Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Flint Dibble on Pseudo Archaeology and Science Communication

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

In this episode, join Matt and Chris as they enjoy a stimulating discussion with the archaeologist Flint Dibble. Flint recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss the evidence (or lack thereof) of advanced ancient civilizations facing off against the famed pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock. The episode was a four-and-a-half-hour tour de force in science communication and effective debunking, thanks to Flint's efforts.We talk to Flint about his experience on the show, the extensive preparation involved, his thoughts on how to effectively engage with pseudo-archaeology and strategies for enhancing broader science communication. Additionally, Flint discusses the significance of authentic archaeological work and the crucial role of academic participation in public discourse.We enjoyed this one a lot and hope you will too!LinksFlint's YouTube ChannelFlint on XJoe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint DibbleFlint's Guardian Article: Lost civilisations make good TV, but archaeology’s real stories hold far more wonderCritical YouTube series on Hancock's Netflix Show Ancient ApocalypseFlint's Conversation Article: With Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, Graham Hancock has declared war on archaeologistsFlint's Cardiff University ProfileAtun Shei Review: An Archaeologist Debated Graham Hancock. I Have ThoughtsMedium Article by Chris that talks a bit about Graham Hancock's BookJoin us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music

Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, where we are not having a decoding, we're not doing a supplementary material episode, we're doing an interview with another academic, Clint Dibble. So I'm Chris Kavna, anthropologist extraordinaire of sorts, not really, but kind of.

And Matt is Matthew Brown, a psychologist. And we have with us Flint Dibble, an archaeologist and classical archaeologist, I believe, from Dartmouth. Is that correct? No, I'm at Cardiff University. I taught at Dartmouth a few years ago. Yeah. There we go. So in good academic style, your profile remains on their website

as if you're a current member. So my Google skills have let me down. But so Flint is a classical archaeologist and we'll talk a bit about his research. However, recently he became internet famous of sorts because he appeared on the Joe Rogan experience, Joe Rogan podcast to debate Atlantis or ancient civilizations with the well-known proponent of that, Graham Hancock. And I think it was a four, maybe four and a half hour episode. Yeah. And so that was a, it felt longer.

Yeah. You know, that's even longer than our normal episodes. So that's quite an achievement. And Flint also has a YouTube channel where he does science communication, not just about ancient civilizations. So, um, but about real civilizations. Yeah. So we'll, we'll cover some of that.

But Matt, I believe you had a question that you thought would help orientate people who might not know any of the relevant details about archaeology or pseudo-archaeology for that matter. Yeah, pseudo-archaeology. Why don't we start there? So for the people who don't know much about it or Graham Hancock, could you maybe just give us a bit of an overview of what his theory is and why is it considered to be pseudo-archaeology and not real archaeology? Yeah, that's a good question. So Graham Hancock, he's an author who has been publishing for about 30 years on topics in human history and prehistory. I think he started off as a journalist. He wrote about poverty in East Africa. And then his biggest book still to date was Fingerprints of the Gods. And it basically argues that all the information archaeologists

have on prehistory is wrong. And there's this lost civilization that existed in the Ice Age that was destroyed in a great flood. And a few survivors taught hunter-gatherers around the world the secrets of civilization, things like agriculture, monumental architecture, engineering, arts, stuff like that. He's not the first person to argue this. This comes out of the history of Atlantis, especially in the 19th century. A scholar named, not a scholar, sorry, but he was actually a congressman, like a senator. An author named Ignatius Donnelly wrote this book, Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, about this sort of idea of Atlantis and survivors teaching everybody around the world all this kind of technology and stuff like that. I get a lot of pushback online, as do other archaeologists, for labeling him a pseudo-archaeologist because Graham does not claim to be an archaeologist. He claims to be a journalist investigating this. But to me, as an archaeologist, the reason why he'd be a pseudo-archaeologist is because he claims he knows more about the past than the fields of study that so many scholars devote their lives to studying you know, studying human history and prehistory. And so, it's that kind of strong claim saying, I know more than you all, you're all

wrong, and you're all trying to silence me and suppress what I have to say, that's what makes him a pseudo-archaeologist, if you see what I mean. It's that kind of rhetoric. And he had a TV show on Netflix that was in the top two in the US and the UK and top 10 worldwide called Ancient Apocalypse, where it really was started off even within the first five minutes. All archaeologists are arrogant. They're patronizing. They're trying to shut me up. And I am over rewriting the paradigm of history. That's how he put it. He's rewriting the paradigm of history. And so it's like, this is uh this is clearly trying to say you know more than all of us scholars that that actually do all this work around the world yeah

well i just wanted like when i was checking out the this atlantis civilization i was surprised at how specific he was about some of the aspects of it like for instance he claims that they had technologies that were more spiritual or psychic in nature rather than technological and that that perhaps explains why we don't see many artifacts of it and of course infamously also they are perhaps you know blonde or white so i think like does it have any like how does he support those kinds of things? I presume that he can't point to some funny looking rocks and go, that was made by a white guy. Well, so, okay.

So about the tele, both of those things actually are very subtly mentioned in his writings or his TV show. The telekinesis and the psychic powers is something he actually goes on more about in interviews, like on Joe Rogan or other sort of podcasts. He does write about it, but it's very kind of toned down in his books. It's not really mentioned on his TV show. So it's something that he does talk about. I guess I'm not 100% sure how this is, but I think he leads Ayahuasca adventures somewhere. So it's also connected with that, the psychic telekinesis

stuff. But i would say that that except for some of his hardcore fans that's something he oftentimes tries to downplay um in terms of the white-skinned people that came that's also something that over the last 10 20 years he does try to downplay to give him credit um he he he wrote about it more in his first book not it's not his actually first book, but his first book on this topic, Fingerprints of the Gods, where what he did was he took kind of 19th century sources or Spanish colonial sources about indigenous America and mythology and indigenous America that talked about sort of white skin deities like Quetzalcoatl and Viracoca and stuff like that. And of course, all this sort of material that he's drawing on, it itself is very colonialist and racist. And so very problematic in that sense, where if you look at pre-contact sources for white-skinned deities, there are none. It's the depictions of their deities in Mesoamerica, they have tan skin, right? They're

not white-skinned at all. And we have a few surviving Maya and Aztec and other manuscripts that show these deities quite clearly. And so this is a misuse of this kind of evidence. I would say that some of his fans are much more overt in claiming that this is a white civilization, but he never does to give him credit. I was not trying to say that he does that, but he does misuse these sources him credit. I was not trying to say that he does that, but he does misuse these sources and he does not think about them critically. And I don't think he addresses the fact that so many of his fans take it as a white civilization. And I think his idea now is actually that this Atlantis came from the Americas. One of his latest books, America Before,

