Cassie Coppersmith

Joe Rogan opens by explaining that he first saw Cassie Coppersmith in a video on Derek's channel, Megalithic Marvels, about ancient Chinese artifacts that he says "don't make any sense." He asks her to explain what the objects are and why she finds them strange.

Coppersmith says she first saw the artifacts in the British Museum, which has a whole wall of them. They are made of nephrite jade, which she calls an extremely hard stone. Her main point is about how they look: "they look machined," and in her view they are too precise for the tools archaeologists say were used to make them. She says plainly that she has not visited the site in China. She notes that archaeologists credit the objects to the Liangzhu culture.

Her theory compares the jades to the hard stone vases found in Egyptian graves. She suggests the Liangzhu people were given or found these objects, did not make them, and came to treasure them as grave goods. She notes that Liangzhu tombs contain thousands of jade artifacts and that much cruder versions also exist. In her reading, the crude versions suggest a culture that owned fine pieces it could not fully reproduce.

On dating, she accepts the conventional chronology for the settlement itself. She says archaeologists securely date the Liangzhu earthworks and community to about 3,400 BC, roughly the same period as the Egyptian graves with hard stone vases. She describes the mainstream explanation of how the jades were made: strings carrying sand or another abrasive. Coppersmith also credits Derek with getting her into the subject.

Looking at images of a B-disc about nine inches across, Coppersmith compares a drilled artifact with an archaeologists' experiment that drilled jade using a bamboo core. When Rogan asks, she says the experimenters got all the way through the stone. She does not know how long that took. She also cites a 1930s experiment in which an archaeologist used abrasive strings to cut a basketball-sized piece of jade, which took a week.

Rogan describes the difference for listeners. The experimental bore shows thick, uneven grooves, while the grooves in the artifact are much finer and closer together. "That looks like a machine," he says. Coppersmith agrees and adds that this piece seems to have been drilled from both sides, with the two bores meeting in the middle.

She names the "sung tube" as the most puzzling object. It is square on the outside with a round tube through the middle, wider at the top than the bottom, with what she calls perfect 90-degree corners. She ranks the jade's hardness on the Mohs scale (garbled as "MySpace" in the transcript), where diamond is 10. She puts the hard stone of the Egyptian vessels, such as diorite, at six or seven and says this jade is about the same. The conversation never connects these hardness figures to a specific test of what the string-and-abrasive method can or cannot do.

Rogan suggests the idea is that an earlier, more advanced culture left these objects behind. Coppersmith frames this as her personal view and notes how little discussion the artifacts get:

It is only my opinion that that's the case. I haven't seen a lot of people talk about these artifacts at all.

Her main exhibit is the largest of the tubes, which she calls the King of Jade Sung, a 15-pound artifact. She argues that the famous etched figure on its side, an image she says appears everywhere in photos from the Liangzhu museum and which she takes to be a symbol of the king, was scratched over an earlier high-relief carving like those on other artifacts. She concludes that the Liangzhu ruler probably found the object, could not recreate it, and stamped his symbol over it. Her question is why a culture able to make the object would then add crude scratches over its surface.

Coppersmith says this pattern is a common theory among alternative historians about Egypt. Rogan adds his own example: the writing on some sarcophagi looks cruder, chipped and less precise than the objects themselves. Rogan then generalizes that people who control a region take credit for older works. Pharaohs are the documented case, and Ramesses II gets the nickname "King Selfie" for putting his cartouche on everything. Rogan argues that assuming rulers made what they inscribed is "kind of crazy" and adds, "That's our map of history." The pharaoh example shows that rulers sometimes claimed things they did not make. It does not show that any particular Liangzhu jade predates the Liangzhu culture.

Coppersmith explains that she named her channel Secrets and Stone "because I believe that the stones speak to you." Her method is to look closely at objects and compare them with the official account of how they were made. She says that at many sites, digging "one or two levels down" reveals inconsistencies.

