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G'day and welcome to Reality Check. Before we start this week's show, here's a little bit about our sponsor for this week.

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That's thehealthyfat.com slash Ross.

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It's linked at the bottom of this video, and just click thehealthyfat.com slash Ross.

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Now, let's get on with the show.

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It's amazing to be here in the Valley of the Kings, which is where many of the pharaohs were buried in secret with a huge number of the incredible treasures,

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the things that Howard Carter described when he found the tomb of Tutankhamen as wonderful things.

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But there's a mystery, there's a conundrum behind that whole story.

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Who on earth made these incredible technologies, these fine stone vases, the beautiful carved statuary,

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the incredibly well-honed granite blocks that are accurate, sometimes within micro millimetres.

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How do we explain those technologies with what we understand were the tools of that era?

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The pre-dynastic Egyptian civilisations, if they were lucky at all, had copper chisels.

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More likely, they had flints and stone adzes.

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Then how do we explain the beautiful objects, the wonderful things that Howard Carter described when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamen?

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That's what we're bringing Ben Van Kirkwijk on to Reality Check this week to talk about.

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Ben's been studying ancient Egypt and the relics of ancient Egypt for a very long time, and he has a fascinating story to tell.

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Join me on this week's Reality Check with Ben Van Kirkwijk.

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Ben Van Kirkwijk, welcome to Reality Check.

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Ross, thank you very much for the introduction. That's very kind.

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And likewise, I will say I also have been a fan of your work for quite some time, and it's a real honour to be here.

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Well, mate, we love the idea of causing mischief with doctrinaire dogmaticism.

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One of the things I love about Uncharted X is you take us down paths with fastidious detail and analysis, and I find if I read online, you're often debunked by doctrinaire archaeology and dismissed out of hand.

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And frankly, there's not a lot of logic behind how they're so dismissive.

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I think one of the things I like to do on Reality Check is bring people face-to-face with obvious mysteries.

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Just like the UAP mystery, it's in plain sight.

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And the evidence that I see that you're citing is it's in plain sight.

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It's right under our noses.

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So, mate, very quickly, before we get into ancient Egypt, give me the orthodox model of human history.

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Tell me when human civilisation is meant to have begun.

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Well, you're quite right when you talk about the doctrine and the dismissal of perspectives that have an alternate timeline or they are suggesting alternate perspectives on our ancient history.

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And in fact, our perspective on human civilisation and the history of it really hasn't changed very much over the last 100, 150 years.

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It's one of those things that stayed fairly static.

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The orthodox timeline suggests that civilisation really started only some 6,000 years ago.

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And this is, of course, the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, that part of the world.

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That was the Babylonians and Mesopotamians started what we call civilisation, then closely followed by the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, etc.

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Only some, you know, 4000 BC, 6000 years ago, which has led us to a path of, I guess, our modern civilisation today.

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That doctrine, which is what it is, has been increasingly challenged by new discoveries across many different scientific fields, as well as discoveries from within archaeology itself.

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And unfortunately, for one reason or another, it really hasn't affected, I guess, the mainstream position of civilisation itself.

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One of the things that I like to point to is having shifted dramatically during this period where we've thought civilisation is 6,000 years ago is the extension of the human timeline itself.

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So, for a long time, if you go back far enough before the age of reason, the age of science, you know, you have the biblical interpretation of the human species, 6,000 years.

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You know, the rise of science starts and then the estimates get up to, well, maybe we're 50,000 years old as a species.

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Then we discover, we create techniques like, you know, radiocarbon dating, C14 dating.

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They find some human remains in Ethiopia.

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And for many decades, they, you know, they were dated to around 195,000 years old.

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So, that was said to have been the oldest human remains here.

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Go ahead.

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I want to cite one example that really leapt out at me when I watched one of your videos.

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You talk about a burial site at a place called Toshka.

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And it's quite phenomenal because there's a corpse lying in a prone position in a fairly primitive grave.

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But there's something in that grave that really made me sit up.

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Because the carbon-14 dating on what's in that grave suggests that it's 14,500 years old.

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What was found in that grave, Ben?

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So, Toshka is one of many sites that is in the southern area of Egypt, sort of northern Sudan, southern Egypt.

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And these are essentially Neolithic burials.

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So, as you say, like in that 14,500 year time frame.

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But one of the biggest mysteries, and Toshka certainly isn't the only one.

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There are many, many other sites like this.

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But in that grave, in this shallow grave with a fetal position corpse, they're finding very primitive pottery, bone and bead ornaments.

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But also, they found these remarkable hard stone vases or vessels.

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And they're made from incredibly hard stones, granite, diorite.

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And they seem to have been made with just remarkable precision.

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It's what I'd like to call kind of an out-of-place artifact that really doesn't seem to be wrong.

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This is what I love because this is the sort of stuff you're citing as evidence of a potential prior human civilization that as yet doesn't fit onto our timeline.

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Because when you're talking about precision vases, let's talk about how precise these vases are.

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Because this is where I was watching your Uncharted X and I almost fell off my chair.

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And I started tweeting in support of you saying, gosh, this is incredible.

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People have got to watch this.

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And I wasn't ready for the barrage of insults that you cop from contemporary archaeology.

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It's just amazing.

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As you may have noticed with me, I really enjoy upsetting some people who have very doctrinaire positions on things.

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And there was no explanation from any of them as to how these precision vases could have been made.

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But let's firstly, with the Toshka site that you're talking about, there's no doubt that these precision vases were recovered from this site.

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They're not something that was inserted later on.

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Well, no, because these sites, there's actually not a lot of records of these excavations for a number of reasons.

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These happened in the 1960s.

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Boston University and Harvard were doing the work down on this and many others in that, I guess, that Neolithic period.

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And all of those sites today are underwater.

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They were all excavated prior to the building of the Great Dam in Egypt on the Nile and the creation of Lake Nassau, which is the largest man-made lake in the world now.

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So they're all underwater.

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So we have to go on these photographs and these older records of these finds.

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But it's certainly not controversial whatsoever to classify these hardstone, these precision hardstone vessels and vases as being pre-dynastic, so before the dynastic Egyptian civilization.

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Because not only do we find them in these sites that date back as potentially as far back as 15,000 years, we find them in other cultures that predate the Egyptian culture, cultures like the Nakata culture and the Nakata II culture, and then right up to the very early parts of the dynastic Egyptian civilization itself.

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So how precise are these vessels?

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How precise are the vases that were found, for example, in that burial site?

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So it's long been a mystery.

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People have always wondered about this, but it's only been in recent, really the last couple of years, that we've been able to get our hands on some of these vessels and do proper analysis on them using things like structured light scanning or CT x-ray scanning and modern metrology.

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The examples that we've looked at have proven to be just remarkably precise is the best term I can give you.

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So if you want to talk about how precise, you're talking about aerospace industry levels of precision, where you're working in single thousandths of an inch.

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And for the metric viewers out there, we're talking about, you know, 25 to 30 or 40 microns, which is, you know, a thousandth of a millimeter.

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And when you're working in those...

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What's that in relation to, say, a human hair?

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So a human hair is between, I think, two to three thousandths of an inch thick.

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So you might be talking like 50 to 75 microns.

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So it's less than the thickness of a human hair.

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And this is the margin of error that we're seeing on some of these vessels.

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If you want a really insane example, the best example of precision in terms of circularity on one of these vessels that was recently analyzed, the difference between on the x and y radius, so the top of the vessel as you measure it in one direction relative to another, the error of margin that we found there was four ten thousandths of a millimeter.

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So four tenths of a single micron, that's probably the best example that we found, which is absolutely mind-bending precision.

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So forgive me for interrupting there, but just so our audience understand, when you're talking about the margin of error, you're talking about the accuracy of the thickness of the stone, solid stone.

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It's diorite.

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In some cases, it's granite.

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And it's been cut to a thickness which is absurdly thin.

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And there's a consistency of that thickness.

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Right.

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So there's a lot of different ways to measure precision and accuracy on these vessels and these objects.

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So circularity, roundness, consistency of the material.

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When I'm talking about precision, it's like how accurately is it made relative to other surfaces.

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So the center line of the vase, like how accurate are the edges of the vase to it?

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How round is the top of it?

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That type of thing.

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There's, and that's where we're getting these remarkable measurements from.

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So perfectly circular to within four ten thousandths of a millimeter.

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In terms of wall thickness, that's another aspect of the remarkable engineering and machining that's gone into these because you do have materials like granite, like diorite, porphyry, schist, these other very hard types of stone.

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And not, you know, not only are they down to, you know, like a fortieth of an inch, so, you know, less than a millimeter thick in some places, these materials are brittle at that.

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It's like glass.

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You know, a cube of glass is very strong, but if you get it down very thin, it's the same material.

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It's hard, but it's very brittle, and that's the same case for stones like this.

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It's made even more difficult by the fact that many of these stones have large crystal inclusions in them, so the material goes from hard to soft as it's being worked.

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But somebody, whoever made these things, had the ability to machine them down to just very, very thin tolerances indeed and keep it consistent.

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And it's, it's, it would be, put it this way, it would be an incredible challenge for us to replicate these sort of things today, even with our best machines and tools.

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And as of yet, we haven't really done it.

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Now, I think the Toshka example leapt out at me because it was just so absurd.

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I mean, that's a grave that's 14,500 years old.

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I mean, that's incredible.

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Yes, there are many others like it, like in that region of Toshka, and it's, it doesn't match up when you compare it or you look at it within the capabilities of that civilization, which was obviously a fairly primitive civilization.

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Shallow grave, bone and bead ornaments, and very primitive pottery, like handmade pottery, nothing even turned on a wheel.

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So these are these out-of-place artifacts, and I think that the, another explanation for them, and one that makes a lot more sense,

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when you consider the evidence, is the idea of inheritance.

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If you are a Stone Age people, and you're in the business of making pottery vessels, if you found a stone vessel, like you're probably using stone tools, but if you found this stone vessel that's just perfectly made and remarkable, it's going to intrinsically become valuable.

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And that vessel's probably going to, you know, propagate through the social structure, it's going to be buried with the chieftain or the, you know, the king at the time, and that's where we find them.

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And the same process seems to have gone on in those cultures preceding the dynastic Egyptians, and indeed, to the dynastic Egyptians themselves.

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One of the biggest mysteries I find about the vases, and one that shines a light on a lot of the contradictions when it comes to ancient Egypt, is the fact that we do find these vessels in the ancient Egyptian civilization, but only at the very start of it.

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So, third, fourth dynasty of the old kingdom, you know, they found 50,000, 60,000 of these things buried beneath pyramids.

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And even the archaeologists admit that these are inherited heirlooms.

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They know they came from earlier times, and that the Egyptian kings of the time buried them with them.

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And they, after that period, they really just disappear from that civilization.

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It's like they didn't have the capability to make them.

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Can I ask you this, Ben?