actually tries to sort of make that argument, though he's very comfortable switching where it came from. In his first book, it was in Antarctica. Now it's in the Americas. To him, it's a lost civilization still yet to be found, if you see what I mean, which is great for him because you can just say, we don't have evidence and that helps prove me true. This is a very specific question. I intended to ask later about it, but since we're on the topic now, so whenever you were on Rogan and the issue came up about the potential colonial accounts and the fact that representations of white-skinned people could relate to the kind of influence of colonial

powers. And Joe Rogan seemed quite open to that possibility during the discussion. However, whenever the specific term white supremacy was referenced in one of your articles, and as you said, you were talking about the sources that Graham was drawing from. But I was curious, because that term is like, you know, a trigger term. Clearly. Yeah. And given your interest in science communication and that kind of thing, whenever you're writing about that, do you ever consider that if you use the slightly different term like if you were to say that outdated racial stereotypes or whatever i that it might engender like let i don't know if it would but i just felt that i don't think it would it wouldn't make a difference i

mean that's the issue we live in this charged world and you know people want to take whatever buzzwords they can and and and appropriate them them into what it means about your identity and stuff like that. And I think I don't know. I mean, I do public communication, but I think it's best to just be blunt. If you see what I mean, say it as it is. Some people are going to listen and some people are not. And that's just how I see this world where you're never going to say something in a way that's going to hit everybody. And so you need to obviously think about who your audience is. A lot of the writing that I've done, like for example, it was in the Conversation UK. The majority of people that read that are academics or college, university educated people. So I was writing for that audience. On the other hand, when I'm on Joe

Rogan, I'm trying to speak to a different audience, the audience that listens there, which is predominantly not college educated. So I'm going to change the kind of language that I use in that context. And so I think that that's part of the problem of the internet sometimes, is it creates this kind of context collapse, where you are addressing one audience in one situation, and other audience in a different situation, and then all of a sudden it just gets collapsed as people take your words and spin them out of context as happened there. And so, look, there's not much we can do about that.

We just have to go with it, you know? But Flint, why then you put it at the top and bold? Yes, we can't do that. put it at the top and bold. I think that was one of the things that made Joe Rogan realize that Graham Hancock was really attacking me in these kind of petty ways was because that was not me that did that. Or he took that tweet I had where I had big archaeology and scare quotes. It was just totally sarcastic. And it's like, this is such a petty argument. Like, how are you twisting this in this way? Flint, this is a slight aside, but we covered a little bit of the debate on like just a breakdown of some of the various techniques. And it was interesting from the point of view of debating

and the kind of secular guru tactics that we cover. But the one note was there was this very clear parallel where, I don't know if you've ever come across Mick West. He's a... I've seen him on Twitter some, yeah. Yeah. He covers UFO. He's like sort of giving technical explanations for various UFO videos and doing investigations. But he was in an engagement with an IDW figure, Eric Weinstein. And during it, he mentioned that he likes doing these puzzles because it flexes his muscles. And then Eric took the reference to flex as him like flexing, you know, as in in terms of intimate lingo. And Mick was like, oh, no, no, I don't use the word like that.

I didn't mean it like that. And Eric was very, very strongly like, no, no, you're correcting me saying that that's wrong. And we pointed out it's very similar to when you said the gram, but there's quotation marks. So I'm obviously being sarcastic. And he's like, oh, sorry, I missed that. So you weren't. It's really done.

Yeah, I will admire that you had quite a lot of patience. I could sense exasperation at various times, but yeah. And actually, again, on the subject of exasperation, for those who haven't seen the episode, there is quite a lot of times where both Rogan and Graham kind of present you with images that are, you know, impressive or at least you know the visual representation at a amateur's glance can often look quite impressive and they would say but doesn't that look man-made right and and no matter how many times that you repeated that even in the case where you said you know like yes i understand it there are aspects of it that could look that way but that's not how we

can assess anything it felt like that point didn't really, like you said that must've been 10 times or so, but it continued to come up. That's a tough point to get across. Cause like, you know, for me to be able to judge whether something looks like architecture is based on my experience seeing architecture from all over the world. Right. And so the only way to really make that point really super crystal clear is to show people architecture from all over the world, hundreds and thousands of images, and that's what experience and expertise is. And so that's why debunking is so difficult, right? To be able to debunk. And that's also why, as I wrote in my piece that just came out on Sunday in The Guardian, where the value of pre-bunking, and I went in there sort of asking to go first and saying that was a precondition for me to agree to do this, was to actually get in there and show what evidence we actually have, rather than sitting there and having to debunk a lot of shady things that aren't evidence, right? Because that's tough. It's tough, especially in that kind of quick oral setting, if you see what I mean. And especially where you're dealing with two people

who are, especially Graham, is definitely very much predisposed against me. But Joe also came into this as a Graham Hancock fan. And so, yeah, it's not easy. And it was never going to be something that I could handle perfectly. And in particular, what I thought was funny about that, though, and what really made me happy like a week afterwards is I realized that Graham, his entire strategy was either the victimization of me calling names or to go to non-archaeological sites, to go to these geological sites and try to make them look like archaeology. He actually avoided going to any actual archaeological sites. When we wanted to sit down and discuss this archaeological site in Indonesia, he's like, we don't have time. We don't have time. And so that told me he was a little worried about

chatting with an archaeologist. He didn't want to get into the depths of actual archaeology, because he goes to dozens of archaeological sites in his books and in his TV show and stuff like that. And he specifically avoided it. And so that sort of made me feel kind of good thinking about that in hindsight. It was like, ah, he was a bit worried about facing off with me. It wasn't just me a bit worried about the venue and the profile of the event and stuff like that. Yeah.

Yeah. The preparation really absolutely came through. And, you know, Matt and I have covered a whole bunch of material, including debates. And you are, I was saying to Matt beforehand, that I think this is the first kind of successful guru debunking in a way of 2024, which is, and it often doesn't go like that, right? I mean, I saw the video you did breaking it down afterwards

and talked about Bill Nye and Ken Ham. And people have various go like that, right? I mean, I saw the video you did breaking it down afterwards and talked about Bill Nye and Ken Ham, and people have various opinions about that, but there are those events where people are engaging with people with alternative theories or creationism. But yeah, I will say that absolutely, it came through loud and clear that you had prepared a lot and were able to speak to, there was no point where something was raised and you were like, well, I have no idea what

you're talking about. Like, not that you could answer everything, but you clearly were prepared. And maybe a question there is just, so for people who might, you know, think that they could do that, I'm just curious how much preparation went into the presentations that you're given the whole thing. Because, you know, for our conversation with presentations and responding to arguments. So how long did that take you? Well, we did with a couple other colleagues, I did two practice debates over Zoom, which were each two hours long. I'd been doing research on Graham and Atlantis anyway, because I was planning on writing a book on this when the show came out. And I still am. But then I got sick. And so that's also what delayed this conversation and stuff like that.

