Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble Offer Few Fireworks in Joe Rogan Debate

​On The Joe Rogan Experience, archaeologist Flint Dibble debated Graham Hancock for more than four hours about the existence of a lost civilization. You will forgive me that I did not have the time to watch the full podcast—it is simply too long—but you are of course welcome to watch below. I watched about half, from various segments of the podcast. I noticed in the parts I did see that Hancock seemed a bit underprepared to encounter the nuts and bolts of how archaeology is actually done, leaving him to complain that archaeologists have simply missed all of the evidence for a lost civilization, despite Dibble’s clear presentation of how archaeology actually works and the methodology of science and the signatures of large-scale settlements, such as evidence of agriculture, that should survive even the most thorough cataclysm.

​Dibble was fairly animated throughout, but Hancock and Rogan were rather sedate. Truthfully, despite the build-up promising verbal fireworks, the debate was kind of boring, except for the bit around 2:10:00 when Dibble and Hancock got into a tussle over media attacks on Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse and Hancock’s claims (which he now denies) that archaeologists have attempted to suppress Hancock’s views. Especially silly was a tiff over “Big Archaeology” when Hancock tried to do a “gotcha” on Dibble by citing a tweet without understanding that scare quotes are sarcasm, leading the conversation to descend into Hancock engaging in name-calling and personal attacks. It’s very clear that Hancock was deeply wounded by 2022 criticism of Ancient Apocalypse and is still very upset that critics associated his lost civilization with historic claims of white supremacy and racism that used similar appeals to Atlantis. (Hancock is himself quite liberal and supports anti-racist causes.) He repeatedly seemed to be asking Dibble to apologize, claiming he was “wounded” as a “human being” when critics noted his reliance on evidence and arguments from racist writers of the past.
 
Hancock trots out his greatest hits, from the Orion Correlation to Göbekli Tepe, but he has nothing new to add, nor can he reply effectively to Dibble’s evidence. His final argument amounts to two points: A lost civilization might be hidden somewhere no one has looked, and archaeologists are mean control freaks who won’t let outsiders speculate without evidence and call it science.
 
Meanwhile, Hancock also offered a lengthy essay he plans to add to Magicians of the Gods about climate change and how historic changes in climate offer evidence of a lost civilization. The article is excessively long and very dull and never quite proves Hancock’s point. He argues that periods of warming coincide with bursts of cultural evolution and creativity, which is fair enough, but instead of drawing from that the obvious conclusion that favorable conditions allow for experimentation and expansion, he instead claims that they represent periods of technology “transfer” from a lost civilization, though this “technology” appears to be the ability to draw circles (for round building) and other basic skills that have little connection to the kind of advanced urban landscape Hancock envisions. And as Dibble noted, there is still no evidence of any domesticated plants from this lost civilization.