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If our civilization was suddenly destroyed in a global catastrophe,
how much of it would be left in 10 or 20,000 years? Would archaeologists of that time be able
to find anything of it beyond maybe some stone monuments? According to some, the answer is no.
There wouldn’t be much of anything left. One of those who holds this view and who has popularized
it is Randall Carlson. Maybe you’ve caught him on the Joe Rogan podcast at some point. We’re going
to examine his claims on the subject and look deeper into the question of artifact durability
to see whether his assertions are in harmony with scientific evidence or just a weak rationalization
for why so little archaeological evidence for a lost advanced civilization has been found.
In my video on Ancient Advanced Machining, I suggested that in the distant future, there
would be quite a bit of material evidence left over that would indicate to archaeologists that
our civilization did, in fact, exist. I received quite a few comments denying my assertion.
I was initially surprised that so many people took issue with me on this point,
until it became apparent to me that they had been indoctrinated by others.
And one of the more prominent of these others is Randall Carlson, a researcher of catastrophes,
who describes himself as a “master builder and architectural designer, teacher,
geometrician, geomythologist, geological explorer and renegade scholar.” We’re
going to look at some claims Carlson made on episode #505 of the Joe Rogan podcast
on the subject of artifact durability to see how well his claims hold up to scrutiny. As the clip
begins, Carlson is addressing the issue of why the material record contains so little evidence
for a technologically-advanced civilization from 12,000 years ago.
- What we see is that there's basically no record to speak of of what people were doing culturally,
and that has led a lot of scientists to assume that, for all those tens of
thousands of years and hundreds and hundreds of generations, that people are essentially
living nothing more than a subsistence kind of hunter-gatherer existence, right?
- No record to speak of? Ask any archeologist of the Stone Age, and they will tell you that
there most certainly is a record to speak of, and this record is full of information.
Carlson seems to be turning a blind eye to what the record has in it,
because it’s inconvenient to him. And let’s be clear here: the record that we have testifies
to the existence of hunter-gatherers through the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. And we
should also note that it is entirely possible for hunter-gatherers to live above subsistence.
We have in the material record at Natufian sites, for example, evidence for food storage at a time
before agriculture was practiced. Carlson may feel that hunting and gathering is nothing to speak of,
but that is not what archaeologists think. It served people’s interests then and in some
ways was superior to the agricultural and urban lifestyles humans lived later. Hunter-gatherers
also could produce monuments. I need only point to sites like Gobekli Tepe to demonstrate that.
- But what they haven't taken into account is the extremity of some
of the global changes that have occurred in the interval that we humans have been here.
- FYI, he is talking about a series of worldwide catastrophes, which he believes
destroyed advanced civilizations of the distant past. These would be urban societies
with complex governmental systems, complex forms of communication, high populations,
mass food production, monumental architecture, significant division of labor, and technology
that is much higher than what is found in the archaeological record for those times.
In fact, none of that stuff is found in the material record 12,000 years ago. Ah,
but just like a kid who doesn’t have his homework, he has an excuse for that.
The earth ate it.
- Because what you'll hopefully begin to appreciate is that,
were some of these events of the scale and magnitude that have happened
probably a dozen or more times in the 150 or 200 thousand years that we've been here,
were those events to occur today, ten thousand years from now archaeologists would be sifting
through the rubble looking for any kind of evidence that we had ever been here.
- So this is the argument we are going to look into today. According to Carlson,
just as the remains of our own society would be extremely difficult to find
in the archaeological record 10,000 years from now, assuming we abandoned it today,
so too, the remains of an advanced civilization before a catastrophe more than 10,000 years ago
would be extremely difficult to find in the archaeological record now.
This is his explanation for why archaeologists haven’t been able to locate it.
Assuming this were true, that next to nothing would be left,
how then would we today be able to demonstrate the existence of this lost civilization? What
is the reason that people believe in it? It’s one thing to say that it could be true,
but it’s quite another to say that we have good reason to believe it.
- Yeah, metal does not last long when exposed to the elements.
- The key expression here is “exposed to the elements.” It is most certainly true,
as I am sure you could guess, that the environment that metal is exposed to, and any other substance
is exposed to, would affect the decomposition rate of the substance. The question here is:
Could we expect that metal objects from more than 10,000 years ago would last until today?
Carlson is making the case that it would be highly unlikely for it to survive that long.
- There was an interesting series of shows a few years ago, I think it was. It had to do with the
idea of what if humans just suddenly departed, and what if we took humans out of the equation,
what would happen to all of the infrastructure left behind, just under normal kind of
gradualistic change that we're used to within, you know, the last few centuries?
- The show he is referring to is Life After People, which aired on the History Channel
between 2008 and 2010. The show speculates about how objects would deteriorate over time
if people suddenly disappeared from the world. It’s important to note that the show
never says that nothing would be left after 10,000 years. In fact,
it leaves the question open. And the show never claims to be an authority on the matter.
- The upshot of it was that ten thousand years from now, it's pretty much gone.
- Is this true? Heavy metals, such as gold, silver, platinum, iron, copper, tin, and lead
are particularly durable. Archaeology, as you know, often finds artifacts below the ground. So
for the sake of this discussion, let’s consider how long a metal object would last underground. An
in-depth study for the U.S. Department of Energy was done in 1980 on the durability of metals,
and its conclusions shed some light on this matter. The study was conducted in order to
determine what sorts of containers would work best in the disposal of nuclear waste material.