But I yeah, so I'd been sort of doing research into Graham a little bit and some of his ideas. So I'd been sort of doing research into Graham a little bit and some of his ideas. And my book isn't about Graham. It's about Atlantis in general and why it's so popular and to explain to the general public why archaeologists aren't looking for it, right? You know, because we just aren't. And to really do that in an entertaining and interesting way to break down the archaeology of ancient Greece, the archaeology of the Ice Age. So I'd been doing that kind of research anyway.

But to prepare for the debate itself was uh i don't even like to call it a debate because it wasn't like a formal debate but whatever everybody calls it that so i might as well since i seem to have done well just acknowledge what everybody wants to call it so uh so yeah i i i so you know i think my main prep for this was to listen to more of graham on podcasts and stuff like that to see how he talks. And then, of course, look, I'm an archaeologist with my own focuses and specializations. So I had to do a lot of research that was outside of my wheelhouse, sort of into Mesoamerica and into Indonesia and stuff like that. And so with that, I got help of a lot of colleagues to send me articles to read, to give me some takes. They helped out by giving me some slides and images and recording a few videos that I showed

during the conversation. So I probably had a team of like 20 to 30 people that helped me out in bigger or littler or bigger ways. And yeah, I took off two weeks with vacation time to prepare. And then so I spent basically the two weeks beforehand, just doing this full time and making sure that I had, before I agreed to do it, I had my general strategy. You know, I knew that I wanted to start with that erotic scene on Athenian vases, just because I thought that would be a funny way to make the point that we have these patterns. And that was my PhD

supervisor. She's the one that published that, Kathleen Lynch at University of Cincinnati. And then I knew what my two sort of core arguments were that he ignores ice age evidence and the domestication arguments that I brought up. I actually have a third, which is the history of Atlantis, and we never, so he avoided that. And so, yeah, so I had that set and yeah, it was a lot of prep. And that would be my advice to people is if you're going to actually engage with pseudoscientists, make sure you know who you're arguing against and what their core arguments are so that you are ready to attack the specifics of how they present stuff. Because I think that was key, you know, when, while preparing, I read Mehdi Hassan's, what is it, How to Win Every Argument. And one of his points was that when you argue against a celebrity, these celebrities, they rely on their media training. They're just used to saying the same kind of thing over and over again, and they don't prep in the

same way. So you can actually predict what they're going to say and what they're going to talk about. So that would be the first stage. And then the other key thing is I always think that the truth same way. So you can actually predict what they're going to say and what they're going to talk about. So that would be the first stage. And then the other key thing is I always think that the truth sandwich approach is important. We should be focusing on our actual evidence, not just on debunking. And so that then just gave me the research to, all right, hit up the plant domestication, hit up the ice age, coastal stuff, that kind of stuff, and turn it into an engaging lecture rather than a debate, if you see what I mean. So yeah,, that kind of stuff, and turn it into an engaging lecture rather than a debate, if you see what I mean. So, yeah, that was kind of the thoughts behind my prep. And it was a lot though. Yeah. I imagine it's quite difficult because some of the rhetorical arguments that are

put to you are quite, well, they're just bad, but they're not obviously bad to lay what is. And one of the ones that really struck me was when he was looking to pin you on what percentage of the Sahara Desert had been literally dug up. Yeah. And you could tell that, like, any answer less than 100%, unless they dug up every square foot of soil in the Sahara Desert, then we can't say for sure that there isn't an ancient civilization there. But at the time, I was thinking, well, how would I respond to that that i i wasn't sure and i think that was a tough one for you too

yeah and i mean you know there is no real answer a we don't know how much it is and to be honest anywhere in the world what have we excavated like point zero zero zero one percent let's be honest i mean we have millions of sites but does that represent the entire planet? No. But is it representative of the entire planet? Of course. You know, we have just so much archaeology. And you're trying to say that, like, when we go looking for Ice Age stuff in the Sahara and we can find it like my dad did. Well, what the fuck? That's what we do. We go and we find this stuff. You're saying, oh, it's under this grain of sand. You't check that one and it's like come on screw that man we have every single science is based upon incomplete knowledge that's just every single field of study is based upon incomplete knowledge that's life we don't have omniscience we have the evidence we have and we make really good arguments from it and so you know that's what we do i think one of the um okay first of all we should say that he he very much took on that like it's like a tone of grievance yeah he's been victimized by by yourself from the entire big archaeology big archaeology big archaeology in quotes

and uh and it's a nice version of the the galileit that he put out there, which is, look at these people, they were right. And everyone said they were wrong. The implication being, you know, the same things happened to him. But, you know, looking into those incidents, I think it's pretty common across in any academic field, you know, new ideas, new things, they do face a bit of an uphill battle in getting, you know, the consensus to sort of shift. And so I thought that was one of the few points where at least, even though he was using it for bad ends, he was at least standing on stable ground. Yeah. I mean, look, but I think that

every single article we publish is a new idea. That's what we do. That's what a PhD dissertation or thesis is. That's what, you know, every article I've published is. And so that's just sort of life. That's how it goes. We're always trying to change what we have. And we're trying to build a consensus by convincing our colleagues that the evidence we've looked at or the theory we have or the methods we're using are one of the right ways to go about doing this. And so, you know, that's just life. I don't see that as a problem. Of course, a new idea is not going to have a ton of traction immediately because it's brand new. It's the first time people are hearing it and thinking about it and evaluating it. But in Graham's case, this idea goes back 200 years. So it's not exactly new.

So, and I don't know, look, let's also go read what Galileo has written or Isaac Newton. I mean, amidst their really cool ideas that have stuck is a bunch of bullshit. If you go read them, it's a bunch of stuff that we now know is not true. And so that's just sort of life as well. None of us are 100% correct. And so, yeah. I think it helps. And a message that we try to communicate on the podcast as well is that when you're dealing with an area where people aren't specialists in it,

and this applies with journalists as much as just media consumers, there is often a tendency to take single articles as completely vindicated. And yes, there can be articles which are very convincing, right, of some new theory or some bombastic new evidence. But usually, most people in academia understand that a new article is a single piece of a puzzle, and that you need a lot more to change a consensus. So it could be the case that somebody proposes something and they present evidence, and there is resistance, sometimes unfair resistance. resent evidence, and there is resistance, sometimes unfair resistance, but in many cases, you actually need to amass a large amount of evidence to knock over a previous consensus.

So I think that issue about, because Graham, for example, focused a lot on this paper that was retracted, right? And a lot of grievance around that but but if your overall you know like body of evidence was strong any individual paper being knocked out it yeah it shouldn't matter but a lot was put on that by you taking this out you've essentially completely destroyed the careers of like various you know well-intentioned scholars and whatnot and i i i thought that but to the lay listener that i think is compelling where they're like well why would they force a paper to be removed from the literature like that seems like bullying so i think you have that issue about like the the lay perception of science and how it advances and what the reality is, which is like much less exciting.

