Michael Button

The episode opens with Michael Button describing the year since his last appearance. He says his YouTube channel has grown beyond what he expected, and that researching and investigating ancient history, which he used to do for free, is now his full-time job. He calls this an immense privilege and thanks the people who helped him get there, Joe Rogan among them.

Rogan praises Button's work as thorough, objective and measured. He argues that mainstream archaeologists have left a "giant blind spot" that has let independent researchers reach larger audiences than the academics. Rogan also says academics are "so determined to cling to their timelines" and dismiss discoveries made outside "their little circle", which he calls silly. This criticism comes from Rogan in conversation. The segment offers no specific case to support it.

Button says he does not think he has reached his peak and that he tries to listen to feedback and improve. He says that millions of people around the world are fascinated by the mysteries of the past and know they are getting "a very narrow version of it from mainstream academics." He describes himself as having had an academic career path that he did not continue, and says this gives him a kind of advantage.

read the papers, and go investigate for yourself, like listen to what I say, but don't take what I say as gospel. Because at the end of the day, I'm just a YouTuber, you know, so that's the caveat I want to put on it.

Rogan remarks on how quickly new discoveries are arriving. Button replies that two papers published in the year since his last visit have "huge ramifications for how we view history." He organizes his case around three questions that archaeology once thought it had answered but, in his view, can no longer answer because of new evidence. He says that "the rug has been pulled out from underneath our understanding of human history", yet on the surface "it's kind of like business as usual." The two papers are not named or described in this part of the conversation.

Why did civilization take so long to appear after hundreds of thousands of years of modern humans, and why did it then appear in many unconnected places at roughly the same time? How old is human intelligence, and how intelligent were other human species? When did humans first reach the more isolated landmasses, meaning the Americas and, as Button puts it, Australia, "which is perhaps less important, but still interesting"?

For the first question, Button lists Mesoamerica, South America, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, ancient India and ancient China as flourishing "all around about the same time, give or take a thousand or so years." He sets that spread against a span of "300,000 years plus for modern humans," and adds that some of the new papers suggest the span "could be a lot longer than that." For the second question, he jokes that the name Homo sapiens, which he translates as "wise man," is "an incredibly humble thing for us to say about ourselves."

Button says the answers to these questions are fundamentally important because, whatever they turn out to be, they explain why we live in this civilization today. His recurring point is that the field now lacks answers it once claimed to have, not that he has found the answers himself.

Rogan asks whether civilizations may have existed much earlier and left no trace because of time, erosion or natural catastrophe, or whether they simply have not been found yet. His example is the Amazon, where LiDAR and other recently available technologies have revealed what look like grids of ancient cities under the jungle. He says this shows the Amazon was home to millions of people, which he calls "a crazy shift" from how the region was seen a few decades ago.

Rogan then turns to the Olmecs, noting that "Olmec" is a name modern people gave them and that "We have no idea what they looked like." He says some of the colossal heads look "roughly either Polynesian or perhaps even African" and that these heads are the cornerstone of what is known about the culture. He offers an age of "Six thousand years we think?" and immediately qualifies it: "Who knows? It's just a rough guess." Treat that figure as Rogan's own hedged guess, not an established date.

Button answers that the conventional starting point for civilization comes from an old line drawn at the invention of writing, around 3,000 to 4,000 BC ("or supposedly was the invention of writing," he adds). He says 20th-century discoveries such as ancient Sumer made writing the accepted marker. For the period from 3,000 BC back to about 12,000 BC, he says "clearly civilization is older," pointing to roughly 12,000-year-old sites. The transcript renders their names as "Tashtepe" and "Quebecly-Tepa," which appear to refer to the Taş Tepeler sites and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

I think that is a civilization. I think over time that will come to be accepted as a civilization.

Button says this amounts to "a kind of doubling of the timeline," from 6,000 to 12,000 years ago, whatever definition of civilization one uses. He separates that claim from anything earlier: going much further back, he says, gets into "purely hypothetical scenarios." This is one of the clearest limits he sets in this part of the interview.

Button links the civilization question to the history of human intelligence. He says that only a few decades ago, modern humans were thought to be about 100,000 years old and to have become intelligent around 50,000 years ago. Combined with improving climate around 14,000 years ago and then the agricultural revolution, that older model made for a story that was "very. very neat." He says this older model is still somewhat in place but is "breaking," and that most archaeologists would accept that it is breaking.

I would argue that the time span of human intelligence has increased by 20 times from 50,000 to over a million years.

Button presents this as his own argument ("I would argue") and says more than once that he will explain the evidence later. This section of the interview does not contain that evidence, so the million-year figure has no support here. He says the change "puts everything back on the table," that hardly anyone is talking about it, and that bringing attention to it is a large part of why he makes his content. He then admits he drifted from Rogan's original question.

Rogan brings up a theory he heard from Jesse Michaels the day before, though he is unsure whether it is Michaels's own theory or someone else's. In the theory, agriculture mattered for more than food security and settled life. Ergot grows on wheat, barley and other grains, and early farmers, knowingly or not, may have eaten this psychedelic substance, which Rogan calls "akin to LSD." Rogan connects this to Brian Muraresku's book The Immortality Key and the Eleusinian Mysteries, and suggests it was "probably" behind a lot of invention and creativity.

Rogan says a recent study on the Eleusinian Mysteries "kind of showed" that ergot was present, while noting it was "not proved." He does not name the study, and the conversation quickly moves to a different find. Producer Jamie looks up a puma-bone pipe that Rogan says tested positive for DMT. Rogan first places it at Eleusis, then Peru. The search result puts it at Inca Cueva, a high-altitude cave site in Jujuy, northwestern Argentina.

