The big question for me in that timeline is, why didn't we do it sooner?
Why did it take so long?
Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago, to start seeing
the beginnings of civilization?
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over
30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during
the last ice age, and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.
He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season
of which has just been released, and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas,
a topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart.
Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist, scholar, I love talking to on the podcast,
extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and respectful in this agreement.
I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history.
Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries
with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream, in the various disciplines
involved.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.
Let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history, that there was
an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before, and perhaps seeded what people now call the
six cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Andes, and Mesoamerica.
So let's talk about this idea that you have.
Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?
It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness
in the story that we are taught about our past, which envisages more or less, there have been
a few ups and downs, but more or less a straightforward evolutionary progress.
We start out as hunter-foragers, then we become agriculturalists.
The hunter-forager phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years.
I mean, this is where it's also important to mention that anatomically modern humans were
not the only humans.
We had Neanderthals from, I don't know, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago.
They were certainly human because anatomically modern humans interbred with them, and we carry
Neanderthal genes.
There were the Denisovans, maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago.
And again, interbreeding took place.
They're obviously a human species.
So, you know, we've got this background of humans who didn't look quite like us.
And then we have anatomically modern humans.
And I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jebel Air Hood
in Morocco and date to about 310,000 years ago.
So, the question is, what were our ancestors doing after that?
And I think we can include the Neanderthals and the Denisovans in that general picture.
And why did it take so long?
This is one of the puzzles, one of the questions that bothered me.
Why did it take so long when we have creatures who are physically identical to us?
We cannot actually weigh and measure their brains.
But from the work that's been done on the crania, it looks like they had the same brains that
we do with the same wiring.
So, if we've been around for 300,000 plus years at least, and if ultimately in our future
was the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn't it happen sooner?
Why did it take so long?
Why was it such a long time?
Even the story of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing.
I remember a time when it was said that there hadn't been anatomically modern humans before
50,000 years ago.
And then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia, and then 310,000 years
ago.
There's a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle there.
But the big question for me in that timeline is, why didn't we do it sooner?
Why did it take so long?
Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago, to start seeing
the beginnings, what are selected as the beginnings of civilization in places like Turkey, for example?
And then there's a relatively slow process of adopting agriculture.
And by 6,000 years ago, we see ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization.
And we're then in the pre-dynastic period in ancient Egypt as well, 6,000 years ago, beginning
to see definite signs of what will become the dynastic civilization of Egypt about 5,000
years ago.
So, and interestingly, round about the same time, you have the Indus Valley civilization
popping up out of nowhere.
And by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization until the 1920s, when
railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins.
I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and these are extraordinarily, beautifully centrally
planned cities.
Clearly, they're the work of an already sophisticated civilization.
One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley civilization is that we find a steatite
seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture.
And that seal is 5,000 years old.
And the yoga posture is Moolabandasana, which involves a real contortion of the ankles and
twisting the feet back.
It's an advanced yoga posture.
So there it is, 5,000 years ago.
And that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga take to get to that place when
it was already so advanced 5,000 years ago?
What's the background to this?
China, the Yellow River civilization.
Again, it's around about the same period, 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
You get these first signs of something happening.
So it's very odd that all around the world, we have this sudden upsurge of civilization about
6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a natural evolutionary process that would lead
to a civilization.
And yet, certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these
different civilizations.
I just find that whole idea very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look at this
radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth,
which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas
event.
It was an extinction-level event.
That's when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct.
It's after that, it's after that event that we start seeing this, what are taken to be
the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization.
We come out of the Upper Paleolithic, as it's defined, the end of the Old Stone Age, and
into the Neolithic.
And that's when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling.
But what happened before that?
And why did that suddenly happen then?
And I can't help feeling, and I've felt this for a very long while, that there are major
missing pieces in our story.
It's often said that I'm claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization
in the Ice Age.
And I am not claiming to have proved that.
That is a hypothesis that I am putting forward to answer some of the questions that I have about
prehistory.
And I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities, because the Younger Dryas
event was a massive global cataclysm, whatever caused it.
And it's strange that just after it, we start seeing these first signs.
So the current understanding in mainstream archaeology is that after the Younger Dryas is when the
civilizations popped up in different places of the globe, with a lot of similarities, but
they popped up independently.
Yeah, independently, and by coincidence.
And by coincidence, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations,
Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, China, they all pop up at pretty much the
same time.
That is the mainstream view.
And they don't just pop up.
They kind of build up gradually.
First, there's some settlements.
Oh, definitely, yes.
And then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture in that
is also non-obvious, but it's just, there's first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the
people are living, then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that
kind of stuff.
It seems like an entirely reasonable argument.
Everything about that makes sense.
There is no doubt that you're seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those
thousands of years before Sumer emerges.
But what's happening now, really, I spent much of the 90s and the late 1980s investigating this
issue of a lost civilization.
I wrote a series of books about it.
But by 2002, when I published a book called Underworld, which was the most massive and most
heavy book that I've ever written because I was writing very defensively at the time.
By the time I finished that book, my wife, Santa, and I spent seven years scuba diving all around
the world looking for structures underwater often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies
that they'd seen underwater.
By the time that book was finished, I thought, actually, I've done this story.
I've walked the walk.
I really don't have much more to say about it.
And I turned in another direction.
And I wrote a book called Supernatural Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, recently
retitled Visionary.
And that was about the role of, fundamentally, about the role of psychedelics in the evolution
of human culture.
And I didn't think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue.
But Gobekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me.
The more and more discoveries there, the 11,600-year date from Enclosure D, which is the two
largest megalithic pillars.
And I reached a point where I realized, I have to get back in the water.
And I have to investigate this again.
And Gobekli Tepe was a game changer.
But I think it's a game changer for everything.
Because Gobekli Tepe, the extraordinary nature of it, we're looking at a major megalithic site,
which is at least 5,500 years older than, say, Gigantia in Malta, which was previously
considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world.
And this led, of course, to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from the Turkish
government, who see the potential tourism potential of having the world's oldest megalithic
site, and from archaeologists.
And this, in turn, has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region.
And what they're finding throughout that whole region around Gobekli Tepe, and going down
into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley, as far as Jericho, and even across
a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus, is what Turkish archaeologists are now calling the
Tass Tepler civilization.
They're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills civilization, with very definite identifying
characteristics, semi-subterranean, circular structures, the use of T-shaped megalithic
pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Gobekli Tepe.
It's clear that Gobekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process.
It was actually, in a way, the end of this process.
It was the summation of everything that that Stone Hills civilization had achieved.
But what is becoming clear is that this is a period before the foundation of Gobekli Tepe.
As far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Gobekli Tepe.
But of course, there's a lot of Gobekli Tepe still underground.
So we can't say for sure that that's the oldest, but it's the oldest so far excavated.
What we're seeing is that in that whole region around there, something was in motion.
And it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
And this is where these two dates are really important.
The Younger Dryas, I'll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends
around 11,600 years ago.
So Gobekli Tepe's construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don't find older
materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas.
But the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of
culture that manifests in full form at Gobekli Tepe.
And after the construction of Gobekli Tepe, in fact, even during the construction of Gobekli
Tepe, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted.
The people who created Gobekli Tepe were all hunter foragers at the beginning.
But by the time Gobekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished,
closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and
then topped off with a hill, which is why Gobekli Tepe is called what it is.
Gobekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill, or the hill of the navel.
For a long time, Gobekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot-belly.
Can you say how it was discovered?
I think this is one of the most fascinating things on earth, period.
So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?
Well, Gobekli Tepe is, first of all, the oldest fully elaborated megalithic site that we know
of anywhere in the world.
It doesn't mean the older ones won't be found, but it is the oldest so far found.
The part of the site that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site,
we do know.
My first visit to Gobekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt,
who died a year later, was very generous to me and showed me around the site for over
a period of three days.
And he explained to me that they've already used ground-penetrating radar on the site,
and they know that there's much more Gobekli Tepe still underground.
So anything is possible in terms of the dating of Gobekli Tepe.
But what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular, but not quite circular enclosures,
which are walled with relatively small stones.
And then inside them, you have pairs of megalithic pillars.
And the archetypal part of that site is enclosure D, which contains the two largest upright megaliths,
about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct.
They're substantial, hefty pieces of stone.
It isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20-foot tall or 20-ton megalith,
nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it.
There's nothing magical or really weird about that.
Human beings can do that and always have.
Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there.
It's within 200 meters of the main enclosure.
So that's not a mystery, but the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture,
this massive, massive megalithic pillars appear.
And the pillars, one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment.
And there is good work that's been done which suggests that enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star Sirius.
And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures,
which are all oriented in slightly different directions.
It was the work entirely of hunter foragers, but by the time Gobekli Tepe was completed,
agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there.
Now, you asked how Gobekli Tepe was found.
The answer to that is that there was a survey of that pot-bellied hill in the 1960s by some American archaeologists.
And they were absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic.
And they had found some Paleolithic flints, upper Paleolithic flints around there.
So it looked like a good place to look.
But then they noticed, sticking out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut stone, bits of very large and very finely cut stone.
And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archaeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age.
And they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine remains.
And they abandoned the site and never looked at it further.
And it wasn't until the German Archaeological Institute got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius, had real insight into this and started to dig at Gobekli Tepe that they realized what they'd found, that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world.
And they'd found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that's where agriculture, at any rate, in Europe and Western Asia begins.
It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
It was created by hunter-gatherers, yeah.
There was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Gobekli Tepe.
But by the time Gobekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down and buried, agriculture was all around it.
And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants.
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say, a time capsule?
So protected by forming a mound around it?
Is it around that similar time?
It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago, to about 8,400 BC.
So around 1,200 years, it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site.
And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture, I'm going to use the word, being introduced.
There'd been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there.
And to me, that's another of the mysteries about Gobekli Tepe.
And then, with the new work that's being done, we realize that it's part of a much wider phenomenon, which spreads across an enormous distance.
And the puzzling thing is that after Gobekli Tepe, there almost seems to be a decline.
Things fall down again.
And then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments, until we come to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia.
But agriculture has taken a firm route by then.
Actually, one other thing, I'll just say this in passing.
When I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place.
So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archaeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, and that Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture.
It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers who traveled west.
So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so annoying to archaeologists as it is.
And perhaps we should also state, if you look at the entirety of history of hominids, humans or hominids have been explorers.
I didn't even know this when I was preparing for this.
Yeah.
Looking at Homo erectus.
Yeah.
1.9 million years ago.
Absolutely.
Almost right away, they spread out through the whole world.
Yeah.
And we, Homo sapiens, evolved from them.
And we should also mention, since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand, there's still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there.
Like we mentioned in Africa, that it's, you know, I think the current understanding we didn't come from one particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations.
This is the out of Africa theory.
I think it's more than a theory.
It's really strongly evidenced.
Why?
Because we're part of the great ape family, and it's an African family.
Yeah.
There's no doubt that human beings' deep origins are in Africa.
But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and the astonishingly distant travels that they undertook.
Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity.
I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the next hill.
And I think that goes very deep into human character, and I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world.
And then settling in different parts of the world, I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.
So I guess the general puzzlement that you're filled with is, given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements?
That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility.
Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archaeological record, which await to be discovered.
And, of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archaeology.
But the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archaeology is not, on its own, enough to suggest that we're missing a chapter in the human story.
The reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000-year gap.
It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world.
And they're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another, and that are also distant from one another in time.
They don't necessarily occur at the same time.
And this is where I think that archaeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas, as well as just a history of things.
Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story.
So there are particular issues.
For example, the notion of the afterlife destiny of the soul.
What happens to us when we die?
And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do think about.
What happens?
I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm not.
Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea.
But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way,
that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates.
The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey.
And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls.
It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America through Mexico, through into North America.
But it's also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia.
The same idea.
And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence.
I feel that what we're looking at is.
An inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world.
And then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures.
So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas.
The other thing, very puzzling thing, is this sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes.
At least I think that's the best theory to explain them.
Here, I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santigliano and Hertha von Deschend.
Giorgio de Santigliano was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you're based, back in the 60s.
And Hertha von Deschend was professor of history of science at Frankfurt University.
And they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill.
