Archaeologist Flint Dibble attempted the ambitious task of explaining science and critical thinking to Joe Rogan last year. Rogan has been a promoter of the pseudo-archeology of a man named Graham Hancock, who argues that mainstream archeologists are covering up the evidence of a lost advanced civilization in the Ice Age that could have been the real-life Atlantis. Dibble went on The Joe Rogan Experience to debate Hancock and show why Atlantis isn't real. He may not have succeeded in convincing either Rogan or Hancock to accept the findings of mainstream archeology, but he did very effectively present the case for real science over crankery. Today, Flint Dibble joins to explain how ordinary people can avoid being taken in by pseudo-experts and why real science is so much more interesting and powerful than pseudoscience.

Nathan J. Robinson

I think you do such important work, and until recently I didn't realize how important the work that you do is. My first entry into what we're going to be discussing here today was from writing about Joe Rogan. I write about politics mostly, and I'm a debunker of political bullshit, and so I had to watch a lot of The Joe Rogan Experience because he is one of the leading purveyors of what I would call "half-baked takes" on things that are really consequential and important. I happened upon an episode where he was talking with a guy I'd never seen before named Randall Carlson, who was a proponent of the idea that Atlantis was a real place.

And I have never looked into Atlantis, but I always understood that the consensus among the professionals was that Atlantis was a mythical place, not real. Rogan is a very fascinated interviewer, and this guy was presenting all of his evidence for Atlantis. I was sitting there going, well, shoot, I'm fairly sure that a real archeologist would know that this was full of shit, but I'm not a professional, and I can't debunk this guy. I'm sitting here watching it and thinking, since I don't know whether this guy's evidence is real, do I have to now call into question whether I believe in Atlantis? And Rogan clearly does believe in Atlantis at the end of it—he seems totally persuaded.

So, my first question is: Is Atlantis real?

Flint Dibble

That's a good question. So I'm writing a book on this right now, and I think it'll be the first book focused on Atlantis written by an actual archeologist in a long time, certainly at least a generation. And so the answer is, no, it's not real. It's pretty clear. I'm also a historian—I'm a historian and archeologist. I focus on Ancient Greece, and I've read a lot of Plato in its original language, in ancient Greek. I've taken graduate level courses, and I've taught undergrad level courses, on Plato, as well as on the archeology of Ancient Greece. It's really clear that Atlantis is a philosophical allegory created by Plato.

It's not even a myth. A myth is something we think of as an oral legend that can pass on through the ages and oftentimes has some sort of kernel of truth. So it might be the place in the myth is real, like Troy in the Trojan War, or maybe some of the characters could be based on real people, or an event could be, or the description of the weapons and the armor. But of course, the story as a whole ends up becoming an oral legend that gets changed as it gets told and retold and situated into the contemporary context within each telling. Just like how the movie Troy is its own thing that's based in the 21st century, it’s different from Homer's Iliad that it's kind of based from, which is also different from other versions of that myth that we have.

For Atlantis, though, we know really clearly that it's not a myth for two different reasons. One, how it's set up in Plato's philosophy, where it's very clearly set up as a philosophical allegory. I don't know if you ever read Plato's Republic, maybe in high school?

Robinson

Yes. So this is like the imaginary city state that he conjures. He does a lot of thought experiments.

Dibble 

Exactly. It's a thought experiment with this ideal city to develop this ideal constitution for ideal citizens, and it's ruled by philosopher-kings and all that kind of jazz. Well, at the very start of the Timaeus and the Critias, the two dialogues that the Atlantis story is told in, Socrates says he wants to have a conversation about that ideal city. He wants to see it in a war and how it would behave in a kind of thought experiment about this kind of contest between two states, and the ideal city is set up to fight Atlantis, which is created for that story. And so it's set up very transparently as a thought experiment in Plato.

Now, some people might say, maybe Plato is referring to some sort of known myth, because he does that at times. He also invents his own myths, like the allegory of the cave. Are we looking for Plato's cave? No. And so, therefore, we can look at the archeology, mythology, and history from the ancient Greek world, and there's nothing even remotely related to this Atlantis story. And it's not like every single myth has to be written down. We have all this art that shows mythical scenes. We even have plentiful art of mythical scenes that we don't have the text of. Like we have this scene of Achilles and Ajax playing a board game, and it's repeated over a hundred times in different painted pots, different figurines, different kinds of media. So we know it's a real myth, but we have no record of it in textual evidence. But when it comes to Atlantis, we have nothing in art, and we have nothing in textual evidence. And if we try to fact-check it, in a sense, with the archeology on the ground in the past, it doesn't line up with anything.

