PowerfulJREJoe Rogan Experience #2546 - Michael Button
PowerfulJRE
A Year Of Rapid Change 0:01
Michael Button opens by describing how much his work has grown since his last appearance, moving from doing ancient history research for free to making it his full-time job. Joe Rogan praises his measured, objective approach, noting that mainstream archaeology has left a gap that independent researchers like Button have filled for a much larger audience. Button credits his independence from academia for giving him freedom to explore ideas without worrying about funding pressures or professional backlash, even though he still faces criticism online.
Three Questions Archaeology Cannot Answer 3:32
Button lays out what he sees as three fundamental questions that archaeology once thought it had answered but no longer does. The first is why civilization took hundreds of thousands of years to appear and then emerged almost simultaneously in unconnected places like Mesoamerica, South America, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, ancient India, and ancient China. The second is how old human intelligence actually is, a question tied to how smart other human species may have been. The third is when humans first reached isolated landmasses like the Americas and Australia. He stresses he is not a professional archaeologist, only a dedicated researcher, and urges listeners to check primary sources rather than take his word as final.
Pushing Civilization's Timeline Back 9:31
Button argues that the old marker for civilization, the invention of writing around 3000 to 4000 BC, is outdated. He points to Tashtapella in Quebec, dated to around 12,000 years ago, as evidence that civilization is at least twice as old as previously thought. He explains that the idea of humans becoming intelligent only 50,000 years ago made the old timeline feel tidy, but new evidence suggests human intelligence could stretch back over a million years, a twentyfold increase that reopens nearly every question about prehistory.
Psychedelics And Ancient Ritual 12:31
Rogan brings up a theory attributed to Jesse Michaels, linking the rise of agriculture to ergot, a psychedelic compound found in wheat and barley, and connecting it to the Eleusinian Mysteries described in Brian Muraresku's book The Immortality Key. The conversation turns to a puma-bone smoking pipe found at Inca Cueva in Jujuy, northwestern Argentina, dated to roughly 2130 BCE, which tested positive for tryptamine alkaloids from Anadenanthera seeds, making it among the oldest direct evidence of intentional psychoactive drug use in the southern Andes. Rogan also mentions scholarly speculation that Moses's burning bush may have involved a DMT-rich acacia tree, and both agree that ancient cultures worldwide seem to have experimented with psychoactive substances long before modern prohibition.
Gobekli Tepe And Its Neighbors 21:31
The discussion shifts to Tashtapella and Gobekli Tepe in modern Turkey, which Button considers the earliest evidence of something like civilization, featuring fourteen interlinked sites with shared symbolism, religious traditions, and architectural styles that imply organized, stratified labor. He notes archaeologists resist calling it a civilization only because it does not fit every old checklist item, and that new finds of residential buildings at Gobekli Tepe are undermining the earlier claim that no one lived there permanently. Only about five percent of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated, and Button suggests the site deserves special urgency in case an artifact as important as the Rosetta Stone lies in the unexcavated ninety five percent.
Carved Stones And Old Questions 24:30
Rogan and Button discuss a striking boar carving found at Gobekli Tepe, nearly life size and still bearing traces of red paint, which may represent the earliest known example of raised relief, three dimensional carving in stone, where the surrounding stone is cut away rather than the image simply etched in. They note this implies specialized labor, since whoever carved it was not spending their time gathering food. The pillars themselves are described as massive, with most weighing around ten tons and one uncut stone at the quarry estimated at fifty tons, raising open questions about how such weights were moved. The section closes with Rogan raising the possibility that Gobekli Tepe might not be the first civilization at all, but a rebuilt one following some earlier catastrophe like a great flood or the Younger Dryas impact.
Rethinking the Timeline of Civilization 27:00
Michael Button explains that carbon dating of Göbekli Tepe works because the site was deliberately covered in uniform dirt roughly 11,600 years ago, which only tells you when it was buried, not when it was built. He notes the site clearly wasn't a first attempt by hunter gatherers, since something that sophisticated implies a long developmental history before it. There is debate over whether the covering was intentional, a natural landslide, or something else entirely, but Button leans toward the original excavator Klaus Schmidt's view that it was deliberate. He stresses that no one can speak with real confidence about the deep past, and that both YouTubers and professors are ultimately speculating from limited evidence.