She makes two specific criticisms of mainstream interpretation. First, she says carbon dating is sometimes done only partway down a site and the report is written once the date matches the expected story. Second, she says that in places like Cambodia, a king's inscription is taken as proof of when a structure was built, with little further investigation. She gives no particular site report or dating study as an example of either problem.

In megalithic architecture, she says the oldest construction is often the lowest level, and later cultures built on top with what look like copies of the work beneath. In her words, "they were really trying to make what they saw, but they just couldn't." She says that once your eye is trained for this, you see it everywhere in the world.

Coppersmith dates her interest to a trip to Egypt four years ago, when she watched videos by Ben van Kerkwyk on the way there. She describes it as becoming an obsession. She says she deliberately visits sites that others rarely cover, since Egypt is in van Kerkwyk's hands and Peru in Brien Foerster's. She recently returned from India and has also spent time in Cambodia and Thailand.

Her reason is about strength of evidence: "I think you have to have more than three examples." She argues that documenting thousands of cases worldwide, such as stone nubs or similar-looking megalithic walls, makes a stronger case for a different history than revisiting the same few sites. Her stated goal is modest: a case strong enough that people will consider the possibility.

Rogan goes further. He says it seems much more likely that the timeline is wrong than that historians are right and everyone else is "just a conspiracy theorist weirdo." He brings up the Kailasa temple in India and repeats a point Jamie made in an earlier episode: an army was brought in to destroy it, stayed a long time, and barely damaged it.

Rogan mentions a YouTube video claiming the Kailasa temple was carved with lasers, which would explain why no waste stone is found. His reaction is mixed. He calls it "absolutely possible" but also "so insane" given how far it would overturn the accepted timeline. Neither speaker offers any evidence for the laser idea beyond the video.

Coppersmith moves to an example she saw herself a couple of weeks earlier: lathe-turned pillars at the Hoysala temples in southern India, which she says are feet across, with visible lathe marks. She describes where she and archaeologists differ. They accept that the pillars were turned on a lathe, but they say it was probably human- or animal-powered, while she believes the pillars were machined. She calls the pillars "completely unexplainable" and points to the size of machine that would be needed to turn one on its side.

At Hampi, she points to objects in the museum and in remote corners of the site that she interprets as parts of a lathe setup, such as end plates where a pillar would have spun. She says nobody explains what they are. She claims strong evidence for ancient machining but leaves room for other methods: "it doesn't have to be machines," since there could have been techniques "that we don't even recognize."

Asked about one pillar, she says it is about twice her height and very heavy. She identifies the stone as chloritic schist, or soapstone, which she says is softer when quarried and hardens after exposure, though she adds that some lathe-turned pillars are granite. Her account of the stone's softness matters for the argument, because it makes non-machine turning easier to picture, but the discussion does not take that point further.

Rogan asks whether anyone has analyzed how precise and uniform the pillars are, looking at images of the Kopeshwar Mahadev temple. He admits the gap directly: "I would love to know what the precision of that is." Coppersmith adds her impressions from visiting: the sites have "crazy energy," visitors may touch the pillars, and you can see where the lathe work starts at the bottom and stops at the top. She mentions that "a lot of people" wonder whether the profile, viewed sideways, resembles a sound wave. Neither speaker endorses that idea.

After a sponsor break, Jamie pulls up a description of the pillars in the Swarga Mandap of the Kopeshwar Temple. The source of the text is not named. It describes "extremely uniform circular and polygonal profiles," consistent spacing that keeps the ceiling oculus centered, and interlocking stone held by gravity without mortar. It says the work "resembles machine-turned-work." Rogan mocks the hedge ("That's cute") and asks whether it is more likely actually machine-turned. The same text calls the temple an example of "advanced medieval Indian stone engineering," which credits the precision to medieval builders rather than a lost earlier civilization. The speakers do not address that tension before the excerpt ends.

Coppersmith starts by pointing to temples where, she argues, older and more precise elements were moved into later buildings. Her central claim is about layering: "So the core of most of these temples, in my opinion, is the original megalithic part of these temples, the oldest stuff." As evidence she cites dark, precisely shaped pillars that look out of place in their surroundings: "very crude stonework above and below them, and then they have this perfect lathe pillar right in the middle."