Robinson

It's kind of funny to say Atlantis is "not even a myth."

Dibble

It is a modern one. From the 17th century on, it became this kind of modern myth.

Robinson

Yes, but usually the way that this is argued is, we see all of these stories about this place and a similar kind of catastrophe that happened. Isn't it strange that there are all these stories about catastrophes wiping out some place? Now, let's go look for the place. But actually, what you're saying is, no, what's important is that we don't see these kinds of things about Atlantis. That if we did have a common set of stories about a lost civilization from this time, then we would have compelling evidence that we might want to go look for this thing, or we can see it as real. But what's very striking in the Atlantis case is that we really only see it in Plato as one of the kinds of things that Plato was always doing.

Dibble

Exactly. That's exactly it. As archeologists, we work from the known to the unknown. Let's say we're excavating a wall. We start excavating on the stones that we can see, and we then extend to find out where it's going. We don't, all of a sudden, just start putting a trench where we think it might be 10 meters away. That would be silly. We start with what we have and we go on. Same thing, if we dig down to a new layer, we start with what we've uncovered, and then we expose more. Or we lay a trench where we find a scatter of shards visible on the surface. And so with the story of Atlantis, we should be doing the same thing.

The ideal city is situated as Athens, for example. We know the archeology of Athens, and we can compare the descriptions of Athens to the archeology of Athens, and we find that they don't match. So if they don't match, why would we trust these examples of Atlantis? We can't just jump to the unknown and start comparing it to other myths.

Now let's think about why catastrophism and all these myths of floods are oftentimes linked up. Is there only one flood that has ever happened? Within our lifetime, we can think of major flooding events that have destroyed cities, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where you are, or you can think of Fukushima, the disaster in Japan from the tsunami. Floods are frequent, regular occurrences in nature that destroy cities and settlements and are therefore going to leave records in myths and storytelling and whatnot as events that happen. And the only reason to link them is—you need a reason, if you see what I mean—to say that these are not separate floods, but to say they're all the same flood, and they never really provide any reason other than “flood myths must all have the same universal origin.” That's just their own logic, which doesn't really jive with evidence from our own lived experience of natural disasters, which happen quite regularly around the world.

Robinson

You've previously compared this to the following: it's as if future historians were looking back at our time and at climate change, and they saw the Fukushima disaster and Hurricane Katrina, and they said, "this must be part of one big, giant global flood." We would understand that actually that was misinterpreting a lot of different local flooding events that were catastrophes within the local area. And so we can see it is kind of useful to think, if future archeologists and future historians look back at our time, how might they make mistakes? And then, how can we avoid making similar judgments?

Dibble

And this is why, in many ways, as archeologists, we've learned beyond this. These ideas about Atlantis were a big part of 19th and 18th century scholarship. What we've learned is that we cannot make really simplistic comparisons across major periods and cultures and continents. And so there can be this kind of superficial comparison of Fukushima to Katrina, as they're around the same time period, they're both floods, while sea level is rising and climate change is happening. But clearly Fukushima is not that because it's spurred by an earthquake. And so making that superficial comparison leads to all kinds of mistakes, but at a public level, a superficial comparison is something that's really easy to understand. It seems so seductive because it's like, yes, that myth talks about the flood, and then there's the biblical flood, and then there's this flood from this Aztec mythology—it's like connections, but they're all really superficial connections if you see what I mean. They don't really make any sense. And we can understand each of them within their own context in a much more nuanced, complex way. And that's where specialists come into play. That's where you need that kind of specialist.

Robinson

So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is not just because I watched this episode with Randall Carlson and was like, "oh God, I really need to have a professional debunk this Atlantis nonsense for me so that I can feel confident in my beliefs." It was also just weird to me that Joe Rogan is so fascinated by archeology, and I came to see it as one aspect of a broader mindset. The way that he approaches archeology is the way that he approaches many different subjects, which is to say, this “everything that you're being told by the experts is false” kind of narrative where he has on these people who push this narrative.

You went on his program to debate this guy, Graham Hancock, who argues basically that there is a conspiracy of archeologists to cover up the possibility that in the Ice Age there was a lost civilization with highly advanced technology that disappeared, and there's very little evidence of it because, for some reason, archeologists have decided not to look for the evidence or to ignore the dissenting voices. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I think the stakes of the Atlantis discussion may seem low, but the stakes of the dismissal of experts as a bunch of conspiratorial plotters seem very high and very dangerous. Could you explain the attitude with which people like Rogan, Hancock, and Carlson approach professional archeology?