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What is the view, if you to articulate the view of modern archaeology, mainstream archaeology, what do they say about this notion of a prior human civilization that predates, for example, dynastic Egypt?

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Well, they do know there were cultures, not so much civilizations.

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There were primitive cultures like Nakata, but they just suggest that all of the reports of it are myth and legend.

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I mean, one of the other major contradictions is the dynastic Egyptians themselves do have their own history.

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They trace back their own culture and civilization in nearly 40,000 years.

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They have a king's list, and there's a number of different reports of this.

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And they go back to other periods, as do many other cultures.

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They have cataclysm stories and flood stories, and they talk about advanced civilizations, their ancestors with amazing capabilities somehow being destroyed by cataclysm and starting again.

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But modern archaeologists and historians generally just dismiss that as myth and legend.

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And they say, well, no, the real history starts with, you know, Nama, the first king of the first dynasty, and that's when the civilization starts.

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They just classify everything else as myth and legend.

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So let's talk about the accepted orthodox model of human history.

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One of the stories you've done, you talked about a 2006 New Scientist article that presented a timeline of human evolution.

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And officially, humans emerged.

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And correct me if I'm wrong, this is still the case in orthodox evolutionary theory.

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Humans emerged around about 195, 200,000 years ago.

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And the carbon-14 dating of the oldest modern human remains starts from around about 200,000 years ago.

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That was the case in 2006, yes.

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So what do we know now?

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Well, so the story has changed since then.

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It's a good example of how new discoveries can change the story of our own species and history.

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So since then, since 2006, they've actually made another discovery in, I think, Morocco.

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They found a jawbone of a human.

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And this was dated to slightly beyond, I think, 300,000 years.

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So instantly, it's like the human species just got a whole third of that time longer.

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We added another 100,000 years to the human timeline.

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And, you know, these discoveries and these advances in science have progressed even further than that.

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And today, that remains the oldest human record in the fossil record.

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But now we've got studies that look at things like DNA evidence when, you know, Neanderthals, which, genetically speaking, are our cousins,

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when we and Neanderthals evolved from a common ancestor, that date is somewhere in the realm of 800,000 to 900,000 years.

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Similarly, there have been studies done on teeth morphology.

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So how do we have the teeth that we have?

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And at what rates would dental evolution need to happen for us to get sort of the teeth that we have?

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And they did a massive study on the statistical analysis of teeth morphology.

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And it showed that for us to have the teeth that we have, we would have had to have been around some, again, 800,000 to 900,000 years.

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So I think the timeline for the human species keeps getting longer and longer.

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And when you put that date of civilization of, you know, only 6,000 years ago in the context of a period of time when they might have had modern humans on this planet for as much as 800,000 or 900,000 years, it starts to look a little ridiculous.

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So officially, the orthodox model would have it that agriculture only began 10,000 years ago.

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And yet that would appear to be totally inconsistent with even the grave we talked about at the head of this interview, which is that, you know, a grave that's 14,500 years old.

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There are these holes in the archaeological record that are not explained by the orthodox model.

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Indeed.

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Yeah, there are many mysteries and many contradictions when you take a close look at all of the evidence that surrounds the history of human civilization.

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The more that we learn, it's like it is a difficult process and a difficult period of time to try and analyze, right?

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We really do have very scant evidence.

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We're looking back through this, the mists of time and the further back you go, the more scant that evidence becomes.

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And the more, you know, it's like there's been more civilizations that have had the chance to live in these areas and to change what you're looking at.

189
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So it's a, you have to continually evaluate the best evidence to try and put together the best theory that you can.

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My problem, I think, with the orthodox perspective on particularly the date of civilization is that a lot of this new evidence that comes up forms of things like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

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I mean, this was a massive megalithic site that it is 12,000 years old.

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At least, in fact, there's strong evidence that it may well be much older than that.

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And so, just to make the point here, officially, the orthodox model still has it that around about 4,000 to 3,500 BC, the first civilization was the Sumerians of Mesopotamia.

194
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And then you had the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans and the Chinese.

195
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But human civilization basically started 4,000 years ago.

196
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Well, 4,000 BC.

197
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4,000 BC, yeah.

198
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Yeah, 6,000 years ago.

199
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Yes, that is still the orthodox position.

200
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So everything prior to that was, we were considered to be hunter-gatherers.

201
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Humans existed, but we were nomadic hunter-gatherers.

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You know, civilization, you define civilization with things like permanent dwelling, you know, large numbers of people.

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You get specialization, social structures, governance, these types.

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So the agriculture is another one that, you know, organized agriculture is another sign of civilization.

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Cities, those types of things.

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So prior to 4,000 BC, none of these things are thought to have existed.

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Yet, we keep finding more and more evidence that, in fact, they did.

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Now, you talked about Gobleki Tepe, which is in southeastern Turkey.

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It's a stunning discovery, a massive megalithic site.

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And we know that carbon-14 dating of organic material in the actual pillars at that site shows that it's at least 12,000 years old.

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And just to give the audience an account of it, it's got what we believe are astronomically aligned stones, possibly a celestial calendar.

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Stone circles arranged geometrically.

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How does that obvious construction, and it's an elaborate construction, fit into the notion that civilization happened many thousands of years later?

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Well, if you want to look at the orthodox or the mainstream perspective on Gobleki Tepe, and you can find this today, even if you go look at the Wikipedia page for it.

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Not that Wikipedia is a tremendously reliable source when it comes to controversial topics.

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But they will tell you that this was something built by hunter-gatherers.

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So rather than changing the date of civilization, they literally changed the definition of hunter-gatherers to, well, okay, they're not just nomadic tribespeople, but now they're also guys that, you know, they seem to enjoy doing a bit of megalithic pillar building on the weekends, maybe to get away from the wife and kids or something like that.

218
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I'm not sure.

219
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Okay, so let's go through that.

220
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Let's deal with that.

221
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What's your response to that?

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I mean, my understanding is some of these pillars at Gobleki Tepe, the T-shaped pillars, they're hundreds of tons.

223
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Well, no, they're not that big.

224
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The biggest, they are, it is a significant logistical challenge.

225
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Some of these, you're talking 20 feet tall, 20 to 30 tons, single-piece stones, arranged very elaborately.

226
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They, in some cases, taken significant distance, like many miles from the quarries from where they were formed.

227
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The interesting thing about Gobleki Tepe, there are many things.

228
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This is a brand new discovery.

229
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It was really uncovered by a German archaeologist in the 1990s, and it's been excavated ever since.

230
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It's a site that has a lot of nuance to it.

231
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So the carbon dating that we have for that, where it's incontrovertibly 12,000 years old, at least, we actually get those dates, not from the pillars, but from these cobblestone walls that are enclosing these pillars.

232
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And there's strong evidence, and anyone that goes there would be able to see this for themselves.

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It's as if that site was rebuilt, like these primitive walls that surround these pillars and these stone circles.

234
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They were built to kind of repair and prop up these pillars.

235
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In some cases, there are actually broken pieces of pillars in these walls, and it's from those primitive walls that we get this date of 12,000 years old.

236
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So do you think Gobleki Tepe might actually be a bit older?

237
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I do, yes.

238
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I think that's probably significantly older.

239
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I think that there were people that came to this site that found it, or they knew about it, and they rebuilt that site.

240
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They protected it.

241
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In fact, the walls encompass the pillars.

242
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They cover up some of the details.

243
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And as I said, there's actually broken pieces of pillar, as if those pillars had already fallen and broken when they built these walls.

244
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And we date it based on the organic material found in these cobblestone, these rough cobblestone walls that surround it.

245
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There's clearly two different styles of architecture here as well.

246
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One is a megalithic style with these massive single-piece pillars with intricate, high-relief carvings on them that have these astronomical alignments and all sorts of significance.

247
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Martin Swetman has written an entire book on this topic.

248
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It's fascinating.

249
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And then you have this primitive cobblestone walls that came along and were built to essentially restore and protect the site.

250
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It probably was a sacred site to these people.

251
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And it's from the remains of those people that we can date it to 12,000 years back, which was an absolute, just shocking revelation at the time to the world of archaeology.

252
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Nobody thought that this type of megalithic building existed at all 12,000 years ago.

253
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And it, and of itself, should have shifted the date of civilization back.

254
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It's a massive megalithic site.

255
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There are hundreds of these T-pillars.

256
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It requires a significant number of people.

257
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It requires specialization.

258
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It requires all of these facets of civilization to even undertake this sort of thing.

259
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And here's the crazy thing about that part of Turkey is not only did, so Göbekli Tepe was the first site, but since that site's been uncovered, they've discovered that there might be as many as 40 more sites just like it in that region of southeastern Turkey.

260
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And I don't think there's any question we're talking about an unknown civilization existing in that point way back in time.

261
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So tell me about Karahan Tepe.

262
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It's even older, isn't it, than Gobleti Tepe?

263
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It is.

264
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Yes, Karahan Tepe, nearby to Göbekli Tepe in that southeastern part of Turkey.

265
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It's another site that was found.

266
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It's something like five times as large as Göbekli Tepe.

267
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There is up to maybe 1,000 T-pillars on this site, these large T-pillars and many, many stone circles.

268
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It's in the process of being excavated.

269
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I've visited the site many times myself, and it's dated to at least somewhere around 500 to 1,000 years older than Göbekli Tepe.

270
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In fact, there's been more sites discovered recently that even are older than that based on the carbon dating that they found.

271
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But it seems clear to me that there is, much as is being discovered in the Amazon by guys like Graham Hancock at the moment, there is evidence that there was an entire lost civilization that we know nothing about that existed in this part of the world at that time.

272
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And this discovery should really be shaking the foundations of our ideas on human civilization and when it truly started to its core.

273
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But as of yet, it really hasn't had that impact, at least according to the textbooks and the universities.

274
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It's unfortunate because I think that the evidence is becoming overwhelming that there was indeed some pretty advanced human activity going on long ago and in periods of time that happened before, you know, cataclysms and the Younger Dryas, which is a huge part of this whole mystery.

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While we're on the subject, let's tell our American friends about the truth of claims that the first settlement of the Americas by humans was about 12,000 years ago.

276
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I think the conventional explanation is, isn't it, that there was a land bridge that connected America to essentially the European continent through Russia?

277
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Right.

278
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Yes.

279
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What's the truth now?

280
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What do we now know?

281
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So, indeed, yeah.

282
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So, the orthodox story has long been that there was the Bering Land Bridge that was an ice-free corridor between the great ice sheets, the Kordarian, and the Laurentide ice sheets that cover the Northern Hemisphere.

283
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And it's said that humans migrated down through that path around 13,000 years ago and began to populate the Americas, starting in North America, moving down to Central America, and then South America.

284
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However, and it's something called the Clovis Doctrine.

285
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These people were called the Clovis.

286
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It's literally named – we don't know that.

287
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It's named after the place where they found some of the arrow points and the flint tools that have a very specific shape.

