From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nola.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Friends, neighbors, fellow conspiracy realist. Ooh how we love some hidden history, you guys. What's your favorite hidden history story that we've covered?
Atlantis, Secret civilizations, Lost civilizations are always a banger.
Cronoak was a big one for me when we first started looking to it, and now crow it so.
Much right, I always confuse it with Krakatoa. It's crow Atan. That's the word that was etched onto the tree.
Krakatoa is the sentient mutant island in the x men Ethos.
With that, I do have to respectfully ask you to read this incredible quote that you got because I just got.
I love the attribution so very much. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, our boy wrote this where our governing force. Some would say, for after seven more days, I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will blot out from the face of the land every living thing that I have made. Now, do we want to
guess who said that? Alleged jars of clay? Jars of clay? Yes, oh, man, I remember we were talking about jars of clay earlier, maybe a few months ago, and I went back on a deep jars of clay bingch that one song is still I like it, I will say, I love it. I think it was just called blood. Yes, mistaken.
This is not a jars of clay lyric pool However, this is in fact from God.
Yes, from Genesis seven to four. Yeah, yeah, one of his first bangers. It's also where he or not a gender God. It's also where God super humbly describes the creation of the universe. And then I did that, he said, And then afterwards God says, ah, I'm gonna erase this.
Yeah.
Oops, mulligan. It's a flood story. And oh they're so common, right. This episode takes us to a flood story. We're traveling, and I love that you mentioned Atlantis. We're traveling through time and space through the ancient Persian Gulf and just maybe we're discovering a lost civilization along the way.
Yeah.
I love this episode. This the idea in particular, because we think of at least I thought of flood in biblical terms as rain because of this very quote from Genesis. But what we're learning as we humans continue on, it's that flooding, massive flooding, like real Earth changing flooding, occurs in a lot of different ways, and it's not just from rain. Sometimes it's because the ocean literally moves around.
Plates right, movement of the actual stuff of Earth. Yeah. Earth is a living organism and every so often it has a massive fart, you know what I mean, a massive bowel movement. Well, there you go.
I mean, what better way to lead into our tiny quick break and then come back with more about Earth's farts.
Here are the facts, all right. To understand tonight's episode and the science and possible conspiracy involved, we have to first learn about the Persian Gulf. We were talking about this a little bit off air. It is also called the Arabian Gulf. The current US president, quite recently in the news came out to reporters and said, we're not calling it the Persian golf anymore in America. We're calling it the Arabian golf.
I thought he was just gonna name it golf of America again. What have we just started naming everything of America?
Yeah, yeah, I don't know about you guys, but my learnings about the Persian golf came as a young lad when I would watch the news with my family, and it was during the original Iraq invasion by the United States.
Desert storm, right, yer, Fox, the desert storm, yes, of course, and you would hear father of President Bush speaking.
He would say the Persian golf all the time. And you would hear generals and people going on television and talking about the Persian golf, and it was, you know, they would show images often not even of the water of the golf itself. They would show images of what looks like desert and you know, army stuff.
Right right and then and then sometimes I think, not going to name names news networks, but there were a couple news networks that got caught with their hands in the propaganda cookie jar by putting that yellow hue over things like you see in every every Western depiction of Mexico and film Oh the Peace Filter. Yeah, yes, I didn't know that's the name, but yeah, the people that that is what we're doing sometimes.
Can I also just say that I've never really thought about this until I've heard you guys just say the phrase so many times. But the word golf has sort of a sinister quality to it, doesn't it. It's very like Lovecraftian, like the idea of an abyss. Why don't we just call it the abyss, the Persian abyss.
The Persian chasm. Yeah, I hear that. It's I think, well that speaks to Matt's point, which we we got to get into as well. We in the West are very much programmed. Do you think of the Persian Gulf in a really narrow scope, But if you if you put human's aside, which you know, you look at just the region itself. It's what's called a marginal Mediterranean sea, like a subsidiary sea of the Arabian Sea, which itself is kind of a subsidiary of the Indian Ocean.
And is it because it's like little inlets kind of or they're sort of like that, Okay, got it.
It's like an inland sea.
You can if you look at it from above, because we now we now all have Google Earth and maps and all these things, you can really see where the water where the Arabian Sea slashed, the Indian Ocean slash, the Gulf of Oman, all of that water pushes in through this one pretty narrow little section around. I'm looking at a thing specifically called the Valley of the Caves here, but it's pushing around where Oman and the United Arab
Emirates are. Goes that over the top and then through into the Persian Golf or creates the Persian Golf, right, and as we move on in this episode, to me, it just really does show you already where that water comes from and like how that area could have been flooded at some point.
