Michael Button

And before that, it was like 100,000 years old.

So this discovery pushed back the age of our species by another third, like 100,000 years.

So I saw that and I was thinking like, how are we still basing our kind of idea of history around the fact that nothing happened for, you know, 310,000 years, and then everything happened in like the last, you know,

10 000 years since the neolithic revolution i just thought that was odd because you know we've been in this anatomically modern form for so long and yet we were being taught that nothing was nothing had happened until you know the last 10 000 years and i just didn't make sense to me so that's kind of where uh where i started thinking about it and then we did this module at university i remember called uh

It was called something like Cataclysms or something, and it was all about how, in recorded history, natural disaster had a big impact on human societies and stuff like that, and how small, tiny changes in climate could massively disrupt human civilization and bring them all crashing down.

the case study they used was something called the late bronze age collapse have you ever heard the late bronze age yes yes when all these like powerful influential civilizations at the kind of peak of human progress around 1000 bc all simultaneously came crashing down and no one was quite sure why it was but the best theory we have is that it's um like a kind of combination of climate factors which led to trade disruption which led to

societal unrest.

And then all these empires, like the Hittite Empire, the Syrian Empire, the palaces of Mycenaean Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, all within a 20 to 30, 40 year period, all came crashing down at the exact same time.

And I remember being hooked by that.

I was like, that's so crazy.

We don't even know why this happened, but it was like a half degree change in climate.

And so I remember starting to research how bad a climate had been during history and how bad it had been, like these big climatic episodes had been during prehistory.

And I started thinking like, wow, if that had caused all these civilizations to collapse, just a tiny half degree change in climate, which caused drought, which led to those civilizations collapsing.

Some of the stuff that had been happening during prehistory was so much worse than that.

And that got me thinking, like, how do we know that sophisticated human culture hadn't flourished, you know, 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, and collapsed due to climate change or natural disaster, volcanoes, comet impacts, anything like that.

And that's kind of what set me on the journey that along with the, you know, the discovery of the remains in Morocco and

That really got me thinking about the story we've told regarding our past and how I wasn't quite sure.

And yeah, that's kind of what made me initially kind of break away from the traditional timeline that we were being taught.

Yeah, it annoys me.

I feel like academics, as opposed to the alternative historians, are kind of more saying, we don't know, but here's a potential hypothetical scenario that could be possible.