Mike Ramirez

New: Joe Rogan might have a new best friend after Grammy Award-winning rapper LL Cool J says he’s 100% convinced that ancient civilizations are buried beneath Antarctica and the Earth’s permafrost: LL COOL J: “I’m going to tell you where everything is at Joe. The permafrost.” ROGAN: “You think there’s ancient civilizations there?” LL COOL J: “100%.” CONTEXT: The wild part is that LL’s basic premise contains a kernel of truth: Cold environments are extraordinary time capsules. Frozen ground can preserve things that would normally decay, disappear or be destroyed. In northeastern Siberia, genetic evidence shows humans were living in the region more than 40,000 years ago, including an ancient population researchers call the Ancient North Siberians. In Greenland, scientists recovered enough DNA from roughly 4,000-year-old human hair preserved in permafrost to reconstruct the genome of a man from the island’s earliest known culture. That would have been almost unimaginable before ancient-DNA technology existed. And underneath Antarctica, researchers have found something even stranger: entire ancient landscapes. Radar mapping beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet revealed a vast network of valleys and ridges carved by rivers before the modern ice sheet covered the region. The preserved landscape is thought to be at least 14 million years old and potentially more than 30 million years old. It has essentially been sitting beneath the ice like geological deep-freeze. But there’s a massive chronological problem for the lost-civilization theory: That Antarctic landscape is millions of years older than Homo sapiens. There is currently no accepted archaeological evidence of an ancient human civilization beneath Antarctica. And the famous Antarctic formation Rogan pulls up that looks uncannily like a pyramid? Geologists have examined that one too. It’s an unnamed peak in the Ellsworth Mountains, roughly 4,150 feet tall. Its remarkably symmetrical faces can be explained by ordinary erosion acting on relatively uniform rock. In other words: it really does look like a pyramid. But there’s no evidence humans built it. That distinction is important because frozen environments have already delivered discoveries that would have sounded outrageous a few decades ago. Ancient genomes. Previously unknown human populations. Entire buried landscapes. IMPORTANT NOTES: Denisova Cave in Siberia even preserved evidence showing that Denisovans and Neanderthals inhabited the region across enormous stretches of prehistory even with occupation at the cave extending back hundreds of thousands of years.