Right, we can also see the topography of the area. Now that's key, and that that little crook you're describing there, the Strait of Horn moves is something that may also be familiar to other people. It's one of the world's most valuable bottlenecks, if we're being diplomatic. So the Persian Gulf, it's big in comparison to the size of your average human, but it's not that big in comparison to other bodies of water. It's ninety three thousand square miles in area,
but it's way longer than it is wide. I think it's smallest with is something like thirty five miles, which is very very small and very easily controlled if you have the right toys.
That's at the Horror Moves straight up, straight.
Of of horror Moves. Yes, correct. And the other thing that is fascinating about this is it's very long, it's very skinny, and it's very shallow. At its maximum depth it's maybe three hundred.
Feet, but that's still obviously deep enough to traverse with, you know.
Shipping vessels. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, great point there, Noel. And this is it's called the Persian Gulf because historically it's been associated with Persia, right, the predecessor of modern Iran, and earlier this year. Full disclosure, folks, some members of our crew were part of a group that traveled out that way. We actually saw a little vista of the gulf. This was unrelated to the Strait of Horror Moves. Just to be clear. We were there for podcasts stuff.
Yeah, but yeah, where you guys were located, you were theoretically, I mean where you were, and I guess we won't say or can we Okay, you're you're in Cutter, right and in Doha specifically where you're looking out like across the way if you're looking at Iran, that is precisely where we're what we're talking about today, right.
Yeah, yeah, part of the inspiration in fact, it's so ben that would have been along that kind of man made boardwalk situation that we are.
Walking around on.
Yeah, and what was it that it was like a man made kind of boardwalk situation that was fascinating because of again the fact that they kept building it out and out and out. I believe it was called the corniche. So that had been the vista that Matt's describing when we were kind of walking around in that area.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And uh oh, Cutter is its own peninsula, right if you look at a map, it's a tiny, relatively small area protruding out into the ocean, and the Gulf itself is ringed by other nations. We mentioned Iran and Cutter, but also Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United
Arab Immirates. Let's spend just a little bit of time on the framework and the programming that's happened to we Westerners in the US, like you were saying, met when you hear the phrase Persian Gulf, you're immediately going to think of it as a historic regional hotspot, especially when it comes to the oil trade. Spice must flow, The spice must flow. That's why the United States has spent so much time and energy war gaming out how to
disrupt a blockage of the Strait of Hoar moves. And this is still a very unsafe area to travel, depending on which edge of the shore you stroll. The The cool thing is, though, despite being damaged by pollution in the works of Man, the Gulf is still a tremendous blessing to the area's ecology. Great fishing grounds, reefs, oysters, feeding that historic pearl industry. The main thing we have to know about it again is very long. It's cartoonishly shallow.
It's vital to modern shipping, and that like that note, the spice must flow. That is why all developed countries keep some kind of eye on the area. And the worry is that if particularly for anti Iranian forces like the US, the worry is always that Iran might wake up the Ayatola might have a bad day and they may attempt to close the strait and disrupt the world's oil trade.
One thing I thought was really interesting from some conversations with some business type folks out there in Qatar or canter is that it is very attractive to do business with these parts of the world because there's no regime change, so things are consistent and predictable. But to your point, that does also mean that it is things are at the whim of one individual. But typically these areas are very business friendly, you know, for outside investors.
Right right, especially the tax structure and things of that nature. And I think that's an important point about perceived stability emphasis unperceived. I mean, we looked at the modern Strait of Hormuz questions in earlier episodes, and if you want to learn more, the Institute for the Study of War just released there a raw and update in Gosh just a few days ago May of this year. We're recording on June third, twenty twenty five. But tonight, as we tease,
we're looking at something a little bit different. So back in twenty ten, an intrepid archaeologist discovered something bizarre. He looks around and he says, well, the Gulf today is an inland sea, but we know this was not always the case. For thousands, thousands of years before was flooded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf may have been home to ancient communities of humans and Teaser maybe some not quite humans living in the area for well over ten
thousand years, and then it disappeared. So what happened? Is there really out there a lost civilization hidden beneath the waves.
It seems like there might have been.
