[Music] foreign [Music] the Great Pyramids some of the wonders of the world they've been there for thousands of years you're highly familiar with them you if you're old enough remember King Tut's Museum tour of the late 70s and early 80s but if you asked yourself how exactly they build the pyramids I mean they just cut a bunch of stone and put them in a pyramid shape but how'd they do that with no electricity or Hydraulics thousands of years ago and why are they still there pretty much unchanged after thousands of years it's kind of an amazing architectural and Engineering feat isn't it how did they pull that off that ancient civilization we're not exactly sure is the truth Randall Carlson has some ideas about this and he's qualified to have them he's an architect a master builder a geometrician an Explorer and a scholar and he's been taking a very close look at the pyramids and also other ancient structures around the world and asking questions about how they got there and what their existence means for the rest of us very interesting person with a very interesting perspective joining us now for the next hour Randall Carlson thank you Mr Carlson great to see you yes thanks for having me Tucker so uh very few people get to a place in life where they can be considered an expert on the construction of the pyramids how did you get to this place like where are you from what have you done how did you get to where you were now well I originally from Minnesota yeah I'm a third generation Builder um and so I started learning to build and craft my father Yes and and what kind of Builder was he he was mostly a house Builder yep yeah but you know he used a lot of geometry he designed all of his own built about 250 houses in his career wow just him and my grandfather working together um so I kind of grew up on the on the building sites and just started liking construction build was he good oh he was very good yeah Swedish Carpenter yes the best in the world if I can say yeah well of course it goes without saying it's true it's great so uh I grew up and then uh in the early 1970s I I was in this kind of this group this kind of yoga meditation group and they wanted to build a some back in those days it was Buckminster Fuller dope yeah yeah remember those yeah Bucky domes yeah Bucky domes yeah so they wanted to build a couple of Bucky domes and nobody in the group knew how to do that so they called on me and my two younger brothers and we kind of spearheaded the construction of these things but I had to get my head wrapped around all of this geometry because this was like nothing we had learned I mean I knew how to lay out a roof and right enough trigonometry to figure out they could be the Raptors yeah you know in in building its rise over run everything rise over run exactly but you know that's the tangent function in in uh trigonometry anyway so this was a whole different set of geometry it was very challenging but we kind of you know Rose to the challenge we built these things they're probably I'm sure they're no longer in existence what was they made out of well two by fours and then we uh banded them together just with four inch PVC pipe we drilled cross section through and then used iron strap banding put the whole thing together and then plywooded it and then um put Roofing on it and that was it wow but yeah so um it was very much fun so then one of the domes we did the the architect that designed it designed it after a Islamic mosque so it had a it came to Aspire so that was really challenging but it was very unique and it was featured in International publication called shelter a big oversized kind of almost magazine-like I think recently reprinted but so of course since my brothers and I built it I had to get a copy of it but in there it kind of went into the history of architecture and went into some of the geometry in the background of many of these buildings and sacred structures and stuff and this is 1973 and I found that extraordinarily fascinating and that's kind of what led me into the geometry that they were using and the more I got into it the more profound it became so this was kind of uh the launching my descent into the rabbit hole initially can I ask you to pause and and ask what do you mean by profound how is geometry profound well because it links together all kinds of phenomena from the micro to the macro scale it's complicated and I'm launched soon going to be launching a whole series of I guess you could call them classes or lectures where I explain in detail and show the principles but you probably heard of the Freemasons yeah of course right right okay so now the Freemasons were the custodians of this geometry for centuries and it goes back to the days of Plato and Pythagoras and then obviously earlier than that the Egyptians were very much uh imbued into the principles of geometry you mentioned the Great Pyramid there's so much or the pyramids there's so much we could talk about about that I am not going to claim to know how they were built however there is information encoded into them that's pretty unambiguous once you work through it it's beyond coincidence that really points to the fact that some of these cultures in those times had more knowledge sophisticated knowledge about the scientific workings of our world and the the cosmos than they have ever been given credit for and a lot of mainstream views are are very dismissive of this idea but the the proof is in the pudding I mean if you work through it it comes to the point where at what point do you go this is beyond coincidence you see and the other thing that I'm sorry can you give us an example so you're a builder yeah um so you would know so presumably yeah yeah you you build things can you give us an example of a physical characteristic of the pyramids or some characters the pyramids that suggest that the people who built them had knowledge that they probably shouldn't have had three thousand years the angle of the Great Pyramid 51.84 degrees is a very unique angle it has a lot of you know um a lot of uh significance to it uh that I think it's very difficult for me to explain it's a lot easier for me to just show diagrams and cross sections and things like that but one of the things is that when you go into these ancient structures what you find is that whether you're going to evade a culture in Ancient India whether you're going to even like the building of Gothic Cathedrals the megalithic stone structures of Northern Europe from four thousand five thousand years ago even the Monumental Earthworks of North America when you begin to analyze them their Dimensions their uh their orientation to the sky and so on what becomes apparent is they're all working from a common template which is really pretty remarkable on different continents and different continents yes yes okay this is the mystery how I don't know I can't answer that but it's there it's it you can show it I I've demonstrated it over and over again how the geometry they used and how our systems of measurement are also derived from the same system of geometry I'll give you a a simple example two of the uh predominant units of measurement in ancient Egypt where the Riemann and the Royal Cubit the very simple relationship between those is that if you Dr Riemann is um it's about 1.2165 feet on the side which is just over 14 inches a royal Cubit is just over 20. about 20.6265 inches now if you