And Hamlet's Mill differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession.
And I'll explain what precession is in a moment.
Generally, it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession.
And the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so.
Santigliano and von Deschend are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that.
And they do actually trace it, I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly, to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization.
Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this mystery in the first place.
Okay, now, the precession of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars.
And our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis at roughly 1,000 miles an hour at the equator.
But what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis.
So if you imagine the extended north pole of the Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star.
But Polaris has not always been the pole star, precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth.
Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended north pole of the Earth points at empty space.
There is no pole star.
That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis.
The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the Zodiac, that lie along what is referred to as the path of the Sun.
The Earth is orbiting the Sun, and we are seeing what's behind it, what's in direct line with the Sun in our view.
And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the Sun, so at different times of the year, the Sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation.
Today we live in the age of Pisces, and it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol.
This is another area where I differ from archaeology.
I think the constellations of the Zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose.
Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was the spring equinox.
The question was, what constellation is rising behind the Sun?
What constellation is housing the Sun at dawn on the spring equinox?
Right now it's Pisces.
In another 150 years or so, it'll be Aquarius.
We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians, it was Ares, going back to the time of Ramesses or before.
Before that, it was Taurus, and so on and so forth.
It's backwards through the zodiac until 12,500 years ago you come to the age of Leo, when the constellation of Leo houses the Sun on the spring equinox.
Now, this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly.
The whole cycle, and it is a cycle, it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years.
Put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years.
That may be a convention.
Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more, but you're talking fractions.
It's in that area, 25,920 years.
And to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years.
And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon.
The movement in one lifetime in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger.
It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it's difficult.
You've got to pass it on.
And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santidiana and Vondeschen call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture,
worked out the entire process of procession and selected the key numbers of procession,
of which the most important number, the governing number, is the number 72.
72, but we also have numbers related to the number 72.
72 plus 36 is 108.
108 divided by 2 is 54.
These numbers are also found in mythology all around the world.
There were 72 conspirators who were involved in killing the god Osiris in ancient Egypt
and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile.
There are 432,000 in the Rig Vesa.
432,000 is a multiple of 72.
And at Angkor in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Thom.
And on that bridge, you have figures on both sides, sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent.
That serpent is Vazuki.
And what they're doing is they're churning the milky ocean.
It's the same metaphor of churning and turning that's defined in the story of Hamlet's Mill, of Amlody's Mill.
There are 54 on each side.
54 plus 54 is 108.
108 is 72 plus 36.
It's a precessional number, according to the work that Santillana and Vandeschen did.
And the fascination with this number system and its discovery all around the world
is one of the puzzles that intrigue me and suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge
that was passed down and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time,
but then was spread out very, very widely around the world.
So one of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archaeology
is you take this sort of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously.
I do, as I believe the ancients did.
I think it's important to sort of consider what humans would have thought about back then.
Now we have a lot of distractions.
We have social media.
We can watch videos on YouTube or whatever.
But back then, especially before sort of electricity, the stars is like the sexiest thing to talk about.
There's no light pollution.
There's no light pollution.
So there's the majesty of the heavens.
Every single night you're spending looking up at the stars.
And you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars
and sort of the scientists of the day.
And I'm sure there's going to be these geniuses that emerge.
Yeah.
They're able to do two things.
One, tell stories about the gods or whatever based on the stars.
And then also, as we'll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example.
Oh, yeah.
So like, it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
It was an ever-present reality.
And it was bright.
And it was brilliant.
Yeah.
And it was full of lights.
It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it.
It was an overwhelming presence.
And that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier.
Because it's hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky that the sun, over the course of the solar year, is month by month rising against the background of different constellations.
And then there's a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards, and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac.
I think it would have been hard for the ancients to have missed that.
They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today.
That may well be a Babylonian or Greek convention.
But that the constellations were there, I think, was very clear.
And that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky, which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to.
Well, but detecting the precession of the equinox is hard.
Because especially, they don't have any writing systems.
They don't have any mathematical systems.
So everything is told through words.
Yeah.
Well, they have, let's not underestimate, oral traditions.
Oral traditions.
That's something we've lost in our culture today.
One of the things that happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory.
Actually, there's a nice story from ancient Egypt about the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing.
Look at this gift, he says to a mythical pharaoh of that time.
Look at the gift that I am giving humanity, writing.
This is a wonderful thing.
It will enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose.
And the pharaoh in this story replies to him, no, you have not given us a wonderful gift.
You have destroyed the art of memory.
We will forget everything.
Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context.
And actually, that's a very interesting point.
And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time.
One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history is human beings love stories.
We love great stories.
And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story.
And so carefully done that actually it doesn't matter whether the storyteller knows that they're passing on that information or not.
The story itself is the vehicle.
And as long as it's repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on.
And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge.
So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
I take them very seriously.
And the other, many reasons, but I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm within human memory.
I mean, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years.
I mean, the best known one, of course, is the K-PG event, as it's now called, that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million or 66 million years ago.
But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species?
Yeah, the Mount Tober eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad.
But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas, really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas.
It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.
And I think it's an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm of which one of, but not the only, distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater.
The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archaeological explanation is, look, people suffer local floods all the time.
I mean, as we're talking, there's flooding in Florida.
But I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood.
They know it's local.
But that's the argument largely of archaeology dealing with the flood myths, that some local population experienced a nasty local flooding event, and they decided to say that it affected the whole world.
I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur, and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the Ice Age.
So there is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change.
So can you explain this hypothesis?
Yes.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory, as its opponents often attempt to write it off.
It's the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archaeology and including oceanography as well.
And they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the Earth.
You can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example.
You can see it's about the width of a human hand, and there's a drawer there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time.
And that drawer has revealed the sides of the drawer.
And you can see the cross-section, and in the cross-section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the Earth.
And it contains evidence of wildfires.
There's a lot of soot in it.
There are also nanodiamonds in it.
There is shocked quartz in it.
There is quartz that's been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade.
There are carbon microspherules.
All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact.
I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Lewis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is.
There was no crater.
And for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater.
But when they finally did produce that deeply buried Chicxulub crater, that's when people started to say, yeah, they have to be right.
But they weren't relying on the crater.
They were relying on the impact proxies.
And they're the same impact proxies that we find in what's called the Younger Dryas boundary layer all around the world.
So it's the fact that at the moment when the Earth tips into a radical climate shift, it's been warming up for at least 2,000 years before 12,800 years ago.
People at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief.
You know, we've been living through this really cold time, but it's getting better.
Things are getting better.
And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12,860 years ago, there's a massive global plunge in global temperatures.
And the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age.
And it's almost literally overnight.
It's very, very, very rapid.
Normally in an epoch when the Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise.
But there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
And then equally dramatically and equally suddenly, the Younger Dryas comes to an end.
And the world very rapidly warms up.
And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea called Meltwater Pulse 1b, around about 11,600 years ago.
So this is a period which is very tightly defined.
It's a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed.
That's when the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas.
And it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.
Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not?
Like, what explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?
The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part.
The main theory that's been put forward up to now, and I don't dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream, basically, which is part of the central heating system of our planet.
So no wonder it became cold.
But what's not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean.
And it was so much of it, and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks.
And that's where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.
Now, the hypothesis, of course, is broader than that.
Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist, an astronomer.
They have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact event or events was what we now call the torrid meteor stream, which the Earth still passes through twice a year.
It's now about 30 million kilometers wide.
It takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit.
It passed through it in June, and it passes through it at the end of October.
The suggestion is that the torrid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago, came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the sun, and went into orbit around the sun.
An orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth.
However, when it was one object, the likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.
But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments, because these are chunks of rock held together by ice.
And as they warm up, they split and disintegrate and break into pieces.
As it passed through that, its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider.
And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the torrid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet.
Certainly from the west of North America, as far east as Syria, and that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would have caused craters, although there certainly were some.
We're talking about airbursts.
When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter, and it's coming in very fast into the Earth's atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the Earth.
It's going to blow up in the sky.
And the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on the 30th of June, 1908.
The Tunguska event was nobody disputes.
It was definitely an airburst of a cometary fragment.
And the date is interesting, because the 30th of June is the height of the beta torids.
It's one of the two times when the Earth is going through the torrid meteor stream.
Well, luckily, that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited, but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed.
If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the torrid meteor stream and about the risk of cosmic impact.
So the suggestion is that it wasn't one impact.
It wasn't two impacts.
It wasn't three impacts.
It was hundreds of airbursts all around the planet, coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap largely.
Some of them may also have hit the Northern European ice cap, resulting in that sudden, otherwise unexplained flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean and caused the cooling that then took place.
But this was a disaster for life all over the planet.
And it's interesting that one of the sites where they find the Younger Dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an airburst and where they find all the shocked quartz, the carbon microspherules, the nanodiamonds, the trinitite, and so on and so forth, all of those impact proxies are found at Abu Hurrera.
That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago, and it was obliterated.
Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time.
And it's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Abu Hurrera.
Now, this is a theory.
The Younger Dryas impact—it's a hypothesis, actually.
It's not even a theory.
A theory is, I think, considered a higher level than a hypothesis.
That's why it's the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
And, of course, it has many opponents, and there are many who disagree with it.
And there have been a series of peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
One, I think, was in 2011.
It was called a Requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
And there's one just been published a few months ago or a year ago, you know, called a complete refutation of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title.
So it's a hypothesis that has its opponents.
And even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view.
Robert Schock from Boston University, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall.
He doesn't go for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
He fully accepts that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place.
But he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst.
So what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad.
But there is dispute about what caused it.
But I personally have found the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.
How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations?
So is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?
In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying.
It's the Younger Dryas that's central to what I'm saying.
And the Younger Dryas required a trigger.
Something caused it.
I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we're looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation.
But I don't mind other explanations.
It's good that there are other explanations.
The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet.
And that word advanced civilization, this is another word that is easily misunderstood.
And I've tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us.
We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved certain things.
So amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world and are a category of ancient maps called Portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople.
For example, the Portolanos suddenly start to appear, and they're extremely accurate maps.
Most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas.
For example, on these Portolano-style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again.
And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they base their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived.
These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes.
Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison's chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea.
So you could have the time in London, and you could have the local time at sea at the same time, and then you could work out your longitude.
There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is.
The fact is, these Portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes.
Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the Ice Age.
They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian Peninsula, and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass.
And that was the case during the Ice Age.
That was the Sunda Shelf.
And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained, in my view, by archaeology,
which says, oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it.
So they put a fictional landmass there.
I don't think that makes sense.
I think somebody was mapping the world during the last Ice Age.
But that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech.
It means that they were following that exploration instinct, that they knew how to navigate.
They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before.
They knew how to navigate, and they knew how to build seagoing ships.
And they explored the world, and they mapped the world.
Those maps were made a very, very long time ago.
Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria.
I think even then they were being copied and recopied.
We don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed.
I suggest it's likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire.
I suggest it's likely that some of those maps were taken out of the Library and taken to Constantinople.
And that's where they were liberated during the Crusade and entered world culture again
and started to be copied and recopied.
So, from this perspective, when we talk about advanced Ice Age civilization,
it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of their scholars of the stars
and their expert seafaring navigators.
Yes, that's about as far as I would take it.
And when I say that it, as I have said on a number of occasions,
that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century,
I'm referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude.
I'm not saying that they were building steam engines.
I don't see any evidence for that.
And perhaps some building tricks and skills of how to...
Well, definitely.
And this, again, is where you come to a series of mysteries
which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in Egypt with the three great pyramids
and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to.
On the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself.
This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.
Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the great pyramids
and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them?
Well, first of all, the astronomy.
And here, I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular.
One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018.
He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been.
Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubix,
who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx.
John West picked that up and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself.
He spent most of his life in Egypt and he was hugely versed in ancient Egypt.
And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns
and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx,
he began to think maybe Schwaller was right.
Maybe there was some kind of flooding here.
That's when he brought Robert Schock, second person I'd like to recognize, geologists at Boston University.
He brought Schock to Giza and Schock was the first geologist to stick his neck out,
risk the ire of Egyptologists and say,
well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least a thousand years of heavy rainfall.
And as Schock's calculations have continued, as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery,
he's continuously pushed that back.