Human Origins Pushed Back Drastically 30:31
Button points out that the oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans, found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, are now dated to between 300,000 and 350,000 years old, far older than the 50,000 to 100,000 year estimates once taught. He reminds the listener that fossilization itself is extremely rare, something like one in a million, so the fossil record is a tiny, incomplete sample from which broad claims are drawn. This raises the question of why it would take anatomically identical humans hundreds of thousands of years to develop agriculture and complex civilization, especially given how many natural disasters, including asteroid impacts scattered across the globe, could have erased earlier societies entirely.
Seafaring a Million Years Ago 34:02
Button describes two major recent papers reshaping ideas about ancient intelligence. One concerns stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, dated to between 1.04 and 1.4 million years old, discovered at a site called Calio in August of the previous year. Sulawesi sits east of the Wallace Line, a boundary that has kept it separated from the mainland by 50 to 100 kilometers of deep ocean for tens of millions of years, meaning whoever left those tools crossed open water. Similar finds exist on Flores, with tools 1.02 million years old, and on Luzon, with tools 700,000 years old, all in the same region and all requiring ocean crossings.
Accident or Deliberate Voyage 37:02
Button brings in NASA research on how many people are needed to successfully colonize an isolated landmass without genetic collapse, citing figures of at least 160 people under strict breeding controls, and closer to 500 without such controls. He argues it strains belief that 500 people of breeding age could have been accidentally swept out to sea and survived, and that this happened independently on three separate islands around a million years ago. Applying Occam's razor, he suggests the simplest explanation is that these early humans were intelligent enough to deliberately build seaworthy boats, requiring planning, carpentry skill, imagination, and likely some form of communication and organization, all traits once thought exclusive to modern humans emerging only 50,000 years ago.
The Forgotten Copper Industry 41:01
The conversation turns to a copper mining industry in North America dating back about 9,000 to 9,500 years, matching the earliest metallurgy dates found anywhere in the world. Estimates suggest as much as 1.5 billion pounds, or roughly 680,000 metric tons, of copper were extracted from the Lake Superior region over many millennia, peaking between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, often from natural surface deposits called float copper. The people using it made weapons, arrow points, and jewelry, but then abruptly stopped, for reasons unknown. Button argues this contradicts the assumption that technology always advances in a straight line, showing instead that societies can invent something, use it for centuries, and then simply abandon and forget it.
Baalbek and Layered Ancient Sites 46:01
Rogan raises the trilithon stones at Baalbek in Lebanon, massive blocks larger than anything else built by the Romans, yet unmentioned in any Roman records despite Rome's extensive documentation of its own projects. Both point out that structures built later on top of older foundations are often less sophisticated than what lies beneath, a pattern seen at many ancient sites where people reused a good location without knowing or recording who built the original base. This raises the possibility that the visible, later civilization at a site isn't necessarily the first one there, even if it's often assumed to be.
Why Certainty Is the Problem 48:00
Button and Rogan agree that claiming definitive knowledge about the deep past is misguided given how little evidence actually exists, and that this bothers many credentialed experts who resist letting go of authority. Button says he's grateful for how many people now engage with this material, and Rogan credits a growing group of serious, objective researchers, including figures like Ben van Kerkwyk and Jimmy Corsetti, for pushing these open questions further. Button reflects that both physics and history reveal, with each new discovery, how vast the unknown really is, framing physics as the question of where we are and history as the question of who we are and where we came from.
Catastrophe and Human Brutality 51:01
Rogan wonders whether flood myths found across ancient cultures might be echoes of real catastrophic events that reduced humanity to small surviving populations who then had to rebuild. He connects this to the brutality of ancient peoples, suggesting that survivors of such collapses would likely have been hardened and ruthless out of necessity. Both mention the Toba volcanic eruption around 70,000 years ago, which some theories say reduced the global human population to just a few thousand people, and discuss how unimaginable life would have been under those conditions, with scarce food and most of the world's population gone.
A Mysterious Male Die-Off 53:01
Around 6,000 years ago, something wiped out roughly 95 percent of male bloodlines, a fact scientists can trace through the Y chromosome, which shows a massive drop in genetic diversity among men specifically. Mass graves and violent burial sites from that era suggest widespread killing, though no one knows the cause for certain. Because the effect only hit men and not women, a natural disaster seems unlikely, pointing instead toward organized violence. Joe Rogan connects this to the shift from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, noting that once people built houses and stored crops or livestock, they became fixed targets for wandering groups like the Mongols, who mocked settled peoples as fools for building walls they couldn't run from.
