"Groundbreaking!" - 1 Million Yr-old Skulls, Egyptian Labyrinth & Ancient DNA | Michael Button • 367
Julian Dorey · 19 Dec 2025 · 3h 2m
Guest: Michael Button · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A British content creator with a background in ancient history academia lays out the case for why prehistory is far older and stranger than the standard timeline suggests. Starting from the 2018 Jebel Irhoud fossil find that pushed Homo sapiens back to roughly 300,000 years, and a recently reported million-year-old Homo longi skull from China, the guest argues that human cognitive capacity likely predates the conventional 50,000-year 'cognitive revolution' marker tied to European cave art. He walks through the academic gatekeeping around sites like Göbekli Tepe, which he argues meets every practical definition of civilization except the narrow, writing-and-agriculture-based checklist inherited from Mesopotamian archaeology. The conversation moves through suppressed or career-damaging discoveries in the Americas (Monte Verde, Bluefish Caves, the Cerutti Mastodon site, Hueyatlaco) that challenged the Clovis-first orthodoxy, then into South American megalithic stonework, the possible lost civilizations of the Amazon hinted at by lidar surveys and colonial-era eyewitness accounts, and a modern scan-based claim of an intact subterranean labyrinth beneath Hawara in Egypt that Egyptian authorities have allegedly blocked from further investigation. Along the way the two also range into World War I and II history, Roman politics, and a genetic bottleneck showing a massive Neolithic die-off of men. Throughout, the guest frames his position as neither fringe nor mainstream, arguing for taking alternative evidence seriously without leaping to aliens or hidden elites.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Ancient Homo sapiens fossil discoveries
- Warped human perception of deep time
- Symbolic intelligence and shared myths
- Denisovans and unknown human lineages
- Göbekli Tepe and the definition of civilization
- Similar stonework in Peru and Egypt
- Suppressed Clovis-first challengers in the Americas
- World War I and II causes and consequences
- Radar and the Battle of Britain
- Hawara labyrinth and hidden scan data
- Giza pyramid construction timeline doubts
- Neolithic genetic bottleneck killing off men
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“There are likely to be a million-year-old fossils of Homo sapiens somewhere on our planet. We just haven't found them yet.”
“We know nothing and there's a huge huge story here, a huge empty blank space in our understanding of our past that just no one really understands.”
“North American archaeologists basically tried to get this guy almost killed because he was making these statements.”
“We're all descended from the the winners, the the most horrifically violent of them. That's who we all come from.”