Dibble

Archeology is having this moment, let's say culturally, within this climate of anti-science and anti-intellectualism that exists in our 21st century world. It’s really heightened right now. I think some of it is that we are all coming to grips with the future and the present. And so, therefore, we look to the past. The past becomes a touchstone for these kinds of culture wars type topics, let's say. I think that's part and parcel of it.

I also think that for this kind of conspiratorial audience, for many of these individuals you mentioned, the Atlantis lost civilization type narrative is their version of entertainment. And so you can turn on Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix, and it's extremely entertaining. Or you can tune into one of the many times Graham Hancock has been on Joe Rogan. Every time he's on, you can look at the comments and everybody's like, "another old-school Rogan episode," where they can talk about this kind of fantastical stuff that's entertaining. And many of the people listening believe it, and many don't. A lot of studies actually show that 50 percent of Americans, give or take—ranges as low as 40, as high as 60 percent—believe in this kind of lost civilization. So it's a very prevalent belief. Certainly, some of the people listening or reading believe this, and some of the people they know believe this. So it's a very common belief that people have. That becomes an issue in many ways because it's so entertaining, compelling, and mysterious, and it's attractive right now because we're interested in history, and it then ties into this anti-intellectualism, anti-science, anti-expertise culture that exists there.

It acts as a kind of gateway into more subversive beliefs, without a doubt. If you follow some of the larger accounts that promote this on Twitter or X, or on YouTube, within the comments, it's just filled with a wide range of harmful beliefs, like disbelief in climate change, for example, or anti-vaccination, or boilerplate antisemitism or white supremacy. It's not to say that everybody who believes in Atlantis has these beliefs, but among the communities that are there, there's a prevailing acceptance of these other beliefs as well.

And so I think that's a big problem because it does prime people to start distrusting experts and to start believing these kinds of pseudoscientific quacks, which in many ways, Carlson and Hancock are. They adopt the language and mannerisms of archeologists, but they don't understand them in the least.

Robinson

Well, if people are to resist, and as I say, if non-experts like myself are to know the difference between quackery and the truth, you have to learn some real critical thinking skills. As you mentioned there, these people like Hancock come along with the affect of a calm, reasonable professor presenting evidence. And Hancock is not Alex Jones. He comes along with pictures, data, charts, and things, and he says, I have evidence. It turns out that he doesn't have any evidence.

What's interesting is that it's very easy to be taken in, and so learning how to think about these things as a non-expert seems important. Hancock comes along and says, look, the archeological community is intolerant, and they don't want to look at these sites and all these unknown things—we don't know what this is, and it could be anything. And basically, it's very compelling when you first see it because he shows you all these mysterious things, and he's like, what could this be? Look at this interesting coincidence. But what you said to him is, essentially, But where's the evidence for a lost civilization? Where is it?

Dibble

Yes, and the places he says we can't look, we do look. I'd say there are two rhetorical keys that the general public could look at. One is more specific, which is that he is situating this evidence in the Ice Age, but he ignores all the Ice Age evidence we have. So he says, this is an Ice Age civilization, but he completely ignores all the evidence for humans at that time. And he said he focuses on later monuments like the Sphinx and stuff like that. And so that should be a key. Actually, if you're interested in his idea and you want to actually do some reading to test it because you're not sold and want to be a critical thinker, well, go look at what archeologists actually say about the Ice Age and see if there's any room for this lost civilization.

He argues, for example, that this civilization was global and it lived on the coast. Well, guess what? We have lots of Ice Age evidence from Ice Age coasts, despite sea level rising for various reasons. And I presented some of this when I was on Joe Rogan talking about isostatic rebound, which is where the glaciers melt and there's less weight on the continental shelf, so some areas are rising at the same rate or faster than the sea level is rising because of the melting of the glacier. So areas like Northwest U.S. and Canada, and in other areas where there's tectonic uplift, where, again, the land is rising faster than the sea, we have plentiful Ice Age coasts. This is what I'm trying to say. He claims we don't, but we do, and we've explored it, and there's no Ice Age civilization there. Or he talks about deserts. And again, we've explored the deserts. We explored the rainforest. We have lots of evidence, and nothing for his stuff. So he's saying there's these black holes in our understanding, and that's just not true because you can go find that.