288
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It's a place called Clovis, so hence the Clovis people.

289
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And we long thought that that was the first population or the first peopling of the Americas.

290
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Now, since then, there has been a number of sites discovered, not only in North America, but also in Canada, that really are shifting that date further and further back.

291
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There are sites like Bluefish Caves, which has evidence of human occupation some 20,000 to 25,000 years ago.

292
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And recently, as talked about by Graham Hancock on his excellent series, Ancient Apocalypse, White Sands in New Mexico, we're finding evidence for humans existing in the Americas many, many thousands of years prior to this Clovis date of some 13,000 years ago.

293
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So it seems like that whole explanation for how people got to the Americas really doesn't support the evidence that we're finding in recent decades.

294
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And so before we go to Egypt, let's set the scene for, I think, the final issue that you attach significance to, which is cataclysm.

295
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You think there's been a cataclysm in recent, relatively recent human history that has a bearing on whether we can even find evidence of these prior human civilizations that you believe potentially exist?

296
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Indeed. And there absolutely was a cataclysmic event that occurred.

297
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There is just a massive weight of scientific evidence behind it at this point.

298
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People think about it, probably the best way to think about this event is it was the last great extinction event to happen on this planet.

299
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And I'm not talking about the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

300
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I'm talking about the saber-toothed tigers, the woolly mammoths, the woolly rhinos, all of these megafauna that existed in places like North and South America and Europe.

301
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Now, these animals, it was roughly 50% of what we would call megafauna, large land-based animals.

302
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50% of them went extinct in a very short period of time, somewhere between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago.

303
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And we're not really sure why. The orthodox explanation has always been human overhunting, which really doesn't make sense when you're talking about giant cave bears and the American lion, which was the size of a horse, and nomadic hunter-gatherers.

304
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There were more mammoths at that point than people by many estimations.

305
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So this, combined with a lot of recent research into essentially climate history, has shown that something catastrophic happened to the planet around 12,800, 13,000 years ago.

306
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And again, there is more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers backing this up now, looking at what you would call impact proxies.

307
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So looking through strata layers in the soil, finding high concentrations of things like extraterrestrial platinum and iridium, shock-synthesized nanodiamonds.

308
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So these things that are indicative of essentially cosmic impacts.

309
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So, you know, chunks of a disintegrating comet or meteorites, very large ones that are either bursting in the atmosphere or they're hitting the ground.

310
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There is just seems to be huge amounts of evidence that something like that happened only some 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.

311
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Correlated with that, we also know that this was the very abrupt end of the Ice Age, of the last glaciation period.

312
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Sea levels rose in a short period of time, some nearly 300 to 400 feet, you know, 100 meters or more.

313
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In a real short period of time, all of those, the Laurentide and Caudarian ice sheets, they melted, went into the oceans.

314
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So all of these things happened.

315
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And we can look back through things like ice core samples in places like Antarctica and Greenland, look at oxygen concentricities, determine things like global temperature at the time, particulate matter.

316
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And it shows that something happened.

317
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12,800 years ago, something happened.

318
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The Earth just was plunged into this deep freeze for about 800 years.

319
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Temperatures dropped dramatically.

320
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There was massive climate change.

321
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At the same time, we have a massive megafaunal extinction.

322
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At the same time, we have sea levels rising.

323
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There are indications that during this time at one point, up to 10% of the biomass on the planet was on fire.

324
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Absolutely crazy.

325
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Like the sun got blocked out.

326
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I mean, there's all these indications.

327
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And it all points to the most likely scenario being just a cataclysmic bombardment of the planet from space.

328
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So it's fair to say we are at the moment in mainstream science locked into a paradigm, a doctrine, if you like.

329
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I love the way they will use the word doctrine for Clovis doctrine, because it suggests they're somewhat doctrinaire.

330
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This is in defiance of the evidence that you and others like Graham Hancock point to, that essentially there must have been some kind of organized human society to make the artifacts that we see.

331
00:33:20,960 --> 00:33:42,960
You believe that this is strong evidence that before this younger Dryas cataclysm around about 12,800 years ago, there was some kind of advanced human civilization that was making these kind of advanced technologies and that these technologies were in all likelihood recovered by whatever civilization followed.

332
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Yes, that's what I think we're looking at when we look at places like the sacred valley of Peru, or we look at places like ancient Egypt.

333
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But I think that's that explanation of inheritance and of longer timelines makes much more sense of the evidence than the orthodox story does.

334
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I mean, one.

335
00:34:03,860 --> 00:34:07,940
So why is there such doctrinaire obduracy to that notion?

336
00:34:08,080 --> 00:34:13,360
I mean, I've followed Graham Hancock's story with great interest, and I love his work.

337
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And the thing that really strikes me is, whatever you think of his work, he grounds it in as much solid science as he can find.

338
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And boy, he really cops it from establishment archaeology.

339
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I mean, they're even trying to get him gagged.

340
00:34:31,120 --> 00:34:31,840
Indeed, yes.

341
00:34:31,840 --> 00:34:48,780
He's been the recipient of just these, I mean, just terrible attacks on his character and all sorts of ad hominems and kind of how best to put this sort of liberal kind of dog-whistling terms, calling him racist and xenophobic and all these terrible things, which is nonsense.

342
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I mean, I've known Graham for years as well.

343
00:34:50,920 --> 00:34:54,900
He's one of the kindest, just gentlest people you'll ever meet.

344
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He's a wonderful human being.

345
00:34:56,640 --> 00:34:58,480
And he's definitely been attacked.

346
00:34:58,740 --> 00:35:00,880
Because he's married to a Somali woman, isn't he?

347
00:35:00,880 --> 00:35:02,160
I mean, it always struck me.

348
00:35:02,160 --> 00:35:02,700
Yeah, it was Santa.

349
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He's utterly absurd.

350
00:35:04,580 --> 00:35:06,240
Indeed, yes, yes, yes.

351
00:35:06,320 --> 00:35:08,520
She's actually, I think she's Malaysian originally.

352
00:35:08,860 --> 00:35:12,780
But yes, he's definitely not a racist, that's for sure.

353
00:35:14,020 --> 00:35:16,940
And in fact, he cops a lot of this flack.

354
00:35:16,940 --> 00:35:28,440
And in a lot of cases, he's literally reporting what other archaeologists and anthropologists have written in terms of things, these legends of Quetzalcoatl and these other things that they say,

355
00:35:28,440 --> 00:35:33,360
well, it's this idea that you're taking away this indigenous people's culture.

356
00:35:33,600 --> 00:35:37,440
It's literally the stories they told that is also reported by other archaeologists.

357
00:35:37,580 --> 00:35:43,220
But because he's alternative, he gets attacked for it, where all these other guys are saying the same thing, aren't getting attacked.

358
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However, as to why this is going on, I think there's a couple of reasons for it.

359
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One is, I think it's a reaction to the shifting of the modern media landscape, the rise of the internet and the ability for people to do independent research and to get their message out.

360
00:36:02,240 --> 00:36:12,980
But it's in some ways doing a bit of an end run around what has always been the, you know, the old boys club of, you know, explorers clubs and universities, which is where these discussions used to take place.

361
00:36:12,980 --> 00:36:25,580
And in fact, if you look at archaeologists and explorers of previous generations, we're talking about the last century, the 19th century, they were very much more open to the mystery and understanding where they didn't, couldn't explain things they were looking at.

362
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And they were talking about that amongst their peers.

363
00:36:28,440 --> 00:36:37,780
And that's, you know, that that's shifted now where it's, you know, you have the internet, you have social media, you have people like me or Graham that can get their message out there and make sense of it.

364
00:36:37,780 --> 00:37:00,860
And I think there's, so there's a bit of a reaction from the gatekeepers of history, the archaeologists, the historians in their academic ivory towers, that the rugs getting pulled out from under their feet a little bit at the, at the end of the day, archaeology is not like a hard science, like chemistry or physics might be this hypothesis, you know, experiment result, it doesn't really follow that.

365
00:37:00,860 --> 00:37:08,240
It's a, it's, it's closer to language and art studies, it's an interpretation of a loose set of evidence, but they are deemed the expert.

366
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You know, they're deemed the gatekeepers of the story.

367
00:37:11,880 --> 00:37:17,440
So when other people are threatening that, I think you end up, I think they interpret that as a personal attack in some way.

368
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So they respond as if they're being attacked personally.

369
00:37:20,420 --> 00:37:25,840
And we get some of the just, I think some of the terrible accusations that have been levied against people like Graham Hancock.

370
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It's a natural reaction, I think, because they're feeling threatened.

371
00:37:29,680 --> 00:37:42,060
I see parallels here with the work I've been doing on UAPs, because in the face of, I think, overwhelming evidence that sits in plain sight, that there is clearly an anomalous phenomenon.

372
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There is this obdurate resistance from much of the mainstream media, but certainly from mainstream science and commentators.

373
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And it's quite hilarious, because the more and more the evidence mounts, you get admissions from the Office of National Intelligence, and they still dogmatically stick to their doctrinaire positions.

374
00:38:02,160 --> 00:38:03,900
The parallels are uncanny.

375
00:38:03,900 --> 00:38:06,840
It really is.

376
00:38:07,040 --> 00:38:11,820
It happens in a lot of different branches of science and investigations, really.

377
00:38:12,460 --> 00:38:23,620
One of the things I like to say, and I think I'll quote Chris Dunn, who I think originally coined the phrase, but to me, it's like you wouldn't trust an archaeologist to design the chair that he's sitting on.

378
00:38:23,620 --> 00:38:27,380
But if it's an ancient chair, he's going to claim to be the expert on it.

379
00:38:27,460 --> 00:38:37,420
And that's a summary of all of the technological and engineering-based evidence that we're seeing in places like ancient Egypt and the perspectives that archaeologists have on them.

380
00:38:37,680 --> 00:38:39,080
In general, they're not engineers.

381
00:38:39,320 --> 00:38:43,420
They don't understand the intricacies of precision and stonework.

382
00:38:43,420 --> 00:39:04,540
They're just not playing in that field, and they routinely ignore all of the evidence that comes to us from true experts, you know, machinists, engineers, people that can evaluate what they're looking at and talk about, you know, the tools that the ancient Egyptians had and these primitive cultures or, you know, ancient cultures had really can't explain the artifacts that we're looking at.

383
00:39:04,540 --> 00:39:06,600
So, Ben, take me to Egypt.

384
00:39:06,780 --> 00:39:18,860
Let's talk about the plethora of ancient precision advanced artifacts, the schist disk, unfinished obelisks, the vases, columns, and precision boxes.

385
00:39:19,360 --> 00:39:20,320
Where do we start?

386
00:39:20,480 --> 00:39:25,020
Like, what's your favorite object that challenges the orthodox paradigm?

387
00:39:26,140 --> 00:39:27,820
Tough to pick a favorite, Ross.

