Ancient Apocalypse: Responding to the Critics

let me start by saying right upfront and with no ranker that I know I performed poorly earlier this year in my debate with archaeologist Flint Dibble on The Joe Rogan Experience that's J 2136 of April 16th 20124 Flint is a better debater than me he was better prepared than me his ability to deliver what he had prepared far outmatched my own and he was faster on his feet than I was so cudos to Flint for his performance on which I congratulate him indeed I did congratulate him in an email I sent him a few hours after the debate where I wrote it was good to talk to you today you speak well for your cause I was impressed throughout our confrontation I took Flint at face value as an archaeologist passionately opposed to my views on prehistory who'd come to the table to discuss his differences with me I took it for granted that his knowledge of archaeology would be superior to my own and would be presented with complete transparency so when Flint made seemingly authoritative statements concerning supposedly solid archaeological data that I had no prior knowledge of I believed him I was convinced besides in the fast moving format of The Joe Rogan Experience there was no real time opportunity for me to fact check what he was telling me where I have done so subsequently however what I found has shaken the confidence that I initially had in Flint for example the subject of sunken shipwrecks and what they tell us about the past Flint's case was that my supposed lost seafaring civilization of the Ice Age must surely have left behind some evidence of its existence in the form of shipwrecks since as he put it at this point we have something like 3 million shipwrecks from around the world and so one of my questions for Graham is if this is a global civilization with ships why is it that we don't have shipwrecks from this Global civilization I see this as a big big problem if we're looking for an a civilization that's traversing the oceans we should find these shipwrecks and similarly these shipwrecks are located near the coast they're located on the submerged Continental shelves we are actually exploring these submerged Continental shelves in detail my goodness not only are there 3 million shipwrecks from around the world but also we know where they are we've pinpointed their exact locations on the submerged Continental shelves with that much knowledge at our disposal the fact that not a single shipwreck from a lost seafaring civilization of the ice ages amongst them not even one out of three million does indeed raise questions about the very existence of such a civilization I didn't know that archaeologists had factual data on 3 million submerged shipwrecks and I felt backed into a corner by my own ignorance when I got round to fact checking Flint's presentation some months later however I found that his handling of the whole matter had left several unanswered questions which I'd woefully failed to task him with during the debate itself for example since it's no secret that many of the jre's multi-million audience are listeners rather than viewers and that onscreen captions are easily overlooked even by viewers including myself in this case why did he only offer an onscreen caption to disclose that his impressive figure of 3 million shipwrecks is not a fact confirmed by observation but a UNESCO estimate why did he not disclose that the number of shipwrecks actually located around the world today is less than 250,000 of which the vast majority are less than a thousand years old and why did he reiterate confidently later in the interview that we have 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped sitting in Joe's Studio faced a face with dible I took his word as an archaeologist that 3 million shipwrecks had been m mapped and I didn't offer a counterargument looking back on the whole exchange with the benefit of hindsight knowing now that the actual number of located shipwrecks is less than a tenth of Flint's figure I wonder why that debating Point mattered so much to him that he was prepared to use such tactics to Win It surely better to be open about the real figures and then have a real debate over what conclusions about Ice Age seaf fairing we might reasonably draw from them a point of information here the last ice age also known as the last glacial period dates from approximately 115,000 years ago to around 11,600 years ago it is at some point during this lengthy period closer to its end than to its beginning that I've always proposed that my Lost Civilization flourished meanwhile the most ancient shipwreck so far identified by archaeologists found at a depth of 30 m offshore the Greek island of docos is only around 4,600 years old some 7,000 years after the end of the Ice Age not a single plank from the ship itself remains as everything biodegradable was long ago consumed by the Sea what has survived however is the ships non-biodegradable cargo in the form of hundreds of camhi and others suround IC vessels now scattered on the seabed the next oldest shipwreck dated to 3,300 years ago more than 8,000 years after the end of the Ice Age lies at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea 90 km off the coast of Israel here too the structure of the ship itself hasn't survived but its cargo of amori has the most ancient intact shipwreck is 2,400 years old and lies at the bottom of the black sea at the