It's a fascinating case. Right, Here's where it gets crazy. For millennia now, people have wanted something like Atlantis to be real. We know about it from previous episodes. Humans across various disparate cultures spun legends about lost cities and count trees bury beneath large bodies of water. It is a nie universal myth, up there with flood stories and up there with descriptions of Bigfoot or hairy men encountered in evenings of your Uh.
It's something key to these theories that are out there. Right, It's not just that there was a lost civilization, it's that there was a lost advanced civilization. So it's interesting to think of it in ways of, well, what if there just were humans there a long, long time ago, and maybe they were like the early humans that we imagine, they just didn't make it, but they were there way before we think they were there.
Yeah, they were maybe not the best or the smartest, but they were the first in that area. Yeah, you probably you definitely heard about Atlantis if you listen to this show, and thank you for supporting us. But you've probably also therefore heard of things like Lemuria or move. There's a rogues gallery of these stories, and the specifics differen but the broad strokes of the tail are almost always eerily similar. It's the following. There's an ancient civilization,
sometimes extraordinarily advanced for their region. They anger the gods, or they fall to catastrophic natural disaster an earthquake, a flood. They disappear, their civilization disappears beyond human reach, and in a lot of these stories, some remnant population survives this cataclysm. They travel to new safer lands, higher ground. Maybe they bring along with them their advanced culture and their technologies
to the larger world. And we see this lightly floated as explanations for commonalities that current research can't explain, right, like, why do these statues ringing this part of the Pacific look so similar to statues on this other part of the Pacific shoreline? Right? And that's not inherently a racist proposition or line of questioning. I would say, it's just an attempt to explain why these people, so far apart from each other, seem to have such similar taste.
You know, Yeah, agreed, Are you guys related? What's going on?
You guys keep making the same statue though, you know, Right. But then it's like the pyramid question, right when people say, oh, look at all these ancient pyramids. Yeah, maybe it's because a pile of rocks is actually a really smart and sustainable, durable building, right. Oh yeah, it's that parallel thinking.
I'm always harping on, and we're always harping on. I mean, it's very real, and you start to see it more and more the more you dig into history and connections between regions and things that maybe shouldn't have a direct tie, but yet somehow seem to coexist a lot of times it's just sort of the obvious choice, right, yeah.
I mean, so therefore, we know the existence of flood myths, especially it's not inherently controversial. Humans have been around for a while now, not not the longest lived organism on Earth, but you know, good hustle, and over that time disasters have occurred. They're proving cases in the modern records of towns and cities that were lost to floods. In the modern day, modern civilization has even started flooding areas on purpose.
Check out the Three Gorgeous Dam. Travel a little north of the Atlanta metro area and ask yourself what's under Lake Lanier.
Yeah, and good luck finding anything under there now, Like, just because waters in a lot of places that are
flooded are extremely murky. It's a little different with ocean water, right, but if you're talking one hundred feet down, three hundred feet down, good luck being able to go down there and effectively excavate anything, right, I mean, if something gets lost to flooding, right, it just humanity has a tremendously difficult time recovering stuff, and especially doing the painstaking process of sifting through layers and layers of soil right beneath that water.
Mm hmm, yeah, well said right. Water is one of the greatest destroyers on the planet. Right, We were talking about this, I think in ridiculous history, rock versus water. If there is no time limit, water always wins. It just doesn't take off days, you know, and see, yes, oh yeah, that's a great oh man, And that's one of the few things in the United States where the name does measure up. Please go see the Grand Canyon
if you get a chance. It is baffling and it's like how we all got the zap on us when we saw the Hoover Dam for the first time.
Totally yeah, yeah, I mean, you use the word cartoonish, but it does feel like you're in a video game or something.
It's surreal.
Well yeah, and as a man's intense insane almost it is insane attempt to control those powers that we're talking about that are so huge, and because that water really doesn't care, and it's gonna move and then it's gonna be around for millions of years, billions of years until this whole thing ends.
I always remember one of my family members when we first saw both the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam. As a matter of fact, he used that line twice, but seeing the Hoover Dam, he just said, behold, man has spat in the face of God, will there be consequences? And it's like, you know, that's intense stuff to say to an eight year old, but we kept moving on. It was a cool gift shop. So as a result, I love this point about spiritual explanations. Right nearby, populations
are running from these floods. We know floods occurred, right, and as they were running and dying by the way, they were struggling to understand what happened and why it happened to them specifically, so they often turned to spiritual explanations. Let's pause for a word from our sponsors here, and when we return, we'll learn more about why these myths are so powerful and whether indeed they are myths at all.
