. A drastic bottleneck in male genetic diversity dating back roughly 7,000 years. During the Neolithic period, the male population across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East collapsed by up to 95%. Imagine a world where 3.9 billion men vanished overnight, leaving only 200 million survivors. This wasn’t a plague, famine, or natural disaster. The culprit was far more sinister — unbridled, systematic violence. While mitochondrial DNA passed down through mothers showed stable diversity, Y chromosomes passed from father to son reveal a near apocalyptic drop. Nature doesn’t discriminate by gender when wiping out populations. Volcanoes don’t target men. Storms don’t spare women. This—”

MICHAEL BUTTON: Oh, wow.

JULIAN DOREY: Okay, so — “This was a human made catastrophe. A coordinated eradication of males so extreme it left scars in our genes. But where are the bodies? Turns out they’re everywhere. Over 250 Late Neolithic Massacre sites have been uncovered in Europe alone. Skeletons tell gruesome tales — skulls shattered by axes, arrowheads embedded in ribs, bones stripped of flesh—” All right, yeah, click to read the full story. But that actually, that last part answered a question I was going to ask. Are there — I was going to say, like, even in other parts of history, are there biological diseases and things that could discriminate by gender? Do we know of any examples of that?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I don’t think so. Not that I know of, anyway.

JULIAN DOREY: I mean, that evidence of — they found the sites of massacres with skulls bashed in and stuff — obviously paints the picture here.

MICHAEL BUTTON: That’s crazy, though.

JULIAN DOREY: 95% overnight.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, it’s crazy. Not overnight, but —

JULIAN DOREY: Yeah, you know what I mean. Over time right there.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JULIAN DOREY: They’re just dwindling down over and over again.

MICHAEL BUTTON: We almost wiped ourselves out there. And we’re all descended from the winners — the most horrifically violent of them. That’s who we all come from.

JULIAN DOREY: Survival of the fittest.

MICHAEL BUTTON: And this was quite recent. This was 7,000 years ago, which is recent when you look at —

JULIAN DOREY: — the story of Göbekli Tepe.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah, we’re just savagely killing each other.

JULIAN DOREY: What else are you working on right now?

MICHAEL BUTTON: I can’t remember. I haven’t — obviously I’ve been in America for a little while, so I haven’t actually done too much. But that’s one that’s coming out tonight, man. I’ve got a whole list, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. All the historical mysteries — I’m coming for them all.

JULIAN DOREY: That’s what I’m saying. Everyone’s got to check out your channel because you cover every part of the globe and it’s only going to get bigger and bigger. So it’s awesome to see what you’re doing, bro. It’s great to have you here in America too, to hop on. You’re going to have to do this again. You’ve got to start coming to America a little more too, mate.

MICHAEL BUTTON: I’d love to. And I’m really grateful for you inviting me on. It’s been an awesome chat and an awesome experience to come out to your beautiful country. So yeah, very grateful.

JULIAN DOREY: Excellent. All right, brother, we’ll do it again sometime.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Thanks, Julian.

JULIAN DOREY: All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

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