remarkable depth of nearly 2 km because there's almost no oxygen in the Black Sea at such depths and therefore little biodegradation the ship's Timbers remain well preserved meanwhile the oldest boat of any kind so far discovered is a Dugout canoe dated to around 10,000 years ago 1,600 years after the end of the Ice Age the canoe was extracted from a Pete bog in the Netherlands in 1955 during the construction of a road and is now on display in the drent museum in assen so far so good for Flint's case until we take into account another fact of great significance that he failed to disclose during the debate despite the absence of submerged shipwrecks from the period all archaeologists fully accept that seafaring did occur during the Ice Age and on a surprising scale I'll confine myself here to two examples out of many the peopling of Australia and the peopling of Cyprus in the case of Australia it's important to keep in mind that sea level was about 120 M lower at the peak of the last ice age than it is today in consequence large parts of the Indonesian and Malay archipelagos that are now separate Islands formed a continuous Ice Age l Mass geologists refer to it as Sund directly connected to Mainland Asia at the same time New Guinea and Australia were connected forming the Paleo continent geologists refer to as sahul it would therefore have been relatively straightforward for migrants from Asia to travel by land plus a little island hopping as far as timour thereafter even at the last glacial maximum it wouldn't have been possible to migrate onwards to sahul Australia without undertaking an open ocean Voyage of more than 90 kilometers writing in Nature's scientific reports Michael bird and co-authors have this to say the first peopling of sahul by anatomically modern humans required multiple Maritime Crossings with at least one approaching 100 km we conclude that anatomically modern humans had the capacity to plan and make Open Sea voyages lasting several days by at least 50,000 years ago the conclusion is completely Justified since even the most skeptical archaeologists now accept the overwhelming evidence that Australia has been continuously inhabited by anatomically modern humans for more than 50,000 years from this two unavoidable conclusions follow first the earliest migrants must already have mastered the Arts of ship building and open ocean navigation before they made the journey secondly they must have been able to construct watercraft big enough and sturdy enough to carry sufficient numbers of migrants of reproductive age to avoid the risk of Extinction unsurprisingly though Flint failed to disclose this during our debate the fact that no submerged shipwrecks have yet been found that testify to that migration isn't offered by any archaeologist as evidence that no migration occurred there are parallels in the case of Cyprus even at the peak of the last ice age when sea levels were at their lowest Cyprus surrounded as it is by great deeps always remained an island until about 30 years ago archaeologists Adam ly rejected all evidence that suggested it might have been colonized at any point during the Ice Age because their preferred hypothesis or shall we call it a preconception was that seafaring in the Mediterranean didn't begin until well into the Neolithic around 9,000 years ago today to the credit of archaeology there has been a paradigm shift and the evidence that forced it isn't the discovery of submerged Ice Age shipwrecks but irrefutable proof that the colonization of Cyprus did in fact occur during the Ice Age at least as early as 12,000 years ago and perhaps more than 14,000 years ago in a paper published in the Journal of Maritime archaeology in 2020 Bernard nap professor of Mediterranean archaeology at the University of Glasgow and honorary research fellow at the Cyprus American archaeological research institute confirmed there can be no question that prehistoric seaf farers sailed between the lentine Andor Anatolian coasts and Cyprus some 12,000 years ago possibly several times per year in order to transport large ruminants like weaned calves or small wild boar on boats much more sophisticated than we might imagine those who undertook these Maritime Ventures had the ability to design and construct ccraft and to navigate most likely on a seasonal basis across the Open Sea from some adjacent Mainland be it some 50 to 60 kilm from the nearest point in Anatolia or about 95 kilm from the nearest point in the Levant subsequently in a paper published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024 Cory Bradshaw and co-authors used the quote l archaeological data hindcasted climate projections and age structured demographic models unquote to demonstrate evidence for early arrival 14257 to 13,182 calendar years ago to Cyprus large groups of people a, to 1,375 arrived in two to three main events occurring within a 100 years to ensure low Extinction risk these results indicate that the post glacial settlement of Cyprus involved only a few large scale organized events requiring Advanced watercraft technology it's no easy matter to settle a previously uninhabited Island and make a long-term success of the Venture thus the paper's co-authors conclude quote the large founding population we estimated is best viewed as an insurance policy against the likelihood of Extinction our analysis on the frequency of arrivals also supports the idea of