Joe Rogan on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2321

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

It is well established that the Great Pyramid was not built entirely from stacked quarried blocks: its lower core incorporates a natural bedrock knoll left in place when the builders leveled the surrounding plateau, and the commonly cited 2.3 million block figure is a whole-volume approximation that does not subtract this rock core. However, a 2026 peer-reviewed study in Nature (npj Heritage Science) puts the bedrock knoll at on the order of tens of percent of the lower core, spanning roughly the first 17 courses of masonry, and stresses that its exact size cannot be measured because it is fully enclosed. Removing about 1,300,000 stones would mean the natural core replaces more than half of the roughly 2.3 million total blocks, which is far larger than any current scholarly estimate. So the underlying point (that a solid rock core lowers the true block count) is real, but the specific 1.3 million figure is unsupported and substantially exaggerated relative to the published evidence.