She hedges on several details. She describes one pillar as rotating, then adds, "I think it used to rotate. It does not anymore." A moment later she says, "And maybe that's just a myth. I have no idea." She also offers more than one explanation for where the pillars came from: original temples, or possibly a workshop that later builders found and used.

When Rogan asks about the official dates, she gives 1,200 to 1,500 AD and explains that the dating rests on inscriptions that ruling kings carved on pillars and temple walls. Rogan finds that thin: "It's all inscriptions evidence. It seems like I would need more evidence, you know?" Someone in the exchange calls the inscriptions graffiti.

Coppersmith backs her doubts with her own research in Cambodia, where she says temples are also dated by inscriptions. Her method: the inscriptions had already been translated from Sanskrit into French, and she translated the French into English, running them through AI. She reports that the kings "very seldom do they say, I king so and so built this."

What they say is I installed a lingam.

From this she concludes that "the archaeologists make a fairly big jump between what the kings actually wrote and saying, well, this king must have built this," and that "So in a lot of instances, they're actually putting words into their mouths." This is her most specific evidential claim in the passage. She does not name particular inscriptions or temples, and her reading depends on a Sanskrit-to-French-to-English chain that included AI translation.

Asked for her own timeline, Coppersmith frames it as personal belief: "I personally believe that it's pre-flood. So, you know, more than 12,000 years ago." She thinks some sites are probably older still. She calls Peru, which she visited a couple of months earlier, "fully unexplainable," calls Egypt "incredibly ancient," and says she believes India is "one of the most ancient places on Earth."

Her view of who built these places has two parts that pull against each other. On whether different civilizations built them, she says, "What they built suggests that it probably was." She also believes those civilizations were in contact, because "there's enough similarities around the world that it feels like there was a communication network between them." Yet she says the building styles of India, Egypt and Peru are "completely different, right?"

Egypt: plain blocks with few decorations, especially at the Osirion, which she calls "clinical." Peru: "playful," with "big, pillowy blocks." India: carvings over everything.

To explain how old cores and later inscriptions end up at the same sites, she proposes that for thousands of years civilizations have been drawn to certain places: "they're attracted to these places, and they build on top of them and they settle there." The result, in her account, is generation after generation of building on the same sites.

Rogan applies the same layering idea to Kailasa. He notes that it is at least a thousand years past its attributed construction date: "And it looks like there's been zero erosion." He argues that a few thousand more years would leave it looking the same, so later generations who did not know who built it would inherit stories that one king or another did. His conclusion: "Like, out a few thousand years, and it's fucking guesswork." He calls it a disservice when archaeologists find an inscription and treat the question as settled.

Rogan says he is obsessed with the site, has watched four or five documentaries on it, and discussed it on an earlier episode with the CEO of Perplexity. The two stress its precision and geometric alignment, and that "They removed an entire cliffside mountain and, you know, it was, it was, they carved it from the top down." Their main open question is the waste rock: "they have no idea what they did with all the stone. That's the big question." Rogan argues there should still be a pile of the "millions and millions of tons of stone" somewhere. No source for that tonnage is given.

Coppersmith offers some sympathy for archaeologists. She describes the evidence available to them: "the only evidence I have are pot shirts that I can date," along with inscriptions and cultural layers. She reads those layers differently, as "cultural layers of cultures that, in my opinion, lived there afterwards." She also wonders how many archaeologists privately think "this actually doesn't make a whole lot of sense," and when Rogan suggests the younger ones do, she says she has talked to them.

Rogan describes academia as a hierarchy of professors, PhD supervisors and authors whose work is built on the established timeline, and says "they are the gatekeepers of information." He describes ego and vicious attacks between academics, "even if they're wrong." His main example is Clovis-first. He says the man who proposed people were in the Americas before the Clovis people "was destroyed by his own peers," and that it took years to show he was right, by "like over 10,000. years." He adds: "Like now they're pushing it past 22,000 years ago because of the footprints they found in White Sands, New Mexico." He does not name the researcher.