#2546 - Michael Button

It’s been a wild year. I’ve gone from researching ancient history on the side to doing it as my job, which is an immense privilege. Millions of people are fascinated by the mysteries of our past, and I’m trying to stay open-minded and give them the best work I can.

You do it in a measured way, which matters. Mainstream archaeology has left a giant blind spot, and people know they often get a narrow story. You lay out evidence and can entertain an extreme possibility without flying off into fantasy.

Going independent gives me freedom from grants, institutional pressures, and career protection. I’m not an archaeologist; I’ve got an ancient-history degree and I’m a massive nerd who researches constantly. Investigate things yourself. I’m a YouTuber, not gospel.

Archaeology has three enormous questions: why complex societies arose in disconnected regions at roughly the same time; how old intelligence like ours is, including in other human species; and when humans reached isolated places like the Americas and Australia. New discoveries keep breaking the neat old timeline.

The Amazon should make people pause. LIDAR is revealing grids and settlements beneath jungle once dismissed as wilderness, where millions may have lived. Then there are cultures we barely know, giant Olmec heads, rough dates, and the obvious question: what the fuck were these people actually doing?

The old boundary for civilization was writing, putting the beginning around three or four thousand BC. But Göbekli Tepe and the wider Turkish network, about twelve thousand years old, look like civilization or something close: shared symbols, ritual traditions, major architecture, organized labor, homes, and specialists. We’ve effectively doubled the conventional horizon.

Only a tiny fraction of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated. There are huge carved pillars and blocks weighing tens of tons. Somebody organized, moved, and supported people whose full-time job wasn’t finding dinner. Then comes the freaky bit: much of the fill appears deliberate. How old was it before it was covered?

That’s where I become cautious. Klaus Schmidt thought builders intentionally filled parts of it; others argue natural processes. We don’t know. My biggest bugbear is confidence in deep history. We’re all making inferences from limited evidence: show what it suggests, offer alternatives, and don’t rule out what you cannot rule out.

The fossil record is a ridiculous little pile of scraps compared with the past we’re reconstructing. Modern human fossils go back roughly three hundred thousand years, but fossilization is rare. Why assume people spent all that time unable to build, organize, invent, or make complicated things? Climate shocks, floods, erosion—what would remain?

A Sulawesi paper is huge here: tools date to roughly 1.04 to 1.4 million years ago, and the island was always separated by deep sea. Flores has million-year-old tools; Luzon has evidence around seven hundred thousand years. When several islands require crossings of fifty to a hundred kilometres, repeated colonization starts looking deliberate.

It’s not one unlucky guy clutching driftwood. You need a viable population. How do hundreds get swept out, survive tropical seas, arrive together, and establish themselves—more than once? Boats sound less crazy. And if they voyaged, how did they coordinate? A furry dude with a giant brow ridge saying, “Trust me, I remember this route,” isn’t quite navigation.

Intentional crossings imply planning, carpentry, experimentation, imagination, courage, organization, and probably complex communication. That could push modern behaviour from fifty thousand years back beyond a million. The nearly half-million-year-old Kalambo Falls wood structure also required serious intelligence, and wood surviving that long is unbelievably rare.

Technology isn’t an escalator. North America had a major copper-working tradition at least nine thousand years ago, extracting huge quantities around Lake Superior for millennia. Then it stopped; we don’t know why. People can discover something, use it brilliantly, then abandon or forget it.

Maybe we’re not civilization’s first run, just the most technologically advanced version we know. Baalbek and precision artifacts inherited from cultures that couldn’t replicate them don’t prove a lost super-civilization. But they keep asking: how? Older foundations can look harder than what got built over them.

Reuse makes sense because the best location stays the best location, but the latest people at a site aren’t automatically its original builders. Preservation is the other problem: cities collapse, organic structures rot, metal corrodes, landscapes move. Absence of evidence over these timescales is not evidence that nothing happened.

New technology is exciting. LIDAR changed the Amazon; AI, better scanning, or methods we can’t imagine may someday map buried landscapes. A time machine would really throw a monkey wrench into things, but the present textbook isn’t history’s final draft.

The Americas keep breaking the old model. White Sands footprints put humans there at least twenty-two thousand years ago, beyond Clovis-first. Chiquihuite Cave may be around thirty thousand; Pedra Furada has much earlier claimed hearth-like evidence; Cerutti mastodon material may suggest activity beyond a hundred thousand. They’re not equally secure, but the question is open.

Valsequillo’s Hueyatlaco site is wilder: tools lay beneath volcanic deposits dated around two hundred and fifty thousand years, with an animal bone giving a similar age. Artifacts disappeared and the site was disturbed, so it isn’t settled fact. But serious researchers published it, and one correct early site would radically alter the Americas story.

Australia may have the same issue. The accepted date is roughly sixty-five thousand years, yet Moyjil has charcoal, heated stones, and hearth-like features possibly around one hundred and twenty thousand. Without remains or unmistakable tools it’s hard to prove, but earlier arrival isn’t absurd if people crossed sea barriers much earlier.

In Borneo, a child had a lower leg amputated around thirty-one thousand years ago and lived years afterward. That means infection management, care, healing, and probably plant medicines. Recurring Ice Age signs may also show systems for carrying information before writing. Prehistoric people keep looking more capable, farther back.

The pushback gets weirdly emotional. Graham’s series got called dangerous, when the reaction should be, “Whoa, this is interesting.” You catch hate from people claiming you said things you didn’t. Don’t read it. You’re careful; keep going. Plenty of archaeologists love the unknown, not a tiny approved box.

Proper archaeologists and institutional people have reached out supportively, and that means a lot. Not every academic is a bogeyman. I don’t want belief in a prepackaged lost-civilization claim; I want people to see that much more is on the table than a few decades ago. I hope curiosity wins.

That’s why I love this. Physics asks where are we? History asks who are we, and where did we come from? Every discovery expands the unknown. I’ll keep going hard on archaeology and lost history, and on Patterns of History, looking at civilizations rising and collapsing. And I’m in a punk band called Headache. It’s a lot, man—but it’s cool.