large and by inference planned migrations to the island in other words many small sporadic foray of unconnected people over long periods of time were unlikely to support a permanent population it should go without saying that a project involving organized migrations aboard vessels capable of carrying large numbers of settlers across Ross more than 50 km of open water is the sort of undertaking that we would normally associate with a civilization of some sort in the case of Cyprus as in the case of Australia regardless of the absence of submerged shipwrecks there is now no doubt that such migrations did occur during the last ice age and could only have been accomplished on board seagoing vessels to except that some humans had ships during the Ice Age without any evidence of submerged shipwrecks from the period yet to use the same absence of submerged shipwrecks to cast doubt on the hypothesis of A Lost Civilization of the Ice Age exhibits to say the least a double standard but even more slippery in my opinion was Flint's failure to inform the audience of the archaeological consensus that humans were indeed seafarers deep in the Ice Age had he done so his whole argument around the Shipwreck issue which I was initially flawed by would have been null and void my bad I guess for not having the facts at my fingertips in the debate when I needed them the issue of mology more than 12,000 years ago has never been one that I've pursued in my Quest For A Lost Civilization of the Ice Age so I'm grateful to my friend Mano saada for his Facebook post a few days after the debate in which he drew attention to an apparent problem with Flint's presentation at 18 minutes 6 seconds of the YouTube screening of the debate Flint makes the following claims Graham has has acknowledged that there's a good chance there's no metallurgy for example um with this civilization he said maybe a decision was made not to use metals and I'd say we could definitively prove there was no large scale Metallurgy in the Ice Age if you look at ice cores in in the Arctic right we can track Metallurgy of the Roman period of medieval periods based on lead emissions that end up in these ice cores and there are no emissions from Metallurgy in in the Ice Age so we can be sure that there's no global metallurgical civilization that's doing a lot of Mining and smelting certainly they're not doing burning fossil fuels like they might be in the 18th or 19th century so we know that could not have been around that early cuz it would show up in the atmosphere to vouch for the supposed truth of these claims Flint relies on the slide he displayed as he made them the graph featured in Flint's slide is taken from this 2018 paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pnas unfortunately for the audience however this 2018 PN as paper doesn't deal with the ice age at all but only with metal levels in the Greenland ice cores for the period from 1,100 BC to 800 ad the graph and text Flint shows on screen for a few seconds leave no opportunity for readers to grasp that there's no mention of Ice Age levels in the paper it seems to add a final seal of approval to his statement and there are no emissions from Metallurgy in in the Ice Age by contrast contradicting Flint's claims this 1996 paper in Earth and planetary Sciences letters demonstrates High metal levels in the Greenland ice cores during the Ice Age likewise this 1988 paper shows that the extraordinary spikes in metal levels during the Ice Age have been found not only in the Greenland ice cores but also in ice cores from Antarctica in summary muddying the Waters of Flint's claims the 1996 paper demonstrates High atmospheric metal levels in the Greenland ice cores during the Ice Age and the 1988 paper demonstrates High atmospheric metal levels in Antarctic Ice cores during the Ice Age the authors of both papers speculate I repeat speculate about possible natural sources wind dust volcanoes Etc but they never consider or even give a moment's thought to the alternative possibility that human methology might have been the cause of these extraordinary spikes in metal levels presumably because archaeologists advis them that there was no mythology in the Ice Age and therefore no point in looking for it what the authors offer by way of explaining the anomalous spikes is therefore a perfectly respect able hypothesis but not any kind of proof of Flint's claim that quote there are no emissions from mythology in the Ice Age end quote I'm therefore puzzled that to support his case Flint cited only the 2018 paper which doesn't deal with Ice Age atmospheric metal levels in the ice course at all while ignoring potentially contradictory evidence in the other two papers surely the right thing would have been to site the 1996 and 1988 papers which do show high Ice Age atmospheric metal levels with that done and the need for disclosure satisfied Flint could full-throated have sought to explain those high levels as the results of wind dust volcanism Etc and not the results of mety but shouldn't the audience have been given all the relevant facts in order to make informed decisions about what they were being told are there special tests that can distinguish between atmospheric Metals arising from Earth's natural processes and Atmospheric metals that are definitively anthropogenic in other words man-made YouTuber Dan Richards reached out to Leading glaciologist Dr Peter nef