And he's now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12,500 years ago
during the Younger Dryas for the creation of the Great Sphinx.
And then, of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara.
The Sahara was a completely different place during the Ice Age.
There were rivers in it.
There were lakes in it.
It was fertile.
It was possibly densely populated.
And there was a lot of rain.
There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain.
The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.
The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Boval.
Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together.
Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years.
He's got a very bad chest infection.
And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work.
But Robert is the genius.
And it does take a genius sometime to make these connections,
because nobody noticed it before,
that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground
in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt.
And skeptics will say,
well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want.
But Orion actually isn't any old constellation.
Orion was the god Osiris in the sky.
He was, the ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu.
And they recognize it as the celestial image of the god Osiris.
So what's being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity,
of a celestial deity.
It's not just a random constellation.
And then, when we take precession into account,
you find something else very intriguing happening.
First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids,
as it is today,
and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago,
it's not precisely related to how Orion's belt looked at that time.
There's a bit of a twist.
They're not quite right.
But as you precess the stars backwards,
as you go back and back and back,
and you come to around 10,500 BC,
12,500 years ago in the Younger Dryas,
you find that suddenly they lock perfectly.
They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground.
And that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx,
an equinoctial monument,
aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox.
Anybody can test this for themselves.
Just go to Giza on the 21st of March.
Be there before dawn.
Stand behind the Sphinx.
And you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx.
But the question is, what constellation was behind the Sphinx?
And 12,500 years ago, it was the constellation of Leo.
And actually, the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look.
And I and my colleagues are pretty sure
that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely.
And that over the thousands of years, it became damaged.
It became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head.
There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand,
but still the head stuck out.
By the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty,
when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built,
by the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty,
the head of the lion, original lion head,
would have been a complete mess.
And we suggest that it was then recarved into a pharaonic head.
Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre,
but there's no real strong resemblance.
But it's definitely wearing the Nemes headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.
And we think that that's the result of a recarving
of what was originally not only a lion-bodied,
but also a lion-headed monument.
It wouldn't make sense if you create an equinoctial marker
in the time of Khafre, 4,500 years ago.
And the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.
I mean, it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high,
and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox.
If you create it then, you would be better,
you'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull,
because that was the age of Taurus,
when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring equinox.
So why is it a lion?
And again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies
and putting on the ground as above, so below,
putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time.
Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau,
it's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute,
but the fact that the principal monuments of the Giza Plateau,
the three great pyramids and the Great Sphinx,
all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC,
to me is most unlikely to be an accident.
And actually, if you look at computer software at the sky at that time,
you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent
and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the River Nile.
I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many
why Giza was chosen as the site for this very special place.
So the point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground
which memorializes a very ancient date
does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago.
If from the ancient Egyptian point of view,
you're there 4,500 years ago,
and there's a time 8,000 years before that,
which is very, very, very important to you,
you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture
to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau,
which is what we think we're looking at,
except for one thing,
and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.
And we're pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least,
does date back to 12,500 years ago.
And with it, the megalithic temples,
the so-called Vali Temple,
which stands just to the east
and just to the south of the Sphinx,
and the Sphinx Temple,
which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.
The Sphinx Temple has largely been destroyed,
but the Vali Temple,
attributed to Khafre,
on no good grounds whatsoever,
is a huge megalithic construction
with blocks of limestone
that weigh up to 100 tons each.
And yet, it has been remodeled,
refaced with granite.
There are granite blocks
that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks.
And those core limestone blocks
were already eroded
when the granite blocks were put there.
Why?
Because the granite blocks
have actually been purposefully
and deliberately cut
to fit into the erosion marks
on the, we believe,
much older megalithic blocks there.
So, I think Giza is a very complicated site.
I would never seek to divorce
the dynastic ancient Egyptians
from the Great Pyramids.
They were closely involved
in the construction of the Great Pyramids
as we see them today.
But what I do suggest
is that there were very low platforms
on the Giza Plateau
that are much older
and that when we look
at the Three Great Pyramids,
we're looking at a renovation
and a restoration
and an enhancement
of much older structures
that had existed
on the Giza Plateau
for a much longer period
before that.
Actually, the Great Pyramid
is built around a natural hill.
And that natural hill
might have been seen
as the original primeval mound
to the ancient Egyptians.
So, the idea is that
the Sphinx was there
long before the pyramids
and the pyramids
were built by the Egyptians
to celebrate further
an already holy place.
Yeah.
And there were platforms
in place
where the pyramids stand.
Not the pyramids
as we see them today,
but the base of those pyramids
was already in place
at that time.
So, what's the case?
What's the evidence
that the Egyptologists
used to make the attributions
that they do
for the dating
of the pyramids
and the Sphinx?
Well, the Three Great Pyramids
of Giza
are different
from later pyramids.
This is another problem
that I have
with the whole thing
is the story
of pyramid building.
When did it really begin?
And the timeline
that we get
from Egyptology
is the first pyramid
is the pyramid
of the pharaoh Zoser,
the step pyramid
at Saqqara,
about a hundred years
or so
before the Giza pyramids
are built.
And then we have
this explosion
in the Fourth Dynasty
of true pyramids.
We have three of them
attributed
to a single pharaoh,
Sneferu,
who built,
supposedly,
the pyramid
at Maidum
and the two pyramids
at Dashur,
the Bent and the Red Pyramid.
And then within
that same hundred year span,
we have the Giza pyramids
being built.
This is according
to the Orthodox chronology.
And then suddenly,
once the Giza project
is finished,
pyramid building
goes into a massive slump
in ancient Egypt.
And the pyramids
of the Fifth Dynasty
are, frankly speaking,
a mess outside.
They're very inferior
constructions.
You can hardly recognize
them as pyramids at all.
But what happens
when you go inside them
is you find
that they're extensively
covered in hieroglyphs
and imagery
repeating the name
of the king
who was supposedly
buried in that place.
Whereas the Giza pyramids
have no internal
inscriptions whatsoever.
What they do,
what we do have
is one piece
of graffiti
about which
there is some controversy.
Basic statistics,
it's a six million ton
structure.
Each side
is about 750 feet long.
It's aligned
almost perfectly
to true north,
south, east, and west
within three 60ths
of a single degree.
The 60ths
because degrees
are divided
into 60s.
And
it's the precision
of the orientation
and the absolute
massive size
of the thing.
Plus,
it's very complicated
internal passageways
that are involved
in it.
You know,
in the 9th century,
the Great Pyramid
still had its
facing stones
in place.
But
there was
an Arab
Caliph,
Caliph al-Mamun,
who had already
realized that
other pyramids
did have their
entrances in the
north face.
Nobody knew
where the entrance
to the Great Pyramid
was.
But he figured,
if there's an
entrance to this
thing,
it's going to be
in the north face
somewhere.
So he put together
a team of workers
and they went in
with sledgehammers
and they started
smashing where he
thought would be
the entrance.
And they cut their
way into the
Great Pyramid
for a distance
of maybe
100 feet.
And then
the hammering
that they did
dislodged something.
They heard a little
bit further away
something big
falling.
And they realized
there was a cavity
there.
And they started
heading in that
direction.
And then they
joined the internal
passageway of the
Great Pyramid,
the descending and
the ascending
corridors that go up.
When you go up
the ascending
corridor,
every one of the
internal passageways
in the Great Pyramid
that people can walk
in slopes at an
angle of 26
degrees.
That's interesting
because the angle
of slope of the
exterior of the
Great Pyramid is
52 degrees.
So we know
mathematicians were
at work as well
as geometers in
the creation of the
Great Pyramid.
If you go up
the Grand
Gallery,
which is at the
end of the
so-called ascending
corridor,
and it's above the
so-called Queen's
Chamber,
you go up the
Grand Gallery,
you're eventually
going to come to
what is known as
the King's Chamber,
in which there is a
sarcophagus.
And that sarcophagus
is a little bit
too big to have
been got in through
the narrow entrance
passageway.
It's almost as though
the so-called King's
Chamber was built
around the
sarcophagus already
in place.
Above the King's
Chamber are five
other chambers.
These are known as
relieving chambers.
The theory was that
they were built to
relieve the pressure
on the King's Chamber
of the weight of
the monument.
But I think what
makes that theory
dubious is the fact
that even lower down,
where more weight
was involved,
you have the Queen's
Chamber and there are
no such relieving
chambers above that.
In the top of these
five chambers,
a British adventurer
and vandal called
Howard Vise,
who dynamited his way
into those chambers
in the first place,
allegedly found,
well, he claims he
found the graffiti,
a piece of graffiti
left by a work gang
naming the Pharaoh
Khufu.
And it's true,
I've been in that
chamber and there is
the cartouche of Khufu
there, quite
recognizable.
But the dispute
around it is whether
that is a genuine
piece of graffiti
dating from the Old
Kingdom or whether
Howard Vise actually
put it there himself
because he was in
desperate need of
money at the time.
I'm not sure what
the answer to that
question is.
Another reason why,
but it's one of the
reasons that Egyptologists
feel confident in saying
that the pyramid is the
work of Khufu.
Another is what is called
the Wadi al-Jaf Papirai,
where on the Red Sea,
a diary, the diary of
an individual called
Merer was found and he
talks about bringing
highly polished limestone
to the Great Pyramid.
And it's clear that what
he's talking about is the
facing stones of the
Great Pyramid.
He's not talking about
the body of the Great
Pyramid.
He's talking about the
facing stones of the
Great Pyramid during the
reign of Khufu.
So that's another reason
why the Great Pyramid is
attributed to Khufu.
But I think that Khufu
was undoubtedly involved
in the Great Pyramid
and in a big way,
but I think he was
building upon and
elaborating a much
older structure.
And I think the heart
of that structure is the
subterranean chamber,
which is a 100 feet
vertically beneath the
base of the Great Pyramid.
Anybody who suffers
from claustrophobia
will not enjoy being
down there.
You've got to go down
a 26 degree sloping
corridor until a
distance of about
300 feet.
It's 100 feet
vertically,
but the slope means
you're going to walk
a distance of about,
not walk,
you're going to
eight walk.
You're almost going
to have to crawl.
I've learned from
long experience that
the best way to go
down these corridors
is actually backwards.
If you go forward,
you keep bumping your
head on them because
they're only three feet,
five inches high.
You get down to the
bottom, you have a
short horizontal passage,
and then you get into
the subterranean chamber.
The theory of
Egyptology is that
this was supposed to be
the burial place of
Khufu, but after
cutting out that
300 foot long,
26 degree sloping
passage, a lot of
which passes through
bedrock, and having
cut the subterranean
chamber out of bedrock,
gone to all that
trouble, they decided
they wouldn't bury him
there, and they
built what's now
known as the
queen's chamber as
his burial chamber,
but then they decided
that wouldn't do
either, so they then
built the king's
chamber, and that's
where the pharaoh is
supposed to have been
buried.
Those Arab raiders
under Khalif Mamun
didn't find anything
in the Great Pyramid
at all.
So your idea is that
the Sphinx and maybe
some aspects of the
pyramid were much
earlier, and why
that's important is
in that case, it would
be evidence of some
transfer of technology
from a much older
civilization.
The idea is that
during the Younger
Dryas, most of that
civilization was either
destroyed or damaged,
and they desperately
scattered across the
globe.
Seeking Refuge.
Seeking Refuge and
telling stories of
maybe, one, the
importance of the
stars, their knowledge
about the stars, and
their knowledge about
building and knowledge
about navigation.
That's roughly the
idea.
So it's interesting
that the ancient
Egyptians have a
notion of an epoch
that they call
Zeptepe, which is
the first time.
It means the first
time.
This is when the
gods walked the
earth.
This is when
seven sages brought
wisdom to ancient
Egypt, and that is
seen as the origin of
ancient Egyptian
civilization.
There are king
lists, by the
ancient Egyptians
themselves, there are
king lists that go
back way beyond the
first dynasty, go back
30,000 years into the
past in ancient Egypt,
considered to be entirely
mythical by Egyptologists,
but nevertheless, it's
interesting that there's
that reference to
remote time.
Now, what you also have
in Egypt are what might
almost be described as
secret societies.
The followers of Horus
are one of those,
specifically tasked with
bringing forward the
knowledge from the first
time into later
periods.