According to the result Rogan reads aloud, the tubular pipes were made from puma long bones. They were found alongside Anadenanthera seeds, a plant associated with vilca and cebil snuff traditions. Residue tests detected tryptamine alkaloids. The material is dated to roughly 2,130 BCE, "over 4,000 years ago," which the result says makes it among the oldest direct archaeological evidence for intentional use of psychoactive Anadenanthera in the southern Andes.

The same result adds a qualification that cuts against Rogan's first framing. Rogan had said the find showed people somehow knew how to make DMT, a process he describes as separating the molecule from the plant and working out that it should be freebased or smoked. The result says Anadenanthera colubrina is "not simply a DMT plant": its chemistry can include bufotenin, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT in varying amounts depending on plant material and preparation. The pipes are interpreted as evidence of ritual use of the plant, not proof of modern purified DMT. Rogan accepts the distinction but keeps his core point that they were smoking the plant and getting DMT from it.

The careful answer is DMT was detected in pipe residues.

Rogan then cites scholars from what he thinks is "the University of Jerusalem" who believe Moses's burning bush involved "Some kind of psychedelic," possibly the acacia tree, which he says is "apparently rich in DMT." He jokes that Moses came back with rules to live by and attributed them to God. The institution, the scholars and the claim all come with Rogan's own hedges, and none is sourced in the conversation.

Button agrees that ancient cultures in South America and elsewhere "clearly" used psychedelic substances, and that people seem to have experimented with them for a very long time. He stops short of the larger theory. On whether psychedelics caused agriculture or led to civilization, he says:

I mean, the theory of whether that caused agriculture, whether that led to civilization or anything like that, I mean, I don't know.

Rogan compares the 1970 placement of psychedelics on Schedule 1 to the end of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He claims the mysteries stopped because the authorities saw the participants, whom he credits with inventing democracy, as a threat to their control and to their ability to send people to war. He offers no source for this account of why the mysteries ended. The speaker who replies, apparently Button, agrees that "The powers that be always want to restrict any kind of like thought" outside what they want people to think.

Rogan argues that new groups keep challenging those in power, and that this is probably good for people. He excludes war from that, but says new ideas probably drive civilization forward rather than letting it stagnate. As a contrast, he passes on the impressions of friends who served in Afghanistan: regions controlled by warlords, clan-like and nomadic life in the mountains, "not much different than the way it was thousands and thousands of years ago." He concludes that when the same groups stay in control forever, there is no motivation to change and no innovation. This is anecdotal and secondhand. The reply also notes the geographic limit: "they're stuck in the mountains. So it's like you're just trying to live."

The section ends as the talk returns to fertile regions, with Turkey singled out as "fascinating." The speaker says that "many people are now speculating" it could be one of the birthplaces of civilization. The transcript breaks off mid-sentence, so this part of the interview never completes the argument.

The conversation picks up on whether the Neolithic sites of Taş Tepeler, in modern-day Turkey, deserve the label "civilization." The episode's sponsor read comes just before this. Michael Button answers with a firm yes: "I think it undoubtedly is." He calls the region "the earliest evidence in my view of something akin to civilization." He accepts that archaeologists resist the term because the sites do not "tick off every part of the checklist," but he treats that objection as beside the point.

His case rests on several features. He describes 14 sites that are now shown to be interlinked, with shared symbolism, shared religious traditions and the same architectural styles. He adds impressive architecture, clearly organized labor and a stratified society. He argues stratification follows from the building work itself: "how do you achieve that without someone at the top and someone below?" In his view these were traits once used to define civilization, and he expects archaeological opinion to come round: "I think it will get there."

Joe Rogan suggests a motive for the reluctance: archaeologists may be protecting the timeline they have been teaching. Button agrees that the view will change. He says the field has been "moving the goalposts just because they didn't know it existed." As further evidence he cites newly found residential buildings at Göbekli Tepe. Scholars long argued that people did not live at the site and must have travelled there. The new finds suggest people lived there permanently or at least semi-permanently. By his account, the main criteria still missing are writing and agriculture. He mentions an "interesting discovery" about writing at Göbekli Tepe, which the two had discussed the day before, but he does not describe it here.

Later Button dismisses the definitional argument outright: "it doesn't really matter how you define civilization. It's clearly incredibly sophisticated." Rogan agrees that "that word is a problem." He compares the quibbling over terms to Anthony Fauci's statements about gain-of-function research. Button then states what is at stake for him: if these sites count, the timeline of civilization "has doubled from 6,000 years to 12,000 years." He also argues that the builders were not starting from scratch. "They weren't just hunter-gatherers that thought, let's try something new and build this," he says, so there must have been "a long procedure up to that point." That leaves open how much further back the story goes.

Button names Karahan Tepe, Göbekli Tepe and Sefer Tepe as the biggest sites. These are the famous ones with pillars set in circular enclosures. He and Rogan agree that only about 5% of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated. Rogan wonders how many other structures are still underground and known only from ground-penetrating radar and other survey techniques. Button says that if Göbekli Tepe were fully excavated it would be "something like 50 times larger than Stonehenge."

While looking at an image of the site, the two try to interpret a grid overlaid on the circles. Button guesses it marks archaeological pits but says he is not 100% sure. He then explains why excavators work slowly. It is "standard archaeological practice to not excavate too much of a site," and using tractors or similar machinery risks destroying important finds. He calls this caution "valid" more than once.