The second rhetorical thing that a critical thinker could think about is the type of rhetoric these gurus, if you will, use. And the key one is, I'm being canceled; there's a conspiracy against me. As soon as there's somebody saying this entire discipline is trying to cancel me, that should be a red flag immediately. This person is probably creating a narrative of them as a savior that knows more than an entire discipline and therefore is probably full of crap. When you look at the people who actually did make major paradigm shifts in various scientific fields, they never claimed they were being canceled. Where's Albert Einstein going on air and saying physicists are canceling me for proposing new ideas? No. Real archeologists and historians that propose new ideas are plentiful, and they're my colleagues and friends. We talk about Galileo being burned by the Church. Galileo was not being burned by his colleagues. And so there's a big difference there. As soon as somebody's using that kind of language of, "I am being canceled, there's a conspiracy against me to shut me down because these people don't want their truth challenged," that should immediately be a red flag. Why is this person using this kind of rhetoric? They're only using it to convince you, rather than to convince you of the veracity of their ideas. Because what they're doing is they're appealing to the public rather than the experts who understand all the evidence.

Robinson

I don't know what the actual facts are, but he did come with a story of an archeologist who presented some findings that were criticized by others in the community, and then they eventually accepted it. But I think what's interesting is, even if there are cases like that, why are you leading with that story about the community rather than leading with the evidence?

When you went on Rogan, you led the discussion away from being about the archeological community and more towards, all right, you have a hypothesis. Your hypothesis is that there is a lost, highly advanced civilization that we don't know about or that is not accepted by the mainstream. All right, let's hear what there is to say about that, and then eventually, as you said, it was Joe Rogan himself who goes, okay, but there's no evidence for it. Eventually, when you ask the direct question of, what is the proof of this thing?—not, what are some interesting, mysterious things that we don't know about—he was like, look, this percent of the Sahara Desert hasn't been excavated. And you respond, well, are you not going to believe in the lost civilization until we have dug up the entire Sahara Desert?

Dibble 

Yes, exactly. But I do want to bring it back. He brought up Clovis first as this example of archeologists who were not believed by the larger field and then eventually they proved themselves right. But those archeologists were, first, archeologists, unlike Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson, and second, they never claimed they were better than other archeologists. They continued in their jobs. They continued publishing in peer review papers until they amassed a critical body of evidence that convinced pretty much everybody in the field.

And so, that's the point. They weren't appealing to the public. They weren't saying, hey, you don't know XYZ about archeology, tell my colleagues that I'm right. It's like, no! The entire point of science is you only convince your colleagues! You have to convince your colleagues you're right. That's how you get something published. That's how you get in textbooks, that's how you get on TV. You are the one who makes a discovery in a way that is convincing enough to convince your colleagues.

We all understand this challenge because, to be honest, every single peer-reviewed paper we publish is something new. We're not just publishing the same old ideas. We're always looking at new evidence or using new methods or we have new questions or we have a new test that we put together. That's what scholarship is. And so this idea of just appealing to the public with this stigmatized language, that should always be a red flag because the public doesn’t have the experience and the knowledge to vet those claims. So if somebody's coming to you to vet a historical narrative, that's a big red flag, because they need to convince their colleagues and the experts who know the evidence.

Robinson

Or they go to someone like Joe Rogan. The problem is, it always sounds “elitist” to say, "well, the public doesn't have the tools to evaluate this—you ordinary people can't evaluate this. Only the experts are capable of evaluating it."

On the show, you talked about what the people in your profession actually do, which the public is unaware of. When you start to understand what it means to do archeology, that's when I feel like you see just how little [evidence] someone like Graham Hancock has. He really has nothing. And once you try and understand what it would mean to have something, then you start to go, oh, okay, this guy's a charlatan. This guy's an entertainer.

Dibble

Yes, I think that's exactly the key point. And I agree that it does come off as elitist. But it's like that for any serious discipline. It takes a lot of time to become a professional, whatever it is, from a construction worker to a chef to an archeologist to a scientist. It takes a lot of experience to do that. It doesn't always require a formal education. I work with plenty of archeologists, and don't get me wrong, most of the archeologists I work with do have a formal education, but I work with plenty—dozens and dozens—that do not and who are experts in the field because of the experience they have actually doing archeology on sites and publishing material and things like that. And so, in that sense, I think a big key is to understand the history of the discipline.

