#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Lex Fridman Podcast
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Episode: #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Author: Lex Fridman
Duration: 02:41:34
Episode Shownotes
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 2nd season of which has just been released. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep449-sc See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Graham's Website: https://grahamhancock.com/ Ancient Apocalypse (Season 2): https://netflix.com/title/81211003 Graham's YouTube: https://youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom Graham's X: https://x.com/Graham__Hancock Graham's Facebook: https://facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock Fingerprints of the Gods (book): https://amzn.to/4eM3QXC SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex Riverside: Platform for recording podcasts and videos from everywhere. Go to https://creators.riverside.fm/LEX LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (09:58) - Lost Ice Age civilization (17:03) - Göbekli Tepe (29:07) - Early humans (34:07) - Astronomical symbolism (45:36) - Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (1:03:55) - The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx of Giza (1:24:29) - Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest (1:33:49) - Response to critics (1:57:56) - Panspermia (2:05:22) - Shamanism (2:29:22) - How the Great Pyramid was built (2:36:41) - Mortality PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Summary
In this episode, Graham Hancock discusses the concept of a lost civilization during the Ice Age, positing that it may have been destroyed around 12,000 years ago due to a global cataclysm. He challenges traditional narratives of human history by emphasizing the coexistence of different human species and the abrupt emergence of civilizations following the Younger Dryas. Hancock highlights Göbekli Tepe as the oldest megalithic site, emphasizing its significance and the advanced knowledge of its builders. The episode further delves into topics like ancient astronomy, shamanism, and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, framing these discussions within the broader context of human cultural evolution.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_01
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.
00:00:18 Speaker_01
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 archeologist, Ed Barnhart.
00:00:37 Speaker_01
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 disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history.
00:00:55 Speaker_01
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. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
00:01:12 Speaker_01
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for note-taking, Riverside for making amazing-looking podcasts online, Element for hydration, Shopify for selling stuff online, and BetterHelp. for your mind.
00:01:28 Speaker_01
Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to LexRubin.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
00:01:39 Speaker_01
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
00:01:52 Speaker_01
To me, Notion is hands down the best integration of LLMs into the note-taking process when there's a lot of documents, a lot of different kinds of documents, and a lot of different kinds of people creating the documents.
00:02:06 Speaker_01
In the same way that in the recent episode I talked about with the cursor, can query the code base, Notion generalizes that and can query the document base.
00:02:20 Speaker_01
So all the wikis and projects and all the notes that you take, all of that can be queried, you can ask questions about it, you can find stuff, you can summarize, especially when there's multiple people on the team, you can summarize all the progress made in a particular project, all that kind of stuff.
00:02:35 Speaker_01
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00:02:43 Speaker_01
Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex, that's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Riverside.
00:02:57 Speaker_01
It really is just an incredible platform for recording podcasts online. A lot of people are doing podcasts. And the natural question that people ask me and people ask on the internet is how to do it easy.
00:03:09 Speaker_01
I think Riverside is the place to go to achieve easy, professional-level quality on both the audio and the video. I've used it a bunch over the years to record remote podcasts. In fact, I need to be doing more remote podcasts.
00:03:25 Speaker_01
The point is the technology is super easy because You have double ender recording, so you have extremely high quality recording of both ends. All you do is just log in in the browser. It just works. I'm so glad this exists. It just works.
00:03:40 Speaker_01
And of course, they have a bunch of nice features that are leveraging AI, for example. You have a text-based editor for both audio and video, which is just incredible.
00:03:50 Speaker_01
The syncing of the multiple guests, obviously, simple seeming thing, but hard to do seamlessly and flawlessly, and they do just that. I mean, it's just incredible. They pulled it off. It's not easy to pull off.
00:04:06 Speaker_01
and they make it look easy, which is wonderful. So it's a product that I recommend to a lot of people who are interested in doing a podcast of any kind. Like I said, I record my remote interviews with Riverside.
00:04:18 Speaker_01
Give it a try at riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar delicious electrolyte mix. I drink it throughout the day, I'm drinking it now.
00:04:38 Speaker_01
And I'm actually pretty low on water and electrolytes at the moment because I did a really hard training session. The training session was about an hour and a half and I think I only took one round off.
00:04:52 Speaker_01
And it was just hard training round after round after round. And by the end of it, I was just sort of both in the zone technique-wise, but also kind of psychologically accepting whatever happens in each particular puzzle that is jiu-jitsu.