The Great Wall's Strange Design 57:02
The conversation turns to an odd detail about the Great Wall of China: some arrow slits and parapets face inward, toward China itself, rather than outward toward invaders from the steppe. The explanation offered is that the wall functioned as a network of forts, gates, and roads built for defense after a breach, controlling movement in both directions and regulating trade and border crossings, not simply as a one-way barrier. The wall's scale is staggering, with the continuous Ming-era sections spanning 8,850 kilometers, while the full complex, including natural barriers and older structures, stretches over 20,000 kilometers, built over roughly 2,000 years starting in the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE.
Machined Jade and Ancient Puzzles 1:00:31
Michael Button raises examples of ancient Chinese jade artifacts, wafer-thin and highly polished, that look machined despite being extremely old, with evidence suggesting later generations inherited these objects but had lost the ability to make anything so refined. This parallels Egyptian vases carved from diorite, an extremely hard stone, shaped with less than a hair's width of variance and fitted with handles that seem impossible to produce on a lathe. Both point to a recurring pattern of civilizations rising, mastering sophisticated techniques, then losing that knowledge, echoed later in history by Baghdad's scientific golden age before the Mongols destroyed it.
Why So Little Survives 1:03:00
Button explains that almost all modern materials, aside from stone, degrade within a few millennia, which sounds long but is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of years humans have existed. He compares this to AI-generated images showing New York City reduced to jungle and crumbling ruins after just a thousand years. This preservation problem means the few surviving structures, like the 476,000-year-old Kalambo structure discussed earlier, likely represent a tiny fraction of what once existed, most of it lost entirely to time.
AI and the Future of Archaeology 1:04:00
Rogan speculates that a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence might eventually scan the earth's entire crust and reconstruct a far more accurate timeline of human history than we have now, much as ground-penetrating radar and lidar have already reshaped archaeology. Button agrees this is the field's great hope, while cautioning that so much physical evidence has simply vanished that even powerful new tools may not fully close the gap. Both agree that current understanding of prehistory cannot be the final word, and that assuming otherwise ignores how science has always kept advancing past what seemed like settled knowledge.
India's Machined-Looking Monuments 1:12:31
The discussion shifts to a 57-foot, 10th-century CE monolithic statue of Lord Bahubali in India, commissioned by the Ganga dynasty, which appears so precisely detailed, right down to uniform facial features and finger and toe work, that it looks machined despite being carved from a single block of granite over a thousand years ago. Similar puzzles appear at sites like the Kailasa temple, carved directly downward out of volcanic rock, reportedly with hammer and chisel, and the Barabar caves, which have mirror-polished interior surfaces despite conventionally being described as simple shelters. Button also mentions a newly reported million-year-old human skull found in Yunxian, China, with a modern-sized brain, which, combined with earlier evidence of seafaring in Southeast Asia around the same era, suggests modern human cognitive abilities may be far older than currently assumed.
A Skull That Rewrites Human Origins 1:20:31
A skull called Yunxian 2, found in China and long assumed to belong to Homo erectus because of its age and location, has been re-examined using modern CT scanning by researchers from a Chinese university and London's Natural History Museum, including professor Chris Stringer. They now believe it may actually be Homo longi, part of the same group as the Denisovans, a sister species to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Since this skull is over a million years old, its classification suggests that the split between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans must have happened long before scientists previously thought. Earlier estimates placed that divergence around 500,000 years ago, so this pushes the timeline back by roughly 400,000 years or more, meaning Homo sapiens may already have existed as a distinct species a million years ago.
A Fringe Idea About Neanderthal Origins 1:22:31
One of the speakers raises a theory he'd read that Neanderthals weren't simply a separate branch of humanity but might have resulted from Homo sapiens interbreeding with some other ancient primate or human species, essentially reversing the usual story. Neither host is certain this holds up, and an AI search confirms it isn't a mainstream scientific claim, though some researchers have proposed hybridization ideas around late Neanderthal or early modern human fossils. What is well established is that humans interbred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans, and evidence now suggests genetic contact occurred in multiple waves between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago, much earlier than the previously assumed window of 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Recent findings also suggest Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted cooperatively in the same locations for long stretches, not just through isolated encounters.
Denisovans as Possible Giants 1:27:00
Fossil evidence, including a thigh bone found undersea, a larger tooth, and a bigger jawbone, suggests Denisovans may have stood over six feet tall, notably larger than the average human male today. Given how few Denisovan fossils exist, the hosts speculate this could connect to legends of giants, including biblical references, since even a modestly larger, physically dominant group encountering small Homo sapiens communities could seed lasting myths. They compare this to modern giant humans, like UFC heavyweights standing 6'7 to 6'9 and weighing 265 pounds, and note that primates can naturally grow very large, referencing an extinct giant ape whose oversized molars were first discovered in a 1920s Chinese apothecary shop.
