Michael Button — A British YouTuber (channel 'Michael Button1') with a degree in ancient history who broke from academia to make popular videos arguing for a deeper, lost human past. His channel exploded in 2025, less than a year after he started.
The gist
Button argues mainstream archaeology has badly underestimated how old and how sophisticated humanity is, pointing to discoveries like 315,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains in Morocco, Gobekli Tepe, and a 476,000-year-old wooden structure in Zambia. A recurring theme is the 'preservation problem': because materials decay over tens of thousands of years, an advanced past civilization could have existed and vanished without a trace, and even modern Manhattan would be gone in 100,000 years. He and Rogan rail against academic 'gatekeeping' and the smearing of figures like Graham Hancock, tying in the green Sahara, Egyptian vases and pyramids, underground cities, and out-of-place artifacts like fossilized cart ruts and a 'wheel' in Turkey. The back half drifts into UFOs, the three-fingered Peru mummies, the Varginha incident, drones over New Jersey, and a recurring claim that psychedelics drove human cognitive and cultural development.
Big reveals
- Button reveals there are only nine confirmed Homo sapiens sites older than 100,000 years globally, used to extrapolate 200,000 years of history.
- Describes the 476,000-year-old Kalambo (Colbo) wooden structure in Zambia as proof humans were building permanent structures hundreds of thousands of years before the Neolithic.
- Frames the bestseller 'Sapiens' as simply repackaging an academic consensus that he believes is wrong by over 400,000 years on when humans got smart.
- Cites John Anthony West's claim that the Sphinx could be 34,000 years old based on water erosion and precessional cycles.
- Introduces the Silurian hypothesis (proposed by physicist Adam Frank) that a non-human industrial civilization could have existed millions of years ago and left no trace.
- Both agree Earth is hit by a civilization-wiping cataclysmic impact roughly every 100,000 years, meaning it could have happened three times during our species' existence.
- Discusses Peru's three-fingered, three-toed mummies (via Jesse Michaels) whose CT scans show intact, non-human bone structure, one containing a fetus.
- Rogan ties the Peru mummies to the 1996 Varginha, Brazil UFO incident, where a soldier who handled a sulfur-smelling creature reportedly died of an incurable infection.
Things worth remembering
- Homo sapiens remains found in Morocco (Jebel Irhoud) in 2017 are 315,000+ years old, pushing back the age of our species by roughly a third.
- The Late Bronze Age collapse saw multiple powerful empires fall almost simultaneously, possibly triggered by just a half-degree climate shift.
- Button argues concrete, glass, and metal from a city like Manhattan would crumble to imperceptible dust within 10,000 to 20,000 years.
- The Sahara was green for about 9,000 years and turned to desert through rapid desertification right around when ancient Egypt is said to have emerged.
- The Valley of the Whales south of Cairo contains hundreds of whale skeletons roughly 40 million years old, from when whales had legs and toes.
- The Toba supervolcano eruption ~74,000 years ago may have crashed humanity to as few as 3,000 to 10,000 survivors.
- The Clovis-first model collapsed after 22,000-year-old human footprints were found in New Mexico, far older than the supposed 13,000-year arrival.
- The Antikythera mechanism is a roughly 2,000-year-old geared analog computer, with no comparable technology reappearing until Swiss clockmakers centuries later.
- Derinkuyu, the underground city in Turkey, could house around 20,000 people with livestock and food stores, extending about 85 meters underground.
- Andaman Islanders survived the 2004 tsunami with almost no casualties thanks to a cultural myth telling them to flee to high ground when the sea recedes.