with this exact question here's their exchange on X which Richards made public on 24th April 2024 in this video on his dunking channel to make certain my assumption about this was correct that the scientists involved don't test for lead very often in older ice cores I asked Dr Peter nef AKA ICP and he helped me out as you can see Richards his ex handle is super sexy D summarizes quote lead isn't usually looked for unless they're looking for human activity it's not something an ice core from 20,000 years before the present is likely to be tested for during an analysis if I'm wrong please correct me nef confirms think we got it happy to be a resource The Logical conclusion from nef's advice given while serving as a neutral resource is that Ice Age Ice cores aren't specifically tested for traces of Mythology and that therefore to affirm with certainty as Flint did during the debate that there are no emissions from mythology in the ice AG is to overstate current scientific knowledge on the subject however this wasn't the end of the matter as Richards tells us in the video Dibble sought out his ex exchange with nef and interjected with this bizarre warning I describ dibble's War War as bizarre because the issue at stake here isn't what he ignorantly describes in that X exchange as an absence of lead from Ice Age Ice cores on the contrary as he should have known if he felt qualified to pronounce on the matter at all the 1996 and 1988 papers cited earlier show that lead is abundantly present in Ice Age Ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica the heart of the matter sidelined by dible is that these ice cores have never been specifically tested for traces of Mythology and that it is therefore irresponsible to state with certainty as Dibble did during our debate that there are no emissions from Metallurgy in in the Ice Age a more disturbing aspect of dibble's intervention however is its intention which with the use of loaded language like pseudoscientist has every appear of a bid to devalue Richards in the eyes of nef and other scientists certainly that's how Richards himself views the whole exchange which he describes as Dibble posting scorched Earth crap where he wants to make sure that no scientist will give me any information whatsoever I guess you know science Educators nowadays are afraid of people that might use science in a way that undermines their whether or not mythology was being done somewhere on Earth during the Ice Age isn't a fight I have a dog in I've focused on dibble's handling of the issue here for the light it sheds on his debating strategy as a self-styled science educator something that I'd allowed to get under my skin much more than I should have and that put me on edge during the debate was my previous history with Flint going back more than a year while he has not not actually outright labeled me a racist and white supremacist and continues to deny ever doing so he has frequently Associated me and my work with racism and white supremacism in such a way as to insinuate that I am at the very least a closet white supremacist and racist in this interview given to the British newspaper the guardian on 27th November 2022 for example where he alleges that my ideas quote strip indigenous people of their Rich Heritage and instead give credit to aliens or white people end quote or in an article he contributed to the conversation on 18th November 2022 where he excoriated my alleged use of race science quote this sort of race science is outdated and long since debunked especially given the strong links between Atlantis and arens proposed by several Nazi quote unquote archaeologists the most recent example of this strategy came on 16th April 2024 during the debate itself when Flint confidently proclaimed I did not say that Graham reinforces white supremacist ideas on the same day however he had arranged for an article that he had pre-written to be published in sapien's anthropology magazine in which he States hanok and other pseudo archaeologists Center white Europeans as able creators while chalking up the accomplishments of other people's to outside influences and quote which of Flint dibble's two statements is true the one made on the JRE or the one in sapiens anthropology magazine it's said that there's no smoke without fire so is there any fire behind Flint's smoke this is a question that I'd already addressed as early as January 202 3 in my formal response to an open letter from the society for American archaeology the SAA of which Flint is an enthusiastic member demanding that Netflix relabel ancient apocalypse as science fiction and asserting that it has a long-standing association with racist white supremacist ideologies does injustice to indigenous peoples and emboldens extremists specifically the essay accused me as Flint himself has later continued to do of proclaiming that white survivors of my proposed Lost Civilization quote were responsible for the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples in the Americas and around the world however the narratives on which claims of white saviors are based have been demonstrated to be ones Modified by Spanish conquistadors and Colonial authorities for their own benefit these were subsequently used to promote violent white supremacy Hancock's narrative emboldens extreme voices that misrepresent archaeological knowledge in order to spread false historical narratives