draw a square this one Riemann on a side it's diagonal will be a royal Cubit so right there there was a fundamental geometrical relationship between the two basic units of measurement used in ancient Egypt if you look at pictures of the pyramid you'll see it's on it's called the circle the circle is a a section of Bedrock that was cut and it's cut to be exactly one Royal cubit in in thickness 20.6265 inches um now if you look at a square and it's diagonal it's irreconcilable just like Pi Pi you you know is an irrational number one point yes yeah 3.141592 etcetera etcetera yes okay so the the diagonal of a square is to its side in the ratio of the square root of two to one the square root of two is an irrational number you cannot reconcile so you could make the side of a square a whole number its diagonal is now irrational or you could make its diagonal uh rational and decide is irrational however if you go up to the next Dimension and you draw one square Riemann take its diagonal and use that the side of a square which is a royal Cube it you get two uh Square riemanns so in other words once you go from linear to area now it's perfectly reconcilable a square Royal Cubit is exactly equal to one to two square riemanns now it goes further because you can now take the die if you so so what they did know is they would take a square imagine this you've got a big building site laid out you drive in a CO a pole that's going to be the the corner of the structure It's usually the northeast corner because in the northern hemisphere that was considered to be uh the darkest place of the building once it was finished so you put the the the pole into the ground the stake into the ground the building grows from that this was the philosophy behind it grows from that and what you end up with is is it takes form and grows it grows from Darkness into greater illumination and that was a philosophical idea behind behind it the other thing they did is they would make rectangles so you got a rectangle that's one Riemann on the side picture it's 14.58 inches roughly make a rectangle it's long side is a royal Cubit the way you would get that is you simply draw a Riemann underground right it's Royal Cubit now you take that as a you're you're knotted rope or your chain whatever you're using and you draw an arc which is equal to the diagonal of the square and you use that to develop a rectangle okay then you take the diagonal of that rectangle whose long side would be the square root of 2 times its short side and you measure its diagonal and it becomes the root 3. and that leads to the qubit that was used throughout Palestine a thousand years later called the Palestinian Cubit is that the one described in the Old Testament yes used to measure the ark Etc yes yes and to build King Solomon's Temple yes yeah and it goes from there so it's a whole system of of unified geometry and one is derived from the other yes yes it's a whole system and and again this is I'm going to be putting all of this out there I've already put out pieces of it so in in the uh I do con classes and and workshops and things in this where I what I do is I get people to get big drawing pad and I get I make custom compasses they use a straight edge and a compass and I take them step by step through the simple drawings up to the more complex drawings and that's the way you really learn it you can hear about it you can you can be told about it but the way you really get it in here is because by doing the drawings it integrates mind eye and hand by there you get you get some really solid learning so what I try to do and then I bring in all kinds of examples you know that spans the you know the the term of History so I go back to Egypt I go back Samaria the the the stepped ziggurats I go to Anchor wat which anchor wat as um in Cambodia yeah in Cambodia one of the the vastus uh urban area ever in this city right and at the heart of that thing is a layout of a temple there's 108 prominences on it which is a number you find over and over and over again in these ancient traditions and it's based on this I show in my classes and things how it's defined precisely by this square root of two rectangle where the short side is one length you'd start with a square lay it out in the ground and it's diagonal then gives you the length of the Temple so it's right there it's embedded in the in Anchor watch so what I mean so I sense that there is something very profound at the heart of what you're saying and I'm still trying to get to what that so so my understanding of units of measurement was that they were they were relative so like the hand is used to measure horses or whatever right or a foot is about a the length of your foot Etc they were derived from just common human experience but you're suggesting what you're explaining suggests that there's something that the unit of measurement is kind of inherent to nature maybe yes yes I would say 100 so what is that and how did so many disparate cultures Through Time Hit Upon This the same thing because it could have been anything else right I mean it could yeah like we could decide if we were making up like the French Revolution did we're making up our new units of measurement yeah and we're just gonna you know the weight of this glass of water is now the basic measurement of weight right well the interesting thing Tucker is that when you get into it there's a whole Canon of numbers that become associated with the units of measurement how they were applied to building and those numbers have symbolic significance to these ancient cultures that used them I mentioned that the 108 yes um spiers on on um anchor wat well now we can go to Nature and we'll find that if you take the diameter of the sun 864 000 miles times 108 gives you the distance from the Sun to the Earth go to the Moon which is 2160 miles 108 times its diameter is the distance from the Earth to the Moon so there's an example of how these ratios these numbers are actually embedded in the structure of the solar system now I didn't wait a second so so there's no way of course that an ancient culture I mean I'm part of a modern culture and I didn't know that and there's no way they could have could have known that well this is the assumption but I don't know here's the thing well that's right we don't know of course we don't know thank you so I'm trying to say okay let's just take a timeout consider that there might be a whole lot more to the ancient history than conventional Academia is recognized and and keep this in mind Tucker you may already know this I mean if you look at our history what recorded written history five thousand years if we look at the current round of History you go back 10 