#961 - Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson & Michael Shermer

Joe Rogan (0:08)

Three, two, this is live, ladies and gentlemen. And this is a very unusual podcast we're going to have here, and a very unusual discussion. I have to my left, Michael Shermer, very famous skeptic. He's been on the podcast before. Of course, Randall Carlson, amazing gentleman who knows far too much about terrifying things like asteroids. And Graham Hancock, author, also a fantastic human being, many times been on this podcast as well. And this all came out of a podcast that Randall and Graham and I did recently, and Michael Shermer commented on it. And it was all essentially on the hypothesis that the great extinction that happened with the North American land animals that happened somewhere around the end of the ice age, and the end of the ice age, the abrupt end of the ice age, being caused, please correct me if I fuck any of this up, being caused by a comet impact.

Michael Shermer had some questions about that, and we said this would be an amazing podcast to get everybody together in a room and go over this. Since then, there's been some interesting stuff that's happened.

Well, I thought this was really fascinating that Forbes did a comet wipeout ice age megafauna, and this is actually from just a couple of weeks ago. And then there was also this interpretation that's fairly recent as well about one of the stone tablets, one of the stone carvings, rather, on Gobekli Tepe. And Graham, you would probably be the best to describe that.

Graham Hancock (1:41)

Yeah, that was published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, peer-reviewed journal by a couple of scientists from the University of Edinburgh.

And they are proposing an interpretation of the Gobekli Tepe imagery. There's quite a lot of imagery on those T-shaped pillars, particularly one pillar, pillar 43 in enclosure D. And their deduction, what they take from their interpretation, of course, many will disagree with them. Their interpretation is that those images are speaking of the comet impact. They're speaking of a comet that hit the earth roughly 12,900 years before our time.

Joe Rogan (2:23)

And Randall, this has been something that you've been obsessed with for many, many years now. We've documented it and detailed it in many conversations that we've had on the podcast.

Randall Carlson (2:36)

Oh, yes, now I can't say that I'm that familiar with that article. I haven't had a chance to get into it.

Joe Rogan (2:41)

But this idea that the comet impact is what has caused the end of the ice age.

Randall Carlson (2:47)

Well, it's so complex, but now what we do is we throw some type of an impact into the mix and it seems to fill gaps that have...

Joe Rogan (2:56)

Pull this right up to you.

Randall Carlson (2:57)

It seems to fill gaps that were at this point still unexplained.

You know, there's varying theories between some extent of climate change and some extent of human predation that caused the extinction. And I've always felt like you can't blame it on one or the other. I think humans probably had a role, but only in the very final stages of the extinction event. And one of the scenarios would certainly suggest that there were extreme climate changes between what's called the Balling Alarod, which was the rather gradual warming at the very end of the Pleistocene, which was then followed by the Younger Dryas, which was the return to full glacial cold. And then the end of the Younger Dryas, which is dated at about 11,600, which is considered now to be the boundary of the Holocene. Post-Younger Dryas, pre-Boreal, it's called, would be the beginning of the Holocene. And it seems that most of the extinctions did occur between roughly 13,000 and 11,600 years ago, although the dating has a wide spread on it. So you can't pinpoint it down to a specific event. But I've always felt like that there had to be something we needed to look at that triggered the extreme climate changes that we do see at the end of the Ice Age. And to my opinion, you can't attribute that solely to Milankovitch theories, which is basically the changing solar terrestrial geometries because they're too slow. And what we see at the end of the Ice Age were very rapid climate changes. And so one of the things that I think has been missing has been the trigger. Wallace Brecker pointed out years ago that possibly a major flood from the draining of Lake Agassiz caused an interruption of the thermohaline circulation, which is basically the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean, and that this might have been what triggered the Younger Dryas and then also contributed to the mass extinction events. But now I think that the dating of the draining of Lake Agassiz is too late for that and was probably a latter event within the overall melting phenomena that occurred between roughly 14,600 and about 11,000 years ago.