that are overtly misogynistic chauvinistic racist and anti-semitic Flint has read my detailed reply to the SAA open letter but during the debate itself he took no account of anything I'd put on record in it and he continues to take no account of it whatsoever in his ongoing efforts to smear me with insinuations of racism and white supremacism I therefore take this opportunity again for the record to restate the relevant passages from my 30 January 2023 reply to the SAA open letter Graham Hancock to SAA 30th January 202 3 as to the allegations made in the open letter that my work promotes racism and white supremacism as well as misogyny chauvinism and anti-Semitism it must presumably Be An Inconvenient fact for the SAA that there is not a hint of misogyny chauvinism or anti-Semitism in ancient apocalypse and that neither race nor white skin are mentioned in any episode of the series the essay a is therefore reduced once again to smearing by association and to making thinly veiled accusations that my interest in the possibility of A Lost Civilization of the Ice Age most recently explored in ancient apocalypse is in some way inherently racist and white supremacist although there is much more to say in reputation it's sufficient to note here that since I began work on this subject more than 30 years ago the ations I've considered as a possible Homeland for a hypothetical Lost Civilization of the Ice Age don't include any part of white Europe but do include the ancient Americas the ancient Sund shelf submerged lands around Indonesia ancient Antarctica and ancient India so if not from ancient apocalypse where do the saa's accusations of racism and white supremacism originate the answer is spin around some of the contents of some of my previous books in particular my 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods where I reference several indigenous Native American myths in which wh- skinned beaded gods are portrayed as the Bringers of culture and civilization very often after some great Global cataclysm since the SAA is accusing me of empowering racism and white supremacism by citing these myths the issue of whether or not they were tampered with by the Spaniards becomes Central in its open letter the SAA presents it as an established fact that the myths were indeed tampered with in Spanish interests and it's true that growing numbers of archaeologists do believe that it is not a fact however rather it's a body of opinion and conjecture which even today is subject to dispute and disagreement and which in the early and mid 1990s when I researched and wrote Fingerprints of the Gods was not a prominent view on the subject certainly some authorities for example iner clendinen in 1991 Fierce and unnatural cruelty Cortez and the conquest of Mexico were very much in the tampered with camp but in stark contrast a great many more equally well-qualified Scholars had no doubt that the myths collected by early Spanish visitors to Mexico in the decades after the conquest were authentic and untampered with so when I reported these as authentic indigenous myths in Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995 I not only did so in good faith but also found myself in the good company of amongst many others Jac laf then professor of Latin American history at the sbon qual coatal and guadaloop 1987 Michael dco then professor of anthropology and curator in the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University Mexico 1988 Mexican John beerhorst the mythology of Mexico and Central America 1990 renowned Mexican Anthropologist and historian Miguel lean Portia then at the Instituto indianist inter Americano Mexico City the broken Spears expanded and updated Edition 1992 David Carrasco director of the Moses miso American archive at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of archaeology and ethnology quo Cole and the irony of Empire 1992 and historian Hugh Thomas Conquest Mont Cortez and the fall of Old Mexico 1993 none of these works or the use within them of myths of returning white saviors as the SAA typecasts these complex and varied accounts attracted the least outcry of racism or white supremacism at the time they were published nor do they do so now neither have there been accusations of racism and white supremacy made against other authorities who have subsequently drawn upon the same Corpus of qual coal myths that I drew on in Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995 these authorities include Neil Baldwin Legends of the plumed serpent biography of a Mexican God 1998 John Paul Aztec and conquistadors the Spanish Invasion and the collapse of the Aztec empire 2005 and Michael Wood ConEd doors 2010 of the greatest significance to the ongoing debate over the authenticity of indigenous miso American myths about a returning white savior again white savior is the saa's phrase not mine have been two studies in particular these are the revised Edition 2000 with an important new chapter added of David carrasco's qual Cole and the irony of Empire and HB Nicholson's magisterial topilin qual Cole The Once and Future King of the TLX 2001 reprinted in 2008 and again in 2015 although based on his 1957 PhD thesis which I didn't have the opportunity to examine when I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods Nicholson's topilin quz Cole strongly reinforces the authenticity and legitimacy of the same same indigenous Mexican