And that paper is such a weird, odd duck, let's say. Archaeology papers are rarely retracted. It's not a common thing for archaeology papers to be retracted. I've only seen two in my life and they were both in the last year, at at least that i know of and paid attention to and and i think and what's weird is in both cases the the the papers were done by groups that are associated with this kind of lost civilization idea and so uh one of them it had nothing to do with lost civilization it was about a meteor impact in hopewell in the in the u.s much later, we're talking, they weren't disputing the dates, but it was about whether that could have been a destruction. And some of the authors on that paper were part of this comet research group who also supports the Younger Dryas impact

hypothesis and this lost civilization idea. And then this one was done by this team of Indonesian geologists. And they, you know, the leader author, he's written a book, Plato Never Lied, Atlantis is in Indonesia. And so he's very much associated with Graham Hancock and with these ideas. He even acknowledged Graham Hancock in the paper saying, thank you for da-da-da-da. And so in both those cases, they're very strange. They're obviously at the forefront of this kind of cultural war between this disparate group of pseudoscientists and the disparate group of actual scientists. And so, I don't know. I was never saying that it should be retracted. I'm not sure if it was a good idea or not. There's

all kinds of archaeological literature that has since been disproven. But I do think that, especially in the case of the Indonesian paper that he was bringing up, it certainly was published in very bad faith. They didn't acknowledge the actual archaeological excavations that have occurred at the site. I actually got in touch with the archaeologists who did major excavations there, published a book on it, but in Indonesian. So it's not known outside of the world of East Asian archaeology. world of East Asian archaeology. And so what that meant is this team could just ignore him and publish in English and just ignore the fact that all these excavations had occurred and that they actually explained what was going on with the site. And so that was one of the examples of how this was blatantly in bad faith. They're just ignoring this other team that's there and not citing it, not engaging with it or anything. And so it was very, very strange. I don't know the details about why it was retracted, though, or anything like that. But I do find it funny that they claim that this has been suppressed when, yes, the term

retracted is in front of the paper, but the entire paper is still online and available for free. And all the text and all the figures and everything. And so it's like nothing has been suppressed. You can go still read it yourself if you want to and make your own opinions. If you see what I mean. Flint, how did you come to the attention of Joe Rogan? Like what, what, what was the secret of events that sort of led to you going on there? Yeah, not Joe Rogan.

It was actually through Graham Hancock that I ended up going on there. When, so I, like i said i was starting to do some research on atlantis and then when his tv show came out it was very aggressive against archaeologists and i wrote a twitter thread that weekend after seeing it with a couple bottles of wine with my wife and uh and so i wrote a twitter thread basically saying what the what the hell why are you declaring war on archaeologists you go to archaeological sites you're it's because of archaeologists? You go to archaeological sites, it's because of archaeologists you have stuff to write about. And I sort of laid out how he was being very aggressive towards us and why his arguments were wrong, in a sense, a preview of what I talked about on Joe Rogan. And that Twitter thread went viral, which led to the invitation to publish in the conversation. A lot of people read that.

And then in the meantime, Graham was very upset with the pushback he was getting from archaeologists. So he started challenging people to some sort of debate. And in particular, he wanted to debate this guy, Professor John Hoopes at University of Kansas, who has been, I guess, his main antagonist for a decade or two in the archaeology community. And John refused to. And so Graham kept getting more and more antagonistic, calling John Hoops a coward, insulting the rest of us as insignificant nobodies. And so I wrote like this public letter on Twitter saying, look, I am an actual archaeologist. I've excavated at all these different sites. I've taught at all these different places. I've published on all this stuff. If you want to sit down and chat, if you're going to call my colleague a coward, then let's do

this. And because Joe had put out a very specific invitation in an episode, he said, I'd love to hear what archaeologists think about your ideas, Graham. So I quoted that. And Graham saw that and invited me and announced it. And then literally the next day I found out my cancer had returned to my lymph nodes. And so I had to have surgery, remove all of them. I was on therapy for a year. So it kept delaying it until it actually happened. Yeah. So that's kind of the story there. It was a long story, but yeah. But it was Graham that actually proposed it to Joe Rogan's team that me and him go on there and then do it. And he was very keen on doing this even after my cancer came and he found out about that. He's like, you got to do this. You promised you would,

you know, that kind of thing. And I'm like, all right, well, let me finish this shit. Let's make sure I'm not going to die or something. He was very understanding of my cancer. Other people were not. One pseudo-archaeologist online, Bright Insight, this guy, Jimmy Corsetti, or not one pseudo archaeologist online bright insight this guy jimmy corsetti accused me of inventing my cancer because i was scared of going on joe rogan he's he's not a very nice guy despite having a million and a half youtube subscribers and uh he thinks atlantis is in what east africa no west africa but yeah so it was an adventure dealing with all of those people as well that were trying to give me shit for having cancer. It's just like, fuck you, you know? The depths that you would sink to, Flint. Irradiating yourself to avoid the

but you were dragged there a year later. So even that self-inflicted cancer couldn't deter you from it. From the damn sun is what it was from. Well, speaking to that as well, in general, I'm curious because like, you know, as we talked about, there's a lot of people in science and in academia that are very ambivalent about engaging with people that are seen as like pseudoscientists or fringe theorists or these kinds of things. However, as noted by you and by Joe and various others,

there's a lot of interest, right? Because Netflix shows and bestselling books and that kind of thing. And your episode with Joe, I think it's fair to say, the reception, including amongst people that were favorably disclosed initially towards Graham, not all of them, obviously, but a lot of people seem to have taken, like they've reevaluated quite a lot from your performance, which is to your credit, but I'm curious about your opinion

about the value of engaging in that kind of public discourse, because, you know, a lot of academics are reticent to do it. But in this case, it seems to have done a lot for, you know, at least giving a public response from the archaeological field. So yeah, I'm just curious about your thoughts, you know, not just in archaeology, but in general, about the value of engaging with people that are, you know, fringe theorists or alternative theorists. Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's definitely value in doing it. That's why I did it. But I think we need to be careful and strategic in how we go about doing it. We pick the battles that, A, we're not going to give extra oxygen to something that is lacking in oxygen, right? You know, this amplification. We don't want to do that. So I don't think we should go and engage with every single pseudoscientist or fringe

theorist out there. I think if we're going to engage, we should make sure that we're reaching new audiences. That was one of my goals, because this is an audience of people that are interested in archaeology that have probably never heard an actual archaeologist at length, right? And so that's an opportunity. I mean, so when we first started thinking about this kind of pseudoscience creeping up on us in the world, like in the last decade or two, you know, a lot of times what we saw were activists on that side coming into our spaces and sort of using them to amplify their message and find a new audience, right? And now at this point, I think that group of conspiracy theorists, of French scientists, they have huge audiences. And so we should be the activists that can go in there and try to try to get this audience to understand what we have to say. It's an opportunity that we should be taking advantage of is what I think. But I think, again, it has to be done with clear preparation, understanding the audience and the venue, understanding the person you're talking to, not just going and talking to some person who does not have an audience, but instead talk to the people that have a large audience that you can make a difference on. I did not, I'm not going