000 years you look at the the the domestication of animals that the transition to sedentary Lifestyles yes you look at the dispersion of languages um all of these kinds of things ten thousand years ago right but humans modern like ourselves I've been around for 180 200 000 years at least modern skeletons of humans that are indistinguishable people you'd recognize yeah yeah if you dressed them up in a you know put some skin and meat on them and put them in a nice suit yeah so here's the question that I've always had when I began to learn that when I was looking more into anthropology was like okay well so wait a minute we've gone from feudalism to the space age in a few hundred years when my two grandfathers were born I think what the fastest human had ever traveled at that time was probably um by horseback unless you know they've been shot out of a cannon or something you know but uh and that was the main mode of transportation on foot horseback Carriage right when my grandparents were born in the 1890s so think about that a Century Century and a half what we've gone to now imagine 10 000 years in the future how easily could a couple of centuries of progress get lost in the noise be pretty easy in the in the chaos that humans inevitably create or that nature is created because we aren't paying attention to the no that's right and that's kind of what I was about to talk about if you want to go there yeah I do I do but I just but I don't want to lie to over the significance of what you said about geometry and numbers because I so one of the problems for normal non-science people like me was the 1995 million men March in Washington by Louis farrakhanum which I covered and he went into this now famous speech but numerology and everyone's like oh this farrakhan's crazy therefore there's no significance to number patterns at all because he's crazy he discredited it but I remember thinking at the time yeah okay whatever he's crazy I get it but maybe like what is he talking about exactly I mean people have been fixated on number patterns on certain numbers above other numbers for thousands of years why do you think that is well I remember when I was on one of my The Joe Rogan podcasts with Graham Hancock and we had this debate with uh skeptic Michael Shermer who writes a column for scientific American I remember him saying that well this it's it's pattern recognition people are seeing patterns his take was well those patterns aren't really there they're projecting these patterns I agreed with him and I said I think this is they're seeing patterns but the patterns are there and it could be there's an internal component maybe somehow these patterns are structures of our own Consciousness right right but they're most definitely objectively verifiably provable to exist within the natural order of things all you got to do is stop and look without preconceptions uh and you'll see that it's there but how would we how would we know that or how right I mean it it suggests a connection between people in the natural world that we don't consciously perceive right and you know here we come down is it it's is it something from the inherent to within the the the the the common conscious field of human beings or as a diffusionist was there you know somebody who had this kind of information this knowledge that brought it to these people if you take a lot of the Legends and myths at face value that's what it's suggesting I think it could be a combination of both because the myths are pretty explicit on yeah there was this group of Outsiders that came in that taught us about geometry and astronomy and and then we begin to incorporate it into our culture and they've perhaps left a kind of a template which brings us to the whole question that I'm trying to raise is that is it possible that there's more to the human story on Earth than conventional scholarship has at this point recognized well we didn't know dinosaurs existed not that long ago so that's like a fairly new discovery right so of course there's a lot we don't know like right yeah so what are the markers as someone who's interested in anthropology and archeology would you say for human civilization that predates the recorded history that we have that are like kind of a not it doesn't really sort of make sense like are there the pyramids are clearly one are there others where you think what is that well here's the problem what what has not been recognized until now is the magnitude of some of the changes that have unfolded on this planet of ours in the time that we humans have been here do you mean physical changes physical changes yes yes catastrophic changes yes things that could have easily erased whatever was already there whatever was changes let me put it to you this way changes on a scale that if they were to happen today an archaeologist 10 000 years from now would find very little trace of us even having been here I mean changes that are on that in the glacial period the Ice Age yeah you've had since the time that humans first modern humans and we don't know how far back they go I mean I used to say 150 000 years and then there were new discoveries put it back to 180 000. now there's been more discoveries suggesting 200 000 I don't know what the limit's going to be um like Graham Hancock says these things keep getting older and older um but within that time there has been a whole succession of glacial interglacial oscillations those shifts are quite dramatic can you tell us what that means glacial interglacial oscillation okay that would be a good segue into our first slide okay can we look at our first slide so there's ice age Earth now that's what the Earth would have looked like 15 to 20 000 years ago what you've got to do is consider that Northwestern Europe mantle and Ice Northern America mantle and ice up to a mile and a half thick reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific all of Canada was buried under ice still is no Canada's not bad just kidding intellectually perhaps some of the uh yeah but no you had me got what okay sorry no Tucker It's not still there so there's no human civilization in Western Europe or well that's becomes the question would there have been civilization in say unglaciated certainly wasn't it certainly wasn't any um civilization in the area that of the glaciation now when you have a cycle of glaciation coming it pretty much obliterates everything that was there before the climate change is associated with the transition into an ice age and out of an ice age are almost inconceivably extreme they really I mean you're talking about uh at the end of the Ice Age you know this was something that used to be conceived as taking a hundred thousand years well is our dating improved it went from a hundred thousand to fifty thousand from fifty thousand to twenty thousand radiocarbon dating you know became a thing in the 1950s and as we begin to to learn more we started thinking well wait a minute there are forests growing in Canada 40 to 50 000 years ago how's that possible well if if there was