myths collected by Spaniards in the decades after the conquest that I drew upon yet far from there being an outcry about it the book has been twice reprinted since 2001 and widely lorded by Scholars as David Carrasco puts it no one has been able to organize the existing primary sources or interpret them as deeply and clearly as he has no one has surpassed Nicholson and no one will it's not necessary to multiply examples here to State matters briefly my response to the saa's accusations of racism and white supremacism is that they are not based on a representative analysis of the content of my work or of my general Outlook and behavior but solely on the fact that I cited certain indigenous myths from the Americas that certain Scholars think were tampered with by Spaniards in fact Fingerprints of the Gods I concluded responsibly in line with the consensus of many authorities at the time that the myths are authentic and I reported them accordingly there is a further point that needs to be driven home however if the myths were not tampered with by the Spaniards if they are genuinely indigenous as I believed in 1995 and as I still believe today then then even the elastic logic of the SAA cannot stretch to attaching a racist or white supremacist burden to them on the contrary it seems to me that if any party is guilty of racism and white supremacism here it is the SAA itself with its predominantly white membership and its claim to possess Superior knowledge of the truth about indigenous myths knowledge Superior even to that of the indigenous and inhabitants of Mexico in the 16th century who shared those myths in the first place I will close with comments by David Carrasco on Anthropologist iner clendenin's attempts to dismiss on the grounds that it is a quote splendidly implausible unquote web of Spanish fictions the notion Central to the myths that the Aztecs believed Cortez and the wh- skinned Ed Spaniards quotes were the returning quetzal Cole end quote and the parallel notion that this belief greatly weakened moaz Zuma making him hopelessly indecisive and ultimately leading him to abdicate these myths primarily come down to us through the 16th century Florentine codex of Father Bernardino Des sahagun who was fluent in nahat the Aztec language who worked assiduously with teams of indigenous knowledge Keepers to prepare the 12 books of the Codex and who was undoubtedly the most thorough and principled of all the Spanish collectors and compilers of the indigenous myths traditions and histories of Mexico clendinen however wants to claim that the myths of the returning qual kattle have no indigenous origin were entirely concocted by Cortez himself in a 152 letter to the king of Spain and were later picked up secondhand by sahagun I have no doubt writes Carrasco that Cortez was striving to impress the Royal mind with his extraordinary management skills or that his literary craft was elegant and profoundly political what is challenging to me is clend dinan's claim that this Spanish political fiction of both qual atle returning and moaz Zuma's vacillation and collapse was picked up by sahagun who powerfully reinforced it erroneously thinking it was an Indian belief when in fact the ruler's gesture of abdication was a very late Dawning story making its first appearance 30 or more years after the conquest the stunning implication is that this Spanish fiction the story of moaz Zuma's paralysis is parades down the years through the literature and scholarship and is internalized by commentators less wary than clend dinon all the way to Leon Portia Who falls unconsciously under Cortez charismatic pen along with the rest of us this means Leon Pier's extensive nahal training and sense of the Aztec ethos not to mention sahagun profound familiarity with Spanish native exchanges contribute no effective critical stance in relation to the Spanish literary craft which later Spaniards were not aware of and which a number of Indians internalized as their own Carrasco concludes that the work of clendinen and others carries a bloated sense a Transcendent sense that the Spaniards led by the incomparable Cortez made up the facts of the story while the Indians merely repeated them unknowingly the same sense of superior knowledge of claiming insights that the indigenous inhabitants themselves supposedly did not share applies to the spin put by the SAA on the myths of qual Cole's return that I reported in Fingerprints of the Gods far from seeking to promote racism and white supremacism my purpose in that book and in all my subsequent work very much including ancient apocalypse has been to honor indigenous voices and perspectives in ways that the SAA despite much virtue signaling does not finally returning to Flint's baseless allegation that I quote Center White Europeans as able creators while chalking up the accomplishments of other peoples to outside influences end quote let's see what I've actually said on the record about the ethnic makeup of my proposed lost Ice Age civilization first a regret words like negro negroid and Caucasian caucasoid were already Politically Incorrect in 1995 when I used them in Fingerprints of the Gods 6 years earlier however in 1989 the word negroid was still being used in the African origins of civilization a highly regarded book by sagales scholar shik anad Diop to describe the physical appearance of people from Africa south of the Sahara meanwhile