And especially for someone like Graham and his ideas, that's an immediate red flag. Because if you understand the history of the discipline, first, the ideas he has are not new. He claims that they're new to him, but he is just giving a sort of facelift to ideas that have been percolating since the 17th century and that really coalesced in the 19th century with this book by Ignatius Donnelly called Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. He thanks, mentions, and cites Ignatius Donnelly in his books. And if you've ever read Ignatius Donnelly's book, it was really the first clear book of pseudoarcheology in many ways. It was from 1881, and it was a bestseller. It influenced J. R. R. Tolkien and his account of Númenor, for example. It was just a huge book. And so if you've ever read that, you immediately see these parallels and that what Graham is proposing is an old idea. That should immediately raise red flags that this idea has been tested before.

Second of all, the way that pseudoscientists in general, but specifically pseudoarcheologists here, describe the field is way out of date. So, Graham always mentions, for example, that archeologists think of civilization as developing from primitive to advanced along this kind of timeline. And that is how archeologists did picture the development of civilization a hundred years ago. We no longer think that in the least. We don't even use the term “civilization” anymore because there's no clear definition of it. And so you're just immediately framing stuff in a way that makes zero sense in terms of how actual archeologists frame this kind of stuff. It might still be taught in your middle school or high school textbooks. I'm sorry, sometimes what we're taught in middle school and high school does not reflect the cutting edge of a discipline. But at the same time, if you take this kind of stuff at a university level, even just an intro level class, you will never see an account of the development of civilization, because we don't know what a civilization is. 

Second of all, we also understand that there's not some sort of arc of progress where things always become more advanced. Instead, things are just doing what humans do, which means there are ups, there are downs, there's sideways, there's left to right—there are changes for one reason or another, just like we're seeing today. We don't just see things as progressing. We have this political term progressivism, where we like to think of progress always moving forward, whether it's on a moral level or a technological or economic level. But I think we're starting to realize that that's just not true, even in our own world. We're seeing all kinds of issues, and we've recognized this issue with the past, meaning archeologists and historians, a long time ago. It's why we throw out terms that are value judgments on societies, things like Dark Ages. As soon as we make these kinds of value judgments, we're making mistakes in how we understand these past people for how complex they were.

And so, it's like that with “civilized”. The term “civilization” is automatically a value judgment, where there's an opposite side, which is uncivilized. The idea is that civilized people are better than uncivilized people. And now we realize that hunter-gatherers built all sorts of fantastic monuments. These people over here, who we would not have called a civilization a hundred years ago, were actually quite complex and nuanced people. We're realizing that those kinds of value judgments just don't map out clearly. So we've moved away from them, and instead we understand that history is much more complicated.

Robinson

There were a couple of striking moments on Joe Rogan. I can't remember how it came about, but I think Hancock would go, look at this thing: do you think this thing could possibly be naturally created? It must have been made by humans. And Rogan would say, yes, that looks human created to me. And I'm sitting there thinking, yes, but what do you know about how to tell whether something is made by people? As an archeologist, you don't just look at it and go, that looks like people made it. Surely, you have criteria, you have tests. You've developed methods.

Dibble

One hundred percent. Look, we have this argument all the time in the field over whether something is natural or human-made. It's not an uncommon argument to have. You find stuff that starts to look like it has straight lines, and that then makes you think “human.” But the reality is, nature can produce lots of straight lines as well, and in weird shapes and things like that. And so yes, we have very clear criteria.

When you think about some of those underwater features that Hancock was describing, like Yonaguni near Japan. Well, several geologists and archeologists have been there. If this was made by humans, there'd be tool marks that create those straight lines. When you look at a piece of architecture, you can find evidence of tool marks on it, on the stones themselves. And so when you don't have that anywhere on an entire monument, you should be saying, hey—and then you can test it.

Well, interestingly, the parts that are above water, which we know are clearly natural because geologists have studied it, they're exactly the same as the stuff below water, but they don't like you to look there. Or, for example, they bring up some of these stone tools. We have really clear criteria, because you have certain stones that humans made into tools. I'm named after one of them, for example. Early humans made tools out of flint or obsidian. And these resources, these types of stones, are important because they fracture in a certain way that produces these sharp edges. You can fracture them by knapping them, it's called, in a very consistent way, and that's how you get all these arrowheads that look the same, or these flakes or blades or whatever. And so what we can identify are clear criteria that differentiate a piece of flint that was knapped by a human from a piece of flint.

