#2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble

Joe Rogan (0:13)

All right, well, this took a lot of time to organize, but I'm very excited, and I'm happy you're both here. Thank you. Flint, please introduce yourself to everybody, what you do.

Flint Dibble (0:24)

Yeah, hi, my name is Flint, and I'm an archaeologist. I've done archaeology my whole life.

My dad was an archaeologist, and I'm just very passionate about sharing archaeology, and what we do, I find in general that people don't really understand what modern archaeology is about. And so I'm going to try to get that across while here, you know, that's my goal.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

Fantastic. Take that microphone and try to keep it about a fifth from your face.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

One second, we have to, his HDMI is not working, it's not going through.

Joe Rogan (0:53)

All right, we had a bit of a technical issue, but we're up. So, Flint, you were just explaining how your passion is archaeologists, you're an archaeologist, and you have this opportunity to sort of educate people on how archaeology is done.

Flint Dibble (1:07)

Yeah, that's my goal, is to try to share what we do, why we do it, and what our goals are with it, yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

Okay, terrific. And Graham, everybody knows you, you've been on this podcast about ten times.

Graham Hancock (1:19)

Largely thanks to you, Joe.

Joe Rogan (1:20)

Oh, I'm very happy, happy to introduce the world to it. Are we okay, Flint, with the HDMI?

Graham Hancock (1:24)

I think we've been doing shows together since 2011

Joe Rogan (1:27)

You, I think, were one of my first real guests. You might be the first real guest, because before that it was just my friends, just comedians. And it was all in my house, and we ate pizza, and it was fantastic.

Jamie's setting everything up, making sure we're good to go. Okay, the way we'd agree to do this is, Flint, you wanted to open, and you wanted to do about ten minutes and just sort of explain things. And so we'll let you do that, and then, Graham, you'll have an opportunity to respond.

Flint Dibble (1:56)

Yeah, thank you. Jamie, do you mind pulling up my screen?

Joe Rogan (2:01)

Here we go.

Flint Dibble (2:02)

All right, so look, one of the things that I see when I'm online or in person sharing archaeology is I find it's tough to get across what it is, and so I wanted to start with a fun example. So I understand that maybe not everybody can see the screen, so Joe, do you mind actually just kind of describing what this artifact is that you see?

Joe Rogan (2:19)

Oh, you're putting this on me, buddy.

Flint Dibble (2:20)

Exactly.

Joe Rogan (2:23)

Well, this is an Athenian red figure from 470 BC and it is two people having sex. It's a man on top of a woman. You see his penis. You see it's, yeah, it's very graphic.

Flint Dibble (2:37)

It is very graphic. So what do you think this shares about what archaeology is? Any ideas?

Joe Rogan (2:41)

Well, I mean, you're finding artwork and parts of civilization that were left behind and, you know, have been around in this case since over 2000 years.

Flint Dibble (2:52)

Yeah, and for a long time, scholars thought that a piece like this described sort of life in Athens, and they connected to Athenian texts sort of like Plato describing people having sex even, right? And on the other hand, however, every single piece of Athenian artwork with graphic sex like this, couples actually fucking with penises and stuff like that, ends up in Italy. It's part of an Athenian pornographic export market. And Kathleen Lynch and Sean Lewis and others have published on this. And so the real point is that what we're looking at is the painters are designing something for consumers in Italy, and particularly in Etruria. And this instead fits better in with telling us about life in Etruscans and the kind of stuff that they show in their tombs, sort of romance between people or the kind of sexual scenes that they designed themselves in Italy as well. And the whole point here is that archaeology is not really about an artifact.

It's not about a monument. It's about our patterns.

And so when we sort of look at how much archaeology there is in the world, this is a map that shows the Horn of Africa with every single archaeological site that's been surveyed there. And there's 171,000 of them.

Joe Rogan (3:58)

That's incredible. This looks amazing.

Flint Dibble (4:01)

It's just, and this is just because of the terrain. Most of the, many of these are tombs, for example, Islamic and pre-Islamic tombs. And so they're visible on the surface.