388
00:39:27,820 --> 00:39:56,300
I would think that there's one overwhelming contradiction that becomes immediately obvious if you can see it, and then you will see it everywhere in Egypt, and this is really my favorite place to start people off with ancient Egypt, and that is to consider that in ancient Egypt, and this is a, if you consider the orthodox timeline, this is a unique feature of this civilization in that the oldest stuff is always the best.

389
00:39:56,880 --> 00:40:13,060
It's kind of funny to look at things like the Great Pyramid and the massive stone pyramids of Giza, which are just, until you see them in person, they're really, it's impossible to capture the scale of them on film and truly appreciate them until you see them in person, but it's monumental, takes your breath away.

390
00:40:13,660 --> 00:40:18,540
But people shouldn't forget that these are supposedly amongst the very first pyramids ever built.

391
00:40:19,780 --> 00:40:24,880
And this, you can extend this analogy across all these different facets of ancient Egypt.

392
00:40:24,880 --> 00:40:31,240
It's the oldest stuff that's the most massive, that's the most precise, that's the most difficult.

393
00:40:31,960 --> 00:40:38,900
And it's like it's a civilization that started with, you know, a Tesla, and they devolved down towards horse and carts.

394
00:40:38,900 --> 00:40:46,620
Because the ancient Egyptian civilization existed for 3,000, 4,000 years, and they just, it's almost like they went backwards in technology.

395
00:40:46,720 --> 00:40:53,020
They kept building pyramids, they kept building statues, they kept making sites, but the technology just wasn't there.

396
00:40:53,020 --> 00:40:58,560
It's always this oldest stuff that is the best, and this applies to so many different categories, it's not funny.

397
00:40:58,660 --> 00:41:03,760
And it's very difficult to explain technologically from a civilization perspective.

398
00:41:04,440 --> 00:41:12,860
I didn't realize until I watched your videos that a lot of the more dilapidated pyramids are actually the more modern ones, the newer ones.

399
00:41:12,860 --> 00:41:16,540
And they were made of mud brick by dynastic Egyptians.

400
00:41:17,620 --> 00:41:18,520
Yes, they were.

401
00:41:18,680 --> 00:41:29,180
And it's a good, and I like to point at those and think that, okay, do you actually, do you truly believe that they started off being able to build pyramids like the Great Pyramids,

402
00:41:29,260 --> 00:41:38,940
6 million tons of stone, you know, 2.5 million blocks of stone, including granite beams that were lifted 150 feet up in the air that weighed 80 tons.

403
00:41:38,940 --> 00:41:43,640
You know, there's 2,500 tons worth of granite in the middle of that pyramid.

404
00:41:44,420 --> 00:41:50,660
And then they went backwards to building these things out of mud brick, or is it more likely that they saw this artifact?

405
00:41:50,900 --> 00:41:58,020
They, you know, it impressed them as much as it impressed us, and they learned how to replicate it, to try and build it.

406
00:41:58,060 --> 00:42:01,340
These kings that came along wanted some of that for themselves.

407
00:42:01,600 --> 00:42:06,600
They wanted to have some of that majesty and connect themselves to this amazing culture themselves.

408
00:42:06,600 --> 00:42:10,040
And I think that's what we're looking at when we look at ancient Egypt.

409
00:42:10,160 --> 00:42:18,780
It's the same tendency of these kings, guys like Ramses II, notorious and probably considered today the most powerful king of Egypt or pharaoh in Egypt.

410
00:42:19,100 --> 00:42:20,940
He would write his name on things.

411
00:42:21,040 --> 00:42:23,980
He would carve his name on everything, all these massive statues.

412
00:42:24,500 --> 00:42:25,220
Ramses II.

413
00:42:25,220 --> 00:42:29,400
And oftentimes, that is then said to be in the history books.

414
00:42:29,520 --> 00:42:31,100
Well, Ramses must have had that made.

415
00:42:32,520 --> 00:42:38,860
And there's a tacit acknowledgement, if you dig deep enough in some of these history books, that, well, maybe he was renaming older stuff.

416
00:42:38,860 --> 00:42:45,200
But that's, I think, the tendency that, and that's the trend that happened in ancient Egypt.

417
00:42:45,420 --> 00:42:46,340
It's an inheritance.

418
00:42:47,260 --> 00:42:55,860
It's a desire to connect themselves to this culture that they did through their own myths and legends, and then to just model themselves after it.

419
00:42:56,240 --> 00:42:59,300
And I think that explains a lot of what we're looking at in ancient Egypt.

420
00:42:59,300 --> 00:43:01,200
So let's talk about Ramses.

421
00:43:01,400 --> 00:43:12,860
I mean, you talk about how you suspect that what he was doing was using earlier artifacts and basically stamping his hieroglyph on those artifacts.

422
00:43:13,280 --> 00:43:16,960
One of the examples you use is at Tannis.

423
00:43:17,860 --> 00:43:18,200
Oh, yeah.

424
00:43:18,380 --> 00:43:19,600
And there's an obelisk.

425
00:43:20,740 --> 00:43:25,780
And you make a point that essentially there's a piece from a broken obelisk that was reused.

426
00:43:25,880 --> 00:43:26,960
Can you talk to that, please?

427
00:43:27,820 --> 00:43:30,680
Yeah, it's just one of my favorite examples to show people.

428
00:43:30,800 --> 00:43:34,260
And Tannis is one of those sites that's, I mean, it's talked about in the Bible, a very famous site.

429
00:43:34,340 --> 00:43:37,180
It's been around since the Old Kingdom, potentially even before then.

430
00:43:37,280 --> 00:43:40,600
So, you know, 2700 BC, 3000 BC timeframe.

431
00:43:40,940 --> 00:43:43,780
And it existed throughout the ancient Egyptian civilization.

432
00:43:44,500 --> 00:43:54,260
And on Tannis, you can find the most amazing examples and evidence for this type of inheritance and renovation and reuse of ancient artifacts.

433
00:43:54,260 --> 00:44:01,580
So in the case of this particular block, it was originally an obelisk that must have fallen over or broken.

434
00:44:01,700 --> 00:44:05,160
So they took a section of it and then somebody used it in a wall.

435
00:44:05,640 --> 00:44:07,680
So it's a reuse first as it's put in a wall.

436
00:44:08,160 --> 00:44:09,480
And then somebody wrote on it.

437
00:44:09,520 --> 00:44:11,820
They wrote, they inscribed these hieroglyphs on it.

438
00:44:11,820 --> 00:44:14,980
So there's another reuse where it's getting inscribed with hieroglyphs.

439
00:44:15,420 --> 00:44:21,400
And then Ramses came along and he was very good at doing this because he would carve his name and they had it.

440
00:44:21,460 --> 00:44:28,420
They were skilled at sort of carving over the top of existing hieroglyphs and carving very deep inscriptions into these obelisks.

441
00:44:28,420 --> 00:44:36,520
And you can literally see at the end of this piece of stone where his writing is blending in and covering up existing inscriptions.

442
00:44:37,120 --> 00:44:43,560
And there's this really deep cartouche of Ramses II, who was a ruler in the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom.

443
00:44:43,960 --> 00:44:51,220
So you have a piece of stone that's been repurposed and reused, you know, three, maybe four times at Tannis.

444
00:44:51,220 --> 00:45:00,100
And, you know, Tannis is one of my favorite sites because it also shows you some of the just mind-bending logistical achievements.

445
00:45:00,320 --> 00:45:11,020
There's another example of a reused piece of stone at Tannis that I think should question anyone's idea that, you know, this was primitive people were capable of doing this.

446
00:45:11,340 --> 00:45:12,820
But there's a giant foot at Tannis.

447
00:45:13,280 --> 00:45:18,280
Flinders Petrie found this back in the late 1800s.

448
00:45:18,280 --> 00:45:23,300
And it's this huge foot, like the toenail is larger than my outstretched hand.

449
00:45:23,480 --> 00:45:27,220
Like it's the piece of foot, it's a foot of a massive granite statue.

450
00:45:27,340 --> 00:45:32,980
And this granite, this foot has had the ends of it carved off and it's been repurposed as a block in a wall as well.

451
00:45:33,060 --> 00:45:37,060
But it was originally part of this one single piece giant statue.

452
00:45:37,580 --> 00:45:39,340
And there's other pieces of it at Tannis.

453
00:45:39,340 --> 00:45:49,700
But the amazing thing about that statue and that piece of granite is that that piece of granite came from more than a thousand kilometers away in the south of Egypt.

454
00:45:49,960 --> 00:45:55,860
So there was a statue here that would have weighed in excess of a thousand tons, a single piece.

455
00:45:55,860 --> 00:46:05,180
And somebody transported that block from way down in Aswan in the south, a thousand kilometers to the north in Egypt and erected this statue.

456
00:46:05,460 --> 00:46:09,340
And then later on, it broke and was reused as a piece in a wall.

457
00:46:09,540 --> 00:46:12,860
You know, there's that great scene in the movie, the movie Planet of the Apes.

458
00:46:12,860 --> 00:46:25,080
I remember watching it as a little boy and you come to the end of the movie and, of course, apes are running the planet and you don't quite know where these astronauts are, these human astronauts that are being chased around the planet by these apes.

459
00:46:25,380 --> 00:46:31,100
And then at the very end, they find the Statue of Liberty on the beach, a dilapidated Statue of Liberty.

460
00:46:31,780 --> 00:46:35,420
Just on that point, there's also the Luxor Temple.

461
00:46:35,420 --> 00:46:44,780
There's these gigantic, huge granite, solid granite statues that are polished, beautifully polished, and they're surrounded by sandstone pylons.

462
00:46:44,980 --> 00:46:50,740
And there are glyphs inscribed onto the belt line of those gorgeous statues.

463
00:46:51,300 --> 00:46:54,000
What can you tell me about those statues at Luxor?

464
00:46:54,780 --> 00:46:59,660
So at Luxor Temple, again, this is in the south of Egypt, typically attributed to the New Kingdom.

465
00:46:59,660 --> 00:47:06,340
And in fact, all the sandstone work is very much, I think that was work done by the New Kingdom Egyptians.

466
00:47:06,860 --> 00:47:10,280
It's worth not underestimating the capabilities of the dynastic Egyptians.

467
00:47:10,420 --> 00:47:11,060
They could do a lot.

468
00:47:11,520 --> 00:47:13,900
But there's some things that were technologically out of reach.

469
00:47:14,060 --> 00:47:17,820
And I think a lot of these massive granite artifacts are part of that.

470
00:47:18,020 --> 00:47:25,720
And you can literally see the strong evidence for renovation and reuse and later carving of artifacts in those statues.

471
00:47:25,720 --> 00:47:33,480
So, for example, on these statues, you have, you know, the belt line of these statues is often, that's where you'll find the glyph.

472
00:47:33,700 --> 00:47:36,100
Or maybe Ramses II is probably the most common one.