Let's say the cave walls are made of flint. A nodule breaks off and it shatters, naturally. So what we're looking for are specific criteria, specifically a bulb of percussion and a striking platform that would be prepared. If we can find those specific criteria, which most people have never heard of, then we can say that is definitively made by humans. We've done millions of tests from humans doing knapping, to robots doing knapping, to watching primates doing knapping, to identify what makes a fracture that's caused intentionally by humans versus one that's natural versus one that's ambiguous. And so we then have these very clear criteria to say, that's human made. But it's not just, oh, it looks interesting or unique. It's we have very clear criteria that we know.

Robinson

The absence of tool marks on Yonaguni—surely that is just further evidence of how advanced their technology was.

Dibble

Yes, and that's where things get funny. I saw somebody in an argument on Twitter recently, and it was about the pyramids, I think. It wasn't me in the argument, but it was in my mentions. And so they were like, but it could have been done by laser drones. How do you disprove that? Once you have to start inventing crazier and crazier things to explain this, like maybe these people from 10,000 years ago had more advanced technology than us, it's sort of like, alright, now you're just in the world of fantasy.

Robinson

And the advanced technology left no remnants, whereas we have all sorts of other stuff. You made a point about what we would see if this was true. You mentioned earlier working from the known to the unknown, and it seems that in pseudoarcheology, often it's the opposite. Hancock is very explicit in that way: look at all the things that could be true that we don't know. And you're like, yes, but what do we know? Let's look at the evidence that we have. And if you think that we need more evidence, let's go find some more evidence, and then let's look at that. It was so striking to me when he said that 95 percent of the Sahara hasn't been excavated. If you're going to think that way, it's like Bertrand Russell's teapot—the teapot floating in space, far away. Yes, it could exist. Is there any evidence that it exists? No, but we can't disprove it. Therefore, we're going to entertain it as plausible. But that's not how real science works.

Dibble

Exactly. Science is based off falsifiability. You know that you can falsify a theory, and it might not be that you can right now, but you can do it. What many pseudoscientists, Hancock and Carlson included, try to do is to show why their theory is not falsifiable. So they go to great lengths to show why there might not be evidence from this civilization to say that you can't disprove me—it's not possible to disprove me. And so that, again, should be another big red flag. And therefore, since you can't disprove me, it's also plausible, and we can entertain the idea. This kind of sleight of hand, this rhetoric of trying to get you to look in different places and not to pay attention to the known evidence we do have and how we interpret it, is something they very clearly rely on. And that also then gives people a bad impression of, first, history and how it's done, and second, science, and promotes this kind of anti-science attitude.

Robinson 

You did a very cool thing on the program which exposed the kind of little math tricks that are sometimes used. One of the things that Hancock does is he says that if you multiply the dimensions of the pyramids in some way, you can prove that the people who built them must have understood the circumference of the Earth, or something like that. And one of the things that you do that helps us train our skeptical eye is to notice how you can construct these little things that appear to be evidence of something but then are not actually evidence of something. Maybe you can explain better.

Dibble

Yes, so that was something that I worked really hard to try to think through how to explain to the general public. He does this very frequently, and it's not just him. He didn't even come up with this math. This math exists from a long time ago. It comes out of this book called Hamlet's Mill. It even comes out of medieval type approaches to math of the pyramid. It's called pyramidology, even. A lot of pseudoscience relies upon fairly complex math and jargon that you just kind of tune out and think sounds impressive, rather than actually demonstrating something significant and real.

And so oftentimes, what we forget is that math is simply a language for showing the relationship between different numbers. If you think about it, using math, you could show a relationship between any two numbers. And so, people saying there's a relationship between these two numbers is totally bogus. How do you prove that's intentional when you could find that relationship in so many different ways? And so what he likes to do is he likes to compare, I think, the height and the width of the pyramids to the circumference and the polar radius of the Earth via the processional number 72. But the reality there is that these are such big numbers—the polar radius of the Earth, the circumference of the Earth—that you're comparing these very small numbers to, that with a very minor amount of rounding, it'll work for any number out there. So what I demonstrated is that the same math works for 69 and works for 420. It'll work for any small numbers out there because you're just comparing multiplying up to a big number. With a very minor amount of rounding, you can make that work for anything. And so that's just how math works. Math demonstrates relationships between numbers. So you're going to have to do a little more than show me that these numbers are related. You have to show me in some way that they're intentional.

