#1772 - Randall Carlson

Randall Carlson (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

RANDALL CARLSON Randall Carlson. How are you, sir?

Randall Carlson (0:15)

I'm doing well, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

It's great to see you, it really is.

Randall Carlson (0:17)

It's even greater to see you.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

I was so looking forward to this podcast. I was, I'm just, I'm so excited about this subject, so whenever you're in town, I'm happy.

Randall Carlson (0:28)

You know, Joe, I drove 1,000 miles to get here. That's how much I'm...

Joe Rogan (0:31)

That's a long drive. How long did that take?

Randall Carlson (0:34)

We did two days. It's a 14 and a half hour drive. But we got slowed down because of the weather.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

Yeah, I was worried about that. We've had some ice storms out here for people that don't know.

Randall Carlson (0:43)

Yeah, right. It was nasty for a while.

Joe Rogan (0:46)

And you're going to be out here, you're doing some exploring, you're doing some cave exploring as well?

Randall Carlson (0:50)

Well, we were going to go to see Hall's Cave, which is a...

Joe Rogan (0:55)

Pull that microphone up to you.

Randall Carlson (0:57)

Hall's Cave.

Joe Rogan (0:58)

Get the arm.

Randall Carlson (1:00)

How's this?

Joe Rogan (1:00)

Perfect.

Randall Carlson (1:01)

Good.

Yeah, Hall's Cave is near here. And this was a site that has extinct megafauna remains in it. And it also has some Clovis tools. And it has the Younger Dryas black matte stuff in it. So basically...

Joe Rogan (1:20)

Black matte stuff, meaning whatever the impact was, what was settled?

Randall Carlson (1:25)

So when you had the impact, or I think impacts, plural, you had this dusting of stuff and a lot of fires. So the fires produce soot, charcoal. So at that layer, you have this black matte layer, and below it, you have megafauna. And above it, they're mostly gone. Below it, you have the Clovis culture. Above it, they're mostly gone.

So Hall's Cave was a repository, and we were going to go in it. It belongs to an elderly couple that's on private property. But then when the COVID hit, they got worried about letting people in there. So it's been postponed.

Thomas Stafford was the lead archaeologist on the job, on the project. And he had agreed to set it up for us. But then they got, like I said, the elderly couple that owns the cave, they got cold feet.

Joe Rogan (2:14)

So was this because of the recent strains of COVID? Is this like?

Randall Carlson (2:17)

No, this would have been. So two years ago, we were going to go, let's see, well, two years, was it last summer? We were planning to go a year, a year ago last summer.

So it's been on hold. And I suspect that at some point we'll get to do it. But while I'm out here, we are going to check out a few things. Canyon Lake Gorge, which is down towards San Antonio, is a site that in 2002, there was a heavy, heavy rain, and Canyon Lake is a reservoir.

It overflowed and it cut this canyon and reproduced all these features like recessional cataracts and plunge pools and all these kinds of things that geologists assumed were kind of slow to form, but are very similar to some of the things that are on a much grander scale that we'll look at here today.

But what it is, it's kind of almost forced to revision in thinking because basically they're seeing this duplication of these forms, although on a smaller scale, but formed in two days and not thousands of years.

Joe Rogan (3:24)

So for people that are not familiar with your work, I think we should probably give them a real quick refresher. When you're referring to the younger dryas, you're referring to the younger dryas impact theory, and this impact theory you believe probably ended the ice age, caused the extinction of many mammals and many species of life all over the earth, and reset civilization.

Randall Carlson (3:49)

Pretty much, yeah. In a nutshell, that's going to be it.

Joe Rogan (3:51)

And that is somewhere around 11,000, 12,000 years ago?

Randall Carlson (3:56)

The dating of it, the younger dryas itself is about a 1300 year interval. So to put in this in perspective, go back 16 to 20,000 years ago, we're in the middle of the late glacial maximum, when more than doubled the amount of glacial ice on the planet now. We had North America, half of North America is buried under an ice sheet bigger than the one that now covers the South Pole. So all of Canada up to the Arctic Circle, Northern United States, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Twin Cities, Seattle, all of that area was completely buried under this massive ice sheet.