473
00:47:36,140 --> 00:47:36,740
You see it all the time.

474
00:47:37,040 --> 00:47:41,300
Also, you know, his son, Maren Pettar, his father, Seti I, they did the same thing.

475
00:47:41,960 --> 00:47:50,740
But you can see that it's been carved and it's been carved over the top of pre-existing features on the statue, which to me doesn't, it really doesn't make a lot of sense.

476
00:47:50,740 --> 00:47:56,740
If you are the guy, it was always the intent to make this statue of Ramses II and to carve his name on it.

477
00:47:56,800 --> 00:48:07,180
You wouldn't go to the trouble of carving all of these existing features only to then have another guy come in and then carve, you know, roughly carve this hieroglyph over the top of those features.

478
00:48:07,280 --> 00:48:09,440
And you can see it very obviously.

479
00:48:10,120 --> 00:48:13,780
There are, I mean, there are other examples of statues that have nothing on the belt line.

480
00:48:13,780 --> 00:48:16,400
Like they were ones that they never, they never got around to recarving.

481
00:48:17,380 --> 00:48:27,640
You can also tell from these, the way that these have been carved, that the technology used to carve them is very primitive relative to the rest of the artifact.

482
00:48:27,640 --> 00:48:33,660
So the artifacts themselves, these statues and boxes and columns are just carved with the most remarkable precision.

483
00:48:34,200 --> 00:48:38,240
The granite is finished and polished to a level where it reflects light.

484
00:48:38,520 --> 00:48:42,780
Like imagine the best kitchen granite slab you've ever seen.

485
00:48:42,780 --> 00:48:44,880
Like that's not a natural finish for granite.

486
00:48:44,960 --> 00:48:47,980
You have to work very hard to get that reflective polished surface.

487
00:48:48,680 --> 00:48:56,760
Yet we see that surface on these just complex artifacts with, you know, curved surface and things like that.

488
00:48:56,840 --> 00:49:02,740
But you compare that to the glyphs and the carving of the glyphs, the carving themselves are very primitive.

489
00:49:02,860 --> 00:49:04,200
You can see the chisel marks.

490
00:49:04,340 --> 00:49:05,080
They're not polished.

491
00:49:05,500 --> 00:49:09,800
But also I think there's something about those statues at Luxor that I think is significant.

492
00:49:09,980 --> 00:49:11,820
And it's what you call overcuts.

493
00:49:11,820 --> 00:49:13,160
Can you explain that to me?

494
00:49:13,260 --> 00:49:16,020
What are the overcuts you believe evidence of?

495
00:49:16,820 --> 00:49:21,580
So there's, if you look closely at these, at many of these statues, you can find this in the Egyptian museum.

496
00:49:22,020 --> 00:49:24,660
On smaller statues, you can see it on the larger ones.

497
00:49:24,740 --> 00:49:26,620
We also see it on artifacts like obelisks.

498
00:49:26,620 --> 00:49:43,820
So these complex, massive granite objects have in many cases what is undoubtedly, I think, evidence for very powerful, likely machine-driven tools where you have overcuts where a circular saw has been run up and down this.

499
00:49:43,820 --> 00:49:48,020
And nobody suggested that the Egyptians were using somehow-powered circular saws.

500
00:49:48,620 --> 00:49:49,780
We were also talking about granite.

501
00:49:49,780 --> 00:50:00,460
Like the mainstream explanation for how these things were cut was, well, they got some sand and some water and a piece of wood or a piece of copper and they're just rubbing back and forth.

502
00:50:00,540 --> 00:50:03,500
And you can grind away at granite and do that.

503
00:50:03,500 --> 00:50:08,100
But it's going to take you, you know, two days to make a cut this deep or three days.

504
00:50:08,220 --> 00:50:09,660
So making overcuts is very difficult.

505
00:50:09,660 --> 00:50:21,260
So just explain to our audience, what is the official explanation for how, with the tools that we know, the Egyptian dynasties and pre-dynasty periods at that time had,

506
00:50:21,260 --> 00:50:30,160
what were the tools they had that modern archaeology or conventional archaeology uses to explain how those statues were supposedly crafted?

507
00:50:31,160 --> 00:50:44,800
Yeah, it's, it's, they literally attribute everything to the tools that they've found, which amount to copper chisels, flint chisels and, and pounding stones.

508
00:50:45,040 --> 00:50:46,460
That's, that's the toolkit.

509
00:50:46,700 --> 00:50:47,700
Like, that's pretty much it.

510
00:50:47,700 --> 00:50:58,440
And because this is one example of the circular logic that goes on in this, in this space, it's, they, everything must have been made by those tools because those are the tools that they found.

511
00:50:58,540 --> 00:51:01,080
So they just say, everything is made by these tools.

512
00:51:01,080 --> 00:51:17,540
Even when the evidence that there was a different tool is right there in the tool marks and in the artifact itself, it doesn't matter because the tools that we found are flint chisels and, you know, copper, copper chisels and literally pounding stones, rubbing on them with sand.

513
00:51:17,700 --> 00:51:21,380
That, that's how they say everything in ancient Egypt was made.

514
00:51:21,480 --> 00:51:29,180
It's, it's, you got to remember the old kingdom back in those periods of time, there's no evidence that even the old kingdom Egyptians even possessed the wheel.

515
00:51:29,440 --> 00:51:30,840
They didn't use the wheel.

516
00:51:31,000 --> 00:51:32,060
They didn't use pulleys.

517
00:51:32,120 --> 00:51:34,780
They didn't use, they, they dragged things on sleds.

518
00:51:34,960 --> 00:51:36,360
They, they used human horsepower.

519
00:51:36,540 --> 00:51:39,520
They, they really even didn't use too many, too much in the way of livestock either.

520
00:51:39,520 --> 00:51:42,860
And we know this because the Egyptians drew these scenes on the wall.

521
00:51:43,360 --> 00:51:47,480
They, they showed us how they did things with primitive tools.

522
00:51:47,480 --> 00:51:49,840
And we have a lot of those primitive artifacts.

523
00:51:50,080 --> 00:51:52,320
We have mud brick pyramids, for example.

524
00:51:52,320 --> 00:51:57,380
They actually show us in the tombs of the nobles on the West Bank of the Nile down at Luxor.

525
00:51:57,460 --> 00:52:05,880
You can find just painted descriptions and scenes showing them making mud bricks and stacking them up, maybe making mud brick ramps or they're making mud brick pyramids.

526
00:52:05,880 --> 00:52:13,140
You know, what you don't find from the, from the Egyptians, you don't see any evidence or any scenes depicting them building these massive stone artifacts.

527
00:52:13,440 --> 00:52:16,180
You don't see them building, you know, thousand ton statues.

528
00:52:16,180 --> 00:52:19,560
You don't see them building these giant columns and boxes and obelisks.

529
00:52:20,000 --> 00:52:26,060
They don't explain that, but they do show how they made the other artifacts that we, we see in Egypt.

530
00:52:26,560 --> 00:52:32,200
And, you know, in a lot of ways, when you look at Egypt, it's, it's something I call a tale of two industries.

531
00:52:32,200 --> 00:52:39,640
And you have to, you can see there, there are artifacts and objects that are explainable by these primitive tools.

532
00:52:40,060 --> 00:52:43,900
And they're what you would expect that the sort of primitive artifacts, they're very rough.

533
00:52:44,120 --> 00:52:50,860
And these exist alongside with a whole other category of artifacts and architecture that is anything but primitive.

534
00:52:51,100 --> 00:52:54,000
It's precise, it's polished, it's massive, it's megalithic.

535
00:52:54,000 --> 00:52:57,800
And it's not explained by the tools that the dynastic Egyptians used.

536
00:52:57,800 --> 00:53:00,060
So let's talk about tube drilling.

537
00:53:00,260 --> 00:53:13,260
One of the things that you point to a lot is someone was able to drill extraordinarily precise round holes in solid granite, really hard rocks.

538
00:53:13,880 --> 00:53:20,240
Tell me how hard granite is and tell me, you know, what tools the Egyptians supposedly had.

539
00:53:20,240 --> 00:53:28,720
How does orthodox archaeology explain these very obvious tube holes that are drilled into solid granite all around Egypt?

540
00:53:29,680 --> 00:53:36,640
It's, it's, I find it to be one of the most fascinating mysteries in ancient Egypt, the mystery of the ancient Egyptian tubular drill holes.

541
00:53:36,640 --> 00:53:39,980
And we actually find these cores that come out of them as well.

542
00:53:40,520 --> 00:53:44,640
But they're often found made, again, on old kingdom sites, on the oldest sites.

543
00:53:44,840 --> 00:53:51,420
And they're made into stone like granite or basalt, which is, you know, 6.5, 6 to a 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness.

544
00:53:51,540 --> 00:53:54,240
So, you know, a human fingernail is maybe 2, 2.5.

545
00:53:55,240 --> 00:54:00,800
Things like calcite or limestone or marble, alabaster might be a 3.

546
00:54:00,920 --> 00:54:02,220
Copper is around a 3.

547
00:54:02,360 --> 00:54:04,560
Steel is around a 6, 6.5.

548
00:54:04,560 --> 00:54:07,120
So, you're talking about rock that is as hard as steel.

549
00:54:07,760 --> 00:54:13,560
And, in fact, we have examples of some stones that are almost even a 9 on the Mohs scale being worked by the ancient Egyptians.

550
00:54:13,760 --> 00:54:15,640
Diamond is the hardest material we know of.

551
00:54:15,700 --> 00:54:16,220
That's a 10.

552
00:54:16,620 --> 00:54:17,620
So, it's a scale of 1 to 10.

553
00:54:17,660 --> 00:54:19,940
So, these are very, very hard materials.

554
00:54:20,520 --> 00:54:22,320
You know, there's a reason modern sculptors work in marble.

555
00:54:22,480 --> 00:54:23,880
It's soft and it's homogeneous.

556
00:54:24,260 --> 00:54:25,860
Granite is very difficult to work in.

557
00:54:26,200 --> 00:54:32,820
But we find evidence for sophisticated tools being used into materials like granite and basalt.

558
00:54:32,820 --> 00:54:38,740
And one of these signs of sort of significant tooling is these tubular drill holes.

559
00:54:38,840 --> 00:54:40,100
You see, they're small to large.

560
00:54:40,180 --> 00:54:41,580
We see them in all shapes and sizes.

561
00:54:42,320 --> 00:54:42,800
We find them.

562
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:44,860
They're part of the Great Pyramid, for example.

563
00:54:45,520 --> 00:54:47,980
They're all over these Old Kingdom sites.

564
00:54:47,980 --> 00:54:57,000
And it's not so much the precision of them, but it's the analysis and the investigation into the tool marks themselves.

565
00:54:57,000 --> 00:55:04,000
So, these spiral grooves that have been made into these holes and, indeed, into the cores that came out of the hole.