Robinson

In the Trump Two era, there is this tendency to say, “the experts are all lying to you, don't trust the scientists.” Obviously, you should always be a healthy skeptic, and we believe in skepticism, but a lot of the people telling you to be skeptics are themselves total bullshitters. I began the program by saying it's very difficult for a lay audience to tell the difference, partly because they never see a real archeologist. In fact, what you've pointed out before is that if you want to talk about who doesn't get heard and who's silenced, it's the people who do the real science [who are silenced]. The Rogan show with Graham Hancock gets millions and millions of views for nonsense, whereas how many people see a presentation by a real archeologist in their day-to-day life? Hardly ever. So what you're doing is you're helping us, helping ordinary people, have a better appreciation of the real, unrewarded, underpaid work of actual scientists.

Dibble

Yes. There was so much optimism around social media 10–15 years ago, where we experts could connect. Some scientists got big followings, and they started writing good books and got TV shows, and then a lot of that has since been hijacked by these bullshit artists. And it's a real shame, and I think that professionals and experts and scientists and scholars need to work harder at seeding the social media ecosystem. We need to build these ecosystems into something that's stronger so that we can be more accessible. It's funny because I work with all kinds of lay people all the time. Volunteers come and help me in my lab or excavate on sites with me, or they'll audit classes with me. And so there are plentiful opportunities there. But yes, very few people do that. And with archeology, it's really weird. It's a topic that the public is absolutely fascinated with.

Shows oftentimes get fairly high ratings, and YouTube channels take off on archeology. But to be honest, it's almost never professional archeologists that are platformed there. For some reason, we've been cut out of the conversation, and I've still not worked out why—there's some long history there that started in the '90s, I guess, but we've been completely cut out of the conversation. Maybe because we're all Debbie Downers, I don't know. But even when you see an archeologist on TV, they are most likely being completely edited out of context. I have an article I'm about to submit right now on a different TV show where it's like the scholars were tricked to be on this show. They were not told it was a show about Atlantis. They shared their research. They were never asked about Atlantis, and then they were clipped into this show about Atlantis. And so the scholars that appear on Graham Hancock’s show have similarly complained about being clipped out of context. And so we are not just being silenced, what we say is being transformed into these other narratives.

We even see this in legitimate media all the time. If you think about most of the headlines with archeology, it's always like, “Archeologists surprised to find blah blah blah”; “Archeologists baffled by what they find”.  No.  Most of the excavations we do are very targeted, and we always have comparisons and comparanda for what we find. We're very rarely baffled. That's why we write so many articles with so many citations. But the media is just obsessed with us being shocked by what we find. And it's a big problem because our entire field is not represented. How many archeologists can you name? Think about it. Who can you name besides me? 

Robinson

Louis Leakey? 

Dibble

Leakey. There you go. That's a good one.

Robinson

You're from an archeological family. Your father was an archeologist, and you convey an appreciation of the real work. I think people might think the real stuff is dry and boring, and the entertaining stuff is the lost civilization stuff. But actually, once you start to appreciate the science and the real work, the Hancock stuff actually starts to seem really boring and shallow and uninteresting because it's just the repetition of the same few talking points. And then when you see through it and you hear the same things over and over, you're like, this isn't really thought, this isn't really investigation. This isn't really producing surprising or interesting things, and there's such a richness to the actual discipline, the actual work.

What do you do as a professional archeologist, and why you find it so interesting?

Dibble

Yes. So a bunch of my work has transitioned towards doing this kind of public engagement because I think it's really important. My department supports me on it, and I'll be writing a book on it and stuff like that. So I do think that's really important, but my actual research, I also think, is really important. I study, in a sense, ancient food trash. I study the remains of the meals that you ate. So those chicken bones are what I study. I do this in Ancient Greece, and using that, I can answer all kinds of really interesting questions about how human economic and socioeconomic systems adapted to things like climate change in the past.

I had a recent article that came out that looks at the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean. We see the collapse of palatial civilizations that we've known about for 50 to 100 years since Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy around there. This is when we started understanding that the Bronze Age ended in this sort of social collapse. It's only recently where we've developed the science to understand climate change in the past, where we've realized that this collapse actually lines up with a period of changing climate where it got drier and there were more droughts and things like that. But the problem is, the way that we understand climate change doesn't tell us how intense of a climate change it was. It doesn't tell us exactly how it could have impacted these societies, and that's where I step in. By studying the food stuffs that people were eating, I can look at how people were interacting with the environment and how they might change their economies during periods of climate change.