00:05:17 Speaker_01
So I trained against some really strong dudes today. Wrestlers, intense, the technique was there too, so it's a battle for everything. Lots of just attacking for submissions over and over and over.
00:05:32 Speaker_01
Everything in the transitions, there's no stalling in a particular position, it's just movement and movement and movement and constant attacks. Yeah, it was exhausting.
00:05:40 Speaker_01
Plus the heat, just all of that sweating, and I usually don't drink during training, so by the time I'm done, I'm just like, no water in me, and that's when the Element really helps out. I go from feeling really shitty to feeling really good.
00:05:56 Speaker_01
So get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com slash flex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, with a great looking online store.
00:06:12 Speaker_01
I set up a store on LexRumor.com slash store. And I need to add shirts there, especially shirts that don't have my face on them. I keep getting all kinds of ideas, but I just haven't gotten around to it, even though it's super easy.
00:06:33 Speaker_01
No, here's an interesting thing. I've been getting more and more into programming languages that I haven't used before because I'm doing interviews with more and more programmers coming up, planning on it, thinking about it, excited for it.
00:06:51 Speaker_01
Programming makes me happy. Anyway. I found out that Shopify, the product, the service, the website, was originally, maybe still, built with Rails, Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is this technology
00:07:08 Speaker_01
that's super sexy, super popular, or was for a long time, and I never just got around to using it.
00:07:14 Speaker_01
So one of the things I would like to do is to get better at that so I can get a greater understanding of what it takes to program for the web so that I can talk to people who excel at that, who are experts at that.
00:07:29 Speaker_01
Anyway, all that said, you can build incredible stuff with Ruby on Rails, which is Shopify, and you can sell stuff Whatever it is you wanna sell, you can sell it with Shopify. Sign up for a dollar per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex.
00:07:42 Speaker_01
That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
00:07:55 Speaker_01
They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. I think at the end of the podcast, Graham called death a leap into the next great adventure, something like that.
00:08:12 Speaker_01
And I remember that made me smile, a kind of smile that just warms my heart and the warmth stays there for a time. It's a kind of joyful acceptance of the transitory nature of life. those words and the way he said them.
00:08:33 Speaker_01
And just as he said, death indeed is one of the great concerns for us humans, whether we acknowledge it or not. It is the darkness beneath the surface waves of our daily concerns. At least I personally believe that there is a fear there, a great fear.
00:08:53 Speaker_01
that must be confronted and dealt with and integrated into our conception of what it means to be a human being and how to survive the waves.
00:09:06 Speaker_01
Anyway, I'm a big believer that talking is one of the tools that should be used to understand your mind and to figure out what strategies can be used to navigate life. And yeah, that's what talk therapy can do.
00:09:21 Speaker_01
And I recommend the easiest way to do that is BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:09:35 Speaker_01
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.
00:09:58 Speaker_01
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.
00:10:17 Speaker_01
So let's talk about this idea that you have. Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?
00:10:21 Speaker_00
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.
00:10:34 Speaker_00
which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less straightforward evolutionary progress. We start out as hunter-foragers. then we become agriculturalists.
00:10:51 Speaker_00
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.
00:11:03 Speaker_00
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.
00:11:16 Speaker_00
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.
00:11:32 Speaker_00
And then we have anatomically modern humans. And I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. and date to about 310,000 years ago. So the question is, what were our ancestors doing after that?
00:11:51 Speaker_00
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 bother me.
00:12:01 Speaker_00
Why did it take so long when we have creatures who are physically identical to us?
00:12:06 Speaker_00
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,
00:12:22 Speaker_00
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.
00:12:39 Speaker_00
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.
00:12:54 Speaker_00
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?
00:13:06 Speaker_00
Why do 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?
00:13:19 Speaker_00
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.
00:13:31 Speaker_00
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.
00:13:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:13:57 Speaker_00
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.
00:14:17 Speaker_00
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 Mula Bandhasana, which involves
00:14:33 Speaker_00
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.
00:14:41 Speaker_00
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.
00:14:53 Speaker_00
Again, it's around about the same period, 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. You get these first signs of something happening.
00:14:59 Speaker_00
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.
00:15:14 Speaker_00
And yet, certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these different civilizations. I just find that
00:15:26 Speaker_00
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.
00:15:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:16:01 Speaker_00
We come out of the Upper Paleolithic as it's defined, the old 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?
00:16:15 Speaker_00
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.
00:16:24 Speaker_00
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.