566
00:55:04,000 --> 00:55:10,200
So, you can think of this hollow tube cutting through the stone and then it gets retracted and you snap off.

567
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:14,240
You remove a core of material from that hole and you discard it.

568
00:55:14,300 --> 00:55:15,160
It's a piece of scrap, right?

569
00:55:15,200 --> 00:55:15,760
You want the hole.

570
00:55:15,840 --> 00:55:16,640
You don't want this core.

571
00:55:17,180 --> 00:55:21,880
But we found, and Flinders Petrie famously found, several of these cores from these holes.

572
00:55:21,880 --> 00:55:33,260
And by analyzing the markings on those drill cores, you can make inferences and analyze the type of tool that was used and how fast it cut through the stone.

573
00:55:33,720 --> 00:55:44,720
So, we know that there's these spiral grooves that show that, okay, whatever was cutting through this material, this hard material, was doing so at a very rapid rate in terms of how quickly it penetrated the stone.

574
00:55:44,720 --> 00:55:53,200
In fact, the rate of penetration into the stone is something like 500 times greater than we can achieve today with our modern tools.

575
00:55:53,700 --> 00:55:58,080
The tool might have been turning slowly, but it's penetrating into the stone very rapidly.

576
00:55:58,240 --> 00:55:59,620
It's very difficult to explain.

577
00:55:59,980 --> 00:56:06,660
Has anyone ever been able to replicate the kind of drill holes that you're talking about that are cut into solid granite all around Egypt?

578
00:56:07,400 --> 00:56:09,160
I mean, not with the same tool marks.

579
00:56:09,300 --> 00:56:11,080
We can cut that material, no problem.

580
00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:18,500
I mean, we have, you know, silicon carbide tipped drills and we can, ceramic drills and things that we can cut that stone and work it, no problem.

581
00:56:18,620 --> 00:56:20,140
With our big powered drills, hydraulics and stuff.

582
00:56:20,140 --> 00:56:26,640
But I'm talking about the technology that orthodox archaeology says we had 5,500 years ago.

583
00:56:27,440 --> 00:56:27,760
No.

584
00:56:27,880 --> 00:56:37,920
So, the orthodox explanation for these tubular drill holes is that, well, they took a copper tube and they put some sand on it and they got a bow drill and they went back and forth.

585
00:56:37,920 --> 00:56:39,260
And look, that works.

586
00:56:39,260 --> 00:56:48,300
You will slowly, using sand, because sand has corundum and bits of quartz in it, flint, and it'll very slowly grind away at the granite.

587
00:56:48,400 --> 00:56:51,180
And it takes days and days and days to get, you know, this far into the granite.

588
00:56:51,620 --> 00:56:53,160
And those experiments have been done.

589
00:56:53,620 --> 00:56:57,800
So, there was Dennis Stocks is an experimental archaeologist who did this.

590
00:56:57,800 --> 00:57:06,940
The difference is, is that the result of what you get, and this has been studied a few times, it looks nothing like the examples we see in Egypt.

591
00:57:06,940 --> 00:57:10,940
Does, can you grind through stone very slowly with that method?

592
00:57:11,240 --> 00:57:11,580
Yes.

593
00:57:11,860 --> 00:57:15,740
But the result and what you get looks nothing like what we see in Egypt.

594
00:57:15,980 --> 00:57:22,060
It doesn't have these same deep spiral grooves that, that are indicative of this, the power of the tool.

595
00:57:22,260 --> 00:57:24,380
You end up with this nice polished surface, actually.

596
00:57:24,460 --> 00:57:27,260
You can, as you might imagine, you're just really rubbing on this thing with sand.

597
00:57:27,260 --> 00:57:32,960
And it's just slowly grinding away, grinding away the copper, too, at the same rate, and it really wears those tools out.

598
00:57:34,280 --> 00:57:53,640
So, yes, you can use primitive methods to grind away at granite, but it just looks, the problem I have with it is that it looks nothing like what we see in Egypt, which is, we see evidence for some sort of extremely powerful tool, potentially using a technology that we don't possess or that we don't use.

599
00:57:53,640 --> 00:58:06,740
Things like maybe ultrasonics or thermal technologies or something, because, again, even with our most powerful tools that spin really fast and they can cut the material, it's just not penetrating the stone at the same rate.

600
00:58:06,740 --> 00:58:19,420
The tools and the cut lines in Egypt show that that drill could penetrate through the stone 500 times, at a 500 times greater rate than what we can do with our modern tools today.

601
00:58:19,620 --> 00:58:21,780
So, it might have been going slowly.

602
00:58:22,140 --> 00:58:23,480
I mean, Petrie documented this, right?

603
00:58:23,480 --> 00:58:24,980
He said it's a one in 60.

604
00:58:25,080 --> 00:58:36,840
So, if you unwind that tool mark, that circular tool mark in a straight line, so for 60 inches of horizontal travel, it's penetrating one inch of vertical travel in a circular form.

605
00:58:37,040 --> 00:58:40,960
So, that's 500 times greater than what our tools can do today.

606
00:58:41,480 --> 00:58:42,500
And that's a real mystery.

607
00:58:42,640 --> 00:58:44,180
Like, it's very difficult to explain.

608
00:58:44,180 --> 00:58:48,640
So, I mean, the obvious evidence there is right in your face.

609
00:58:48,980 --> 00:58:56,560
There was clearly some kind of advanced civilization that we don't know about that was using mechanized tools.

610
00:58:57,320 --> 00:58:57,500
Yeah.

611
00:58:57,740 --> 00:58:59,680
And of what form that took, I don't know.

612
00:58:59,760 --> 00:59:01,200
We've never found the tools.

613
00:59:01,440 --> 00:59:04,080
Like, that's always – and it's a legitimate question that comes up.

614
00:59:04,120 --> 00:59:05,040
So, where are the tools?

615
00:59:05,600 --> 00:59:06,500
We don't know.

616
00:59:06,500 --> 00:59:09,720
So, you know, we have the evidence for the tools.

617
00:59:09,940 --> 00:59:12,620
We have the marks from the tools, but we haven't found the tools.

618
00:59:13,080 --> 00:59:25,120
I mean, not for nothing, and it's a whataboutism, but even the mainstream explanation of saying, well, it was a copper tube and they used sand, they've also never found a single copper tube from ancient Egypt.

619
00:59:25,120 --> 00:59:30,100
So, there's, you know, the where are the tools question applies equally well to the mainstream explanation.

620
00:59:30,980 --> 00:59:38,720
However, the, you know, the result of those tools, and we've done the experiments with it, it just doesn't look like anything like what we see in ancient Egypt.

621
00:59:38,860 --> 00:59:43,540
There was a different tool involved, and the evidence is there for anyone that wants to go and look at it.

622
00:59:43,600 --> 00:59:49,120
You can look at the holes in Egypt, the scans, and the evidence has been documented by several engineers.

623
00:59:49,540 --> 00:59:52,760
You can visit the Petrie Museum in London and book a research appointment.

624
00:59:52,760 --> 00:59:56,200
You can look at Petrie's drill core and analyze it yourself.

625
00:59:56,720 --> 00:59:57,680
It's undeniable.

626
00:59:58,860 --> 01:00:07,600
It's 100% a spiral groove, and it just isn't explained by these primitive tools that the archaeologists say were used.

627
01:00:08,060 --> 01:00:22,480
So, just continuing this theme, in the early 1850s, there was an archaeologist, Auguste Mariette, who discovered this incredible series of discoveries at a place called Saqqara, these serapium boxes.

628
01:00:22,760 --> 01:00:26,540
Why are these serapium boxes so incredible?

629
01:00:27,440 --> 01:00:31,280
It's probably my favorite site is the serapium of Saqqara.

630
01:00:31,520 --> 01:00:42,620
This is an astonishing site, and if you ever find yourself visiting Egypt and visiting Saqqara, which is a vast necropolis, the step pyramid of Saqqara, you can spend days and days and days at Saqqara.

631
01:00:42,620 --> 01:00:44,260
I would not miss the serapium.

632
01:00:44,260 --> 01:00:50,540
It's an underground labyrinth of these massive galleries and chambers that's all rock cut.

633
01:00:50,720 --> 01:00:52,640
It's cut into the bedrock.

634
01:00:52,760 --> 01:00:53,640
It wasn't constructed.

635
01:00:53,900 --> 01:00:56,560
The roof is bedrock, so it's a tunnel system.

636
01:00:57,300 --> 01:01:05,740
But inside these massive galleries and chambers, you will find 25 of the most remarkable artifacts I've ever seen.

637
01:01:05,740 --> 01:01:10,560
And these are single-piece stone boxes, for want of a better term.

638
01:01:10,740 --> 01:01:12,900
The mainstream calls them sarcophagi.

639
01:01:13,540 --> 01:01:14,160
Very hard stone.

640
01:01:14,220 --> 01:01:21,640
Yeah, granite, diorite, cyanite, all sorts of types of incredibly hard stone.

641
01:01:22,300 --> 01:01:25,460
But what's amazing about the serapium is just the sheer scale of them.

642
01:01:25,520 --> 01:01:28,780
These things weigh, with their lids, up to around 100 tons.

643
01:01:28,780 --> 01:01:34,080
So the body of the box itself is 70 tons, and the lid might be 30.

644
01:01:34,320 --> 01:01:35,780
And there's 25 of them down there.

645
01:01:35,920 --> 01:01:39,300
Like, it's, for some reason, and they've said they've been moved in there.

646
01:01:39,700 --> 01:01:48,860
And then they're shaped and made with, in some cases, just remarkable precision, like perfect 90-degree corners, flat surfaces and planes.

647
01:01:49,620 --> 01:01:54,420
This is a, it's a remarkable engineering achievement to manufacture one of these boxes.

648
01:01:54,420 --> 01:02:06,680
And just to underline this, would we, I mean, obviously we could do it, but what would it take today to cut that granite and that diorite in the way that you see in those serapium boxes at Saqqara?

649
01:02:07,200 --> 01:02:09,220
So the question has been asked.

650
01:02:09,380 --> 01:02:16,720
A good friend of mine and the author of several books, Christopher Dunn, had asked a granite manufacturing company, like, could you make one of these boxes?

651
01:02:16,720 --> 01:02:21,360
And they said, yes, I mean, the cost would be astronomical just to get the raw piece of granite.

652
01:02:22,020 --> 01:02:30,160
And the best, and the only way they could do it, though, would be to basically cut five slabs and bolt it together, which is not what we see in the serapium.

653
01:02:30,240 --> 01:02:32,140
These are single-piece stone boxes.

654
01:02:32,680 --> 01:02:34,240
They're not slabs that are bolted together.

655
01:02:34,320 --> 01:02:35,460
They've been hollowed out.

656
01:02:36,100 --> 01:02:41,160
We, for us to do this today, I mean, you're talking millions of dollars probably for the rough piece of granite.