you know a mile of ice over Canada what happened is the span of time between these events just kept Contracting and Contracting then in the 1980s 1990s we began to extract high resolution ice cores from Greenland from Antarctica yeah from Mountain glaciers yet the story they told was of climate change that occurred inconceivably fast where you might have had 10 to 12 degrees Centigrade which is close to like 18 degrees Fahrenheit literally in less than five years now this is very dimensional really oh yeah yeah uh I wish you know if we had four or five hours Tucker to go I would have brought a whole lot more material to show you this you know but yeah I'm not exaggerating these are uh if that happened excuse me if that happened now you would have a lot of dead people we're screwed yeah if that happened now yeah so what you had there's this period called you might have heard of it the younger driest it was this episode that brought the ice age to an end now because of astronomical forces the Earth it's tilt the the shape of its orbit and so on it's distance from the Sun there are gradually accumulating changes in the amount of thermal energy reaching the surface of the Earth these are called emelankovic forces Okay so generally the thought was is these milankovic forces what were behind the period of glaciation and deglaciation the problem is they play out over tens of thousands of years we're looking at episodes now that happened within a few thousand years because if you go back to that slide we were just looking at thirteen thousand years ago fourteen thousand years ago you had an enormous mass of ice and a few thousand years later it's gone now in order to get rid of that ice it requires energy you don't melt six million cubic miles of ice without some source of energy to do the work and that's the conundrum and if it was first uh identified in the early 1970s once they had radiocarbon dating in hand and they saw how fast this the The Disappearance of the ice was they're scratching their heads and going wait a second how could it you know five six thousand years we thought it was a hundred thousand years but now radiocarbon dating is showing us it has happened one tenth or one you know 20th of the time how do you explain that they called it the energy Paradox because in 73 74 there were several conferences held several Papers written in which they identified the energy Paradox and they couldn't come up with an answer they said there's a taking the data somewhere or in the modeling we're going to put it on the shelf and we'll get back to it they've never really gotten back to it the point is is that this energy had to have come from somewhere so what are the possible so the the energy that melted this these miles of glacial ice that covered a lot of the Earth's surface we don't know that happen it wasn't just because it got sunnier out no unless you know unless the sun was involved on some level exponentially bound anything we've experienced right that is not now right but it wasn't just like we had a Hot August one year no no okay no uh but what has happened in the interim is now in 2007 there was a paper published it says ignited the firestormer controversy about what happened to the great megafauna these great you know because at the time all of this was going on when when when those ice sheets were over North America uh you know you had this tremendous megafauna in the world you had the the mammoths and you had the giant uh uh Cave Bears you had yeah you had the the Irish elk with with 10 and 12 foot antler spans you had you had sloths the size of elephants you had you had Lions the size of horses you had dire wolves I mean the list went on and on and on and with a geological eye blink they were gone to put that in perspective the number of species of megafonda that disappeared within this period of deglaciation eleven to three glaciation with the ices disappeared during the melting during the melting yeah exactly you got it during the melting over 100 species disappeared worldwide big animals about big animals megaphone is defined as an animal that's more than 44 kilograms or 100 pounds roughly in body weight so we're we're all Mega mammals right but the ones today the lions and tigers and bears and everything else deer and Antelope and whatever go ahead make the whole list about 110 to 120 species right in there depending on how you divide it up that was about the number of species that went extinct during this episode of deglaciation now think about that like every Big mammal on earth just goes extinct well half half of all the big because the other half are the ones that are on the planet today you know the the the the the giant American Bison was six feet tall at the shoulder now you I know if you've ever been out in a herd of bison yeah yeah they're impressive beasts yeah now imagine a bison that's twice the body mass so you know so it seemed to selectively affect really large animals and that makes sense because if you have a tremendous amount of habitat destruction what that means is it it it's going to affect the food supply the larger animals that require more food that have a longer gestation period of animals of young in the womb that have a longer period of time of requirement of nurturing until they're viably independent all of that is longer so if you have habitat destruction it's going to selectively go to the top of the food chain whereas the smaller animals the Scavengers these things they're going to have a field day because there's going to be a lot of carrying that they're going to be able to eat and we know like that in place you may have heard you know about woolly mammoths that have been found quick frozen flash frozen yeah permafrost which is still a mystery um what does that mean why because nobody how do you explain Well Clarence bird's eye who was the the the the inventor of the fast fast Flash freezing of food yes right Bird's Eye Foods he was commissioned to do a study he looked at it and said wait a second we're looking at like in the bear South Commandment that was discovered in 1901 with the with some of the warming that came out of the little Ice Age there was a bank of permafrost up on the barasovica river in Siberia that collapsed exposed this woolly mammoth that had been frozen now in this mammoth's mouth is flowering plants that had been eating right the mammoth was sitting on his haunches with both back hips broken right there was something like 20 different varieties of plants and say sedges and things in the stomach that was undigested right so what he looked at is said how quickly and in the whole Mammoth I mean it still had marbled flesh the skin was intact I mean I've got pictures of it that were taken in in my slideshows and stuff I didn't bring them here today but you had so he looked at it he said well the contents of the stomach is not even putrified the entire content even the cells of the the mammoth are frozen so how fast would it take a six ton Mammoth to freeze that the contents of the stomach would not even putrify