Ghost Populations and Missing Humans 1:32:00
The conversation turns to how little is actually known about Denisovans, discovered only in 2010 and represented by just a tooth, a jawbone, and a thigh bone. Human DNA contains traces of so-called ghost populations, ancient human groups whose genetic fingerprint survives even though no fossils of them have ever been found. This ties into the idea that prehistory remains full of unknowns, including whether Denisovans made identifiable stone tools, which is nearly impossible to confirm without skeletons found directly alongside them.
Pushing Back Human Arrival in the Americas 1:34:00
The old "Clovis first" theory, which held humans reached the Americas about 13,000 years ago, has been overturned by footprints at White Sands dated to at least 22,000 years old, now widely accepted. More controversial sites push further back: Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico, with around 2,000 stone tools dated to 33,000 years ago, and Pedra Furada in Brazil, where hearth-like structures, charcoal, and heated stones suggest human presence 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. None of this is confirmed without human fossils, since critics argue the tools and hearths could be natural, but a 2023 paper argued strongly for human presence at Pedra Furada.
Unexplored Sahara and a Painted Cave 1:38:31
A clip about a remote Algerian site called Sefar describes a maze-like rock formation with 15,000 ancient paintings, depicting extinct animals, dried-up rivers, faceless floating figures, and a three-meter-tall figure its discoverer called a god, with much of the site still unmapped. The hosts note that the Sahara was lush and green until roughly 4,000 BC, right around when conventional civilization is said to begin, meaning vast unexplored ground could hold clues to the origins of civilization, though political instability and harsh climate make excavation difficult.
Looted Artifacts and Private Collectors 1:42:00
The discussion shifts to how valuable artifacts vanish into private hands, from inconsistencies in Zahi Hawass's accounts of Egyptian discoveries to long-known tunnel systems beneath Cusco that were explored informally before archaeology recognized them, leaving them vulnerable to black market looting. This leads to the case of Don Miller, a 91-year-old Indiana man whose home the FBI raided in 2014, uncovering roughly 42,000 artifacts and 2,000 human bones, including Egyptian sarcophagi, Ming Dynasty jade, Native American remains, and a dugout canoe from the Amazon. It stands as one of the largest seizures ever made from a private collection, and Miller died the following year in 2015.
The T Rex Skull Scandal 1:48:02
The conversation opens with the story of a stolen T Rex skull, tied to Nicolas Cage having once bought one and having to return it after learning it was stolen, and to a Mongolian dinosaur skull sold for 276,000 dollars that was later voluntarily returned to the Mongolian government after US authorities found it had been smuggled out of the Gobi Desert. This leads into a lighter aside about a company called Ways to Well legally owning a suspended aquatic dinosaur skeleton, and a joke about people online who deny dinosaurs existed at all, some even claiming dinosaurs were actually the dragons of ancient mythology.
How Complete Are Dinosaur Skeletons 1:50:31
They discuss how complete real dinosaur skeletons actually are, noting one recently auctioned specimen at 62 percent complete and another, referred to as Sue, discovered with 90 percent of its skeleton intact. Michael Button points out that many skeletons displayed in museums are largely reconstructions, with visitors often assuming they are looking at original bone when much of it is recreated material. He frames dinosaurs as proof of how fragmentary the fossil record is, since they existed for roughly 160 million years but left only a few thousand known fossils, meaning our picture of deep time is built from a tiny fraction of the actual evidence.
Public Hostility Toward New Ideas 1:52:30
Button reflects on the intense backlash he has received since becoming more publicly known, including people misrepresenting his views, and he compares this to the reaction Joe Rogan has experienced from government-level pushback. Rogan advises him not to read the comments, arguing that a small fraction of very unhappy people will always target anyone with a growing audience, and that this negativity offers nothing useful. Button counters that alongside hate, he has also received supportive messages from working archaeologists who tell him privately that they value his work, which he finds encouraging since it shows not all academics see him as an adversary.
Curiosity Constrained By Academia 1:55:00
They talk about how young people entering archaeology often feel boxed in by gatekeepers, senior academics who control tenure, jobs, and grants, which discourages open curiosity about alternative interpretations of the past. Button says his goal is not to insist on any specific claim like lost advanced civilizations, but to get people questioning assumptions and thinking about how much longer humans with minds like ours may have existed. He hopes his work encourages young researchers inside institutions, since they are the ones positioned to eventually revise the textbooks.