657
01:02:41,160 --> 01:02:45,540
But try moving a hundred-ton load over any road as well.

658
01:02:45,700 --> 01:02:46,860
Like, you need all sorts of permits.

659
01:02:47,220 --> 01:02:50,400
It's extremely difficult and expensive to move that sort of load around.

660
01:02:50,700 --> 01:02:59,880
And then we would have to create custom tools to actually cut that stone out, and it would just be prohibitively expensive to do.

661
01:03:00,320 --> 01:03:02,520
Can it be done, and do we have the technology to do it?

662
01:03:02,520 --> 01:03:11,360
Yes, but it would be, it would take everything we've got, and it would take, and then forget about trying to move these things into an underground chamber.

663
01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:13,900
Because at some point, somebody did this, that 25 times.

664
01:03:13,900 --> 01:03:21,420
They moved a hundred-ton boxes into an underground labyrinth, in some cases with less than a foot of clearance.

665
01:03:21,700 --> 01:03:24,960
The biggest boxes only fit through the passages by about a foot.

666
01:03:25,580 --> 01:03:26,780
Like, that's the clearance you've got.

667
01:03:26,780 --> 01:03:40,140
You've got to turn the corner, and then these boxes are put into these alcoves that are, they're perfectly centered in these alcoves that exist off this giant, massive gallery that's so big you could, you know, drive a Volkswagen down it.

668
01:03:40,440 --> 01:03:41,860
But they're put into these alcoves.

669
01:03:41,940 --> 01:03:46,220
They're lowered down about six feet and put in the exact center of these alcoves, and they're kind of parked there.

670
01:03:46,740 --> 01:03:48,020
And that's where we find them today.

671
01:03:48,880 --> 01:03:52,100
I mean, honestly, the only reason they're not in the museum is because we can't get them out of there.

672
01:03:52,100 --> 01:04:01,500
You mentioned Chris Dunn, and I love some of Chris Dunn's work, because he has the pragmatic attitude of an engineer.

673
01:04:01,840 --> 01:04:06,660
He just looks at something like an engineer looks at something and tries to figure out how the hell you would build it.

674
01:04:07,260 --> 01:04:15,920
And to me, one of the greatest examples of this incredible mystery about ancient Egyptian technologies is the head of Ramses.

675
01:04:16,060 --> 01:04:20,640
Talk to me about the head of Ramses and the work particularly that Chris Dunn did.

676
01:04:20,640 --> 01:04:23,400
Yes, I'm a massive fan of Chris Dunn.

677
01:04:23,660 --> 01:04:26,680
I'm very privileged to be able to call him a good friend as well now.

678
01:04:26,800 --> 01:04:28,040
I've spent a lot of time with Chris.

679
01:04:29,480 --> 01:04:31,280
And, yeah, I'm a huge fan of his work.

680
01:04:31,320 --> 01:04:35,080
In fact, he's responsible for getting me into this space in a lot of ways.

681
01:04:35,880 --> 01:04:42,460
And he has done what I think, I genuinely think his work in the future will go down as just game-changing.

682
01:04:42,860 --> 01:04:44,940
He brings a lot of evidence to the table.

683
01:04:44,940 --> 01:04:54,160
And one of the things that he looked at that is truly fascinating was he did a symmetry analysis on the head of this Ramses statue, one of these giant statues at Luxor.

684
01:04:54,260 --> 01:04:58,360
It's like, you know, 30, 40 feet tall, this giant big head.

685
01:04:58,980 --> 01:04:59,520
Hundreds of tons.

686
01:04:59,520 --> 01:05:05,860
Well, it's the statue itself, yeah, it means maybe, yeah, a couple hundred tons is probably in that range.

687
01:05:05,960 --> 01:05:07,080
Certainly there's bigger statues.

688
01:05:07,220 --> 01:05:10,100
However, this head is unique in that it was on the ground.

689
01:05:10,400 --> 01:05:11,780
So it's not anymore.

690
01:05:11,920 --> 01:05:12,780
It's not there anymore.

691
01:05:12,780 --> 01:05:17,080
But for a long time, it was sitting on the ground at front of Luxor Temple.

692
01:05:17,120 --> 01:05:20,060
So you could actually get up close to it and look at it, and it was very well preserved.

693
01:05:20,060 --> 01:05:28,360
And so what Chris did was he took a study on looking at how symmetrical is this head and is this face, used a few techniques.

694
01:05:28,460 --> 01:05:32,460
One of my favorites, one was this reverse transparency overlay that he shows.

695
01:05:32,460 --> 01:05:42,760
If you get that dead-on center line, you can take a photograph of it, and then you make a copy of the photograph, and then you flip it on that vertical axis.

696
01:05:42,900 --> 01:05:43,640
So it's inverse.

697
01:05:43,920 --> 01:05:49,640
And then you overlay it on the original photograph, make them both transparent, 50% transparent.

698
01:05:49,640 --> 01:05:55,040
So you can then determine, you can look at the features, the differences in features from left to right.

699
01:05:55,580 --> 01:05:57,460
And it's just, it's basically perfect.

700
01:05:57,640 --> 01:06:04,260
We haven't, I'd love to see it scanned with, you know, modern tools and 3D scanning technology to really determine this.

701
01:06:04,800 --> 01:06:14,680
However, you know, by all accounts and from that sort of evidence, it looks perfectly symmetrical, which is just utterly remarkable, particularly when you're talking about something that is really three-dimensional.

702
01:06:14,680 --> 01:06:24,680
You know, you're looking at it on a flat plane, but achieving that level of symmetry is absolutely an aspect of precision and machine precision.

703
01:06:24,860 --> 01:06:26,580
Like, you cannot do this by hand.

704
01:06:27,040 --> 01:06:29,080
I've seen Michelangelo's David.

705
01:06:29,360 --> 01:06:32,140
I mean, it brings, it makes you weep.

706
01:06:32,240 --> 01:06:34,880
It's an incredible artwork, but it's not symmetrical.

707
01:06:35,180 --> 01:06:37,860
It's also made from marble, much softer than granite.

708
01:06:37,940 --> 01:06:39,060
This thing's made from granite.

709
01:06:39,060 --> 01:06:42,820
You know, symmetry is not a characteristic of human faces either.

710
01:06:42,920 --> 01:06:44,820
We all have different sized eyeballs and nostrils.

711
01:06:45,840 --> 01:06:48,540
So it's, you know, it's not reflecting artwork.

712
01:06:48,780 --> 01:06:50,980
It's not something that you can achieve by hand.

713
01:06:51,120 --> 01:07:02,900
This face and this statue had to have been both designed and then likely executed with some machine-like precision to achieve this level of symmetry.

714
01:07:02,900 --> 01:07:09,180
It's simply not explainable with hand tools or with, you know, just by artwork.

715
01:07:09,440 --> 01:07:11,240
It's just, it's not something that exists in artwork.

716
01:07:11,420 --> 01:07:13,060
Symmetry is an aspect of precision.

717
01:07:13,440 --> 01:07:16,880
How does Orthodox archaeology explain that, Ben?

718
01:07:17,700 --> 01:07:18,780
They don't.

719
01:07:19,060 --> 01:07:20,300
They really ignore it.

720
01:07:20,300 --> 01:07:34,560
I mean, most of this sort of engineering-oriented evidence that is brought up by people like engineers who aren't in the academic disciplines of archaeology, mostly it gets ignored.

721
01:07:34,560 --> 01:07:50,780
In the few occasions where archaeologists have attempted to explain the engineering achievements of the dynastic Egyptians, any scrutiny of their explanations just turn out to be ridiculous.

722
01:07:50,980 --> 01:07:56,880
For example, we talked about tubular drills, and I thought this was remarkable.

723
01:07:56,880 --> 01:08:14,320
This was so, in one of the mainstream technology, Egyptology books that was made, written by archaeologists, they, for the longest time and to this day, will refuse to admit that there are, in fact, spiral grooves on this core.

724
01:08:14,460 --> 01:08:17,880
And that's, the spiral groove is what indicates that it's, you know, penetrating the stone.

725
01:08:18,160 --> 01:08:20,920
They will tell you, no, no, it's circular, you know, striations.

726
01:08:21,000 --> 01:08:23,880
It's just like, it's a result of this rubbing mechanism.

727
01:08:23,880 --> 01:08:34,260
And they went to the point of, in that textbook, they, you know, they have a photo of Petrie's core number seven, and Chris Dunn showed that it's a, they actually took that photo and they just tilted it.

728
01:08:34,620 --> 01:08:38,940
They tilted the photo to make the striations look horizontal on the page.

729
01:08:39,480 --> 01:08:44,600
I mean, so instead of acknowledging it, they're literally just saying it's not spiral, and here's a picture of it.

730
01:08:44,660 --> 01:08:53,780
You can see it's horizontal, but they, it's as if you took, like, a screw, a modern bolt with an obvious thread pitch on it, and you just, and you look at, you tilt it.

731
01:08:53,880 --> 01:08:55,940
And so those thread pitches look horizontal.

732
01:08:56,080 --> 01:09:01,160
They did the exact same thing in the textbook with, with Petrie's, Petrie's core number seven.

733
01:09:01,320 --> 01:09:10,380
So they ignore, they ignore it, and when they do offer up explanations, there's some explanation for things like the stone cutting of massive slabs.

734
01:09:10,380 --> 01:09:14,680
Because it's just, it's so ridiculous, it's laughable, from an engineering perspective.

735
01:09:15,060 --> 01:09:16,840
And those are the sort of topics I get into.

736
01:09:17,460 --> 01:09:21,420
So, Ben, I could go on all day, and I think we should wrap up fairly soon.

737
01:09:21,560 --> 01:09:26,880
But one of the things I want to finish with is probably one of the smallest, and I know it's one of your favourites.

738
01:09:26,880 --> 01:09:34,100
Take me to the diorite vase, very small, diorite, squat little vase in the Cairo Museum.

739
01:09:34,840 --> 01:09:40,620
Tell me what diorite is, how hard it is, and what you see in that object.

740
01:09:41,580 --> 01:09:47,500
So diorite, diorite is a, it's one of the many forms of very hard, igneous rock.

741
01:09:48,600 --> 01:09:51,120
It's diorite's typically a little bit harder than granite.

742
01:09:51,120 --> 01:09:58,780
But there's a thousand different names for the types of stones in that range of material in the ancient Egyptians.

743
01:09:58,980 --> 01:10:06,680
Whoever built, whoever made artifacts from these materials used lots of different types of these very hard pieces of stone.

744
01:10:07,440 --> 01:10:12,220
They, one of the challenges of this type of material is that it's not homogeneous.

745
01:10:12,660 --> 01:10:17,520
It's made up, you know, there's horn blend and mica and quartz and silica.

746
01:10:17,520 --> 01:10:23,580
And all these different materials in that matrix, this aggregate that forms in, you know, over millions of years of heat and pressure that forms into stone.