and I think what he came up with if I remember it's been a while since I've read the studies um like 10 hours so if you're going to freeze a woolly mammoth six tons of body mass in 10 hours what kind of temperature change does that require well so so the animal is eating flowering plants and literally it appears that moments later he's slammed onto his haunches of his penis was erect within the permafrost which is a sign that he was rapidly suffocated so he slammed to his haunches presumably buried is that a symptom of Rapid Suffocation yes yes Under Pressure great deal of pressure so he was buried instantly and then Frozen and that's where he's been for thousands of years until the planet warmed a bit in 19 early 1900s in this Bank of permafrost collapsed exposed uh the mammoth's head and it was a whole year later before scientists were had gotten there to study that this carcass and by that time wolves had devoured the flesh off of the skull but they were able to exhume and I guess preserve it to some extent in the Leningrad Museum and there's photographs of it just how it was found so that's it it's those kind of mysteries that really so what is the I mean what's your guess on that Tucker I have pondered this literally for decades and I don't have an answer but I think we might be approaching a possibility of of excuse me of of an explanation and to be clear this is not the only holy mammoth found in permafrost no woolly rhinos have been found yeah lots of creatures now if you come over into Alaska there's Frozen permafrost that has the remains of thousands of Mega mammals in it they're not intact though they're completely disarticulated and they're mixed in with the the now you've just been through a major storm here so you've had a taste of catastrophic weather events right you see trees knocked down sure now in this permafrost in Alaska and there's been some relatively recent studies on that um there's found the remains of trees that have been uprooted and torn apart and mingled in with those trees by the thousands are animal in disarticulated animal remains what else is interest Frozen yeah right but now it's not frozen intact I mean this is like animals that have been literally ripped apart disarticulated is a fancy word for saying ripped apart right mingled in with that interestingly are microspheros iridium Nano Diamonds the signatures of some kind of an impact of something from space mingled into that permafrost in this study which four or five years ago so I know some of the people that were involved in that study um and uh I didn't come prepared to really to talk about that in detail maybe we could pick that up in another discussion but but um it looks like there was some type of a cosmic impact event this is the thing that this 2007 paper that I mentioned earlier that was so controversial where they proposed that the extinction of the megafauna was due to some kind of a a cosmic impact event um and now this this theory has evolved it's it met with a firestorm of criticism why why was it criticized yes well I'll tell you the number of reasons okay I think that gets us right back to politics right because right now the narrative is that any kind of catastrophic change involving our planet is our fault we we're doing it by burning fossil fuel whatever okay right um also you may be like Extinction Rebellion you've heard we're going to cause the sixth great mass extinction and the previous five you know would include the Cretaceous tertiary boundary of 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs that would include the the end devonian the the uh Jurassic Extinction the the late Permian where 95 of all species on Earth went extinct these are obviously natural events because they happen long before human beings were here right it appears that they're a result of a combination of two forces extraterrestrial which we would call exogenic from the outside and perhaps volcanic and seismic which would be endogenic from the inside of the planet I think there's a there's a whole line of research now that links the two that sometimes great impacts on Earth might as a response trigger intense volcanism now so what you have is a double whammy there you know you have you have the sulfur dioxides and the poisons extruded from volcanoes erupting you also have all of the things brought in by what you've heard the term nuclear winter yes Cosmic winter is was the actually original term in the aftermath of the Cretaceous tertiary boundary event which was the dinosaur killer the dust blocked the Sun the dust and and soot from the fires and everything blocked the sun right well now it appears that this similar not on the same scale or magnitude but a similar type of event half happened around twelve thousand to thirteen thousand years ago and this was connected with the sudden demise of the megafauna the the rapid and sudden disappearance of the Clovis culture in North America huge spikes of climate change warming Cooling that happened repeatedly like the the climate of the planet just went for a couple of thousand years this is the young What's called the younger driest younger driest was an older driest from the older driest to the younger driver what period was that this would last from roughly 14 500 years ago to about 11 500 about a three thousand year period I don't think that the the extinction of the megaphone was one Fell Swoop I think it was a series of blows that finally brought these great creatures to an end brought the planet out of the Ice Age and basically opened the door onto the modern Epoch in which our own civilization but we know that human beings lived yes throughout all of this but we're also finding out that it appears that there was a major depopulation event associated with that time period this is Cutting Edge new research but it really looks like the human population crashed and you basically had groups that survived but were dispersed around the planet which has obscured the genetic signal right because if it was just one single isolated group there would be a strong genetic single signal there's not a strong genetic signal which would suggest but what we see is that places like the Clovis there was 50 clovisites at least in unglaciated North America most of them were suddenly abandoned quarries where they had been uh pulling out the the church and their their stones that they were using for their their tools and everything you had uh campsites with with the middens the shell piles and stuff that was The Refuge almost as if overnight a majority of them were abandoned and the old assumption one by one at the same period at the same not only at the same period but almost within the same day as the dating is honing in on when these sites disappeared now the old idea was oh well these guys picked up and moved somewhere else problem is you go somewhere else and it looks like the same thing happened so yeah so now what's appearing what's apparent is is that yeah it's not that they picked up and moved they were essentially exterminated in these events