All Right, we're back legends. Catastrophic events occurred, time passes for the first few years, we kind of know what happened, right, if we're in nearby areas decades past, we're telling the story to our kids, especially pre the written word. Centuries pass the legend keeps growing, and you know, let's say, let's say nol actually was at ground zero for a catastrophic flood. He and his family make it to higher,
safer ground. They restart their lives, and when anybody asks you, no, you give a pretty fact base account of the flood. But then the guy in the next town, let's say, Matt, let's you. Let's say you hear it, and then you hear it fourth or fifth hand, so you start providing your own perspective and narrative to it. And then the country of Bolistan or whatever hears about it. And then
they start adding a thing. But they have to make sure it squares with their existing cultural and spiritual belief system, right, so they start adding in their own gods.
Well, they have to translate it to their own language as.
Well, Yeah, which is always difficult.
Now imagine that that's been happening for thousands of years, if not tens of thousands of.
Years, yeah, or more. It's an oral palimpsest, you know. It's an aggregate, crowdsourced legend. And at the end of that great game of telephone, in that process, the legend that people share could have little resemblance to the actual survival story that ancient Nol told people when he made
it out of the water. You know. So it's frustrating because these myths can largely be malarkey, but they often can also have a grain a pearl, since we're talking about the gulf of truth, and that's why experts continue to explore sites of ancient human habitation. Sometimes they're informed by these legends in oral history, just like the guy
who figured out Troy was a real city. Every so often these folks do find something amazing, and we got to give kudos to one of the best in the game right now, who, by the way, is the primary source for everything we're about to explore.
Oh yeah, doctor Jeff j Jeffrey Ian Rose, Sorry, just doctor Jeffreyan Ross.
Jeff Jeffrey's believediculous and that's what he's going to be to me from now.
Jeff j Jeffrey, dude wrote an absolute banger of a thing in twenty ten I think it was twenty ten eleven. Yeah, yeah, and that's what we're we're focusing on today.
Yeah, yeah, Now, this guy is an archaeologist and researcher with the University of Birmingham, but he works with a ton of people and institutions. We want to be clear, he's not a wing nut. Okay, He's not some cynical fabulous selling tall tales about Atlantis and trying to get you to buy his book.
No, instead, doctor j Jefferson Jeffrey Yes, jingle Heimer Schmidt the third is in fact a pre eminent pre historic archaeologist with a super deep penchant for the Arabian Peninsula's Paleolithic and Neolithic periods and uh described by National Geographic his areas of interest include modern human origins, neo lithisation, stone tool technology, human genetics, rock art, geoarchaeology, underwater archaeology, comparative religions and Near Eastern mythology and folklore. No slouch,
A bit of a polymath here. Pretty impressive resume. Some of these things I did not know existed rock art, give me.
Yeah, I like that phrase too. Neolithisation was new to me. How is that?
Is that the the neolithisation of things? I don't How does that even? What does that mean?
Taken to mean the process of human progress toward the Neolithic age? Kind of like modernization? I got it, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Neolithic version there are, but not at all completely not modern guys.
I'm particularly fascinated by the underwater archaeology thing, because that feels like archaeology on ultra hard mode, like hardcore.
Mode, you know, James Cameron to do you know, Yeah, it's like I'd say it, you know, it's it's like cave diving because you're adding so many other tricky variables to regular archaeology on the land, which is already super difficult and can be such a dice roll.
Well, no, it's the kind of thing you hear even today.
You know, some of these experimental vessels like imploating, remember that Chestnut. It's very difficult to get to some of these areas, you know, like the Marianna's Trench and such to do something like this, and.
Again the gulf is very shallow. This is getting interesting, right.
Easier hard mode for the for the golf, yeah, for underwater archaeology there.
So we're establishing the bona fides here to let you know that doctor Rose, and we're all big fans of doctor Rose is is not some kind of ancient aliens guy. And really in practice he's a lot more like a detective. It's just the cases on his docket, the stuff he attempts to solve are these ancient cold cases, these mysteries. So if you really want to figure out whether there is a lost civilization in this area, specifically, he's your go to guy. He's the number one person you ask
because he'll already know what everybody else knows. Right, we love a one stop shop. So he notices all this stuff. Again, a top tier expert in his field, and he says, angle on a tick, there's something strange. Recent archaeological discoveries are showing irrefutable evidence of what he calls in his paper, a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating back at least seven five hundred years. That makes sense, right, We know humans historically gather near water sources,
especially before the invention of the jug. Isn't that crazy? I'm still thinking about the jug, humble jug, the humble vessel.