in 1997 2 years after the publication of fingerprints The Washington Post clearly felt no discomfort using the term caucasoid in this report and as late as 2008 in Chapter 3 of a book titled everyday anti-racism contribut Caro mapat still found it necessary to write quote it is high time we got rid of the word Caucasian end quote I regret my own use of these much outdated and politically loaded terms in Fingerprints of the Gods even 30 years ago this showed a lack of sensitivity on my part while at the same time handing my critics a stick to beat me with decades later nonetheless as those who have actually read fingerprints must know I attached no suggestion of racial superiority either to the terms negro negroid or to the terms Caucasian caucasoid I handled the matter clumsily for sure but my purpose was solely to draw attention to descriptions in ancient indigenous traditions of the Americas and ancient indigenous sculptures of the Americas that seem to refer to individual uals who had visited the so-called New World in the remotest past but whose physical appearance was very different from those of Native Americans today of particular note are the sculptures and reliefs attributed to the olch culture of the Gulf of Mexico most famously the megalithic MCH heads but also a figure carved in high relief on a giant monolithic slab excavated in the 1940s on account of its high bridged nose and long flowing beard the figure was dubbed Uncle Sam after the iconic National personification of the USA by the excavator American archaeologist Matthew Sterling meanwhile this screenshot from the Kindle edition of Fingerprints of the Gods gives some insight into my thoughts on the allme mystery if so we may be gazing at faces from a much more more remote past than we imagine when we stare into the armored eyes of one of the Negro heads or into the angular chiseled Caucasian features of Uncle Sam it is by no means impossible that these great works preserve the images of peoples from a vanished civilization which embraced several different ethnic groups similar seemingly non-indigenous facial types are also portrayed at Monte Alban 500 miles away there stacked Loosely against the side of a low pyramid where the objects I'd come all this way to see several dozen engraved Steely depicting Negroes and Caucasians equal in life equal in death if a great civilization had indeed been lost to history and if these sculptures Told part of its Story the message conveyed was one of racial equality no one who has seen the pride or felt the the Charisma of the great negro heads from lenta could seriously imagine that the original subjects of these magisterial sculptures could have been slaves neither did the leanfoo had an aristocratic demeanor so in summary what I actually said in Fingerprints of the Gods was people dissimilar to the Native Americans today and more similar to Modern whites and blacks visited the Americas at some time in the extremely remote past the physical appearance of these people as recorded in the alch and Monte Alban sculptures was diverse suggesting an egalitarian multiethnic society the civilizations of both the old world and the new world may have shared the legacy of influence and ideas from an as yet Uniden ified Lost Civilization this is very far indeed from the caricature of my work presented by Flint Dibble to support his allegation that I Center White Europeans as able creators while chalking up the accomplishments of other people's to outside influences on the contrary I have never given special credit to White Europeans anywhere in my work and I have never looked for the homeland of A Lost Civilization anywhere in Europe much of which was a frozen Wasteland during the Ice Age when I propose my Lost Civilization flourished besides as Flint well knows there were no such people as white Europeans during the Ice Age Flint's entire case that I Center White Europeans as able creators while chalking up the accomplishments of other people's to outside influences therefore proves to be a farago of propaganda expressed in weasel language designed to harm an opponent without taking responsibility for the Damage Done there is much more that I could add but I'll confine myself to one more example here not So Much from the debate itself as from public statements about the debate subsequently made by dible for example on 4th May 24 interviewed by Indie 100 for an article modestly titled how I took on Joe Rogan and Graham Hancock and won Dibble had the following to say quote I'll be optimistic and say that I won Dibble laughed noting that a quarter of the way through their discussion at 1 hour 27 minutes to be precise hanock clearly admitted that there is at present no evidence for an advanced civilization on X on 20th June 2024 Dibble doubled down on his claim that I had admitted there is no evidence for my proposed Lost Civilization of the Ice Age some readers of this post might have been persuaded as Dibble obviously intended that after devoting more than 30 years of my life to investigating the possibility of A Lost Civilization of the Ice Age and Publishing thousands of P on the subject supported by detailed footnotes as to sources I still had no evidence for its existence and even the small proportion who did go on to click the link at the end of the post might not have realized that I was being quoted out of context here's the full exchange on this subject