The souls of Pei and
Necken are another one
of these mysterious
secret society groups who
are possessors of
knowledge that they
transmit to the future.
And what I'm broadly
suggesting is that those
survivors of the
younger Dryas cataclysm who
settled in Giza may have
been relatively small in
number.
It's interesting that they
are referred to in the
Edfu building text as
seven sages, because that
repeats again and again.
It's also in Mesopotamia,
it's seven sages, seven
Apkalu, who come out of
the waters of the Persian
Gulf and teach people all
the skills of agriculture
and of architecture and
of astronomy.
It's found all around the
world, that there was a
relatively small number of
people who took refuge in
Giza, who benefited from
the survival skills of the
hunter-foragers who lived
at Giza at that time and
who also passed on their
knowledge to those hunter-foragers.
But it was not knowledge that
was ready to be put into
shape at that time.
And that knowledge was then
preserved.
And kept and handled within
very secretive groups that
passed it down over
thousands of years.
And finally, it bursts into
full form in the fourth
dynasty in ancient Egypt.
And, you know, the notion
that knowledge might be
transferred over thousands
of years shouldn't be
absurd.
We know, for example, in the
case of ancient Israel, it
goes back to the time of
Abraham, which is pretty
much, I think, around
2000 BC.
And knowledge has been
preserved from that time
right up to the present
day.
So if you can preserve
knowledge for 4,000 years,
you can probably preserve it
for eight.
Now, of course, the error bars on
this are quite large.
But if an advanced
ice-stage civilization existed,
where do you think it was?
Where do you think we might
find it one day, if it
existed?
And how big do you think it
might have been?
Well, this is where I'm often
accused of presenting a god
of the gaps argument, that I
think there was a lost
civilization because there's
lots of the earth that
archaeologists have never
looked at.
Of course, I'm not thinking
that.
These are very special gaps
that I'm interested in.
And I'm interested in them
because of all the
curiosities and the
puzzlement that I've
expressed to you before.
It's not just because there
are gaps in the
archaeological record.
It's because those gaps
involve places that were
very interesting places to
live during the Ice Age.
and they specifically
include the Sahara
Desert, which was not a
desert during the Ice Age
and went through this warm
wet period when it was
very, very fertile.
Certainly, some archaeology
has been done in the Sahara,
but it's fractional.
It's tiny.
And I think if we want to
get into the origins, the
true origins of ancient
Egyptian civilization, of
the peoples of ancient
Egypt, we need to be
looking in the Sahara for
that.
And the Amazon
rainforest is another
example of this.
I think the Sahara is
about 9 million square
kilometers.
The Amazon that's left
under dense canopy
rainforest is about 5
million square kilometers,
maybe closer to 6.
And then you have the
continental shelves that
were submerged by sea
level rise at the end of
the Ice Age.
Now, it's well
established that sea
level rose by 400 feet,
but it didn't rise by
400 feet overnight.
It came in dribs and
drabs.
There were periods of
very rapid, quite
significant sea level
rise, and there were
periods when the sea
level was rising much
more slowly.
So that 400-foot sea
level rise is spread out
over a period of about
10,000 years, but there
are episodes within it
like Meltwater Pulse
1B, like Meltwater
Pulse 1A, when the
flooding was really
immense.
How big do you think
it might have been?
And do you think it
was spread across the
globe?
So if there were
expert navigators, do
you think they spread
across the globe?
Well, the reason that
I'm talking about the
gaps is, I don't know
where this civilization
started or where it
was based.
All I'm seeing are
clues and mysteries and
puzzles that intrigue me
and which suggest to me
that something is
missing from our past.
And I'm not inclined to
look for that missing
something in, for
example, Northern
Europe, because Northern
Europe was not a very
nice place to live
during the Ice Age.
I mean, nobody smart
would build a
civilization in Northern
Europe 12,000 years
ago.
It was a hideous,
frozen wasteland.
The places to look are
places that were
hospitable and welcoming
to human beings during
the Ice Age.
And that, of course,
includes the coastlines
that are now underwater.
Of course, it includes
the Sahara Desert.
And of course, it
includes the Amazon
rainforest as well.
All of these places,
I think, are candidates
for, quote unquote,
my lost civilization.
And because I think,
largely from those
ancient maps, that it
was a navigating,
seafaring civilization,
I suspect that it
wasn't only in one
place.
It was probably in a
number of places.
And then I can only
speculate.
Maybe there was
a cultural value
where it was felt
that it was not
appropriate to
interfere with the
lives of hunter
foragers at that
time.
Maybe it was felt
that they should keep
their distance from
them.
Just as even today,
there is a feeling
that we shouldn't be
interfering too much
with the uncontacted
tribes in the
Amazon rainforest.
Although,
interestingly,
some of those
tribes are now
using cell phones.
That possibility
may have been there
in the past.
And only when we
come to a global
cataclysm does it
become essential to
have outreach and
actually to take
refuge amongst those
hunter-forager
populations.
That is the hypothesis
that I'm putting
forward.
I'm not claiming that
it's a fact.
But for me, it helps
to explain the
evidence.
So that speaks to
one of the challenges
that archaeologists
provide to this idea
is that there is a
lot of evidence
of humans in the
Ice Age and they
appear to be all
hunter-gatherers.
But like you said,
only a small percent
of areas where humans
have lived have been
studied by archaeologists.
That's right.
Very tiny percent.
And even a tiny percent
of every archaeological
site has been studied
by archaeologists too.
Typically, one to five
percent of any
archaeological site is
excavated.
I mean, that's why
Gobekli Tepe fills my
mind with imagination,
especially seeing it as a
time capsule.
You know, it's almost
certain that there is
places on Earth we
haven't discovered
that once we do,
even if it's after the
Ice Age, will change
our view of human
history.
Do you think there is
going to be a place,
like, what would be your
dream thing to discover
like Gobekli Tepe that
has a definitive, like,
perturbation to our
understanding of Ice Age
history?
Some kind of archive,
some kind of hall of
records.
There's both mystical
associations with the
Hall of Records at Giza
from people like the
Edgar Cayce organization.
There's also ancient
Egyptian traditions which
suggest that something
was concealed beneath
the Sphinx.
This is not an idea that
is alien to ancient
Egypt.
It's quite present in
ancient Egypt.
So far, as far as I
know, nobody has dug
down beneath the Sphinx.
And, of course, there's
very good reasons for
that.
You don't want to damage
the place too much.
But let's call it the
Hall of Records.
I'd love to find that.
But I think, in a way,
that's what Gobekli Tepe
is.
Gobekli Tepe is a
Hall of Records.
You know, it's
interesting that just as
I've tried to outline,
I hope reasonably
clearly, that the three
great pyramids of Giza
match Orion's belt in
10,500 BC, just as the
Sphinx matches Leo in
10,500 BC, 12,500 years
ago or so.
Pillar 43 in
Enclosure D at
Gobekli Tepe contains what
a number of researchers,
myself included, regard as
an astronomical diagram.
Martin Swetman of
Edinburgh University has
brought forward the best
work in this field, but it
was initially started by a
gentleman called Paul
Burley, who noticed that
one of the figures on
Pillar 43 is a
scorpion, very much like
we represent the
constellation of Scorpio
today.
And that above it is a
vulture with outstretched
wings, which is in a
posture very similar to the
constellation that we call
Sagittarius.
And on that outstretched
wing is a circular
object.
And the suggestion is that
it's marking the time when
the sun was at the center of
the dark rift in the Milky
Way at the summer solstice
12,500 years ago.
That's what it's marking.
And it's interesting that
the same date can be
deduced from Pillar 44.
Of course, it's
controversial.
Martin Swetman's ideas are
by no means accepted by
archaeology.
But he's done very, very
thorough, detailed
statistical work on this,
and I'm personally
convinced.
So we have a time capsule
at Gobekli Tepe, which is
memorializing a date that is
at least 1,200 years before
Gobekli Tepe was built.
If that dating of 11,600
years ago proves to be
absolutely the oldest date
as it is at present.
The date memorialized on
Pillar 43 is 12,800 years
ago, the beginning of the
Younger Dryas, the beginning
of the impact event.
And then Giza does the same
thing, but in much larger
scale.
It uses massive megalithic
architecture, which is very
difficult to destroy, and a
profound knowledge of
astronomy to encode a date in
a language that any culture
which is sufficiently literate
in astronomy will be able to
decode.
We don't have to have a script
that we can't read, like we
do with the Indus Valley
civilization or with the
Easter Island script.
We don't have to have a script
that can't be interpreted.
If you use astronomical
language, then any
astronomical literate
civilization will be able to
give you a date.
The Hoover Dam has a star map
built into it, and that star map
is part of an exhibition that
was put there at the founding
of the Hoover Dam, and what it
does is it freezes the sky above
the Hoover Dam at the moment of
its completion, and Oscar Hansen,
the artist who created that
piece, said so specifically that
this would be so that any future
culture would be able to know the
time of the dam's construction.
So you can use astronomy and
architecture to memorialize a
particular date.
Quick pause, bath and break?
Sounds good.
So to me, the story that we've
been talking about, it is both
exciting if the mainstream
archaeology narrative is correct,
and the one you're constructing is
correct.
Both are super interesting, because
the mainstream archaeology
perspective means that there is
something about the human mind
from which the pyramids, these
ideas spring naturally.
You place humans anywhere, you
place them on Mars, it's going to
come out that way.
So that's an interesting story of
human psychology that then becomes
even more interesting when you
evolve out of Africa with Homo
sapiens, how they think about the
world.
That's super interesting.
And then if there's an ancient
civilization, advanced civilization
that explains why there's so many
similar types of ideas that spread,
that means that there's so much
undiscovered still about the sort of
the spring of these ideas of
civilization that come.
So to me, they're both fascinating.
So I don't know why there's so much
sort of infighting, but...
I think it's partly territorial.
I think that...
I think that...
I don't...
I can't speak of all archaeologists,
but some archaeologists feel very
territorial about their profession.
And they do not feel happy about
outsiders entering their realm,
especially if those outsiders have
a large platform.
I've found that the attacks on me
by archaeologists have increased
step-by-step with the increase
of my exposure.
I wasn't very interesting to them
when I just had one minor bestseller
in 1992 with a book called
The Sign and the Seal.
But when Fingerprints of the Gods
was published in 1995 and became
a global bestseller, then I started
to attract their attention.
And appear to have been regarded
as a threat to them.
And that is the case today.
That is why Ancient Apocalypse Season 1
was defined as the most dangerous
show on Netflix.
It's why the Society for American
Archaeology wrote an open letter
to Netflix asking Netflix to
reclassify the series as science fiction.
It's why they accused the series
of anti-Semitism, misogyny,
white supremacism, and a whole,
I don't know, a whole bunch of other
things like that.
There's nothing to do with anything
that's in the series.
It was like, we must shut this down.
This is so dangerous to us.
It's certainly not a danger.
There are many more dangerous things
in the world than a television series
going on right now.
But maybe it was seen as a danger
to archaeology, that this non-archaeologist
was in archaeological terrain
and being viewed and seen by large,
and read by large numbers of people.
Maybe that was part of the problem.
And human nature being what it is,
I noticed that two of my principal critics,
John Hoops from the University of Kansas
and Flint Dibble, who's now teaching
at the University of Cardiff in Wales
in the UK, are both people who like
to have media exposure.
And John Hoops had just recently started
his YouTube channel.
Flint Dibble has had one for quite a while.
Pretty small number of followers.
I think that they feel that they should be
the ones who are getting the global attention
and that it's not right that I am.
And that the best way to stop that
is to stop me, to shut me down,
to get me cancelled, and basically requiring
Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary
to a science fiction, which is what they actually
had the temerity to suggest to Netflix,
that would, if that had gone through,
if Netflix had listened to them,
that would have effectively been the cancellation
of my documentary series.
It would no longer have been ranked under documentary.
So it was a deliberate attempt to shut me down.
And I see that going on again and again.
And it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary.
I've become very defensive towards archaeology.
I hit back.
After 30 years of these attacks on my work,
I'm tired of it.
And I do defend myself.
And sometimes I'm perhaps over-vigorous
in that defense.
Maybe I was a little bit too strong
in my critique of archaeology
in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse.
Maybe I should have been a bit gentler
and a bit kinder.