So for example, in this article looking at climate change at the end of the Bronze Age, it showed that the food systems, the ways they raised their animals and produced their crops, shifted dramatically after the end of the Bronze Age. So that does two cool things. One, it shows that the climate change we observe was strong enough to have an impact on the society. Therefore, it should be a really important factor contributing to the end of that civilization or that society really. Second, it shows that we can see that people did learn that the climate was changing, and they adapted how they produce food, though it took them hundreds of years. And so that's a problem. If anything, that should inform us now. We live in a period where we know the climate is changing, and we need to work to rapidly adapt if we want to make sure that our society is sustainable and resilient. A lot of my colleagues are looking at the same thing in different regions and different periods.

The other question I look at is how these economies transition with the development of city states in larger cities about several hundred years later—you can think about classical Athens and things like that. And so we can see the development of more efficient technologies, and we see the development of systems that go into place to distribute food to people. So, major civic sacrifice. We sort of get into these debates today about welfare and providing basic food stamps or whatever for people, for the bare minimum stuff, and then you get people on the left and right complaining they're buying iPhones with their food stamps or whatever. And look, in Ancient Greece, people got steak dinners for free. In ancient Athens, we know that they got a free steak dinner one to two times a week on average. That's what created a cohesive society where people were happy to come together and feast, to have good food together, better than the food they have at home, provided by the city state. That developed these kinds of bonds, if you see what I mean. And so we can really tie this all together and think through how it could manifest itself in our own society. For a better society, maybe we should be providing steak and not just food stamps to everybody, or avocados—whatever it is that people are interested in.

Robinson

The findings are really interesting and have lessons for contemporary times. Of course, you're on a detective mission where you're trying to extrapolate from small pieces of evidence. The real work is so totally fascinating, and so much more fascinating, as I say, than: does that look like an astronaut? Maybe that looks like an astronaut. Come on.

Dibble

I know. And nobody knows what our methods can do. Like your teeth, for example. If we did chemical analysis on it, we would be able to see how corn is at the basis of your diet. It's at the basis of the corn syrup in our food. It's at the basis of what we feed to animals. And if we compared your teeth to an American from 150 years ago, we would see a difference. We'd be able to start putting together these major shifts in what we do. We have this ability. My teeth, for example, they would lock in the geological signature from the water I drank when I was a kid. So even though I'm in the U.K. now, they people would know that I migrated here. And so we'd be able to see where people go, what they're eating, how that relates to all these changes over time. And so we have all these new methods that give us these kinds of specifics. DNA is another great one that's just revolutionizing everything because now we realize that these racial categories we've developed several hundred years ago don't map on to human biology at all, in terms of genetics and things like that. And so we need to think about population structure in a much more detailed, specific, and nuanced way, and that should hopefully give us an understanding of our own shared background. Humans are really closely related, and we should appreciate that rather than put up these barriers and walls and things like that. They're very artificial.

Robinson

It’s such a totally fascinating mission to spend your life on.

Dibble

And it also teaches really good critical thinking because it gets you to think about how to create a narrative, like a verbal narrative, out of nonverbal evidence. We're such a literate society, where so much of what we go on is what we read or hear and things like that. And with archeology, most of our evidence is nonverbal. Therefore, it forces you to think through, how can I extrapolate from animal bones to humans and do it in a concrete and clear way based off a very large data set? This is oftentimes what we're working with because trash and buildings are in the millions, and sites even are in the millions, and so we have this huge data set that's really diverse and rich, but it's nonverbal, so we need to think through how it can be critically applied, and then that gives you a new perspective on our own world.

So let me end with a fun story that I really like. In the 1970s, some archeologists were developing this project to understand what trash can say about humans. It was in the city of Tucson, Arizona, and it was called the Tucson trash project, or Tucson garbage project, led by Bill Rathje and others. And so part of their project was to excavate landfills and things like that. But another thing they did is to go door to door. So they go up to you, and they say, are you interested in taking part in this project? And you say, yes, tell me more about it. And they'd say, look, you have to fill out some anonymous surveys. Don't worry, everything's anonymous. You fill out some surveys about what you're eating and what you're throwing out in your trash and stuff like that. And then you give us your trash, and we're going to go through it. And so what it showed was that we all lie to ourselves. So you would fill out those surveys. You're all anonymous, you have no reason to lie or anything. And then they go through the trash, and on average, people like you and me would say that we drank less beer than we actually threw out. It was in the '70s, so there was pornography on paper, and people would say they threw out less pornography than they actually did. People would say they ate more healthy food than they actually did. So it turns out that a lot of what we write or say about ourselves are little lies. The truth about who we are and what we do is really in the trash.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.