What a privilege to sit down with the legend @joerogan and talk all things ancient history, lost civilizations and more! Thanks so much Joe - it was an honour!

Archaeology doesn't show us the past. It just shows us what the past failed to destroy.

Now try 100,000 years. Or 300,000. Anatomically modern humans have existed for 300,000 years. Our brain size: 1,000,000 years. Yet most of what we build decays within a few thousand. We're missing the overwhelming majority of the human story - and almost nobody considers this seriously

The ancient world is filled with ruins from people who thought their civilization was permanent too

If civilization collapsed tomorrow, what evidence of us would survive 10,000 years?

For centuries, Troy was considered a myth. But then somebody found it. In 1868, Heinrich Schliemann became obsessed with Homer's Iliad, yet every serious scholar told him the same thing: Troy wasn't real. The poem was fiction. But he ignored them and went looking anyway. Then, in Turkey, he uncovered a city. Then another. Then another. Nine cities, built on top of one another over thousands of years. And one matched Homer's Troy almost exactly. But the lesson wasn't that every myth is true. The lesson was that some memories survive far longer than we expect. A city can disappear. An empire can collapse. A language can die. And yet the story remains. For centuries, Troy survived only as a tale. Then someone found it.

Historian @MichaelButtonX reveals what a 1-million-year-old skull might mean... 💀👀

What widely accepted belief do you think future generations will laugh at?

When Cleopatra visited the Great Pyramid, it was already older to her than she is to us. Most people picture history as a single line. But Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landings than to the construction of Giza. The pyramid was already 2,500 years old when she saw it. To Cleopatra, the builders belonged to a distant past. Greek historians visited Giza and called it a wonder because, to them, it already was one. The ancient world had an ancient world. Writing is only about 5,000 years old. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300,000 years. That means almost all of our story happened before history began. If 2,500 years of distance was enough to make the Great Pyramid mysterious to Cleopatra, what does 10,000 years of distance do? What does 100,000?

LiDAR is rewriting history Entire landscapes once dismissed as untouched wilderness are being redrawn. Beneath dense forest canopies, archaeologists are finding vast networks of roads, settlements, terraces, and engineered terrain hidden for centuries. The structures were never gone. We just couldn’t see them. And huge parts of the world still haven’t been scanned.

🚨 Evidence suggests Humans used fire 1.8 million years ago Just the 800,000 years earlier than we thought 👇

The biggest misconception about prehistory is that ancient humans were less intelligent than us.

Which ancient civilisation do you think is most misunderstood?

Name a historical fact that sounds fake but is true?

Two photos of the same species at the same moment in time

Centuries ago, Japan carved tsunami warnings into stone along its coastline. But in 2011, the ocean proved them right... Hundreds of 'tsunami stones' still stand across Japan. Some are over 600 years old. Most carry the same warning: do not build below this point. One stone in Aneyoshi reads: “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.” The village obeyed. When the 2011 tsunami hit, the water stopped just below the marker. Aneyoshi survived. Many surrounding towns built below the stones - and over 20,000 people died. A professor from Tohoku University said: “It takes about three generations for people to forget.” So survivors carved memory into stone. Civilizations may have been doing the same thing for thousands of years. If these warnings remained accurate after 600 years, why do we assume older warnings are just myths?

Humans built engineered structures 476,000 years ago Civilization (supposedly) only began 6000 years ago What were we doing the rest of the time?

Are we living in a simulation? 🤔 Historian @MichaelButtonX gives his view...