to lie, I did not expect it to go as well as it did. I did not expect to convince nearly as many of Graham Hancock's fans as I have. I've seen thousands of either private messages or public posts of people that were Graham Hancock fans that some of them still are, but they recognize now the value of real archaeology. Many of them are not, and they recognize the value of real archaeology. That I did not expect. I actually thought most of what I'd be doing was addressing people who were in the middle, who did not know much about it. And I'd be able to kind of, what's the phrase, inoculate them, I suppose, against this point of view by showing them what science actually has to say. And so I have to say to some credit that's due to Joe Rogan being reasonably, I think his mind was changed a little bit over the course of the conversation. And so that was important and

valuable to make it go even more successful than I thought it could have. But I do think that there is value in engaging. We just need to be careful and we need to do so backed up on sort of more recent research on how to engage with misinformation. That was another one of my big goals in my prep. I didn't want to go to the same old playbook that, you know, Carl Sagan developed a few decades ago. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I see a lot of people in the skeptics community extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I see a lot of people in the skeptics community taking that approach, but then you're giving the initiative back to the pseudoscientists by letting them give facts and then you have to sit there and debunk them. We need to be more

assertive in how we go about pre-bunking and moving the conversation along ourselves rather than them moving the narrative along and us responding. And so that was another big sort of preparation I'd done. That's why I had to do those practice debates, to make sure that I was ready to move the conversation and not sort of respond. I didn't want to be responding at any point in time. And of course, it's the points where I was responding where I was coming off the worst, right? but by taking control of the conversation as much as i could i was able to to stay on the offensive and be assertive yeah is this related to the sort of truth sandwich approach where like the way i see it when you look at someone like grant campbell then you've got um someone who is hancock damn it

someone who's got so many degrees of freedom just spin a good story because they're unencumbered by having to stick to any kind of things like evidence. But what that means is the story is very entertaining and very fascinating. So if you're in the debunking mode, then it's an entirely negative, reactive kind of point of view. And am I right in understanding that is that what you try to do is kind of lay out like a parallel narrative that is true, that is supported by all kinds

of interesting facts and convey some of the interest and excitement that comes with engaging with real archaeology in your case. Yeah, I think that's exactly how I put it. We want to put out the positive of what we have. And I think that that comes across much better. But it also, you know, it's like, it's like, we know that people that are armed with facts are less likely to be enamored by these pseudoscientific narratives. And so that's the idea is to just arm them with facts as quickly as possible. And, you know, I didn't really treat it as a debate. Never. I didn't think of it as a debate. To me, it wasn't a debate. We didn't have much of a structure. We had a slight structure we agreed upon. We'd each have three 10-minute blocks and I'd get to go first. That was sort of all we had. And other than that,

it would be a conversation with PowerPoints. And so, you know, I never, I saw it as a spectacle. Look, this is me performing for an audience. And in a sense, I prepared more as if I was giving a lecture, a conversational lecture in front of a million people. And so, you know, that was kind of how I went about doing it. And that would be what I'd recommend to everybody. We can't see this as a debate because seriously, what actual science gets decided in a debate? Like it gets decided in peer reviewed journals. It gets decided in writing. We don't, I've never even been to a conference, an academic conference where there's been a debate. This is like some misconception of scholarship. And so I see no reason to think of this as a debate because it's not, it's a performance, it's a spectacle where the audience, you're trying to

connect to the audience. And that's the main goal there there that's who you're sort of geared in on and locked in on is to speak to them in a way that is uh going to show them what what real scholarship has to say what real archaeology or science has to say yeah and in an interesting and entertaining way for sure you know yeah did the fedora the suit and stuff like that i think i see today you're you're just quite conservative you're a little a little bit more flamboyantly on the show. You look like a time traveler, like an archaeological time traveler. I mean, look, you know, I study ancient images, right? So from ancient Greece and stuff like that. If you look at sort of paintings on pots, deities, heroes, they have their signifiers that tells the audience who they are very quickly. And we do this

in our TV shows. The nerds all have very thick glasses on and pocket protectors. The jocks are all in football uniforms. And, you know, this is just how people quickly typecast who's there. And so, look, I love my hat. I actually do wear it all the time. I just don't do it when I have headphones on. But in that audience, I was like, I got to keep them on. And that was, I asked Joe Rogan's team for headphones that will work with a hat and they assured me they'd have it. And then they gave me normal headphones and I was like, no, I have to hold these on the entire time. But yeah, I think it's easier to just play into who we are for the general public. You know, I have fun wearing my hat. I got it at a flea market in Santiago, Chile. It's not actually a fedora. It's a South American hat. I actually have a fedora, a real fedora.

The fedora is too wide for my head. It makes me look silly. I'm working to get a replacement for this hack because it's falling apart. It's 10 years old, but I have not found one yet. And yeah, look, we just got to play into the role that we have. I think it's silly if we try to pretend we look like a businessman or something like that. That's not our role. You know, we're trying to look like an academic or an archaeologist or whoever we are. And let's just make that clear, crystal clear, so we can move on to our content and our points.

You know, could have went for the Jordan Peterson tried and tested three-piece tuxedo suit that he wore to broken one inexplicably. Do you guys have some advice on how I can become a guru after this? Oh, there's plenty of ways that you could. But I think you're too covered by evidence that it wouldn't work. But I mean, your name, Flint, and I know it comes from your dad.

I heard you mention that your brother's name is Chip, right, as well. And your dad, for anybody who doesn't know, also a well-known archaeologist. And I think that in large part, and to your credit as well, you're an endearing person, right? and you know to your credit as well it you're an endearing person right but the the presentation was good and you you i think you fulfilled the stereotype that some people had about an archaeologist and and it helped it genuinely helped i think because they they then were prepared to like pay attention you know to yeah a bit more and one one thing that I would say is I studied a bit of relevant research about archaeology, but very superficial in like evolutionary anthropology sense. And I remember reading papers about the dental analysis of animal remains,

which I believe you've done a bunch of work on. I remember as a a master student finding out that people could look at the weller patterns or you know various other things i'm sure you could go into much more detail because of the various build-up on the the like the dental record of deceased animals and that blew my mind that we could trace you know migration patterns and flora and fauna patterns and weller patterns via like teeth remains. And in the presentation you've given Rogan, I think making those kind of details and talking about all the stuff that modern archaeologists are doing, that was really

effective because it did, like Matt said, it reframed it from just a negative debunking of you saying, no, there's nothing fun, you know no Atlantis. These things that look like manmade, they're all just natural. Instead shifting to, but we are doing really interesting and exciting things, and it doesn't get talked about enough. And yeah, I thought that was really effective, at least for me. I mean, that's my biggest gripe about how archaeology is presented. It's presented in the same 20th century way still in the media. You know, it's the big monuments, it's all this kind of stuff, except for DNA. DNA is the one thing that has sort of made a dent in public opinion and narratives that we can talk about.