that wiped out half the megafauna so what kind of events are we talking about that's that's the thing that I came here I wanted to show you a few things because all over the globe now that we know how to look for it we can see the signs of this trauma can I ask you a philosophical question absolutely because you're you're blowing my mind good um but I almost never hear anybody talk like this and what I hear instead is people telling me that they know how everything happened and they have no questions they only have answers and there's a kind of certainty or absolute almost religious certainty that enters into all explanations of the past and future and what you're saying is a lot of stuff we don't understand why don't I hear that more that's exactly what I'm saying I'm I'm saying that there's a lot of mystery about the story as there would be but what I mean by Def I mean how you know a lot of stuff's unknowable obviously yeah why don't I hear people who call themselves scientists speak with that kind of reverence for the limits of their knowledge okay I think one thought is this in the early days of the scientific study of the earth going back to the 1820s 1830s up to the post-civil war time these were mostly gentlemen scientists you know doctors um preachers that yeah a lot of clergymen actually a lot of clergymen yeah exactly right now these guys are going out looking at Landscapes without preconceptions yes over and over and you could do a list of from William Buckland to Georgia cuvier to Adam Sedgwick to Roderick Murchison the list goes on they were all catastrophists their interpretation of the landscape was that really some big events happened in the past right well what happens my interpreter I'm an Outdoorsman so I'm outside every day and that is definitely my interpretation just from looking at the landscape you got it okay so then what happened you had uh James Hutton William Playfair and Charles Lyle who came along who established the Creed of uniformitarianism gradualism the idea here and it's a it's a very useful working hypo hypothesis for looking and understanding ancient Global change basically it says that the that the president is the key to the Past so you you look at processes that are going on today a river is eroding its bank right right a glacier moves over the landscape and creates glacial till in terminal Mooring right so you see this Glacier you know I mentioned a little ice age well the little ice age was the the coldest period um since the entire Holocene began about 12 actually the date of the Holocene which is our current geological epoch and to put precisely at about 11 600 years ago and that was the transition from the previous Epoch the pleistocene which lasted for two and a half million years into a completely different Epoch the one that we're in now the that saw again the rise of farming agriculture all of this the dispersion of languages like I mentioned and then ultimately led to the rise of our own civilization after multiple aborted attempts we've now gotten to a level unprecedented throughout the Holocene right so the uniformitarianists or the the the the gradualists they won today and they were involved in establishing the academic institutions at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century that pretty much established the Creeds and the um you know the dogmas that were going to be taught so they said yes you can look at these forces at work today and extrapolate backwards from that to understand everything that happened well like I said it's a powerful working methodology no doubt but it's only half the equation the other half of the equation that was thrown out the baby thrown out with the bathwater is what the early guys were looking at catastrophes seeing evidence in the landscape that they said this looks like it was how do you interpret this other than some gigantic flight well then the the gradual said oh you're trying to get us back to biblical literalism get out of here we don't want to hear any of that so by the early 20th century what had happened is the gradualist Dogma became entrenched in Academia and then there's the famous story of Jay Harlan Bretz in the 1920s who documented this evidence up in the Pacific Northwest for these tremendously giant floods and they said you're crazy get out of here we don't want to hear any of that took 30 years before geologists finally actually began to look at the evidence he'd been doggedly accumulated yes right when they finally started taking a look at it they had to go you know what there is no other way to interpret like flooding Idaho right like big floods big floods you want to see some of that sure let's look at the next slide here and we'll go through a few things uh because that would be the Pacific Ocean going back to the Rockies kind of thing not no this is that's much earlier when we when we get to slide number two I'm going to show you this is this is where I had my initial Epiphany and I'm going to show you it's called an underfit river is the geological term an underfit river ah here we go so if you look at this let's see there's we don't have a pointer do we no okay what I'm going to try to show you here is you can see in 1969 I'm just a punk out of high school and I'm standing on you can see there's if you look at it there's a huge Channel there right you can see there's a there's an embankment on the south an embankment on the North it's three miles wide the modern Minnesota rivers that little blue curly thing on the floor of that yeah I was standing I I went out here one day was on an outing and I was standing on a 250 foot high Bluff on the Northern Rim looking down into this huge awning Valley and seeing the Minnesota River down there and I looked across and I could see this these embankments matching the ones that I was standing on over miles away in the distance and I just remember looking back and forth between the the little river that was I could see down below me and it had embankments on it and those embankments were like miniature versions of that big thing there and I remember thinking is it possible this whole thing was filled with water nah get out of here and I just didn't think there was even anything that I could ever even grasp or get my head around I forgot about it a decade goes by in the interim I was had been started studying geology more I was also very interested in mythology so I was reading stories from you know ancient cultures mythology one of the themes over and over and over again in all of these ancient stories was these ideas of these great catastrophes that engulfed the Earth destroyed years we all know the biblical story of Noah's flood but we begin to see you know I began to you know see the the Greek Tales of ducalian who survived a flood uh who survived a flood Manu and India who survived a great flood and the Hopi Indians had tales about gigantic floods and I'm sensing a theme Here Yeah well all over the planet you've got these cultural groups that have these stories about these giant floods and they're not