00:16:38 Speaker_00
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.
00:16:57 Speaker_00
And it's strange that just after it, we start seeing these first signs.
00:17:04 Speaker_01
So the current understanding in mainstream archeology 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.
00:17:18 Speaker_00
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.
00:17:33 Speaker_00
That is the mainstream view.
00:17:35 Speaker_01
And they don't just pop up, they kind of build up gradually. First there's some settlement.
00:17:40 Speaker_00
Oh, definitely, yes.
00:17:41 Speaker_01
And then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture and that is also not obvious, but it's just
00:17:49 Speaker_01
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.
00:17:58 Speaker_00
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.
00:18:13 Speaker_00
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.
00:18:24 Speaker_00
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,
00:18:35 Speaker_00
By the time I finished that book, my wife Santha 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.
00:18:46 Speaker_00
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
00:18:57 Speaker_00
supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind, recently retitled Visionary, and that was fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in the evolution of human culture.
00:19:10 Speaker_00
And I didn't think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue. But Göbekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me.
00:19:19 Speaker_00
The more and more discoveries there, the 11,600 year date from enclosure D, which has the two largest megalithic pillars.
00:19:26 Speaker_00
And I reached a point where I realized I have to get back in, I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again. And Göbekli Tepe was a game changer, but I think it's a game changer for everything because Göbekli Tepe,
00:19:40 Speaker_00
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.
00:19:57 Speaker_00
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.
00:20:09 Speaker_00
And this, in turn, has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region, and what they're finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe.
00:20:19 Speaker_00
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 Tas Tepeler civilization.
00:20:34 Speaker_00
They're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills civilization. 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.
00:20:52 Speaker_00
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 Stonehills civilization had had achieved.
00:21:04 Speaker_00
But what is becoming clear is that this is a period between, 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.
00:21:16 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:32 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:45 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:57 Speaker_00
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
00:22:09 Speaker_00
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.
00:22:24 Speaker_00
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,
00:22:39 Speaker_00
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.
00:22:53 Speaker_01
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?
00:23:02 Speaker_00
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.
00:23:17 Speaker_00
The part of the site that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site, we do know.
00:23:22 Speaker_00
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
00:23:35 Speaker_00
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...
00:23:50 Speaker_00
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
00:24:06 Speaker_00
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.
00:24:20 Speaker_00
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.
00:24:36 Speaker_00
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.
00:24:54 Speaker_00
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.
00:25:07 Speaker_00
And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures which are all oriented in slightly different directions.
00:25:17 Speaker_00
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.
00:25:31 Speaker_00
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 looking, absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic.
00:25:48 Speaker_00
And they had found some Paleolithic flints, upper Paleolithic flints around there, so it looked like a good place to look.
00:25:54 Speaker_00
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
00:26:07 Speaker_00
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.
00:26:18 Speaker_00
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.
00:26:35 Speaker_00
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.
00:26:46 Speaker_00
It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.
00:26:52 Speaker_01
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
00:26:56 Speaker_00
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.
00:27:14 Speaker_00
And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants.
00:27:19 Speaker_01
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?
00:27:28 Speaker_00
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.
00:27:44 Speaker_00
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.
00:27:58 Speaker_00
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.
00:28:12 Speaker_00
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 root by then.
00:28:31 Speaker_00
Actually, one of the things, 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.
00:28:43 Speaker_00
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.
00:29:00 Speaker_00
who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so annoying to archeologists as it is.
00:29:08 Speaker_01
And perhaps we should also state, if we 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, looking at Homo erectus.
00:29:24 Speaker_01
1.9 million years ago, almost right away, they spread out through the whole world. and we homo sapiens evolved from them.
00:29:33 Speaker_01
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.
00:29:53 Speaker_00
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. There's no doubt that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa.
00:30:08 Speaker_00
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.
00:30:25 Speaker_00
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.
00:30:40 Speaker_00
And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world.
00:30:47 Speaker_00
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.
00:30:57 Speaker_01
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.
00:31:16 Speaker_00
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.
00:31:24 Speaker_00
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.
00:31:38 Speaker_00
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.
00:31:49 Speaker_00
The reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap.
00:31:55 Speaker_00
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.
00:32:10 Speaker_00
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.
00:32:21 Speaker_00
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.
00:32:39 Speaker_00
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.
00:32:52 Speaker_00
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
00:33:06 Speaker_00
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.
00:33:19 Speaker_00
The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey.
