Joe Rogan, ‘lost ancient high technologies’, and an experiment by Nikolai Vasyutin
Scientists Against MythsIn January 2023, Ben Van Kerkwyk, an “independent researcher”, known for the UnchartedX YouTube channel dedicated to studying the “secrets of the past,” a well-known American advocate of lost ancient civilizations and high technologies, was a guest at Joe Rogan’s famous podcast.
In case you live on another planet, Joe Rogan is one of the most popular bloggers in the world watched by millions. Celebrities such as Elon Musk, Oliver Stone, Neil deGrasse Tyson, to name a few, have been guests on his podcast. Sometimes he also interviews propagandists of “alternative history”.
In addition to Ben, another well-known “independent researcher” was also present in the studio – the author of the Bright Insight channel, Jimmy Corsetti.
At minute 55 of the show, the trio starts talking about the mysterious “Core #7”, a cylinder of red granite, found by Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in the late 19th century, and very popular among advocates of ‘lost ancient high technologies’ as an ‘out of place artifact.’ Previously, we made a video about this artifact, and expert Oleg Kruglyakov penned an in-depth article about it – more about them later. For now, let me give you some more quotes from the conversation between Ben and Joe:
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Ben Van Kerkwyk: He [Flinders Petrie] found a famous core, it's called Petrie's core number seven.
It's a drill core from one of these holes. It's in granite. It's located in the Petrie Museum. This museum is one that actually allows research appointments and you can analyze it. It's been analyzed several times.
There's been an argument that's been going on for literally 150 years about this core because what Petrie found and what Chris Dunn later verified, yeah, that's Petrie's core number seven, exactly right there [Ben looks at photo #1 being displayed]
That in fact might even be Chris Dunn's photo. Those spirals, that groove that goes around it, very obvious striations, right? So, it's been incontrovertibly shown that that's a spiral. It's a spiral. So, it's not like just horizontal striations.
[…]
Now, from that and analyzing that, you can determine a few things. Things like how fast was this drill or how quickly was this drill penetrating the granite? And Petrie and Dunn both analyzed it and looked at it. Well, it's about a one in 60 rate. So, for each, say, 60 inches of horizontal travel, it's going one inch into the stone. So, imagine that. So, if you take a spiral and straighten it out, and you just imagine, right, 60 inches this way, you're getting one inch of vertical travel.
That figure is 500 times greater than we can achieve today in terms of how fast it penetrates the granite! [photo #2 is displayed]
Joe Rogan: 500 times greater. 500 times!
[…]
Look at that image, all the spiral lines around that. That's just amazing. [photo #3 is displayed]
[…]
Ben Van Kerkwyk: How the mainstream archaeologists describe them solving this problem is, well, they [Ancient Egyptians] had a copper tube and they got sand and they put a rock on top of the tube in a bow drill and they just went back and forth with this.
And they did some experiments and it, look, grinding works ultimately because sand has little chunks of quartz and corundum in it, but it takes days and days and days to cut this much and the markings and the machining doesn't look anything like what you see in the ancient examples.
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We have heard and read this story about ‘impossible spiral grooves’ many times, told both by Ben and Christopher Dunn, as well as by their Russian colleagues from the Laboratory of Alternative History (LAI), so there is little revelational in the story itself. But there is one small detail: admiring the incredible grooves, Ben and Joe were looking at photographs not of the notorious Сore #7, but of the core obtained by our fellow experimenter Nikolai Vasyutin in his experiments on drilling granite with a copper tube and an abrasive material. Indeed, photo 2 and photo 3 have been borrowed from this article by Oleg Kruglyakov and Pavel Selivanov, which covers Core #7, comparing it with the drilling results of Nikolai Vasyutin’s experiments.
Comparison shows that the cores made by Nikolai Vasyutin have exactly the same kind of grooves as Core #7.
Well, if even such an ‘expert’ on ‘high technologies of the past’ Ben van Kerkwyk failed to notice any difference, perhaps there really is no difference? It turns out that his claim about how the markings obtained by ‘mainstream archaeologists’ do not at all resemble traces of ancient tools are just a bluff?
Here's another quote from Ben and Joe's conversation:
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Joe Rogan: And what do conventional archeologists say when they're confronted by all this data, the pottery or the, excuse me, the, the vases, this, this stuff that you're looking at here? What do they say?
Ben Van Kerkwyk: Well, you either get, you either just get a denial and they won't address it and you get dismissed as, as a, as just being ridiculous, pseudo archeology, fantasy theory type thing. Or in the case of the tube drills, for example, they, they will, it's a funny story because they will argue that no, no, it's not spiral. The grooves on that thing aren't spiral. And in fact, in the textbook, this is what Chris Dunn found out in the textbook that they, where they do try to address the engineering with that tube drill. They took the photo of the tube drill and they just tilted it just a little bit.
So, when you look at it on the page, the lines look horizontal.
Joe Rogan: Why would they do that?
Ban Van Kerkwyk: They altered the photo because, if you admit that tube has a spiral groove on it, now you're admitting that they're cutting into that granite at a ridiculous rate and you can't do any of that stuff with any of the primitive tools. It has this flow-on effect that just knocks over this house of cards that says all this stuff was built with primitive technology and our whole concept of the ancient Egyptians is off.
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Here, Ben elegantly delivers a classic ‘scientists hide the truth to preserve their hardened dogma’ claim. But Ben, you must be very well aware of the granite drilling experiments conducted by Nikolai Vasyutin. Haven't you even tried to figure them out? Didn’t you read the article by Oleg Kruglyakov and Pavel Selivanov, illustrations from which were shown in the Joe Rogan podcast? Didn’t you watch our video on Core #7? After all, the article and the video explain why the impossible spiral groove and the drill plunging into granite with incredible speed are only a myth. Your ideological mentor Chris Dunn was introduced to both the video and the article several years ago, promised to learn more and give feedback, but we never heard an answer.
Maybe, you just don’t want to face something you accuse ‘mainstream archaeologists’ of? Because if we allow that Core #7 is not at all what it is purported to be, then the whole theory of ‘high technologies of the past’ will collapse like a house of cards.
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Written by Georgiy Sokolov, Scientists Against Myths
E-mail: g_souris@mail.ru; fb: https://www.facebook.com/yakudz0
The author would like to thank Alan from Sydney (@SacredGeometryDecoded), Alexander Sokolov, Sergei Kotikov and Dmitry Oliferovich for their help with finding information for this article.
Links and additional materials:
#7 – “seventh of Petrie”, O. Kruglyakov and P. Selivanov