And I've tried to reflect that
in the second season
and to bring also many more
indigenous voices into the second season
as well as the voices of many more archaeologists.
Yeah, in general, I got a chance
to get a glimpse of the archaeology community.
And in archaeology, in science in general,
I don't have much patience
for this kind of arrogance or snark
or dismissal of general human curiosity
that I think your work inspires in people.
And so that's why people like Ed Barnhart,
who I recently had a conversation with,
he radiates sort of kindness and curiosity as well.
And it's like that kind of approach to ideas,
especially about human history,
it inspires people.
It inspires millions of people to ask questions.
I mean, that's why you had Keanu Reeves
on the new season.
He's basically coming to the show
from that same perspective of curiosity.
Keanu is genuinely curious about the past
and very, very interested in it.
And he's bringing to it questions
that everybody brings to the past.
He's speaking for every man in the series.
So given that, can you maybe steel man
the case that archaeologists make
about this period that we've been talking about?
Can you make the case that that is indeed what happened
is it was hunter-gatherers for a long time,
and then there was a cataclysm,
a very difficult period in the human history
with the younger Dryas,
and that changed the environment
and then led to the springing up of civilizations
at different places on Earth?
Can you sort of make the case for that?
No, I completely understand
why that is the position of archaeology,
because that's what they found.
Archaeology is very much wishing to define itself
as a science,
and it uses the techniques of weighing
and measuring and counting
are very key to what archaeology does.
And in what they've found
and what they've studied around the world,
they don't see any traces of a lost civilization.
And the idea that besides,
we live in a very politically correct world today,
and the idea that some kind of lost civilization
brought knowledge to other cultures around the world
is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way.
It triggers that aspect as well.
But basically,
I think the majority of archaeologists
are in complete good faith on this.
I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me.
I think that what we're hearing from most archaeologists,
some much more vicious than others,
but what we're hearing from most archaeologists
is this is what we found,
and we don't see evidence for a lost civilization in it.
And to that I must reply,
please look at the myths.
Please consider the implications of the younger Dryas.
Please look at the ancient astronomy.
Please look at those ancient maps
and don't just dismiss them and sneer at them.
And for God's sake,
please look more deeply at the parts of the world
that were immensely habitable and attractive during the Ice Age
and that have hardly been studied by archaeology at all
before you tell us that your theory is the only one
that can possibly be correct.
In fact, it's a very arrogant and silly position of archaeology
because archaeological theories are always being overthrown.
It can take years.
It can take decades.
It took decades in the case of the Clovis I hypothesis
for the settlement of the Americas.
But sooner or later,
a bad idea will be kicked out
by a preponderance of evidence
that that idea does not explain.
If we can just look back at your debate with Flint Dibble
on Joe Rogan experience,
what are some takeaways from that?
What have you learned maybe?
What are some things you like about Flint?
You said that he's one of your big critics,
but what do you like about his ideas
and what will you maybe be bothered by?
First of all, just very recently,
and it can be found on my YouTube channel
and it's signaled on my website,
I have made a video,
runs about an hour,
which looks at a series of statements
that Flint made during the debate
which I was not prepared to answer.
And it turns out
that some of those statements are not correct.
The notion, for example,
that there were three million shipwrecks
that have been mapped.
Flint actually uses the word mapped,
three million shipwrecks
that have been mapped
at one point in the debate,
and I've put that clip into the video
that I've brought out.
That is not a fact.
That is an estimate,
a UNESCO estimate.
And actually, in the small print
on one of the slides
that he has on the screen,
you can see the word estimate,
but he never expresses that word out loud.
So those who are listening to the podcast
rather than watching it
wouldn't even have a chance to see that.
And I, sitting there in the studio,
didn't see that word estimate either.
And I didn't know that.
I thought, my God,
Flint has a point here.
If there have been three million shipwrecks
found and mapped,
if that's the case,
the absence of any shipwreck
from a lost civilization of the Ice Age
is a problem.
But then I discover that it isn't
three million shipwrecks
that have been mapped.
It's much, much less than that.
And maybe it's 250,000,
still a large number,
but most of them
from the last thousand years.
And unfortunately,
what Flint didn't go into,
and perhaps he should have shared
with the audience,
and again, I go into this in the video,
is that there is indisputable evidence
that human beings were seafarers
as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago.
The peopling of Australia
involved a relatively short,
90 kilometers,
100 kilometer ocean voyage,
but nevertheless,
it was an ocean voyage.
And it must have involved
a large enough people,
a large enough number of people
to create a permanent population
that wouldn't go extinct.
The settlement of Cyprus
is the same thing.
It was always an island,
even during the Ice Age.
And no ships have survived
that speak to the settlement of Australia,
and no ships have survived
that speak to the settlement
of Cyprus either,
but that doesn't mean
that that thing didn't happen.
I should just like linger on this
because for me,
it was the shipwrecks thing
was convincing.
And then looking back,
first of all,
watching your video,
but also just realizing
the peopling of Australia part.
That's mind-boggling to me.
Yeah.
50,000 years ago.
Just imagine being the person
standing on the shore,
looking out into the ocean,
standing on the shore
of a harsh environment,
looking out into the ocean
of a harsh environment,
and deciding that,
you know what,
I'm going to go towards
near certain death
and explore.
I don't know what's
on the other side of that water.
You can't see 90 globes.
And humans did it.
Yeah.
I love humans so much.
It's that urge to explore.
Yeah.
And I suggest that it probably began
with a few pioneers
who made the journey
there and back.
They ventured into the water.
They definitely had boats.
And lo and behold,
after a two or three day voyage,
they ended up on a coastline.
You're an individual.
You've got my relatively
straightforward island hopping
where each island is
within sight of each other
as far as Timor.
And when you get to Timor,
suddenly you can't
island hop anymore.
There's an expansive ocean
that you can't see across.
But that urge to explore,
that curiosity
that is central
to the human condition,
would undoubtedly have led
some adventurous individuals
to want to find out more
and even be willing
to risk their lives.
And that first reconnoitering
of what lay beyond that strait
would have undoubtedly
been undertaken
by very few individuals.
Not enough to create
a permanent population
in Australia.
But when they came back
with the good news
that there's a whole land there.
That's the land
that geographers call Sahul,
which in just as Sunda
was the Ice Age,
Indonesian and Malaysian
peninsula all joined together
into one land mass.
So Sahul was New Guinea
joined to Australia.
So they would have made
landfall in New Guinea.
And then they think,
well, here is this vast,
open, incredible land.
We need to bring more people here.
And that would have involved
larger craft.
You need to bring people
with resources
and you need to bring
enough of them,
both men and women,
in order to produce
a population that will not
rapidly become extinct.
And it's the same in Cyprus.
There, the detailed work
that's been done
suggests very strongly
that we're looking at
planned migrations
of groups of people
in excess of a thousand
at a time
bringing animals with them.
And this certainly
would have involved
multiple boats
and boats of a significant size.
And there's no
archaeological evidence
of those boats?
None whatsoever.
The oldest boat
that's ever been found
in the world
is the Dokos shipwreck
off Greece,
which is around 5,000 years old,
if I recall correctly.
So everything that makes a boat
is lost to time.
Yes, boats can be preserved
under certain circumstances.
There's a wreck
at the bottom of the Black Sea,
almost two miles deep.
I didn't know
the Black Sea was that deep.
But there's a wreck
and there's no oxygen down there
that is more than 2,000 years old
and is still in pretty much
perfect condition.
But in other conditions,
the structure of the ship evaporates.
Sometimes what you're left with
is the cargo of the ship.
And you could say
there was a ship that sank here,
but the ship itself has gone.
The fact is,
we know that our ancestors
were seafarers
as much as 50,000 years ago.
And no ship has survived
to testify to that,
yet we accept that they were.
Do you think one day
we'll find a ship
that's 10, 20, 30,
40, 50,000 years old?
It's not impossible.
I think it's quite unlikely,
given the very thin survival
of ships
the further back you go in time,
with the oldest, as I say,
being about 6,000 years old now.
And then the other thing
to take into account
is the Younger Dryas event itself
and the cataclysmic circumstances
of that event
and the roiling of the seas
that would have taken place then.
How much would have survived
in a boat accident at that time
would have survived
for thousands of years afterwards?
I'm not sure.
But I don't give up hope.
It's possible.
So, okay.
So that's back
to the 3 million shipwrecks.
Yeah.
So what's your takeaway
from that debate?
Well, my takeaway
from that debate
is that I should have been
better prepared
and I should have been less angry.
I have to say
that Flint had really
disturbed me
with these constant,
snide,
not quite exact references
to racism
and white supremacism
in my work.
I detest such things.
And to have those labels
stuck on me,
he's always avoided
taking direct responsibility,
pretty much always avoided.
There's one example
that I include
in the video I've made
where he really hasn't
successfully avoided it.
But in most cases,
he's trying to say
that I rely on sources
that were racist,
but that he's not saying
that I myself am a racist.
But the end result
of those statements
is that people
all around the world
came to the conclusion
that Graham Hancock
is a racist
and a white supremacist.
And that really got
under my skin
and it really upset me
and I felt angry about it
and I felt that I was there
to defend
Ancient Apocalypse Season 1,
whereas in fact
what I was there to do
was to listen
to a series of lectures
where an archaeologist
tells me
what archaeologists have found
and that somehow
I'm to deduce
that from what they have found,
they're not going
to find anything else,
at least not anything
to do with
the lost civilization.
Listen, I feel you,
I've seen the intensity
of the attacks
and the whole racism label
is the one
that can get under your skin
and it's a toolbox
that's been prevalent
over the past,
let's say, decade,
maybe a little bit more
as a method of cancellation
when a person
is the opposite of racist
very often,
it's kind of hilarious
to watch,
but it can get
under your skin,
especially when you have
certain dynamics
that happen on the internet
where it seeps
into a Wikipedia page
and then other people
read that Wikipedia page
and you get to hear it
from like friends,
oh, I didn't know
you're at whatever
and you realize
that Wikipedia description
of who you are
actually has a lot of power,
not by people
that know you well,
but by people
that just kind of
are learning about you
for the first time.
Definitely.
And they can really
start to annoy you
and get under your skin
when people are kind of
indirectly injecting,
they're writing articles
about you
that can then be cited
by Wikipedia.
It can really bother
a person who is actually
trying to do good science
or just trying to inspire people
with different ideas.
I felt that my work
was being deliberately
misrepresented
and I felt that I
as a human being
was being insulted
and wronged
in ways that are
deeply hurtful.
My wife and I
have six children
between us
and we have
nine grandchildren
and of those
nine grandchildren,
seven are of mixed race
and this is my family
and these are kids
who are going to grow up
and read Wikipedia
and learn from reading
Wikipedia
that grandpa
was some kind of racist.
You know,
this is a personal issue
for me
and I'm afraid
I carried that personal anger
into the debate
and it made me
less effective
than I should have been
but ultimately
I do want to pay tribute
to Flint.
He is an excellent debater.
He's got a very sharp mind.
He's a very clever man
and he's very fast
on his feet
and I recognize that.
I was definitely up against
a superior debater
in that debate.
I'm not sure
that I have
those debating skills
and I certainly
didn't have them
on that particular day.
I also admire
about Flint
something else
which is that
he was willing
to be there.
Most archaeologists
don't want to talk
to me at all.
They want to insult me
from the sidelines.
They want to make sure
that Wikipedia
keeps on calling me
a pseudo-archaeologist
or a purveyor
of pseudo-archaeological theories.
They want to make sure
that the hints of racism
are there
but they actually
don't want to sit down
and confront me.
At least Flint
was willing to do that
and I'm grateful
to him for that
and I think
in that sense
it is an important encounter
between people
with let's say
an alternative view
of history
and those with
the very much
mainstream view
of history
that archaeology gives us.
And he's also
a very determined character.
He doesn't give up.
So all of those things
about him
I admire
and respect
but
I think he fought dirty
during the debate
and I've said exactly why
in this video
that I now have
up on YouTube.
To say a positive thing
that I enjoyed
I think towards the end
in him speaking
about agriculture
was pretty interesting.
So the techniques
of archaeology
are pretty interesting.
like where
where you can get
some insights
through the fog
of time
about like
what people were doing
how they were living.
That's pretty interesting.
It's very interesting.