I have to really repeat myself here yeah I can go back up there we we're we're looking at um less than 5% of the continent shelves that have been studied at allall by archaeology I'm not surprised that we find hunter gatherer traces underwater I'm very glad that we do I would very surprised if we didn't but what I'm saying is that not enough of that 27 million square kilometers has been investigated only a tiny fraction has been investigated and that fraction is not enough to draw the conclusion that we can absolutely say there was no Lost Civilization same goes for the Amazon rainforest same goes for the Sahara dist but can we say there's no evidence for an advanced civiliz a in what they have studied in what they have studied yes we can say there's no evidence for an advanced civilization but that's that brings us to another issue of what is studied and what is not studied by archaeology and this is the crucial point which I would have driven home at much greater length if I'd known that my opponent would later take the rest of the exchange out of context and use it against me in the archaeological sites I'm interested in the Great Pyramid and the great SPS of Giza for example or gockley in turkey or Serpent Mound in Ohio or the moai of Easter Island I draw extensively on data gathered by archaeologists indeed I've stated frequently that without their data none of my work would have been possible but I don't study what they study I look in the same directions they do but my focus is entirely different in the case of the Great Pyramid it's a matter of a abiding interest to me and a matter of absolute indifference to archaeologists that its height and base perimeter scaled up by 43,200 encode respectively the polar radius and the equatorial circumference of the Earth in the case of the Great Sphinx More Than A Century of study has yet to provide any compelling evidence as to who carved it out of the Bedrock of the Giza Plateau or when despite this archaeologists teach for the most part unanimously and With No Reservations that it is entirely a work of the fourth Dynasty pharoh cafre I disagree with this Collective acquiescence in the cafre Dogma not because of anything I've learned from what archaeologists study but precisely because I don't study what they study I'm interested in the geological evidence universally rejected by archae ologists that the Sphinx May originally have been carved near the end of the last ice age around 12,800 years ago and I'm interested in the evidence from paleo astronomy which reveals that the Sphinx faces due east with its gaze targeting the Rising Sun at dawn on the Spring Equinox today the zodiacal constellation against the background of which the sun rises on the Spring Equinox is Pisces but 12,000 800 years ago it was Leo archaeologists scoff at the very idea that the lion bodied Sphinx might originally have been created by an astronomically minded civilization of the last ice age as a terrestrial representation of the constellation of Leo but I've studied the matter deeply finding worldwide evidence for recognition of the constellations of the zodiac during the Ice Age and I suggest that archaeologists should think again in the case of gockley it's the same story I don't study what archaeologist study their data is very useful to me but the inferences I draw from it are completely different from theirs and I look where they don't so yes it was a breakthrough for me when the lake Dr CLA Smith of the German archaeological Institute carbon dated gockley te's enclosure d to 11,600 years ago it's why I immediately knew I had to learn more about this enigmatic place but once I'd begun to immerse myself in its Mysteries it wasn't the archaeological findings that convinced me of a connection with my proposed Lost Civilization of the Ice Age although entirely ignored by archaeologists the astronomical symbolism and alignments of the megaliths offered far more compelling evidence in the case of Serpent Mound although sidelined by archaeologists it's the alignment of the great earthw work that provides evidence to support my Lost Civilization hypothesis likewise in the case of Easter Island I'm not looking where archaeologists look or relying on their conclusions to underpin my hypothesis my focus is on neglected matters such as the Easter Island script and oral traditions of a great flood that submerged a primeval Pacific Homeland you get the picture the context for my statement that there's no evidence for an advanced civilization in what they have studied is my immediate follow-up statement edited out of the clip promoted by Dibble but that's that brings us to another issue of what is studied and what is not studied by archaeology I find my evidence in what is not studied by archaeology I find my evidence by exploring undiscovered Pathways I find my evidence not by going from the known to the unknown as Dibble describes archaeological methodology but by abandoning all preconceived notions and Diving straight into the unknown to see what I find that there is no evidence of lost Ice Age civilization in what archaeologists have studied is precisely why I and other Mavericks like me are needed to focus attention on the puzzling gaps in our Collective past that archaeologists haven't even begun to explain and the tantalizing Clues hints and possibilities mostly from outside their own discipline that they've never followed up