Yeah, but that's that's no small thing. Guys, my god, holy crap, it's so.
Weird to think about. Look how many guys look around at how many containers are in your immediate area. That wasn't always the thing, people, we were saying this in ridiculous history. Early humans used to find a source of water and think, well, crap, I live here now, but I can't carry it anywhere.
Well, yeah, and as we advanced at all, humanity realized, oh I need to carry something large, I need to carry something heavy. I better use the water. That's really the only way I'm going to get that anywhere, right, And that was that was why that's so such a good point, you guys, and man, I never thought about drugs like that, but we talked about it with our when we went deep on rivers and just how much those rivers have been the way humanity got things around,
especially with trade. And then you're thinking about this large body of water. If there was any land mass that we're talking about today, humans would have been on that thing.
Yeah, yeah, exactly because mm well look at the real estate in a second, we know, Okay. Doctor Rose speaks to a number of a number of like Science Communicator websites in twenty ten when this paper in specific publishes, and he has a quote that explains why so baffled. He says the following to Science Daily.
Speaking with Science Daily and twenty ten, doctor Rose had this to say, Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly over sixty new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight. These settlements boast well built permanent stone houses, long distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world. So typically this is the quote is done.
These types of sophisticated, super developed settlements have a historical track record.
Right, Yeah, you can see proverbial fingerprints, that milestones that mark progress over time. Right, the mechanisms for carrying stuff become more advanced, we see better irrigation, and usually usually you can see a slow progression. So doctor Rose is saying, hang on, why does this I don't know why. I'm giving him a catchphrase, hagg on a tick. Why does this civilization, this collection of sophisticated sites, Why don't they have a backstory? Why did they just pop into the
historical record out of the blue. I'm a world class archaeologist. I know that this is impossible from everything I understand about human progress. So there must be evidence for a precursor civilization. It's not that it doesn't exist, it's that we are, for some reason not looking in the right place.
Highly logical. So he looks around and then he says, what if there is evidence and it's right under our noses or right out there under the waves of the Persian Gulf, and I'm picturing a moment, you know, where he's on some shoreline at a vista. Yeah, and then has that light bulb and says, you know to his assistant ron, grab me the snorkel boy.
Yeah, get ee to a scuba divory.
Sir, especially considering where he's finding these things, right, And you guys correct me a little bit if I'm wrong here. I'm trying to visualize on the map where exactly he's he's finding stuff and where his colleagues, he and his
colleagues are finding stuff. And I'm looking at that a Live Science article from around the same time, and it's got a picture here of you know, it's got the Gulf of Oman going in the straight up horror moves into the Persian Gulf right there, and you can see Katar and then you can see all of these different sites where this civilization or remnants of a civilization have been found. And it is literally it's across this entire area.
It's in Iran all the way going around. It's in what is the what is the rest of this land here?
Modern day Oman Yemen.
Cutter, it's all of that stuff.
It's the southern it's it's the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula under the Empty Quarter. We're actually part of the Empty Quarter at this point.
Well, it's fascinating just to see how many sites you you said sixty, right.
Yes, sixty overall. So if you look at that map from Live Science, which does come from doctor Rose's work, the numbers on that map indicate what are called find spots. Find spots can be more than one settlement or more than one site.
Well, there are areas where water I believe, where water or sea levels fell a little bit, right, So it's like it's all I don't know, it's just exposing again because I always forget when we think about archaeology. You're going layers into the earth to find stuff, right, Because as that sediment builds up over over the years, over decades, sometimes centuries, sometimes longer, you're finding stuff that was there, placed there, you know, whoever, by accident or on purpose, so long ago.
You're also a hunting this is one of the coolest things. I'm waxing poetic a little bit, but you're also hunting the ghost of rivers. You're a hunting ghost of lakes, and you're doing that by going out to what we the unlearned would simply call a brutal inhospitable desert. And then you're going, oh, wait, if I dig down far enough, there's gravel here that could have only been formed by a river. So we've found the ghost of a river. That's so cool, man, dude.
And once you find that, theoretically you can find remnants of people who traveled on that river or lived right next to it. That's at least the best case scenario that you're hoping for.
One hundred percent. Yeah, I mean, I guess the wildest best case scenario is if you dig down far enough and you find an active ancient civilization. Oh okay, go, yeah, okay, right, I don't think that would'll happen.
That's like, that's tippy top.
