Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan: Key Takeaways

The long awaited discussion between Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is now available. Here are my thoughts after listening to the whole four and a half hour thing, and after following many more social media threads on this than I wanted to.

First, people are interested in the past, they are interested in using evidence to evaluate claims, and they want to hear from archaeologists. That much is clear. Joe Rogan, channeling his huge audience (sixteen million followers just on youtube), repeatedly asks both Dibble and Hancock about what evidence they can show to support their claims, and he participates in evaluating it.

He’s interested in the details. He wants to see the evidence for himself, and he wants guidance on interpreting it. Is that flat stone terrace made by humans, or is it the result of a geological process of bedding and facturing? What about that stone that looks a bit like a knife (at least on one side)?

Like his audience on social media, Rogan also expresses wonder at the way the world around us is shaped over time. He’s interested in just how plants adapt to the environmental pressures humans impose on them, for example. 

As an academic, as a researcher, and as an archaeologist, I share that wonder, and I have made a career of asking and trying to answer those same questions. I want to encourage people like Rogan and his audience to ask those questions. I want to be there for them when they seek answers and when they try to evaluate claims made by authors like Graham Hancock.

If a claim is going to be evaluated, it has to be properly specified. The second key takeaway for me is that the interaction with Flint got Hancock to clarify what he is claiming and what he is not claiming. I’ve read some of his work, and I’ve watched Ancient Apocalypse. I even paid enough attention to write a series of eight blog posts about its main claims. 

I learned during the podcast that Hancock is claiming a kind of lost civilization of pure knowledge, “emerged out of shamanism,” one that is happy, for example, to have a concept of agriculture, but not to implement it. It isn’t a civilization of machines in the way that us industrialized people would understand it, at any rate.

Which brings up my third main takeaway. Flint uses archaeological, geological, and paleoenvironmental data to show that there is no evidence of agriculture or of metallurgy during the last ice age. The evidence is very clear. The increase in environmental levels of metals in soils is more than obvious in the Mediterranean in Roman times, but absent during the ice age. The pollen signal from early cultivation is clear in cores and in archaeological sites from the early Holocene, but there is none of that during the ice age.

In the face of this evidence, Hancock goes in the only direction he can, toward the gaps in our knowledge. Perhaps the evidence is in all the places that archaeologists haven’t explored fully. Have you looked at the continental shelves? Well, some of them, yes, but not all of them. Have you excavated the entirety of the Sahara? No, but we’ve surveyed some of it. It’s rather big.

The most important moment in the podcast comes around the one hour fifteen mark, when Rogan asks Hancock whether he would agree that, in the material archaeologists have found and studied so far, there is no evidence that supports his claim of an advanced ice age civilization. Hancock agrees. That’s a big moment. It’s the only reasonable answer.

I think this is where the mental processes of much of the audience and of many archaeologists diverge. Or maybe this is where they simply stop communicating as productively. To Rogan and to his audience (i.e. a huge chunk of the public), a lost ice age civilization is still a very cool possibility, whether there is any actual evidence that supports it or not, and there are lots of places where we could yet find it. To many archaeologists, the fact that despite all our work, this evidence has not been found yet, should put that discussion on the back burner at least, or perhaps even on ice until such evidence turns up.

Throughout the podcast, as he does throughout his work, Hancock brings up possibilities. This is sometimes referred to by archaeologists, a bit dismissively, as the “just asking questions” strategy. In all those cases, Flint gets the discussion right back to what we actually know, as a starting point for evaluating how likely a possibility is to be true, and that’s what a scholar should do. Possibilities are great, hypotheses are wonderful, evaluations are even better.

Some of the difference is in the way archaeologists and the public understand gaps in the evidence, and the ways we think about possibility and probability. Thinking about cool possibilities is definitely part of the academic process. The more important part, however, is evaluating those possibilities with empirical evidence and modeling, and deciding how likely they are to actually be true. That’s our job. It’s what we do.

And sure, there is a lot we don’t know about the past. We weren’t there to see it. The archaeological record is notoriously fragmentary. But we do know some stuff. We know, for example, that when we survey (i.e. walk around, test-pit, remote sense, etc) a large area of the Sahara, even at fairly low density, we would be more likely to encounter the megalithic buildings of a lost ice age civilization than the campfires of hunter gatherers.  

This is true even when we just look at Google maps, for example, which is the kind of tool I could only dream of (and did) when I was an undergrad thirty-five years ago. But we actually do find those campfires when we care to look, and we don’t find the ice age metropolises (so far). This tells us that the lost civilization is not very likely to have existed, and that our broad, high level understanding of human adaptation during the last ice age is actually pretty good.

Lots of things are possible. Archaeologists worry about equifinality, for example, a principle according to which many different past processes can result in the same or similar outcomes in the present. Is that “stone tool” the result of human planning and action, or is it the result of a mudflow? How do we tell the difference?

Maybe the lost civilization is where we are not looking. Maybe we are looking for the wrong things. Maybe their metallurgy and agriculture were very different from ours and we are just not seeing it. 

Maybe we’re not finding it because every trace of it was completely destroyed by a strangely selective cataclysm that left largely intact the remains of ice age hunter gatherer societies. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Every time we add a maybe to a hypothesis like a lost ice age civilization, we make it more complicated, and less likely to be true than the well-supported null hypothesis that humans until about twelve thousand years ago were mobile, low density hunter gatherers. And every time we look at a piece of ground (submerged or not), and we fail to refute that null hypothesis by finding campfires and stone tools, we make the lost civilization even less likely to be true.

Many other topics are discussed in the podcast which I can’t address here. I have to get back to my grading, after all. For example, Hancock brings up the shabby treatment given by some colleagues to Tom Dillehay over his initial Monte Verde claims, and to Jacques Cinq-Mars over Bluefish Caves. This did happen, and you can also ask James Adovasio about what happened when he claimed Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania was a nineteen thousand year old archaeological site, or when the Holens  and their colleagues published the Cerutti Mastodon claim in 2017.

Scientific research is a human endeavour, therefore it has a political dimension. There are power games. Sometimes, those games rise to intimidation and even some (attempted) silencing. I’ve seen it.

Most of us try very hard to discuss the evidence and claims, rather than the personal failings of the researchers involved. Most of us are more than happy to examine a new claim and give it a fair review, even if we initially find it far-fetched. That’s why I blog about Oak Island and why Flint went on Joe Rogan. The vast majority of us don’t try to get each other fired over an article in a journal.

After a bunch of evaluation of claims and discussion of evidence, Monte Verde is now seen as a very old site, although maybe not as old as Dillehay thinks, Bluefish caves is still being discussed, Meadowcroft is in the definite maybe category, and the Cerutti Mastodon is pretty much rejected as an archaeological site (for now). That’s how the process should unfold.

As Flint says on the podcast, however, there are a-holes in every community, and archaeology is no exception. I’ve met some. At least a few will no doubt tell you that I am one of them. I apologize if some of my past behaviour and/or writings justifies them. Like most of my colleagues, I always try to do better.

Regardless of all that though, as an archaeologist, if I ever go looking for a hunter gatherer camp a few thousand years old, which I occasionally do, and instead I find evidence of a lost advanced civilization, the last thing I will want to do is hide it. And if it is a piece of an ancient UFO, I will most definitely not hide it. Not just because they might get me on the cover of Nature, but also just because those are two very cool possibilities that are always there, somewhere on the back burners of my mind.