747
01:10:23,920 --> 01:10:31,140
So it means that when you're working that surface, it's, you know, you're going from materials microscopically, from materials that are softer to materials that are harder.

748
01:10:31,360 --> 01:10:33,640
So it's a very challenging stone to work.

749
01:10:33,640 --> 01:10:44,060
And there are examples of diorite vases and bowls and, and artifacts that just showed utter mastery of stone.

750
01:10:44,260 --> 01:10:48,300
And it's been machined with just this incredible precision.

751
01:10:49,000 --> 01:10:56,940
In fact, there are, there are examples of vessels that have machined that type of diorite down to something like one fortieth of an inch thick,

752
01:10:56,940 --> 01:11:03,440
which is, you know, less than almost a little more than half a millimeter thick in places, which is, and it's translucent.

753
01:11:03,660 --> 01:11:04,760
The light shines through it.

754
01:11:05,140 --> 01:11:05,240
Yeah.

755
01:11:05,320 --> 01:11:09,840
I mean, Flinders Petrie documented this in the, in this isn't under no means is this a modern forgery.

756
01:11:10,080 --> 01:11:14,760
Flinders Petrie documented this sort of stuff in the late 1800s and he was blown away by it.

757
01:11:14,760 --> 01:11:20,620
And it's just, it's incredible manufacturing and just precision in these things.

758
01:11:20,620 --> 01:11:22,680
And it was showing a light on some of that.

759
01:11:22,900 --> 01:11:23,820
Could we make it today?

760
01:11:24,060 --> 01:11:27,180
I mean, could we cut a bar like that out of diorite today?

761
01:11:28,100 --> 01:11:28,540
Probably.

762
01:11:28,920 --> 01:11:35,000
I think we do have the capability, but nobody's done it because it's prohibitively expensive.

763
01:11:35,860 --> 01:11:39,780
It would, it would take a lot more than our regular stone cutting tools.

764
01:11:39,880 --> 01:11:48,300
It would take aerospace grade five axis mills that are going to be burning through tool tips that are at a prodigious rate because of the material.

765
01:11:48,300 --> 01:11:51,740
And it would just be insanely expensive to do.

766
01:11:53,200 --> 01:11:54,020
And for what?

767
01:11:54,360 --> 01:12:01,780
I think the thing that really looked at me about a lot of these vases that you're talking about is a lot of them have lugs on the outside.

768
01:12:02,540 --> 01:12:09,720
So the lugs would get in the way of a lathe, even assuming that the Egyptians had lathes, which is an open question.

769
01:12:09,840 --> 01:12:10,800
I suspect they didn't.

770
01:12:11,240 --> 01:12:11,340
Yeah.

771
01:12:11,340 --> 01:12:21,560
But how on earth would you craft to such thinness and such fineness the detail in a vase like that if you didn't have a lathe?

772
01:12:21,700 --> 01:12:23,080
What's the technology they did?

773
01:12:24,020 --> 01:12:32,300
So that's, it's one of the interesting parts about the vase investigation or the vase scan investigation is that we've somewhat, the goalposts have shifted here.

774
01:12:32,300 --> 01:12:39,460
Because for the, for a long time, I mean, this was like, this is an example of 3D replica of, of one of these, these vessels.

775
01:12:39,560 --> 01:12:41,800
And as you said, there are these lug handles on the side of it.

776
01:12:42,520 --> 01:12:46,420
And for the longest time, people thought, well, these are all just handmade.

777
01:12:46,420 --> 01:12:59,400
And, and the, the investigation into precision and the machining and the geometry of them has said that it's now shifted where people are saying, well, okay, maybe, maybe the Egyptians made them on lathes, but they were on primitive lathes and you can make them with a lathe.

778
01:12:59,620 --> 01:13:03,140
And in a lot of cases, these lug handles show that that's actually not possible.

779
01:13:03,140 --> 01:13:04,080
You can imagine this.

780
01:13:04,300 --> 01:13:13,120
If you take away the lug handle, you can see how this might've been turned on a lathe, like you're spinning on a lathe and you're carving it, but you can't explain the lug handles with a lathe.

781
01:13:13,120 --> 01:13:19,060
You would, you would have to, you would have to leave a bull nose that runs all the way around the vase.

782
01:13:19,340 --> 01:13:26,240
And then you would have to come back with another tool and remove that excess material, the stuff that exists between the lug handles.

783
01:13:26,900 --> 01:13:38,160
And it's one of the details of the, of the, uh, the van, the vase scan work has shown that, that however they did that, that this, there's no perceivable loss of precision.

784
01:13:38,160 --> 01:13:47,540
When it comes to the lug handles, which is something that we struggle with in our own manufacturing, uh, systems today.

785
01:13:47,540 --> 01:13:54,680
So that, that you, you lose positional calibration when you do tool changes, you expect a degree of, of loss in precision.

786
01:13:54,680 --> 01:13:59,400
We account for that in how we manufacture aerospace parts, jet engine components, rocket engine components.

787
01:13:59,400 --> 01:14:03,760
And that's part of it, but we don't see that in these artifacts.

788
01:14:03,920 --> 01:14:09,080
We don't see that loss of precision of, of, of, uh, capability.

789
01:14:09,300 --> 01:14:20,660
So what that means is that either they could handle that loss of positional calibration and deal with it better than we can, or this wasn't made on a lathe.

790
01:14:20,660 --> 01:14:29,260
And if it wasn't made on a lathe, the only other tool that exists that can make something like this requires five axes of freedom.

791
01:14:29,260 --> 01:14:32,340
And we call those things, you know, five axis mills.

792
01:14:32,340 --> 01:14:38,100
And now we're talking about these giant, big robotic arms with tools that, that can cut at different angles.

793
01:14:38,100 --> 01:14:39,780
And it's all controlled by robotics.

794
01:14:39,960 --> 01:14:43,460
That's the only way you can explain the precision, uh, on these artifacts.

795
01:14:43,460 --> 01:14:50,900
It's the only thing that we have that's even remotely capable of doing something like this is a five axis mill that works on aerospace parts.

796
01:14:51,220 --> 01:14:57,240
And yet we're talking about objects that are at least four to 5,000 years old.

797
01:14:57,500 --> 01:14:59,120
Oh, at, at least.

798
01:14:59,200 --> 01:15:02,160
I mean, yes, the, the youngest ones of these are probably in that range.

799
01:15:02,240 --> 01:15:11,700
I suspect that they're far, far older than that and that they've been inherited and they've been found with people that we then date as being four or 5,000 years old.

800
01:15:11,900 --> 01:15:12,980
It's tough to explain.

801
01:15:12,980 --> 01:15:14,380
I, I, it's fascinating.

802
01:15:14,380 --> 01:15:23,920
I, I, I, I think there's tremendous evidence that there was something very sophisticated going on long ago, and it's not explained by the ancient civilizations as we know it.

803
01:15:24,260 --> 01:15:41,420
And when you combine that with the evidence for cataclysm, the extension of the human timeline, every culture around the world talking about, you know, origin stories involving massive floods or fire and conflagrations and ancestors that could do advanced things, but they were wiped out.

804
01:15:41,420 --> 01:15:49,900
All of a sudden, this idea that there was indeed an ancient civilization on this planet, they had some significant capability and then they were wiped out.

805
01:15:49,900 --> 01:15:52,960
And we're looking at the remnants of what they left behind.

806
01:15:53,300 --> 01:15:55,100
I think that starts to make a lot more sense.

807
01:15:55,180 --> 01:15:58,860
I think it's a better interpretation of the evidence that's out there.

808
01:15:59,040 --> 01:16:01,000
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.

809
01:16:01,480 --> 01:16:05,480
Just by way of interest, how did an Aussie boy get into this esoteric subject?

810
01:16:05,480 --> 01:16:08,140
What, what drew you into this arcane area?

811
01:16:08,900 --> 01:16:11,100
Well, I have to give some credit.

812
01:16:11,300 --> 01:16:16,180
My mother was a history teacher, so I always had a strong interest in history.

813
01:16:16,620 --> 01:16:23,280
But honestly, I mean, I went in the IT computer direction at university, but I have to credit Graham Hancock for this.

814
01:16:23,920 --> 01:16:25,120
I was a big fan of his.

815
01:16:25,300 --> 01:16:30,140
And in 2013, I had the chance to spend two weeks with him traveling around Peru and Bolivia.

816
01:16:30,140 --> 01:16:34,880
And as you might imagine, his perspective on those things sort of opens up your mind.

817
01:16:34,980 --> 01:16:39,560
I had no idea about most of the mysteries that exist when it comes to the topic of ancient lost civilizations.

818
01:16:40,100 --> 01:16:42,900
And then I literally did the same thing in 2015.

819
01:16:42,900 --> 01:16:52,040
I spent two weeks with Graham in Egypt and I met Zahi Hawass and I met guys like Muhammad Ibrahim and Yusuf Eowin.

820
01:16:52,880 --> 01:16:54,020
And that just blew my mind.

821
01:16:54,020 --> 01:16:58,800
And it's like I literally, a year and a half after that, I quit my day job to try and pursue this full time.

822
01:16:58,920 --> 01:17:05,480
I was, I was entirely obsessed with these, these mysteries and the obvious contradictions in the story of history.

823
01:17:05,480 --> 01:17:06,980
And I couldn't really think about anything else.

824
01:17:07,000 --> 01:17:08,200
So I kept going back to Egypt.

825
01:17:08,960 --> 01:17:14,680
And I'm very thankful that people have enjoyed the content that I put out and that, and that it makes sense with them.

826
01:17:14,680 --> 01:17:21,440
And I've had tremendous opportunities to meet people like yourself, like Graham, Randall Carlson, guys like that over time, and Chris Dunn.

827
01:17:22,020 --> 01:17:23,280
And it's, it's been quite a ride.

828
01:17:23,400 --> 01:17:25,260
I, I, I love, I love doing it.

829
01:17:25,800 --> 01:17:27,280
Well, Ben, I love your show.

830
01:17:27,440 --> 01:17:30,240
And I think the work you're doing is incredibly important.

831
01:17:30,640 --> 01:17:35,540
Ben Van Kirkwijk, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with Reality Check.

832
01:17:35,840 --> 01:17:41,180
And I, I look forward to having you on again sometime soon because I could talk to you all day.

833
01:17:42,120 --> 01:17:43,260
Thank you very much, Ross.

834
01:17:43,260 --> 01:17:46,120
It's been a pleasure, uh, to be on the show and, uh, cheers.

835
01:17:46,600 --> 01:17:46,980
Thanks, mate.

836
01:17:49,660 --> 01:17:50,660
Thanks for watching.

837
01:17:50,660 --> 01:17:57,080
Go to joinnn.com to find NewsNation on your television provider.

838
01:17:57,640 --> 01:18:07,540
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