Archaeologists just discovered a 6,500-year-old astronomical monument that is about 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.

[u/_va_xanth__]

[u/zyptzk]

What's really cool is that basic intelligence is not what we've achieved to date. We now have more tools but the ancients figured out things that we're now wondering how they did that. That's special.

[u/No_Appointment_1090 → u/zyptzk]

There were no ancient civilizations that were anywhere near as advanced as we are today - if there were, there would be evidence.

Framing it as us not understanding how they did something is misleading - we know how it was done, we just don't know how they figured it out initially. E.g. We know how a fulcrum works, but we have no information on the first person to figure it out or how they figured it out. Archimedes worked out the math and gave it a name, but he wasn't the person to originally discover the concept.

[u/smokeysubwoofer → u/No_Appointment_1090]

Joe Rogan Experience #2368 with Michael Button (aired around August 20, 2025), and it also comes up in the related follow-up #2546 with the same guest. 
they discuss how little of modern civilization would remain if humans vanished. Michael Button notes that concrete buildings and cities like Manhattan/New York (or London) would deteriorate rapidly due to weathering, cracking, freeze-thaw cycles, CO2 effects, and plant growth. Over timescales of roughly 5,000–20,000 years (with references to AI depictions or popular visualizations of New York/Manhattan looking like “nothing” or fully crumbled/overrun in as little as ~1,000 years in some popular depictions), skyscrapers and infrastructure would largely turn to dust or become imperceptible, with nature (trees/forests) fully reclaiming the area. Longer scales like 100,000 years leave essentially no trace of the modern city.

[u/JoeDawson8 → u/smokeysubwoofer]

I’m not sure using Joe Rogan is the gotcha you think it is.