The long awaited discussion between Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is now available. Here are my thoughts after listening to the whole four and a half hour thing, and after following many more social media threads on this than I wanted to. First, people are interested in the…
There is still no evidence that Gunung Padang is an ice age pyramid, and I am still not a fan of retraction
The peer reviewed paper published last year in Archaeological Prospection that claimed Gunung Padang in Indonesia is a 25k year old pyramid has now been retracted by the journal. As I noted at the time, the paper does not support its main claim. It doesn’t provide evidence that Gunung Padang is anything but a volcanic…
The problems with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
Over the past year or so, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) has gained a great deal of public visibility, first through Graham Hancock’s Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, and just last week, through a profile by Zach St. George in the New York Times Magazine. The idea is that the cold snap, or rapid cooling,…
Curse of Oak Island Archaeology Update: The glass bead from Lot 5
Beads have been very important to North American indigenous populations for a very long time. The Augustine Mound, for example, is a burial site almost 3000 years old in New Brunswick, not very far from Oak Island, that contains over a thousand copper beads. The late Tricia Jarratt did a comprehensive study of them in…
Curse of Oak Island Archaeology Update: The Phips Iron and Lot 5
Season 11 of the Curse of Oak Island (COOI) has featured the finds of iron objects from Lot 5, both because they could be associated with a large pit structure in the same area, and because they are said to be a match, in terms of chemical composition, with iron objects found at the 17th…