And so it's just really frustrating. Every single journalist only publishes on the oldest this, the oldest that, which buys into one of Graham's main arguments, which is things keep getting older. But what that is, is that's a bias from the media and what they present. And so it really frustrates me to see this kind of TV shows and the way it's often, not good science journalism. There is good science journalism, but I mean more of the popular stuff. And so it's just, you know, we have to fight back. We have to present what we're actually doing. And we're in this climate of so much anti-intellectualism. And so we have to think through how to break through and make what we do interesting and exciting and show the 21st century

approaches that we have. And it's not easy, but I strongly believe that we have to stand up and do something. I mean, you guys have your podcast, you're definitely doing that. And I think we need to convince more of our colleagues in general to do that. In whatever way we all do it, there's no real wrong way, in my opinion. I think we just all need to speak up is how I see it and build this ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. And try some stuff. Yeah. I think that's particularly important given that there's so many commonalities in the kinds of disinformation that's happening across disciplines. For example, when I was watching the interview of yours and I was just struck by how similar Graham Hancock, have I got that right this time?

Yes, you got it right. You got it right. Hancock. Have I got that right this time? Yes, you got it right. And Matt Ridley, who wrote Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, which is like a lab-like truth type thing. Very different topic, but

the presentation, like the self-styling as renegades outside, excluded from the institutions, which are all trying to suppress this much more exciting. Yeah, protect their funding. Yeah, so it's the same. If I found Atlantis, I'd get so much funding.

But, you know, the other pattern there too, apart from they sort of have a similar delivery style, but, you know, they're often there too, apart from they sort of have a similar delivery style, but, you know, they're often sort of the journalists or writers, people who are used to writing popular books, who are used to appealing to like know what sells essentially. And so it's just a very different criterion than from what academics are used to focusing on, right? I mean, yes, but look, we teach introductory level courses. You should know we are trained to teach introductory level courses to people that have had no experience thinking about our field. And so I think we all have more training in speaking to the public than we think. And what I think is really interesting is, look, I think academics, for some reason, too many of my colleagues have this mindset where when you teach introductory courses, you don't want to dumb things down because you're trying to teach your students. And the students,

by and large, if we're trying to pay attention to them, they catch up over the course of the semester and they come out, you know, knowing the content of that introductory course. On the other hand, when we talk to the public, we have this mindset, we need to dumb things down. And I think what we need to do is just make sure we explain things clearly without dumbing it down. And I think we have more skills than we give ourselves credit for. I've seen a lot of this comment as well, that we just, we're outmanned in terms of communication. And it's like, how many lectures have you all done? You know, we give so many lectures all the time. And I get it.

Some academics are certainly not very skilled at giving lectures. A whole hell of a lot of us actually are. And it's not just a few of us. I could think of dozens of archaeologists that just give fantastic, phenomenal lectures that win teaching awards and stuff like that. And so, you know, and I'm sure that's true in every single field out there. And so I think we need to be leveraging that ability and practicing and thinking about what works best. I mean, don't get me wrong. This was not the first time I gave an engaging lecture. This is based on decades of me speaking to the

public. And so it takes a lot of thought to be self-critical and self-reflexive on what works and what doesn't. And I think the biggest key is don't dumb things down, but get rid of as much of the technical language as possible. You know, just sort of that's the key is to learn how to speak using the right vocabulary, but still keeping it nuanced and interesting and complex. You know, saying instead of Pleistocene, you say Ice Age, you know, that kind of stuff, which I saw someone critique me for. It's like, it's not the end of the Ice Age, it's since the last glacial maximum. And it's like, yes, but I'm not going to be talking about that to a general audience. That's really interesting, because, you know, in our case as well, there is, you know,

we do a podcast for a general audience and we talk about our speciality and sometimes forget that we are making references, which psychologists will know or social science people have studied social sciences, but not the general public. And I will say that myself, I have had this like sort of bifurcation, if you want, where there's my academic work where i talk in a certain way with a certain kind of delivery and of course i try to be engaging with students as well but i you know it's different than when i talk to a general audience but i think you're exactly right that actually there is a whole bunch of the skills which overlap and if you took it that you were speaking to an introductory

class and you don't need like in introductory classes as well i try to avoid too much technical language because it's alienating right initially to people to be overloaded with terminology so yeah that it's just something i haven't thought of that much that actually, because I've seen the reverse happen where doing the podcast has made me better at giving like formal presentations. Exactly. Me too. Yeah. It's interesting to think of it going the opposite direction. I mean, to be honest, I even advise graduate students or people giving, you know, academic conference papers,

you don't know who your audience is. Look, I do this, my research, it bridges two very different subfields in archaeology. I do classical Greek stuff, and then I do archaeological science and environmental archaeology, and they're two completely different disciplines and approaches. And so anytime, some of this actually comes from me struggling to give academic conference papers where my audience is so dispersed and divided. If I talk about zooarchaeology, the classical archaeologists don't understand. If I talk about classical Greek archaeology, the zooarchaeologists don't understand. So I've learned that even in an academic conference setting to try to strip away as much of the technical language as possible

so that you can hit the people that are not in your subfield, right? And that's really important. I think the only time really technical jargon is useful is in advanced courses where you're, you know, especially graduate level studies, where you're teaching people who might end up in the field and then in our actual, you know, academic scholarship, because in that case, you need to be as precise as possible. And so I think in most, you know most oral verbal settings, we should be trying to strip this language away. It just makes it more accessible and easily understandable, even by colleagues who are in slightly different disciplines.

I just want to interject that, Flint, you asked about becoming a guru, and you've got it completely wrong. You need to increase the jargon, add references, the obscure figures. You've got this the wrong way around need to increase the jargon, add references, the obscure figures. Then you've got this the wrong way round if you want to be a successful guru. And I was going to say, as you were saying, look, if we make some mistakes

and have a little bit of jargon in there, that's okay. Because yes, these gurus use a lot of jargon to make their arguments incomprehensible and make them sound more well-read or intelligent or something than they actually are and so yeah so if we if we if we slip up and have a little bit in there that's okay we can't beat ourselves up too much you know yeah yeah i was watching a video on youtube about you about your your debates released three days ago so some account called what is it called actually aton shea films oh yeah attention attention

attention oh is it really i never thought about that good call yeah yeah and um you know he was saying quite similar things to you flint and that he was saying you know academics or anyone who has got some specialist geeky hyper specialized knowledge on on any topic get out there you know um do your best to to present it in an engaging way on on the internet because there's a massive audience out there of people that are just looking like you'd be surprised how many people will be interested in you know dating you know analyzing the fossilized teeth of ruminant animals for instance and i i i myself i'm always talking about my podcast list and it's the most obscure things that have nothing to do

