We Should've Had Shovels For Hands

About this episode

The episode critiques the claims made by Ancient Aliens regarding the Toba super-eruption and explores the real archaeological evidence of human survival.

Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the Toba super-eruption 74,000 years ago was an alien population cull, a "cosmic reset button" to wipe out noisy, rebellious humanity 1.0 and replace us with a genetically upgraded, obedient slave race that then built all the pyramids. Tristan walks Scott through the claim piece by piece: the Anunnaki population control panic, the inside-job volcano theory, the genetic upgrade fiction, and the "chosen survivors in alien bunkers" arc, tracing every beat back to a Babylonian myth, a long-debunked bottleneck estimate, and Helena Blavatsky's "root races" (which, spoiler, the Nazis loved). Then things get current. The same bunker-survivor fantasy powers Mark Zuckerberg's $270 million underground Hawaiian compound, Peter Thiel's New Zealand escape hatches, longtermism, elite pronatalism, and the eco-fascist "humans are the virus" meme that crawled out of 2020. Douglas Rushkoff calls it The Mindset: accumulate enough capital to personally exit the world you helped break. The actual archaeology from Shinfa Metema 1 shows the opposite: Toba survivors made it through not with bunkers but with bow-and-arrow tech, flexible diets, river-corridor mobility…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tristan Johnson, Scott Niswander

Topics covered

• ancient aliens
• Toba super-eruption
• population control
• archaeology
• mythology
• elite survivalism
• cooperation vs seclusion

Keywords

• Toba super-eruption
• Ancient Aliens
• population control
• archaeology
• mythology
• elite survivalism
• cooperation
• bunkers
• long-distance trade

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ancient Aliens, Nazis

Books & works: root races

Places: Hawaii, New Zealand, Babylon

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