texting each other these stories simply not they're not no they're not on Twitter and texting each other as far as we know um so anyways I'm looking at that and and then a year later I'm traveling out I spent the whole like four months just hiking and and back in those days we could hitchhike yeah I was here I hitchhiked a lot I rode with friends sometimes traveling over most of the western states and everywhere I went I'm like I just got this impression that I couldn't shake that there's there's a story here that goes beyond just all these Landscapes were created one grain of sand and one drop of water at a time and I remember one of the one of the really insightful experiences I had was going through the Columbia River Gorge yeah in in uh that forms the the border between Washington Oregon and Washington and looking at those Landscapes and the magnitude of the gorge there is just struck me so years later not you know six seven eight years later I started going okay I'm gonna read some actual geology I started reading geology textbooks uh a few years later I enrolled in school and started taking geology courses um just to get my head wrapped around the the ACT what what are the geologists saying about this so the more I got into it the more I realized though you know there seems to be dogmas that don't really recognize now at this time by the time we get to the end of the 1960s and into the 70s mainstream geology had accepted the reality of these giant floods up in the Pacific Northwest how are they contrived an explanation that was that where they were trying to force fit it into the gradualist model which we know from glaciers when they melt they form lakes in front of the glaciers yeah pro-glacial Lakes right we know that glaciers can form temporary dams and it will allow this melt water to fill up and at some point the pressure exceeds the ability of the glacier to retain it and particularly Iceland is prone to this where there's volcanoes that will that will erupt under the ice sheet it'll create a reservoir of melt water and typically two to three weeks later that melt water will have percolated through the ice it will discharge at the snout of the glacier in a Icelandic term is yokolops which is a catastrophic flood I began to look at some of the estimates there was a hydrologist by the name of paleo hydrologist by the name of Victor Baker who studied who published a study in 1973 where he was up in a valley just Northeast of the city of Spokane Washington he was able to look at the slope of the valley the width of the valley and he found high water marks on the valley so Engineers use this chassis formula it's called and it basically tells you what Peak discharge is and it's based upon primarily the gradient the faster the the steeper the greater the faster the water is moving the channel geometry which can be determined by where the high water marks are right then they introduce a coefficient of roughness because of a smooth channel will have one kind of flow if you introduce it'll introduce turbulence he did this before he's called the step Backwater method he calculated that the flow Peak discharge through there was as much as 800 million cubic feet per second how do you even wrap your head around what that is it's uh you know too much for trout fishing yeah too much for white water rafting for a year absolutely I mean that's enough to completely transform a landscape oh completely and the estimates are if you took every single River on Earth every continent think of all the Great Rivers North America oh yeah I've been on a lot of Africa yeah imagine you take all every river on Earth flowing together all at once you'd still have to go 10 to 20 times more than that to get this flow that came through the Spokane Valley yeah so how do you explain that well I don't think the more I looked at the concept of God's fire hose right there I mean that's that's like God Spyros yeah you want to see some more yeah let's go to the next slide Emily do you teach geology I've given lectures to geologists so yeah I've taken geologists out in the field to show them this is one more philosophical question why don't people gather why don't they form their theories on the basis of observation more this is happening more yes it is because it seems like theories based on theories which is like not a good way it's like making photographs from photographs it's like no take a new photograph yeah you know what I mean yeah yeah you lose information every time exactly like why don't you just look at stuff well yeah now this this slide we just pulled up here this is an example I could show you dozens again these are underfit rivers where the modern rivers on the left is the Missouri River on the right is the um the Chicago River uh it doesn't matter left is the the Missouri River the right forgotten which river that is I made this slide quite some time ago anyways you'll notice the two Channels with the flat floors yes are much bigger than the river I haven't seen that many many times in river valleys many many times yeah like the one I fish in is like that's a huge Channel but there's just a there is an example Tucker of what the geologists call a an underfit stream or underfit river in other words here's the thing the channels that they're flowing in were created by Mega floods once the and it would be natural that the modern river is going to flow in these oversized channels and once it it's in there it can't really get out of course that's right right it's trapped the river valley you can't go River Valley yeah and what is the modern flood plain to the river really is the flat floor of the ancient gigantic River Channel and that's Mount water that's all Mount water there that that created that and so these melt water floods were enormous and they're showing up anywhere where there were glaciers let's go to the next slide Emily we'll have a look here see what we got okay here's here's an aerial shot I did of an underfit River it's the snake that's a snake where is that well that is just it's to the west of Pocatello yeah Pocatello and I fished right in there have you really oh yeah okay yeah I've hiked all over there I didn't didn't do any fishing oh great trout fishing oh I bet I gotta get through it you know I did that when I was a kid and I've said over and over I want to get back into them you need to I know important yeah I think it is because I could be fishing and I could also be thinking about exactly yeah that's right okay so that that okay if you go back to that let's see what do we got here this is um so what I've I've got it's difficult to read here okay so the average discharge 56 000 cubicles it was 195 CFS was the record cubic feet before yeah the Bonneville flood that created that channel was 40 million cubic feet per second 40 million now if we go back to the to the that first slide I showed you when I was just a punk looking out into that Valley I remember getting into an argument with a friend of mine years later who had had a degree in geology and he said and I was