That's the dream. I think that's asking a lot That's like winning the lottery and saying, why haven't I won the lottery twice? Yeah? Yeah, just say thank you.
You just hit your chisel one time.
You just hear Oh okay, I love it, I love it.
Maybe we'll find it, Maybe we'll find that kind of situation. But right now, this is already immensely exciting to doctor Rose, and it leads his research leads him to that groundbreaking paper we mentioned, new light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo Persian Gulf Oasis. He writes this for Current Anthropology. You can read it online by searching for his name and the title. He's got a stunning case for this. So here we are, doctor Rose is looking out across
the waters, and he's thinking what if? Speaking of what if? What if we take a break for a word from our sponsors and then dive into his actual research. Dive in, we must, and we return all right, So, after conducting a lot of intense research with his colleagues, to be clear, doctor Rose publishes a groundbreaking report in twenty ten. It's a paper titled new Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo Persian Gulf Oasis. It's published in Current Anthropology, which
is Anthropology journal. You can read it online by checking for his name and the title in your search browser of choice. And he just he builds a stunning case for his argument. And it all like it all starts with the timeline, as we understand, right.
And that timeline is noted by Rose. The newly discovered communities all seem to spring up along this shoreline around eight thousand years in the past, and that is just when the golf.
Started getting flooded.
So describing some of these populations in his work as new colonists, he and his colleagues believed that these creators of the settlements were what we might call climate refugees today and an ongoing issue and one that isn't new.
Yeah, the waters drove them from their ancestral home and they migrated to dry land, and they brought their culture with them, the lessons their civilization had already learned. So again we see the atlantas myth. They don't have hover cars, but they know agriculture, right, they know animal husbandry, they know how to build structures that.
Last Yep, just my dumb human brain. I have to really paint a picture of this stuff in imagining people living on lower land that's closer to sea level right in this area, and it's more hospitable because of where it's located in this region of the world. It makes sense that they're living there. That's where there, that's where
generations of lives have existed in this lower area. As that water starts coming in more and more and more, it's like somebody along that line of the you know, somebody's grandmother grandfather has to say, I think we finally have to leave, like it's.
Time, or I had a vision. Yeah, oh yeah, that's the resort to authority. That's how you move crowds of people at this point.
That's it.
So this I agree with you there. This theory becomes more compelling as we continue exploring it. This antidiluvian area, the pre flood area, it would have been primo real estate. We know a bit about the ecology of the time. The Gulf Basin was above water as far back as seventy five thousand years ago. Doctor Rose, by the way, loosely refers to this theory as a Persian gulf oasis. And this we cannot emphasize how much better this neighborhood
is than all of the surrounding stuff. Right. The desert sucks, man, The desert is brutal. And I'm sorry to say that this is not an expersion to people who live in the desert. We're just saying it's a rough place for humans, look inhospitable indeed.
Well, I mean, look, the only reason so many humans live in a lot of these areas, right, now we have these amazing bustling cities. Is because of the technology of cities. It's because of you know, the way we can move water around, the way we can make use of water and desalinate water and all this other stuff.
Yeah, and also locate like recent underground wells and recesses in the desert oaseses or whatever.
Right, but there's so much civilization around that Persian Gulf now, right, I mean if you think of Cutter, it's it's literally surrounded by the Persian Gulf waters there, and you only through technology can can we live there now in a pleasant way? Maybe it's a way to say.
It, right, I mean, certainly that like Bedouins and like nomadic desert folk of the past like figured a lot of that out. Yeah, certainly our animals that are adapted to that. But it is a brutal and very difficult and dangerous way of life, unforgiving.
But so there's isn't doesn't The tigers euphrates run right into the Persian Gulf. So theoretically before all that ocean water came in and we're talking where what do you refer to it as been the Persian Gulf an oasis? Yes, call it an oasis for a reason because theoretically that could be fairly fertile land if you've got the river running down through there and it's a lower area, so plants can actually survive and maybe even thrive in that area for a time.
One hundred percent. It's fed by it's fed potable water from four different rivers, Tigris, Euphrates, Karum, the Wadi Battan, and then it's got wells. To that point you'll powered by underground springs, the fossil water you would call it. This place is a green jewel in an otherwise very rough neighborhood for humanity. So doctor Rose concludes that when the Gulf Basin was at its driest it's least flooded, there was an exposed land mass for this oasis that
would have been around the size of Great Britain. That's huge. Of course you would live there. You can't walk away from that deal. What are you gonna go sit and try not to die of dehydration while you look across the way and these people in the valley are just balling out good luck, dude.