with anything that I know about. So I am the absolute lay audience there. So, yeah, I think perhaps this relates to your idea about winning these debates, which is about not so much adopting a negative frame of mind, debunking things all the time, but rather presenting the engaging and truthful sort of alternative. Yeah. I mean, I think there's room for debunking. It needs to happen to some degree, but I think the way to win this for real is to really, you know, show the public why science

and scholarship is so important, you know, and the public why science and scholarship is so important, you know, and what we actually can say and what we're actually doing. That's the real goal there. I mean, I don't know if you guys made it all the way through, but at the end, I had both Joe Rogan and Graham Hancock agreeing that archaeology should be funded better, and we should not be stripping funding away from it. And so, you know, that's the real end goal here. We need to show how we are relevant and how, you know, we. And so, you know, that's the real end goal here. We need to show how we are relevant and how, you know, we need to support, you know, universities and scholarship and research. This is, we live in this climate where it's just being cut and devastated

so badly. It's not just archaeology, it's most of our arts and sciences. And so, we need to sit there and think through how to speak to the public better. And I think, yeah, an all-hands-on-deck approach, I think, is better than nothing. We should be doing that and prioritizing that, because if we just continue prioritizing scholarship that just our colleagues read, soon we're going to have, and already we have a lot fewer colleagues than we did 10 years ago. And so we need to make sure that we protect our fields of study. So we need to make sure that we protect our fields of study. Yeah. But Flint, that contradicts what you said about big archaeology having its own reach. I just want to, you know, on the Rogan, like the end of it, one thing that I will also say that I really appreciated was, you know, obviously in the nature of like a back and forth and whatever,

there'll be moments where both sides are going to get frustrated with the way that people are presenting things or whatever. And there are points that are raised that people can respond to. And, and I think it's to Graham's credit that like at large points, he, you know, he didn't interrupt or anything like that during the presentations. But the, the other thing is that at the end, the very end, whenever there was this call to say, you know, archaeologists, just be respectful, just be kind, you know, stop bullying people with all kinds of deers archaeologists can do better. And you made the point of response that this is a very different tone from what you've taken in your work and in your documentaries. And that if you were adopting that kind of tone, the response would be different. And I thought that was impressive to see because you could have just, you know, avoided

saying that, but you made it clear. And it was a completely valid have just, you know, avoided saying that, but you made it clear. And it was a completely valid point because, you know. That's why I was there, because he took that antagonistic tone towards us, which led to me writing that Twitter thread. And he tried to, like, back off from that. And it's like, dude, sorry, you are just as aggressive as anybody else has ever been against you. You go into the trenches and you spit venom at archaeologists. And archaeology is an entire discipline. And so I'm sorry, I'm not going to feel that.

And we had agreed beforehand over email that we would have just a respectful conversation sticking to evidence and not attack each other. And he went in there and tried to twist my words and stuff like that. And look, we shook hands afterwards. We were very friendly with each other and we're pleased. But like, you know, like, I'm sorry, dude, you, you specifically reneged on that. And, uh, so I don't feel too bad at all about you losing fans because you were the one that was trying to turn me into some sort of, I don't know, right wing hate figure and, uh, to, to, to bring up this kind of

stuff that i never said about him and so uh i don't know i don't know what to say it's just it is what it is and yeah that came across loud and clear that that's that sort of sense of grievance and uh a kind of sour sour it was one of the topics of the presentation yeah one of his key things and and it was so funny because i mean you know joe rogan seemed to try to dissuade him from going that direction he realized that i was going respectful and evidence-based and so graham's like i want to get to how flint is manipulating the media and joe's like let's talk about this archaeological site yeah it's just like, oh my God. Yeah. Joe isn't always that good,

but he did relatively well. Yeah. I was surprised too. Yeah. Flint, I know we've taken up a bunch of your time, but I do have

a sort of indulgent tangential question while we have a real archaeologist here that I'm curious about. I have my own opinions about it, but they're tangential question while we have a real archaeologist here. Yeah. I'm curious. I have my own opinions about it, but they're based on much less familiarity with the relevant research.

So there's two topics that I think it would be interesting to get your opinion on. And they do speak to, I think, debates in archaeology or I don't know the correct term. Not paleontology. Anyway, the one is the evidence for Neanderthal rituals and the kind of arrangement of stones in caves. Whether that is convincing evidence of ritualistic patterns or I've seen people talk it might be produced by bears. That's one question. The second one, which is probably more a longer and unfair thing to layer on top,

is about the ongoing debate about the warfare in human history and whether we have evidence for, you know, some people are saying warfare is a modern invention that only comes with nation states and others are saying, no, very much a part of human nature going back. It's just that we weren't capable of doing, you know, the large scale warfare that you see. So I realize that's probably quite a lot to layer in the two point question, but why we have you here? I'm just curious.

So, okay. So I'll address the first one first, Neanderthal ritual behavior. So, this was something that my dad was one of the leading researchers on, actually. And he'd be the person to ask if he had not passed away six years ago. But he was a skeptic, let's say, of that argument about Neanderthal ritual behavior. He went to many sites that had been excavated decades earlier. And for example, there was this one site called Fontes Chavadas. It was actually the first excavation I ever excavated at when I was like 16 years old. And so this site sort of has it all.

It has a new lithic stone tool typology. It has a burial in it. And it has what look like hearths, these sort of black lenses of early fire usage. And what he found with re-excavating it, collaborating with geoarchaeologists and geologists who would excavate the sediments and stuff like that, is that actually everything in the cave had been washed in from a chimney above. And so what looked like hearth lenses were actually manganese stains in the sediments. What looked like a burial in this niche in the bedrock, actually those niches in the bedrock were all there naturally. This body had been washed in from above and slumped and settled into this natural niche. And then this new stone tool type technology, typology, it was actually

a sign of water-rolled lithics. So, stones that had been chipped and damaged from water rolling, and that's why it was observed all the way from Europe through Asia, because it's actually a sign of natural processes, not anthropogenic processes. So, I think that there's a lot of debate about many of these contexts that show Neanderthal ritual behavior. I think some of the clearest are in Southwest Asia. There's now, again, similar re-excavations where people went back to Shanidar, where there's what's called the flower burial. It turns out that it's not a flower burial. The flower pollen they had, that's naturally introduced. But it does seem like the argument that that was an intentional burial of sorts

is legitimate. And I think most scholars now accept that. So there is room for considering Neanderthal ritual behavior, but the evidence at this point is there, but also still quite slim. So it's about understanding how widespread these kinds of ritual activities were and what they actually meant for our cousins, these Neanderthals. As my dad always put it, you can think about human scholarship towards Neanderthals. It's like a pendulum. And so in different decades, it goes from people thinking they're just like humans to people thinking they're completely different from us humans. And so I think right now we're in this period where a lot of scholarship is talking about how they're very similar to humans, but I imagine that it'll keep swinging

back and forth because of how do we define what human means? What does human behavior mean? And one of the clearest ways we can look at that is to look at kind of closely related species and hominid groups. I do, yeah, go on. Matt. Flynn, look at the photograph.