The study notes that metal artifacts numbering in the thousands have been found all over the
world and many of these are thousands of years old. Copper beads, for example, have been found
at the site of Catal Hoyuk, which dates to the Neolithic Period. Testing archaeological
artifacts, the researchers determined that iron artifacts on land or buried had a maximum
corrosion rate of between .001 and .4 inches per one thousand years. The modern measurement for the
maximum corrosion rate of iron is .48 inches per thousand years. That means an absolute maximum of
4.8 inches every ten thousand years. A large iron artifact, therefore, from 10,000 years ago, would
not have corroded completely away. Their study concluded that a copper or bronze artifact would,
at the absolute maximum, corrode .1 inches per thousand years, that is, 1 inch per 10,000 years.
The modern measurement for the maximum corrosion rate of copper is .054 inches per thousand years.
That indicates that an absolute maximum of 1 inch would corrode every ten thousand years.
What does that mean? It means that Randall is wrongall. The study is
fascinating and is available online, so I will leave a link to it below this video.
- You know, I mean, if you look at the great buildings that
make up all the metropolitan areas now of the world, most of them are steel-frame structures,
and they're, you know, clothed in a skin that will keep the elements out maybe for a half a century.
- Yes, but what about the parts of the structures that are below ground?
There’s quite a bit of our civilization below ground, as a matter of fact.
- But without maintenance, I mean, you know that the Golden Gate Bridge up in San Francisco is
constantly undergoing maintenance, because if you stop maintaining it, immediately it starts
decaying, immediately it starts rusting. And interesting if you think about it,
if we suddenly...if humans left the planet, 10,000 years from now, and some interstellar
anthropologists arrived, what would they see that would indicate that we had been here?
- Notice how Mr. Carlson continues to focus on structures that are exposed to the
elements. The whole field of archaeology is largely concerned with what has been buried,
because that is where ancient remains tend to be preserved.
- What do you think would still be left after 10,000 years? There's actually two
things that they named in this particular program. I bet you can guess one of them.
-Mount Rushmore?
- Mount Rushmore. Good guess, yes, that's one of them, and of course,
the Great Pyramid the other one, and that's it, you know. Everything else is gone.
- Wow.
- I don’t know which episode of Life After People Mr. Carlson is referring to, but
why he would emphasize the fact that only Mount Rushmore and the Great Pyramid would
survive from our time, I don’t know. It certainly isn’t true. In my experience, most advocates of a
lost advanced civilization from the Stone Age are constantly pointing at material evidence for it.
They go all around the world finding all sorts of artifacts
that they say demonstrate its existence, and which they date to more than 10,000 years ago.
Those artifacts seem to multiply every year. Mind you, none of these are new discoveries. They
just take the artifacts that other people have discovered and redate them to the time period they
prefer. But they certainly seem to think there is plenty left over from this lost civilization.
Now, of course, Mr. Carlson might say, “Well, those are all made of stone.
Stone lasts.” Leaving aside the fact that they are NOT all made of stone (as I recall I recently
had to comment on a claim that cannonballs from Atlantis were discovered), it simply is not true
that only stone lasts. We’ve already discussed metal, but what about other materials?
Glass and ceramics can last for hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah, they might break,
but we still can find the pieces. We have ceramics that have survived from the Upper Paleolithic,
such as the Venus of Dolni Vestonice. They’ve found pottery from Asia just as old. When buried,
glass can last a million years. A glazed piece of pottery can last a million years. Look it up.
How long do you think synthetic material like plastic can last? Well, it depends on the type,
but PVC will last practically forever. Fiberglass also is resistant to decomposition.
Even wood, when in the right environment, can last for tens of thousands of years. You ever
hear of the Schoningen spears? They’re from the Paleolithic period. Look ’em up. How about the
Shigir idol? It’s dated to the Mesolithic period. Google it. These are wood objects.
How about human or animal remains? Underground
these can last a super long time as well. Bone can last over a million years.
A baby mammoth from 40,000 years ago was found preserved almost completely intact in ice.
The fibers from textiles can last for tens of thousands of years. Then, of course, we have
fossils, which can preserve the remains of organic creatures going back a very, very long time.
I have to ask Mr. Carlson, then, where are the remains of the metals, the ceramics, the glass,
the wood, the synthetics, and the people from the time before the last great catastrophe?
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists will give you an answer.
They’ll tell you that the remains have been found.
The problem is, they don’t indicate the existence of a great lost advanced civilization. And you
can no longer hide behind the bogus argument that nothing but stone would have survived.
Now when you... when you now begin to factor in... the thing that I've been basically working with is
the idea that we have these intermittent - I call them nonlinearities discontinuities - within the
normal orderly progression of things, the catastrophes if you will,
superimposed a few of those in the process, and basically 5,000 [to] 10,000 years from now.
you're not going to find much to show that we had been here.
- Obviously untrue, and inventing scientific sounding terms for your view will fool nobody
but the most gullible of people, or the people that don’t want to bother doing the research.
Yes, there have been catastrophic events in Earth’s past, and lots of things get destroyed,
but everything doesn’t get destroyed. The material record doesn’t get erased by these disasters. It
stretches all the way back through all of them. Thank you for watching this video and getting all
the way to the end. If you liked it, please give it a thumbs up
and take a look at some of my other Myths of Ancient History videos. I’ll catch you later.
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