Well, and if you think we think about the fertile Crescent right as over there in Egypt along after the African northern coast there and going around what's now like Israel's Lebanon, parts of Syria, and over there in Turkey, right at least in my mind, like I think of
that whole fertile Crescent thing. Maybe I'm wrong, they're home them right, But then imagining getting all like if you were to traverse those lands that are now modern day Iraq and part of Saudi Arabia and Jordan all the way over there to find this land like that would be almost a I don't know that. I'm just trying to imagine if you made it across that land to find this oasis.
That would inspire a religion. Yes, that's absolutely what would happen. And not to profiling to humans too much, but that that's one hundred percent the precedent. Nobody at that time is going to be saying, here is the scientific explanation for the ecological advantages of this area.
It's just holy crap, Thanks whoever, We really appreciate this being here right right.
This is back at the time where every community's self described name for themselves was the real people. So this is what God has given us, the real people and obviously yeah, and nobody else can move in right. I had a dream and God said, you guys are mid so okay. Doctor Rose also finds this earlier precedent. This is really interesting and the course of his research knew like while he is researching new evidence indicates modern Homo sapiens could have been in this area, especially in the
Southern era peninsula. They could have been in there even before the Persian oasis was above water, which means that ancient people in modern day Yemen and Oman could have made it off of the African continent one hundred thousand years ago. The current theory says that the first successful migration of that sort occurred between fifty to seventy thousand years ago, So this is a huge shift in the
timeline and the story of humanity. People probably found refuge in this oasis in waves of migration multiple points throughout history.
To me, this is so fascinating because humans in some ways are like water, not in just the ways you know, the weird taught to be like water by ours not to mention.
That some certain percentage of our literal bodies are made up of water.
Yes, but brutally aside and you know, contents of our body. Aside humans, we have found a lot like water, just need time for stuff, which is why this concept of you, if you add fifty thousand years to the timeline of humanity, what types of things can humans come up with in that fifty thousand years?
Right?
Really great points and just like how much innovation can you can you get in a really fast amount of time? So you know you I think that's why it's so boggling.
Sometimes, especially if the early communities are not confronted with existential threats but environmental prods, right, parrots and sticks. You know, that's what drives technology because if human population is in an ideal environment with no with no pressures endangering them or forcing innovation, then they might just you know, keep hunting and gathering.
Just hang out, do that thing for a while because it's working. It is good.
Don't fix it. It's not broken, you know what I mean? Why do we need to why do we need to farm animals? Dude? Just wait for the mammoth to run by and kill it.
Well, yeah, until a group of people riding mammoths come over the hillside and you're like, uh oh.
That's another environmental pressure. Different from giant clubs made of bone. Humanity is often the main problem to the solutions that creates. This is where we get This is where we get even more out there. And this is from doctor Rose. Doctor Rose also sees concurrent research proving that there were Neanderthal populations in the upper parts of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This means that this oasis area may have been the contact zone between modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Again,
our bad. Neanderthals are bad. Well, we ate a lot of you killed you. We did our best.
But to be fair, you were doing it. You're eating as many of you as you're eating us too, So you know that's true.
That is true.
Man.
All right, well, let's not make we're turning this into a non apology. Neanderthals. We're sorry you feel an apology is necessariy geez. But uh but that that is a fascinating Vinn diagram, right, And you can maybe see some of the legacy here if you did a region wide DNA test to see the percentage of Neanderthal DNA, right, if any is present. But now you notice, folks, we are talking about we're talking about this area in the past tense, and doctor Rose does the same in all
of his research. Because the civilization fell, the Indian Ocean way before it was called the Indian Ocean expanded inland, it drowns the oasis. It forces these well established, multi generational communities to seek safer ground. I still am not
clear on the timeline here. I don't think we know whether it was a gradual process, you know, like rising shorelines today and it just got a little bit tougher with each generation, or whether some areas experience something more similar to a biblical flood.
Well, yeah, I mean and again going away from the rain flood, the forty days of rain flood into a oh crap, the ocean is like moving towards us because something broke right, some piece of land fell away, and now the ocean is just making its way to us right now. And that to me, I don't know. You know, as you said, if you look through the paper, you look through the writing about the paper, there's not a lot of evidence to show one way or the other.
But it does seem, it does seem to me like it was an apocalyptic moment.