talking about how I thought that this maybe had been formed by this gigantic phone he said no no no no that had been formed over millions of years and I said I think you're wrong Johnny I think you're wrong on this and in fact it was that argument I had with him that was one of the things that motivated me to enroll you know I've been I'd taken engineering courses and drawing courses connected with my building and stuff I had never taken a geology course so I went in and I took a couple of years of geology and I did quite well academically in there um but I went was motivated because I was convinced that no I think it was a big flood now since then Studies have come out and they say this was glacial they called the glacial River Warren using the same formula the estimate of the volume of glacial River Warren was 4 000 times greater than that of the modern Minnesota River and I've never run across my friend John again to gloat over him to you know well it's so odd it's so obvious yeah now that you explain it this way so so all of this adds just to Circle back to the pyramids I think you're answering by implication the question which is would it be possible for civilizations we consider ancient that actually aren't that ancient in the scope of human existence really they're pretty modern relatively significant but whatever for them to have had knowledge far superior to what we assumed they had because if human civilization is just this Continuum yeah then it would be impossible it is an exponential curve and we're up here and everything here was barbarism Savages exactly but you're describing events that not only change the landscape but that of course would change human populations absolutely right so absolutely so it's entirely possible you could have had quite Advanced civilizations that were eliminated by these events and here's the thing when the critics pounce on this idea they're always looking at this possibility through the lens that they would be looking for a civilization that was a mere reflection of our own right exactly and this is the work of interesting Malcolm Bendel is that he's showing that there could have been technological capabilities that would have yielded a civilization that wouldn't have looked anything like our own that could have looked completely different and this is something maybe we could resume that conversation but that would have been technologically advanced in a way that we would recognize as advanced essentially yes but you know we're not going to be looking for you know jet fighters and cars and skyscrapers and things like that well one way to measure it would be the endurance of the things left behind from that Civilization so there's nothing that has been created by our civilization that will exist in 3000 years that's right right so like rebound rebar and concrete degrade fairly quickly they're not going to last 3000 years there's no skyscraper will be here in 300 years yeah concrete would degrade quickly right I know so so like we've never built a Great Pyramid actually no well we couldn't [Laughter] and you know I never thought of this before to think that subsistence Farmers or or you know nomadic tribes could have taken time off from their their wanderings to build a pyramid or is to me it's ludicrous it's just it's so Stark in your face that there's more to this than the conventional models are willing to admit and one of the things that has fascinated me for years and years is the extent of what was going on in North America before the Europeans arrived and all over the comp particularly the Eastern side of the continent there were these tremendous Monumental Earthworks a vast extent that would have required hundreds of thousands of hours of Labor you know and the the old the conventional model is that oh there was all antler picks and wicker baskets yet if you look at Cahokia or or Emerald Mound and you give us a sense of the scale of these things oh well let's see so the there was a the called what was called the Portsmouth Works which was Southern Ohio it had it was five miles in length five miles five miles yes five miles it was raised in bankments uh concentric circles geometric Earthworks in a complex that was five miles GM's biggest manufacturing plant is not five miles long no no and again I've I've got numerous I've got Drone footage I've got slides everything five miles five miles so what what two what two are most of it's gone now why well because Urban agriculture railroad building what what do archaeologists imagine was there like why five miles of Earthworks yeah five miles of earthworms well I don't know I mean what we have is the surveys that were done by Squire and Davis and others back 150 years ago 1670 years ago they're kind of Forgotten I mean you know wait what kind of population would you need to support something like why would you ever need to build a human structure five miles long well yeah why would you no I'm serious it's like kind of an obvious question well see that's kind of you know where I'm really see this is the thing I'm trying to say is we don't have all the answers yet listen all you young people out there that think it's all figured out it ain't it's not figure out there's a whole lot of questions so this is the downside there are many of Google it gives the impression of like a totality of knowledge of every answer existing but um but but just to stick to what we know we know there is a human built structure five miles long yes in North America oh yeah it was extensively surveyed and documented in the mid 19th okay so that right there if that's all we know let's just say that's the only fact we have before us that like completely overturns our understanding of what we think was going on here duh yeah you know duh what can I say just one I mean there was a gigantic system of these Monumental Earthworks all over I mean from from Georgia up to Pennsylvania West to the Mississippi Cahokia look up Cahokia and this you have a gigantic flat topped Mound which I believe I've been up on the top of it and you look and it's interesting I mean it was it's now about I think 75 feet high it's eroded down it's probably originally the height of a nine-story building three times the length of a football field think about that it's huge you go up on top and it's flat and what that does is it gives you 360 degree view Over the Horizon in every direction and when I was up there looking up there that's what struck me is that this is what they were doing they were creating a platform to watch the movement of the heavens but using the technology that we assume the people who built this had and of course we have no freaking idea what technology they had but we pretend that we know and Earth picks and wicker baskets as you put it yeah so like there's no that with the population we imagine lived here extrapolating backward from the Indian nations who were here when we arrived yeah that's just not possible right so like it had to have looked much different from what we imagined yeah it to me it's a it'
2023-01-09