Joe Rogan Rants About "Arrogant" Archaeologists While Interviewing Luke Caverns

​YouTuber, podcaster, and TV talking head Luke Caverns appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience today to discuss ancient history and lost civilizations. Caverns, who counts Graham Hancock as a key inspiration, tries to take a middle ground approach between mainstream archaeology and its popular cable TV alternatives, but undoubtedly more people will have heard him speak through Rogan’s show than from any other format. He is neither an author nor the producer of original research, so there are few ideas we can consider distinctly his own, which makes discussing an interview based on his mostly secondhand claims somewhat challenging. But I do want to point to something Joe Rogan said near the top of the show, when he explained his view of history, which is deeply rooted in disappointment with the modern world (i.e., with politics), a populist anger at elites, and an inability to distinguish between strong evidence and weak evidence. 

When you start looking at the history of the human race and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated because we kind of like woke up in this life. You know, we didn’t choose to be born during this timeline. We woke up in this timeline and we’re like, uh, how did collectively we get here? And then you have this narrative of how collectively got we got here. But then you see there's holes in this narrative and it's real weird. And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes and then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know and this is the only answer and you're like, well, that guy's not right. And then you start like looking at guys like Graham Hancock—like why is everybody calling him a Nazi? Like what the …? And then you start getting deep into the weeds in this stuff and you're like, “Wow, there’s a lot of resentment from the gatekeepers. There’s a lot of people that have been, um, they’ve been teaching a narrative and teaching it in school and they don't want anyone else teaching this stuff. They want to be the only people that can tell people what the history of the human race is.” And unfortunately for them, there’s too much other evidence. It’s too weird. The whole picture is not settled. It’s too strange. And they keep finding new things all the time that throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the timeline of civilization.

​Rogan’s frame of reference is similarly drawn from TV and the choices that TV producers made to create the impression archaeologists are the enemy, an idea he swallowed from a 1993 NBC documentary, The Mystery of the Sphinx, hosted by Charlton Heston: 

You know, like I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton H. He was the host of it. I don't know if you ever saw it. The Mysteries of the Sphinx. [...] And um one of the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert Shoch’s work with the water erosion around the temple, the Sphinx. And there was this very arrogant archaeologist. I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face. He was just so arrogant. He’s like, “Where is the evidence of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago?” Well, now we have evidence. So, like, Göbekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative and now they’re forced to reckon with this.

The person he is likely thinking of, who argued against the “lost civilization” idea in the documentary, was James F. Romano, the curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum. He died in 2003. In the documentary, he made rather obvious points about the discontinuity between the supposed antediluvian culture and Egyptian civilization thousands of years later, pointing to the millennia of “nothing” between them.
 
Rogan and Caverns also discussed Zahi Hawass’s recent appearance, expressing bafflement that Hawass was unfamiliar with the “Turin King List” and its “pre-dynastic like semi-mythological kings going back you know tens of thousands of years.” Of course, that doesn’t actually appear in the surviving fragments of the Royal Canon of Turin; it’s actually from the Old Egyptian Chronicle, a Christian forgery of Manetho (who, also, listed mythological kings, though their reigns survive only in altered and significantly reduced Christian summaries). Rogan doesn’t actually know the material he thinks he knows, but he is confident about what he thinks he saw on TV or in a YouTube video. (At one point, he even claims wealthy Europeans threw parties where they ate mummies, confidently conflating early modern use of powdered mummy as medicine with Victorian-era mummy unwrapping parties.)
 
Frankly, the interview was a strange one, with Rogan and Caverns spending a great deal of time discussing Graham Hancock since Caverns has very little of his own to talk about. They both praise Hancock and claim YouTube gadfly Jimmy Corsetti does the job of archaeologists better than real archaeologists because he produces YouTube videos that they claim are filled with “evidence.” (Whether he understands ​his evidence is another question.)
 
Caverns makes a few howlers, notably his assertion that one of the Olmec stone heads depicts an African man—a claim belied by the actual indigenous people of Oaxaca who still look like their Olmec ancestors. (He and Rogan try to argue for non-Native Olmec by deducing the DNA of various living and ancient Mexicans from their facial features, claiming Black people have big lips and thick brows and descending into an uncomfortably close approximation of Victorian “racial science.”) Caverns also claims other carvings depict Caucasians, a claim taken directly from Fingerprints of the Gods, where Hancock borrowed it from earlier fringe writers. He also goes off on a weird tangent about swastikas as global evidence of a lost civilization (he suggests it represents an Ice Age view of a spiral galaxy), though basic geometric shapes are so simple to draw that they emerge spontaneously in many times and places.
 
Caverns complains that everything “interesting” is labeled “pseudoarchaeology” and says that only “boring” things pass muster with mainstream archaeologists and their fans.
 
But most of the interview, about two hours out of the three, saw the two men bringing up the greatest hits of (mostly Graham Hancock’s) fringe archaeology, from large stones to giants to Ice Age astronomy to psychedelics, and descending into claims that archaeologists have unpleasant and arrogant attitudes because Rogan and Caverns can’t understand how the ancients moved big rocks, so therefore it cannot be that large groups of people dragged and lifted them.
 
A recurring theme is disappointment that some vaguely defined set of elites is preventing ordinary people from connecting to ancient history, deep time, and the spiritual realm accessible through indigenous rituals and hallucinogenic drugs. Borrowing heavily from Graham Hancock’s drug writings, Rogan and Caverns basically agree that secular modernity disappoints them and they want some mystical, spiritual, wondrous experience that workaday capitalism forbids. That’s all well and good, but we don’t need to fantasize about antediluvian giants lifting heavy stones or hero-worship a hot-tempered stoned author to have a spiritual experience.