It's a very important discipline
and I've said
many times before
publicly
I couldn't do
any of my work
without the work
that archaeologists do.
I emphasize
very strongly
in this video
that I don't study
what archaeologists
study
but
nevertheless
the data
that archaeologists
have generated
over the last century
or so
has been incredibly
valuable to me
in the work
that I do
but when I
when I look
at the Great Sphinx
and the studies
of archaeology
saying that this
is the work
of the pharaoh
Khafre
despite the absence
of any single
contemporary inscription
that ascribes it
to Khafre
and in fact
the presence
of other inscriptions
that say
that it was already
there in the time
of Khufu
I am not looking
at what
Egyptologists study
they just dismiss
all of that
and lock into
the Khafre
connection
at Gobekli Tepe
I'm not really
looking at
what archaeologists
look at
I'm looking at
the alignments
of the megaliths
and how they seem
to track
procession of the
star Sirius
over a period
of time
archaeologists
aren't interested
in any of that
so I value
and respect
archaeology
I think it's
an incredible tool
for investigating
our past
but I wish
archaeologists
would bring
a slightly
gentler
frame of mind
to it
and a slightly
opener perspective
and also
that archaeologists
would be willing
to trust
the general public
to make up
their own minds
it's as though
certain archaeologists
are afraid
of the public
being presented
with an alternative
point of view
which they regard
as quote unquote
dangerous
because they
somehow
underestimate
the intelligence
of the general public
and think the general public
are just going to accept
that much
and
actually by condemning
those alternative
point of view
archaeologists
make it much more
likely that the general public
will accept
those alternative
point of view
because there is
a great distrust
of experts
in our society
today
and behaving
in a snobbish
arrogant way
we archaeologists
are the only people
who are really
qualified to speak
about the past
and anybody else
who speaks about
the past
is dangerous
that actually
is not helpful
to archaeology
in the long term
there could be
a much more positive
and a much more
cooperative relationship
and I can see
that relationship
with a gentleman
like Ed Barnhart
it was very much
the case
with archaeologist
Marty Parsinen
from the University
of Helsinki
and with geographer
Alceo Ranzi
Brazilian geographer
very very senior figure
who I worked with
in the Amazon
for season two
of Ancient Apocalypse
looking at these
astonishing earthworks
that have emerged
from the Amazon jungle
and which more and more
are now being found
with LiDAR
indeed we found
some of them
ourselves with LiDAR
while we were there
yeah that was an
incredible part of the show
that I got a chance
to preview
it's like there's
all this earthworks
yeah the traces
of things built
on the ground
that probably
you can only really
appreciate
when you look
from up above
that's right
so the idea
that they build
stuff that
you can only appreciate
when viewed
from up above
means they had
a very kind
of deep
relationship
with the sky
with the sky
yeah
and a very good
knowledge of geometry
as well
because these are
geometrical structures
and some of them
even seem to incorporate
geometrical games
almost of the kind
like squaring the circle
it's not quite that
but you have a lovely
square earthwork
with a lovely circle
earthwork
right in the middle
of it
whatever else
they were
they were geometers
they were
not just builders
of fantastically
huge earthworks
that nobody expected
in the Amazon
not just builders
of cities
that we now know
existed in the Amazon
but that they were
astronomers and
mathematicians as well
everything we're talking
about is so full
of mystery
it's just fascinating
especially the farther
back we go
that's what I love
about the past
is the mystery
that's there
and that's another
thing that I regret
about some archaeologists
is that their mission
seems to be
to drain all mystery
out of the past
to suck it dry
like some kind
of vampire
sucking the blood
out of the past
and to reduce it
to a series of numbers
that appear to be
scientific
I think that's
most unfortunate
the past
is deeply mysterious
the whole story
of life on earth
is deeply mysterious
I mean we were
talking about
the timeline
of human beings
but you know
if you go
back to the formation
of the earth itself
if I've got
the figures right
it's about
four and a half
billion years ago
that the earth
supposedly formed
it was then
incredibly hot
and inhospitable
to life
for the next
several hundred
million years
but it was actually
Francis Crick
who pointed out
something odd
that within
a hundred million years
of the earth
being cool enough
to support life
there's bacterial
life all over
the planet
and Crick
wrote a book
called Life Itself
that was published
in 1981
and he suggested
that life
had been brought
here by a process
of panspermia
now that's an idea
that's around
in circulation
that comets
may carry bacteria
which can seed
life on planets
but Crick actually
in Life Itself
was talking about
directed panspermia
he envisaged
this is Crick
not me
he envisaged
an alien civilization
far away
across the galaxy
which faced
extinction
perhaps a supernova
was going to go off
in the neighborhood
they were highly advanced
their first thought
might have been
let's get ourselves
off the planet
and go and populate
some other planet
but the distances
of interstellar space
were so great
so their second thought
was let's preserve
our DNA
let's
put bacteria
genetically engineered
bacteria
into cryogenic
chambers
and fire them off
into the universe
in all directions
and bottom line
of Crick's theory
in Life Itself
is one of those
cryogenic containers
containing bacterial life
from another
solar system
crashed into
the early earth
and that's why
life began so suddenly
here on earth
if we as a human
civilization continue
I think that is
a one
way
to create
backups
of us
elsewhere
in the universe
given the space
is to
do a life gun
and shoot it
everywhere
and it's just
plants
and you kind of
hope that
whatever is the magic
that makes up
human consciousness
and if that
magic is already
there in the
initial DNA
of the bacteria
the potential
for that magic
is there
the potential
is there
and evolutionary
forces will
work upon it
in different ways
in different
environments
but the potential
is there
yes it's something
that we would do
if we were facing
a complete extinction
of life on planet
earth
a major global
effort would be
made
to preserve it
somehow
and that might
well include
firing off
cryogenic chambers
into the universe
and hoping that
some of them
would land
somewhere hospitable
and as you were
mentioning
there's just
so many interesting
mysteries along the
way here
for example
I mean it's like
I think like
three billion years
it was single cell
organisms
so it seems like
life was pretty good
single cell organisms
that there's no need
for multicellularity
that like for animals
for any of this
kind of stuff
so why is that
it seems like
you could adapt
much better
if you're a more
complicated organism
it took a really long
time to take that leap
is it because
it's really hard to do
and what was the
what was the forcing
function to do
that kind of leap
and the same
I mean for us
to be selfish
and self-obsessed
for us humans
like what was the
magic leap
to homo sapiens
from the other
hominids
and why did
homo sapiens
win out
against the
androthals
and the other
competitors
why are they not
around
anymore
so those are all
fascinating
mysteries
and it feels like
the more we
propose sort of
radical ideas
about our past
and take it seriously
and explore
the more we'll be able
to sort of
figure out that puzzle
that leads all the way
back to homo sapiens
and maybe all the way
back to the origin
of life on earth
yeah
I think that
homo sapiens
is the tail end
of a very long
deep series of mysteries
that goes back
right to the beginning
of life on this planet
and probably
long before
actually
because this planet
is part of the universe
and god knows
what else is out there
in the universe
why do you think
homo sapiens
evolved
what
like what
what was the magic
things
it's a bunch of
theories about
fire
leading to meat
to cooking
which can fuel
the brain
that's one
the other is like
social interaction
we're able to
use our imagination
to construct ideas
and share those ideas
and tell great stories
and that is somehow
an evolutionary advantage
do you have any
like favorite
conception
well
it's interesting
there's no doubt
that anatomically
modern humans
and neanderthals
coexisted
in europe
for at least
10 000 years
probably more than that
and yet one of the
the popular views
is that anatomically
modern humans
wiped out the neanderthals
that we
we killed them off
but at the same time
we were interbreeding
with the neanderthals
in a sense
the neanderthals
are not gone
they're they're still
within us today
we are part
part neanderthal
there's another theory
that i've read about
there is some evidence
that neanderthals
were cannibals
that there was
ritual cannibalism
took place
amongst neanderthals
and particularly
the eating of human brains
and this
can cause
kuru
which can
kill off
whole populations
that's what
another suggestion
of whether neanderthals
died out
there's lots of
possibilities
that have been
put forward
maybe we just
out-competed them
you know
maybe
anatomically modern
humans had some
brain connections
that they didn't have
even though the
neanderthal brain
was bigger
than the brain
of anatomically
modern human beings
as the old saying
goes
size isn't everything
maybe we just had
a more compact
more efficient brain
the fact of the matter
is
that
neanderthals
and denisovans
did not survive
the rise
of homo sapiens
for our discussion
though
what is interesting
is all the hominids
seem to be
explorers
yes
they spread
i mean i didn't know
this
the fact that homo erectus
was all over the planet
more than a million years ago
is testament to that
and i i do think
that exploration
urge
is is
fundamental to humanity
and
i i would like to say
that's what i think i'm doing
i'm i'm exercising
my urge to explore
the past
in in my own way
making my own path
and defining
defining my own route
that's the leap
from
non-human to human
uh
one of the things
you've discussed
is
your idea of
what was the leap
to human civilization
what is the driver
what is the inspiration
for humans
to form civilizations
and for you
that's shamanism
definitely
can you explain
what that means
i think that
um
shamanism is the origin
of of of everything
of value
uh
in
humanity
uh
i think it was
the earliest form
of science
when i spend time
with
uh
shamans
in
the amazon
i observe people
who are constantly
experimenting with plants
in a very scientific way
uh
they're always trying
a pinch of this
and a pinch of that
in different forms
for example
all of the ayahuasca brew
to see if it enhances it
or makes it makes it
different in in in any way
uh
the invention of curare
is a remarkable scientific feat
which is entirely down
to shamans
in the in the amazon
they are the
the scientists
of the hunter forager
uh
state of society
um
and they were
um
the ancient
um
leaders
of human civilization
so i think all
all civilization
arises out of
shamanism
uh
and shamanism
is a naturally
scientific endeavor
where experimentation
is undertaken
and exploration
and investigation
of the environment
around us
and what i'm suggesting
is that
that one group
perhaps more than one group
uh
went a bit further
than other groups
did
and and used
that study
of the skies
and
developed navigational
techniques
and and were able
to sail
and explore the earth
uh
but that ultimately
what lies behind it
is the same
curiosity
and investigative
skill
that shamans
are still using
uh
in the amazon
to this day
uh
and and uh
i do see them
as as
as scientists
in a very
proper use of the word
but do you think
something like ayahuasca
was a part
of that process
yes
ayahuasca
is the result
of shamanistic
investigation
of what's available
in the amazon
of course ayahuasca
is all the fad
in western
industrialized
societies today
and and
some people see it
as a miracle cure
for all kind of
ailments and problems
and perhaps it is
perhaps it can be
uh
in in certain ways
ayahuasca itself
is not an amazonian word
it comes from the
quechua language
and it means
the vine of souls
or the vine of the dead
uh
but the ayahuasca vine
is only one
of two principal ingredients
in the ayahuasca brew
and the other ingredient
are leaves
that contain
dimethyltryptamine
and there are two sources
of that
one is
a bush
called
cicotria viridis
that's its botanical name
they call it
chacruna
in the amazon
and its leaves
are rich in dimethyltryptamine
dmt
which is
arguably the most
powerful psychedelic
uh
known to science
um
and and
uh
the other source
comes from another vine
diplopteris cabrirana
uh
which
the leaves of that vine
also contain dmt
so
the ayahuasca vine
on its own
is not going to give you
a visionary journey
and the leaves
that contain dmt
on their own
whether they come
from diplopteris
or whether they come
from chacruna
are not going to give you
a visionary journey
and the reason they're not
going to give you
the visionary journey
is because of the enzyme
monoamine oxidase
in the gut
that shuts down
dmt
when absorbed orally
basically dmt
is not accessible
orally
unless
you combine it
with a monoamine oxidase
inhibitor
and that's what i mean
when i'm talking about
science in the amazon
because there's so many
tens of thousands
hundreds of thousands
different species
of plants and trees
in the amazon
and they've gone around
and they've found
just two
or three of them
that put together
can produce these
extraordinary
visionary experiences
just imagine the number
of plants they had
to have eaten
yeah
it consumed
and smoked
or all kinds
of combinations
to arrive at that
exactly
exactly
to realize that
this is something
this is something
very special
and then
and then to
use the principles
there to
to find another
form of it
so ayahuasca
is the form
that is made
with the ayahuasca
vine
and the leaves
of the chacruna plant
but yahe
is made from
the ayahuasca vine
and the leaves
of another vine
diploplaris cabrurana
which contain
not only
nndmt
which is the dmt
that everybody's
pretty much familiar
with these days
but also
5meo dmt
and the yahe
experience
which i have
i have also
had
in my view
is more
intense
and more
powerful
almost to the
point of being
overwhelming
than the
than the ayahuasca
experience
but but what
the result