Older American Sites Reexamined 1:58:30
Button runs through a series of controversial sites suggesting humans reached the Americas far earlier than the accepted Clovis-first timeline: the 130,000 year old Cerutti Mastodon site in California, where smashed bones and stone anvils suggest human activity; the disputed Calico site championed by Louis Leakey; and Hueyatlaco in Mexico, where sophisticated bifacial stone tools were found beneath volcanic ash dated by geologists to as much as 250,000 years old, corroborated by a camel pelvis dated to the same age. He explains that the find was suppressed for two decades during the dominance of the Clovis-first paradigm, and by the time it was published many artifacts had gone missing and the site itself was destroyed, leaving the claim unprovable but still argued by the original geologists.
Unknown Builders And Vanished Cultures 2:04:00
Button notes that the Aztecs did not build Teotihuacan, whose name means place where the gods lived, and that the Aztecs themselves had no name for the people who actually built it, only calling an earlier culture the Olmecs, or rubber people. This leads to a broader reflection on how sophisticated civilizations can rise, build monumental architecture, and then vanish so completely that later peoples assume the works were made by gods.
Pushing Back Human Arrival In Australia 2:07:00
Button describes the accepted arrival of humans in Australia at 65,000 years ago via the northern site of Madjedbebe, contrasted with a southern site called Moyjil, where blackened stones and hearth-like structures have been dated to 120,000 years, with researchers stating the evidence leans toward a cultural rather than natural origin. He connects this to genetic evidence that Denisovans, a human species only identified in 2010, may have interbred with ancestors of Aboriginal Australians and with high-altitude populations in Nepal and the Himalayas, whose Denisovan-linked genes may help them survive at extreme elevations.
Ancient Surgery In Borneo 2:11:00
Button closes this stretch by describing a 31,000 year old skeleton found in Borneo, a child whose leg had been surgically amputated and who survived for years afterward with full healing, pushing back the known history of advanced surgery by thousands of years. He and Rogan speculate that such surgery would have required real medical knowledge to prevent infection in a humid environment, and likely involved pain relief drawn from wild plants, noting that Neanderthals are already known to have used plants for medicinal purposes.
The Case for Older Civilizations 2:13:00
You hear the argument that early surgery, like a bone saw operation with unknown stitching tools, proves ancient people were more sophisticated than assumed. Asked to guess the oldest true civilization, Michael Button points to Tas Tepeler and the start of the Holocene, arguing agriculture and civilization arose almost everywhere at once because they are not a hard invention. He notes there have been roughly four stable warm climate periods across 300,000 years of modern sapient fossils, and possibly eleven such periods across a million years of modern brains, raising the question of why civilization could not have emerged in earlier warm periods too.
Shared Ideas and Simultaneous Discovery 2:15:00
The conversation turns to the strange pattern of people in unconnected places figuring out the same things at once, which Joe links to Rupert Sheldrake's idea of morphic resonance, including experiments suggesting rats on one coast learn a maze faster after rats on the other coast learned it first. They speculate about some shared field of information or creativity that humans tap into collectively, and note that civilization's near-simultaneous global appearance looks less like coincidence and more like an explosion, possibly tied to the Amazon and equatorial regions staying habitable even during glaciated periods, which raises the question of how long humans have actually been in the Americas and the Amazon, an area where the rainforest destroys older organic evidence.
Symbols Older Than Writing 2:20:31
Michael describes findings from archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, who identified 32 recurring signs next to Ice Age cave paintings across Europe, consistent over 30,000 years and also found on other continents, suggesting a long symbolic tradition carried during human migration out of Africa, predating written language by tens of thousands of years. A separate 2024 PNAS-related paper found over 200 objects with proto-writing symbols from about 40,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe, matching the complexity of early Sumerian script from 3000 BC, pushing back the timeline for symbolic communication dramatically.
Brain Size, Memory, and Outsourced Thinking 2:24:00
Joe raises the idea of human telepathy atrophying once language and writing took over, and Michael notes human brain size has actually decreased since civilization began, likely because oral memory once required more brain capacity that writing later made unnecessary. They compare this to hard drives and now AI, discussing how tools like ChatGPT may be outsourcing thinking itself, much like people once memorized phone numbers and no longer do. The conversation closes with mention of an Italian researcher's erosion-dating method suggesting pyramid casing stones could be over 20,000 years old, and Michael promoting his channels, Michael Button and Patterns of History, along with his punk band Headache.
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