Yeah, that's I think we all tend to think or process in those terms, because when I close my eyes, I immediately imagine just this tsunami running up on an unsuspecting community. It's like the ocean saying, oh, you thought it was sweet, you know what I mean?
Yeah, Well, because the other way, you imagine it, or at least in my head, and I may be fully uninformed in this, but you imagine whatever is, you know, whatever civilization has grown on that peninsula, if it's there, gradually expands out because the water's coming in. So we're moving what we've got already, and you know, the stuff we're working without just a little bit further along those lines.
And we kind of see that right with the way those archaeological sites are spread out and just all around that area. But at the same time, it's I don't know, it feels like you you have to leave everything behind situation more than a let's begin to move.
Yeah, yeah, agreed. And we also know that the water level has risen and fallen over this vast wath of time. It's fascinating because for a lot of reasons, it's obvious doctor Rose is onto something, and other colleagues in the
field agree that this is an excellent theory. But if it were a civilization that would say, at Point Nemo in the modern day, the most distant point from land out there in the Pacific Ocean, then it would be pretty much impossible to discover material evidence of an ancient civilization. But the gulf is so shallow, right, Send the snorkel boy and figure out what's going on, right, we just need funding for the snorkel boy.
Just three hundred feet though, come on, that's a long snorkel but like a diving bell situation, like one of those old giant like astronautic diving house.
Yeah, but you know, theoretically three hundred feet is the maximum depth right of the golf, so this peninsula is going to be quite a bit higher than that. So you're not wrong. The snorkel boy would actually fare a little better than I imagined just a moment ago.
Well better than if you were diving you know, into the Marianna's trench orthah, yeah, yeah, he wouldn't make it there. Yeah, So this would be an amazing time for research. It still is. But this issue is not the water. The issue is not the physical demands of the golf. The issue is the humans around the Gulf. It is a hotspot for geopolitical tension. That's why we mentioned this at the top of the episode. It can be extremely dangerous
for research to work in the area. Yes, including Iranian researchers. There's often a series of challenging logistics and legal issues involved. But still, if humanity could just get past that, it would be on the cusp of astonishing discoveries, things that could reshape our understanding not just of the ancient world on that peninsula, but society's understanding of the Grand Capital letters human story overall. You know what I mean, This is a big deal. If we could stop killing each other.
Yeah, hey, yeah, man, it is amazing, guys. I in reading these articles, it does seem as though there needs to be some kind of actual underwater archaeology, right, yeah, that needs to happen here. And this was twenty ten when it was put out, so we've got about fifteen years. When I was looking, I want to ask y'all, I couldn't find a bunch of new writing, a bunch of new updates, or any real updates on some of these sites, or even on doctor Rose's work, So like, do we know where we are?
Well, it's tough because doctor rose is I like the word polymath for it. His research extends far beyond this particular line of inquiry. He's kind of laying the groundwork, and then he's looking into other traditions. If you go on Google scholar, it's always a great way to find people's people's research, you'll see that he's been publishing in the area as recently as twenty nineteen. I'm sure he has other stuff coming out, but he's looking at the
first peoples of Oman Paleolithic archaeology. He is. He is into a lot of stuff. So we don't have full published updates to this question in particular, but I believe, strongly hope that those updates are on the way. It may just be a matter of funding, It may be a matter of negotiating between hostile world powers. It's easy for the public to shrug and say, okay, guys, this stuff is neat, I guess, but shouldn't we spend the
money on modern problems. We have a lot of those already, you know what I mean, Like, why are you worried about ancient water? Let's make sure current water is drinkable.
Yeah, sure, but we have learned right that looking back at the way humans dealt with problems is one of the best ways to see how to move forward sometimes or at least how to not move forward in a couple of particular ways.
I don't know.
And Oman, I'm just looking at the map again. Oman's just right at the kind of a tip right there, straight over removes and then just to the east, so that is Oman Gulf mom On right there on the other side. So that's fascinating. He's still there doing research. I just want to learn more.
Yeah, we want to learn more, and we can't wait to hear from you. Because the answer about dismissing the past there's validity to acknowledging modern problems, but also misses the point. This is some of the most crucial research humans can conduct. Learning about the past doesn't just teach you about the past. It reframes your understanding in the present, and every so often it gives us a glimpse into the future. So I think we unanimously agree, keep on
keeping on. We want to hear your stories of other lost civilizations. We just get so excited when we find a real one. And this, by all accounts, appears to be the genuine article. The real McCoy, So tell us where people should look next. You can find us online, You can find us on email, you can give us a call on.
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