of this
sophisticated
chemistry
that we find
taking place
here
is
is
a brew
which is
hideous
to drink
the taste
i find it
quite repulsive
i almost
wretch
just
just
smelling it
in the
in the cup
but then
unleashes
these
extraordinary
experiences
and it isn't
just pretty
visuals
it's the
sense
of
encounters
with
sentient
others
that there
are sentient
beings
that somehow
we're surrounded
by a realm
of sentience
that is not
normally
accessible
to us
and that
what the
ayahuasca brew
and certain
other psychedelics
like like
some
psilocybin
mushrooms
in a high
enough dose
can do it
as well
lsd can do
it but
ayahuasca
is the
master
in this
of of
lowering
the veil
to what
appears to
be a
seamlessly
convincing
other realm
other world
and of course
the hardline
rational scientists
will say
that's just
all
fantasies
of your
brain
but i
don't think
we fully
understand
or even
close to
understanding
exactly
what
consciousness
is
and i
remain
open
to two
possibilities
that
consciousness
is
generated
by the
brain
is
made
by the
brain
in the
way
that a
factory
makes
cars
but i
also
am
open
to the
possibility
that the
brain
is a
receiver
of
consciousness
just as
a television
set
is the
receiver
of television
signals
and
that
if that
is the
case
then
we
locked
in
to the
physical
realm
we need
our
everyday
alert
problem
solving
state
of
consciousness
and that's
the state
of consciousness
that western
civilization
values
and highly
encourages
but these
other states
of consciousness
that allow us
to access
alternative
realities
are possibly
more important
it may be
apocryphal
but it
was reported
after
francis
crick's
role
and his
nobel prize
for the
discovery
of the
double
helix
that he
finally
got it
under the
influence
of lsd
there's
the classic
example of
kerry
mollis
and the
polymerase
chain
reaction
he said
he got
that
under the
influence
of lsd
so the
notion
that the
alert
problem
solving
state
of
consciousness
is the
only
valuable
state
of
consciousness
is
disproved
by
valuable
experiences
that people
have had
in a
visionary
state
but the
question
that remains
unresolved
is
those
entities
that we
encounter
and not
everybody
encounters
them
and you're
certainly
not going
to encounter
them on
every
ayahuasca
trip
there are
ayahuasca
journeys
where nothing
seems to
happen
I suspect
something does
happen
but it happens
at a
subconscious
level
I know
that shamans
in the
Amazon
regard
those trips
where actually
you don't
see visions
as amongst
the most
valuable
and they say
you are
learning stuff
that you're
not
remembering
but you're
learning it
anyway
these sentient
others that
are encountered
what are they
are they
just figments
of our brain
on drugs
or are we
actually gaining
access to a
parallel reality
which is inhabited
by consciousness
which is in
a non-physical
form
and I'm
equally open
to that idea
I think that
may be
what is going
on here
with ayahuasca
but the other
thing
is that
there is
a presence
within the
ayahuasca brew
and she is
present both
present both
in ayahuasca
and in
yahé
and that's
one of the
reasons why
the shamans
say that
that actually
the master
of the process
is the
ayahuasca vine
not the
leaves
it's as though
the vine
has harnessed
the leaves
to gain access
to human
consciousness
and there
if you have
sufficient exposure
to ayahuasca
or yahé
you drink it
enough times
I've had
maybe 75
or 80
journeys
with ayahuasca
you definitely
start to feel
an intelligent
presence
with a definite
personality
which I
interpret as
feminine
and which
most people
in the west
interpreted as
feminine
and they call
her mother
ayahuasca
there are
some tribes
in the amazon
who interpret
the spirit
of ayahuasca
as male
but in
all cases
that spirit
is seen
as a teacher
that's fundamentally
what ayahuasca
is
it's a teacher
and it teaches
moral lessons
and that's
fascinating
that a mixture
of two plants
should cause us
to reflect
on our own
behavior
and how it
may have hurt
and damaged
and affected
others
and fill us
with a
powerful wish
not to repeat
that negative
behavior again
in the future
the more
baggage you
carry in
your life
the harder
the beating
that ayahuasca
is going to
give you
until it
forces you
to confront
and take
responsibility
for your
own behavior
and that is
an extraordinary
thing
to come
from a
plant brew
in that way
and I think
in yes
I think
ayahuasca
is the most
powerful
of all the
plant medicines
for accessing
these mysterious
realms
but there's no
doubt you can
access them
they're all
tryptamines
they're all
related to one
another in one
way
you can access
them through
LSD
and you
certainly
can access
them through
psilocybe
mushrooms as
well
in large
enough dose
both
possibilities
as you
describe are
interesting
and to me
they're kind
of akin to
each other
I wonder
what the
limit
of the
brain's
capacity is
to create
imaginary
worlds
and treat
them seriously
and make
them real
and in
those worlds
explore
and have
real
sort of
moral
deep
brainstorming
sessions
with those
entities
so it's
almost like
the
power of
the human
mind
to imagine
taken to
its
limit
it is
and the
curious
thing is
that the
same
iconography
people paint
their visions
after ayahuasca
sessions
people were
painting
in Europe
in the
cave of
Lascaux
for example
and of course
they had
access to
psilocybe
mushrooms
in
prehistoric
Europe
there's a
remarkable
commonality
in the
imagery
that is
that is
painted
I like
to give
credit
where credit
is due
and there
are two
names that
need to be
mentioned
here
one is
the late
great
Terence
McKenna
and his
book
Food of
the Gods
where he
proposed
the idea
very strongly
that it
was our
ancestral
encounters
with
psychedelics
that made
us fully
human
that's
that's
what
switched
on
the
modern
human
mind
and
very much
the same
idea
began to
be explored
a bit
earlier
by
Professor
David
Lewis
Williams
at the
University
of
Witwatersrand
in South
Africa
fabulous
book
called
The Mind
in the
Cave
where he
is again
arguing
that these
astonishing
similarities
in cave
art and
rock art
all around
the world
can only
be properly
explained
by people
in deeply
altered states
of consciousness
attempting
to remember
when they
return to a
normal everyday
state of
consciousness
attempting to
remember their
visions
and document
them
on permanent
media
like the
wall of
a cave
so typically
you get a lot
of geometric
patterns
but you also
got entities
and those
entities
often are
therianthropes
part animal
part human
in form
might have
the head
of a wolf
and the body
of a human
being
might have
the head
of a bird
and the body
of a human
being
and so on
and so forth
and that they
communicate with us
in the visionary
state
interestingly
although this
sounds like
woo-woo
and it is an
area that most
scientists would
steer clear of
at risk of their
careers
there is very
serious work
now being done
at imperial
college in
london
and at the
university of
california
at san diego
where volunteers
are being given
extended dmt
there's a new
technology
dmtx
where the
dmt is fed
directly into
the bloodstream
by drip
and it's
possible to
keep the
individual
in the
peak dmt
state
which normally
when you
smoke or
vape dmt
you're looking
if you're
lucky at
10 minutes
or if
you're
unlucky
if it's
a bad
journey
because those
10 minutes
can seem
like forever
but with
dmtx
with the
drip
feeding of
dmt into
the bloodstream
these volunteers
actually could be
kept in the
peak state
for hours
and unlike
lsd where you
rapidly build up
tolerance
nobody ever
builds up
tolerance to
dmt it
always hits
you with
the same
power even
if you took
it yesterday
and the day
before and
you're taking
it tomorrow
as well
it's still
going to have
that same
power there's
no tolerance
there so
that's how
they can
they can use
that lack
of tolerance
to to keep
volunteers in
this state and
then when they
debrief those
volunteers they're
also putting
them in mri
scanners and
looking at what's
happening in the
brain but when
they debrief them
they're all
talking and
about encounters
with sentient
others there's
even a group
now called
sentient others
where people
are exchanging
volunteers are
now exchanging
their experiences
they didn't do
so they weren't
allowed to do so
at the beginning
of the experiment
but now that
most of them
have left it
they're exchanging
their experiences
and it's all
about encounters
with insentient
others who wish
to teach them
moral lessons
now to me
that's wild
what what is
going on here
what what what
what what what
how do we
account for
this yeah i
get the notion
of hallucinations
and brightly
colored visuals
but the moral
lessons that come
with it those
are very odd
yeah and
would you say
that the reason
that could give
birth to a
civilization is
it because
the such
visions can
help create
myths and
especially like
religious myths
that would be a
cohesive thing
for a large
group of people
to get around
yeah and can
help us to be
better members
of our own
community with
the moral
lessons yeah
more contributing
members of our
community more
caring more
nurturing members
of our community
that's got to be
good for for
for any community
i'm i've said
this a dozen
times but uh
i'll say it
again if if i
had the power to
do so i would
make it a law
an absolute law
that anybody
running for a
powerful political
position particularly
if that position
is president
or head of
state in any
kind of way
that that person
has to undergo
the ayahuasca
ordeal first
they have to
have 10 or
12 sessions of
ayahuasca as a
condition for
applying for the
job i suspect
that most who
had had those
experiences wouldn't
want to apply for
the job anymore
they would want to
live a different
kind of life and
those who did want
to carry on being a
leader of a nation
would be very
different people from
the people who
are leading the
nations of the
earth into chaos
and destruction
today
yeah they'll be
doing it for the
right reasons i
mentioned to you i
recently interviewed
donald trump and
actually brought up
this same same
idea that it would
be a much better
world if most of
congress and most
politicians would
take some form of
psychedelic at the
very least
i have no doubt that
it would be a
better world
i mean this raises an
interesting point which
is the role of
government in
controlling our
consciousness
and in my opinion
the the so-called war
on drugs is one of
the fundamental abuses
of human rights that
have been undertaken in
the past in the past 60
years
it should be a
republican issue if i
understand the
republican party
correctly the
republican party
believes in
individual freedom
for adults as much as
possible
and particularly the
freedom to make
choices over their own
bodies
but in the case of
even cannabis
i know
that's one of the
great things that's
happening in america
it's it's happening
state by state
where cannabis is
being is being
legalized and that
draconian hand of
government has been
taken off the back of
people who are who
are consuming a
medicine that is far
less harmful than
alcohol which is
glorified in in our
society
we cannot say that we
are free if we allow
our government to
dictate to us what
experiences we may or
may not have in our
inner consciousness while
doing no harm to
others and the point
there is we already
have a whole raft of
laws that deal with us
when we do harm to
others do we really
need laws that tell us
what we may and may or
may not experience in
the inner sanctum of our
own consciousness i think
it's a fundamental
violation of adult
sovereignty and we
would have much less
drug problems if
these drugs were all
legalized and made
available to people
without shaming them
without without
punishing them in any
way but just part of
normal social life and
then you could be sure
that you were getting
good product rather than
really shitty product
which has been cut with
all sorts of other
things ultimately the
way forward is for
adults to take
responsibility for their
own behavior and for
society to allow that
to happen and not to
have big government
taking responsibility
for decisions that
should be in the hands
of individuals and
for me also it's
exciting some of these
substances like
psilocybin are being
integrated to scientific
studies large skills it's
really interesting we've
seen a revolution in in
the way science looks at
psychedelics in the last
20 25 years they they
were in that highly
demonized category but
again it's one of those
paradigms which gets
overwhelmed by new
evidence and it began to
be realized that that
psilocybin and and
other psychedelics are
very helpful in a range
of conditions from which
people people suffer
post-traumatic stress
disorder the fear of
death when you're when
you're suffering from
terminal cancer can be
overwhelming and it's
been found that that
that psilocybin can can
remove that deep
depressions can be
evaporated with one
single massive
psilocybin journey they
just go away there's
really good science on
this and and they are
being integrated into
conventional medicine
more and more we'll see
it happening I'm not sure
if it'll happen as much
as as fast as I would
like to see it happen in
my lifetime but it is
going to happen
yeah actually uh just
recently found out that
you had a
ted talk
war on consciousness
yes
that uh was taken down
yeah
and that was just part of
just the the general
resistance because it
was it was a pretty
it wasn't a radical
it wasn't really a
radical I was talking
about ayahuasca and I
was talking about the
view that I hold very
strongly that as long as
we do no harm to others
sovereign adults should be
allowed to make decisions
about their own bodies
and not face a jail
sentence or or shaming as
a result but this so it
was a tedx talk not a
ted talk organized by a
local ted ted group they
call them tedx talks um
and uh I I gave this I
gave this talk about the
war on consciousness and
it was immediately pulled
down from ted's main
channel uh with all kinds
of bizarre reasons being
given but unfortunately it
was too late because a
number of people had
already downloaded the
talk and then uploaded it
onto other youtube
channels and actually their
banning of it made it go
viral uh in a way that
would not have would not
have happened otherwise
but again it's a sign that
that points of view that
are not acceptable to those
in positions of power uh are
simply dismissed and shut
down uh or at least
attempts are made to to do
so in general just along
that line of thinking i'm
pretty sure that what we
understand about
consciousness today will
seem silly uh to humans
from a hundred years from
now you bet it will uh
especially if we harness
psychedelics to investigate