It looks like a hearth. Look at the photo. It's all manganese. Have seen the dance and another thing though also is we're slowly understanding you know the behavior of uh of other species that are still alive different primates and uh i think that's also important because you know like we we see that other species mourn their dead, for example, and stuff like that. And so I think what this really helps us understand is what it means to be human. And that's really what it all comes down to. What do we see as human behavior and how do we identify that as different or similar to behavior of other species?

Yeah, your second question is more difficult. I don't have as many clear examples. I do think there's some examples of Stone Age battles that took place. I think there's one in Central Europe. It must be from like the Neolithic period. Near a river, I think there's a battlefield that was excavated, but I'm blanking on where it is exactly. So that's something I'm less familiar with. I'm not sure if I could say that warfare is intrinsic to human behavior. I tend to think that what archaeology has shown is just the diversity and heterogeneity and complexity of human behavior around the world. That's why there is no grand narrative of human progress. It's something that I think that Graham Hancock

taps into, but even like Barack Obama, he talks about, you know, I remember he gave his last speech before he left office and he talks about, you know, how historians of the future will judge things around the world, right? It's not like there's some clear direction we're all heading into. We could all be extinct from an atomic bomb soon, in which case we are a lot less resilient and successful than Neanderthals who survived two times longer than us. Or we might be able to figure out how to keep surviving. And so I think thinking of anything as intrinsic to us, you know, that falls into some of the traps that we see with human, what is it, evolutionary psychology, which a lot of your gurus subscribe to, I imagine. And so I think that we need to be careful about that because as soon as we start identifying behaviors as universal, we always find a bazillion exceptions. as universal, we always find a bazillion exceptions. And so I think that that's important to acknowledge that there is no, you know, what we do and the actions we have and the behavior we have is very plastic and very dependent upon context and environment and the sort of social

environment that we're raised in. And so I think that that's really important to recognize. So I wouldn't think of warfare as universal, but yes, we certainly have a lot of evidence for warfare once we start having more complex groups of people and especially larger populations and things like that. So it's something that certainly occurs. We know that intrasocial violence happens all the time and it's a real shame when we find it, but it's part of how we can behave. how some of us can behave is maybe the right way to put it yeah i appreciate i appreciate your perspective on on things that like i just would see if she ashamed not to ask and and in some way there are some parallels

about those debates right but i i think there's more legitimate ground to for people to take different positions on it because you know in the respect of like what what graham was saying to you is we have an excavated you know we've all of the earth so we can't say there's no ancient civilization and superficially people could say that people positing like a significant intergroup conflict are likewise lacking evidence right because the you know but the reality is that like although we do have like a lot of interesting remains and biological like ancient skeletons are actually few and far between and tissue damage i believe you know doesn't fossilize particularly well so you end up with more room for people like debating what the evidence shows or not on that but i i i think the point about

there being you know a lot of diversity around the world in human societies and not seeing everything along a simple you know like evolutionary ladder that's that's completely uh i mean i think the only thing that's universal among human groups is that we have to eat you know like and drink i mean it's our biological needs that are universal and then other than that look we all behave differently and respond differently to the environment that we're in and so i but we can detect sort of violence that should show up reasonably clearly in in bones uh you know skeletal remains yeah so we definitely can and we do but at the same time i don't think it's something that's...

Identifying universal behaviors is very tricky, as I'm sure you know from anthropology and psychology. I mean, look, everybody's different. Well, like if somebody... I mean, there are indicators that if somebody is damaged by weapons or whatever, but if somebody breaks a bone, was it because they fell down or was it because they... Yes, yeah. breaks a bone was it like because they fell down or was it because they you know like there's you can never really like whether you can tell in certain cases but like generally speaking not and then i i also think that the the one thing that is going off in my head though flint and it's it's probably like my argumentative capacity is that like when i think of human societies at least once we start getting

into modern humans i feel like one uh universal i'm a posit and this is partly because i'm a ritual scholar is rituals like and i don't mean yeah i mean just ritualized behavior in the broadest sense, greeting rituals, you know, like symbolic objects being used in ritual circumstances. Like I feel that, you know, even our, some of our very earliest examples seem to talk about a symbolic culture for humans. So like, in that case, so it's just a, it is literally because I study rituals that I'm like, maybe rituals count as a human-universe apart.

No, and I think that that's one of the big arguments with Neanderthals. And that's what's so interesting is with modern Homo sapiens, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, we can start detecting sort of symbolism and ritual in the archaeological record fairly quickly. We have, you know, examples of that, whether it's shell beads or something like that. Um, we have, you know, examples of that, whether it's shell beads or something like that. And so what we, with Neanderthals, it seems to be so much less so. And so I think that that in and of itself is significant.

And, you know, some of the people think that maybe Neanderthals were influenced by contact with, with modern Homo sapiens as Homo sapiens radiated around and that might've impacted their behavior. Um, because, you know, one of my, the other point my dad always made is, is Neanderthal stone tool technology changes very, very, very slowly compared to humans where we're constantly innovating and changing what we do. And so I think that there's just something that's very different there behaviorally between them. But again, probably not me. I don't study Neanderthals, but my dad and some of his former colleagues definitely think that way or thought that way and so i it's a pendulum and i think i agree with you

but i think ritual is a form of communication it's a way that we communicate to each other different things it's just it's a different way of communication that's non-verbal and so yeah i think that that's that's one way to think about it yeah yeah you can you can see like you know ritual behaviors and animals depending on how you define them as well with like fret displays and that but i won't waffle on about rituals just just to say flint like it's been an absolute pleasure your your debate with rogan was a very enjoyable for me to listen to and i yeah i yeah, I, you know, I've enjoyed this conversation.

Sorry to indulge it in anthropology stuff at the end. But yeah, I think that the lesson you give in science communication is a lot of the things that we're talking about on the podcast in a more positive version of what we are normally identifying negative things. So thanks for coming on and thanks for doing all that preparation and giving an interesting thing to listen to. Thanks for having me. I guess to everybody, check me out on YouTube

or X slash Twitter. Hopefully a book will come soon on Atlantis and why we're not looking for it and why actual archaeology is pretty cool and relevant. And yeah, but thank you both. You guys are doing a good job and I really appreciate you inviting me to come on. Yeah. Thanks, Flint. We'll provide links to all that stuff in the show notes. And we'll let you get on with your day.

Chris will go to a faculty event and I'm going to go to bed. Yeah, you deserve to go to bed. The academic life in the three stages. Access to faculty event at night. That's it. All right. Well, thanks, Flint. And we'll speak to you again sometime, hopefully.

Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, I'm around. Bye-bye. in sometime hopefully okay yeah that sounds good yeah i'm around bye Thank you.