consciousness and and uh you
know that is that is what
is happening at uh at
imperial college right now is
is the investigation of the
experience they're not
looking there are other
trials that are looking for
the therapeutic potential of
dmt but in this case
they're looking entirely at
the experiences that people
have and why they're so
similar from people from
different age groups and
different genders and
different parts of the world
are all having the same
experiences and for me from
an engineer perspective it's
interesting if it's
possible to engineer
consciousness in artificial
beings yeah it's it's it's
another way to approach the
question of how special is
conscious human consciousness
yeah how from where does it
arise uh is it something
that permeates all of life
and in that case what is the
thing that makes life special
like what is life what is
these living organisms that we
have here and uh that that
evolved to create humans and
what is truly special about
humans and it's both scary and
exciting to consider the
possibility that we can create
something like this yeah but
why not we're a vehicle for
consciousness in my view i
think consciousness is
present in all life on earth
i don't think it's limited to
human beings we have the
equipment to manifest and
express that consciousness in
the way that a dog for
example doesn't have or a
snail doesn't have or a pigeon
doesn't have but when i look
at two pigeons sitting on my
garden fence and rubbing up
close to each other and
enjoying each other's company
and taking off together and
hanging out together i think
they're conscious beings um
and and i think i think
consciousness is everywhere i
think it's the basis of
everything and i suspect that
fundamentally consciousness is
non-physical and that it can
manifest in physical forms where
it can then have experiences that
would not be available in the
non-physical state that's a
that's a guess that'd be a
fascinating because then you can
construct all kinds of physical
forms to manifest the
consciousness and see if
consciousness enters if they
become consciousness isn't
there some suggestion that
artificial intelligence is
already becoming conscious
that makes humans really
uncomfortable yeah because we
are at the top of the food
chain we consider ourselves
truly special and to consider
that there's other things that
could be special is uh is
scary well look how other
people make us uncomfortable
too i mean look at the state of
the world today uh all the
conflicts that are that that are
raging uh that's that's because
we're afraid when i say we i'm
speaking nation by nation that we
we are afraid of other people
we fear that they're going to
hurt us or damage us in some
way and so we seek to stop
that it's the it's the root of
many many conflicts this this
fear and so fear of ai may not
be such a good idea after all it
might be very interesting to go
down that route and see where it
comes certainly in terms of
exploring consciousness it is very
interesting yeah fear is a
useful thing but it can also be
destructive well it can be
destructive and it can shut you
down completely
if you look into the into the
future maybe the next hundred
years what do you hope are the
interesting discoveries in
archaeology that we'll that we'll
find well i'd really like to
know how the great pyramid was
built uh and and we now have with
new tech with with scanning
technology it's now become apparent
that there are many major voids
within the great pyramid right
above the grand gallery there's a
what looks like a second grand
gallery that has been identified with
remote scanning uh and and um new
chambers one of them has even been
opened up uh already are being found
as a result of this so so it may be
that the seat that the great pyramid
will ultimately give up its secrets i
often think that the great pyramid is
is partly designed to do that it's
designed to invite its own initiates
some people aren't interested in the
great pyramid at all uh but some people
are fascinated by it and they're drawn
towards it and when they're drawn
towards it it immediately starts
raising questions in their minds
and they seek answers to their
questions so it's like saying
here i stand investigate me find out
about me figure out what i am why
have i got these two shafts cut into
the side of the so-called queen's
chamber why do they slope up through
the body of the great pyramid why do
they not exit on the outside of the
great pyramid why when we send a
robot up those shafts do we find them
after about 160 feet blocked by a door
with metal handles why when we drill
through that door to see what's beyond
it three or four feet away we see
another door uh it's like very
frustrating but it's it's saying to us
keep on exploring if you if you're
persistent enough we'll eventually give
you the answer so i'm hoping that that
answer will come as to how this most
mysterious of monuments was actually
built and the inspiration that lay
behind it certainly i'm sure it was
never a tomb or a tomb only uh the
later pyramids might have been actually
no pharaonic burial has been discovered
in any pyramid but but nevertheless it's
pretty clear that the later pyramids
with the pyramid texts written on the
walls like the pyramid of unas fifth
dynasty pyramid at sakara uh were were
tombs um but but uh the great pyramid
to go to that length to create a tomb
to make it a scale model of the earth
uh to orient it perfectly to true north
to make it six million tons this is not
a tomb uh this is something else this is
a curiosity device this is something that
is asking us to understand it and i hope
we will understand it and i hope i hope
egyptologists will be willing to set
aside that prejudice that they're only
looking at a tomb and consider other
possibilities and as new tech is
revealing these previously unknown inner
spaces within the great pyramid i think
that's going to become more and more
likely so not just the how it was built
but the why but the why and to you it
seems obvious that there would be a cosmic
motivation yeah very very much so as
above so below uh you know which is which
is an idea in the hermetica uh the god
hermes for the greeks was the greek
version of thoth the wisdom god of ancient
egypt and that's where that saying comes
from it comes from the hermetica but it's
expressing an ancient egyptian idea to
mirror the perfection of the heavens on
earth so you think there's something
interesting to be discovered about the how
it was built you mean beyond the sort of
the the ideas of the using ramps and what
yeah ramps won't do it ramps won't do it
nor will wet sand uh it's true that the
ancient egyptians did haul big objects on
sleds on wet sand uh there are even reliefs
that show the process where an individual
is standing on the front of the sledge
pouring water down to to lubricate the
sand underneath and and that's a perfectly
respectable way to move a 200 ton block of
stone across sand if you flat sand if you
have enough people to pull it but that is
not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton
granite blocks 300 feet in the air to form
the roof of the king's chamber and the
floor of the chamber above it and the roof
of that chamber and the floor of the
chamber above that and so on and so forth
wet sand never got those objects up there
somehow they were lifted up there now uh
yeah ramps are proposed as the solution
but but where are the remains of those
ramps if you're going to carry uh blocks
weighing up to two or three tons right to
the top of the great pyramid to complete
your work you're going to need a ramp
that's going to extend out into the
desert for more than a mile at a 10
degree slope and it's calculated that a
10 degree slope is about the maximum
slope that human labor can haul objects
up a ramp um and that ramp can't just be
compacted sand since heavy objects are
being hauled up it's going to have to be
made of very solid material almost as
solid as the pyramid itself where is it
we don't see any any trace of those so
called ramps that are supposed to have
been involved in the construction of the
pyramid i think we don't know i think we
have no idea it's built that's why there's
so many different theories we haven't got
the answer yet but the how of it is one of
the big mysteries from our past i love the
great pyramids as a kind of puzzle that
was created by the ancient peoples to be
solved yeah by later peoples i mean this
is i don't know if you're aware of the uh
10 000 year clock i don't know that was
built by jeff bezos and danny hillis in
uh sierra diablo mountains in texas so
they're building a clock that takes once a
year for 10 000 years oh wow so it's
talking about it and it's supposed to sort
of run you know if there's a new nuclear
apocalypse it just runs and it's it's an
example of modern humans thinking like
okay if 10 000 years from now and beyond
yeah if something goes wrong or or the
future humans that are way different come
back and they they analyze what happened
here how can we create monuments that they
could then analyze yeah and in that way be
curious about in in their curiosity discover
some deep truths about this current time it's
an interesting kind of notion of like what can
we build now that would last and the answer
is that the majority of what we build now
wouldn't last wouldn't uh would be it would
be gone uh within a few thousand years um but
what would last is massive megalithic
structures uh like the great pyramid that
would that would last uh and and it could
be it could be used to send a message to the
future uh i think gobekli tepe serves a
similar function i mean there it was it was
buried uh 10 400 years ago and then for the
next 10 000 years nobody touched it nobody
knew it was there it it took the genius of
klaus smith the original excavator to realize
what he'd found and what it and what it was
but the great thing about the sealing of gobekli tepe
the deliberate burial of gobekli tepe is it
means that no later culture trod over it and
imposed their organic materials on it and messed
up the dating sequences and so on and so
forth or vandalized it or used it as a quarry
it's all there intact so you mentioned that the
pyramids and some of the other amazing things that
humans have built has was the results of us humans
struggling with our mortality that's the that's
the ultimate the ultimate goal that seems to me
what's at the heart of many pyramids around the
world is that they're connected in one way or another to
the notion of death uh and to the notion of the
exploration of the afterlife and and this is of course the
fundamental mystery that all human beings face we may
we may wish to ignore it we may wish to pretend that it's not
going to happen but we are of course all mortal uh every one
of us all eight billion or however many of us that are on the planet
right now we're all going to face death sooner or later and the
question is what happens and there are a few cultures that
really intensely deeply studied that mystery we are not one of
them the general view of science i think is
that we're accidents of evolution when we die the
light blinks out there's no more of us there's no such
thing as the soul but that's not a proven point
there's no experiment that proves that's the case we know we die
but we don't know whether there's such a thing as a soul
or not yeah it's the great mystery it's a great mystery that we all share
and those cultures that have investigated it and ancient ancient
egypt is the best example uh have investigated it thoroughly and
map out the journey that we make after death but that notion of a journey
after death and of hazards and challenges along the way
and ultimately of a judgment uh that notion is found right around the
world and it and it even manifests into the three
monotheistic face that are still present in the world today
well you're one such human uh and you said you contemplate your own
death yeah are you afraid of it no i'm not afraid of death at all
uh i'm curious about death i think it could be very interesting
uh i think it's the beginning of the next great adventure
um so i don't fear it and and um i would like to live as as long as i'm
my my body is is is healthy enough to make living worthwhile
um but i don't fear death what i do fear is pain
uh i do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the faculties can
bring i do fear the cancers that can strike us down
and riddle us with pain and agony that i fear very very much indeed
but death is going to come to all of us i accept it
it's going to come to me and i'm not going to say i'm looking forward to it
but when it happens i'm going to approach it
i hope with a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure
uh that there's something beyond this life
uh it isn't heaven it isn't hell but
there's something the soul goes on i think reincarnation
is a very plausible idea again modern science would reject that
but there's the excellent work of ian stevenson children who remember past
lives uh who who found that children up to the
age of seven often have memories of past lives
and in cultures where memories of past lives are discouraged
they tend not to express that much but in cultures where memories of past lives
are encouraged like india they do express it and he found several
subjects children under the age of seven in india
who were able to remember specific details of a past life and he was able to
go to the place where that past life unfolded
and validate those those those details so if if consciousness is the basis of
everything if it's the essence of everything and
consciousness benefits in some way from being
incarnated in physical form then reincarnation makes a lot of sense all the
investment that the universe has put into creating
this home for life may have a much bigger purpose than
than just accident what a beautiful mystery this whole thing is yeah we are
immersed in mystery we live in the midst of mystery we're surrounded by mystery
and if we pretend otherwise we're deluding ourselves and graham thank you so
much for inspiring the world to explore that mystery thank you for talking today
thank you lex it's been a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with graham hancock
to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you
some words from charles darwin it is not the strongest of the species that survives
nor the most intelligent it is the one that is the most adaptable to change
thank you for listening and hope to see you next time
thank you