00:33:26 Speaker_00
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.
00:33:44 Speaker_00
And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we're looking at is
00:33:49 Speaker_00
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.
00:34:01 Speaker_00
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 the sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes.
00:34:18 Speaker_00
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 Santillana and Hertha von Deschend.
00:34:32 Speaker_00
Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science, actually at MIT, where you're based, back in the 60s. And Hertha von Deschend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University.
00:34:44 Speaker_00
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.
00:35:03 Speaker_00
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.
00:35:16 Speaker_00
Santillana and Van Der Schind 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.
00:35:30 Speaker_00
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, is,
00:35:43 Speaker_00
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 a thousand miles an hour at the equator.
00:35:56 Speaker_00
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.
00:36:10 Speaker_00
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.
00:36:25 Speaker_00
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.
00:36:39 Speaker_00
The Earth is orbiting the Sun, and we're 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.
00:36:52 Speaker_00
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.
00:37:08 Speaker_00
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.
00:37:17 Speaker_00
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?
00:37:35 Speaker_00
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 Aries, going back to the time of Ramesses or before.
00:37:51 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:05 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:22 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:30 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:58 Speaker_00
And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Satyajnana and Vandesan call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture,
00:39:07 Speaker_00
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. But we also have numbers related to the number 72. 72 plus 36 is 108.
00:39:27 Speaker_00
108 divided by two 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.
00:39:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:40:14 Speaker_00
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 Amlodi's Mill. There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108.
00:40:31 Speaker_00
108 is 72 plus 36. It's a precessional number according to the work that Santillana and Vandesan did. And the fascination with this number system and its discovery all around the world
00:40:44 Speaker_00
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.
00:41:01 Speaker_01
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.
00:41:19 Speaker_01
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, whatever.
00:41:34 Speaker_01
But back then, especially before sort of electricity, the stars is like, Yeah. The sexiest thing to talk about.
00:41:43 Speaker_00
There's no light pollution.
00:41:44 Speaker_01
There's no light pollution. So there's that. It's in your majesty of the heavens. Every single night you're spending looking up at the stars.
00:41:51 Speaker_01
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. They're able to do two things. One,
00:42:07 Speaker_01
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.
00:42:17 Speaker_01
So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
00:42:31 Speaker_00
It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright, and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it.
00:42:42 Speaker_00
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
00:42:54 Speaker_00
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.
00:43:02 Speaker_00
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.
00:43:16 Speaker_00
They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek
00:43:23 Speaker_00
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.
00:43:36 Speaker_01
Well, but detecting the procession 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.
00:43:46 Speaker_00
Yeah, and 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.
00:44:00 Speaker_00
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.
00:44:13 Speaker_00
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'll enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose.
00:44:26 Speaker_00
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.
00:44:36 Speaker_00
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.
00:44:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:45:00 Speaker_00
And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. 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.
00:45:18 Speaker_00
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.
00:45:27 Speaker_01
So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
00:45:31 Speaker_00
I take them very seriously. And the other, there's many reasons, but I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm. within human memory.
00:45:48 Speaker_00
I mean, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years.
00:45:55 Speaker_00
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?
00:46:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad.
00:46:17 Speaker_00
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.
00:46:32 Speaker_00
It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.
00:46:37 Speaker_00
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.
00:46:54 Speaker_00
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.
00:47:09 Speaker_00
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
00:47:24 Speaker_00
a nasty local flooding event and they decided to say that it affected the whole world.
00:47:29 Speaker_00
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.
00:47:45 Speaker_01
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?
00:47:57 Speaker_00
Yes. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory as its opponents often attempt to write it off.
00:48:11 Speaker_00
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
00:48:27 Speaker_00
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.
00:48:47 Speaker_00
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.
00:49:00 Speaker_00
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.
00:49:17 Speaker_00
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,
00:49:31 Speaker_00
Initially, their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas'. There was no crater, and for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater.
00:49:42 Speaker_00
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.
00:49:53 Speaker_00
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.
00:50:09 Speaker_00
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.
00:50:20 Speaker_00
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.
00:50:37 Speaker_00
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.
00:50:50 Speaker_00
And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
00:50:57 Speaker_00
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, round about 11,600 years ago.
00:51:15 Speaker_00
So this is a period which is very tightly defined. It's a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed.
00:51:26 Speaker_00
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.
00:51:38 Speaker_01
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?
00:51:48 Speaker_00
The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part,
00:52:00 Speaker_00
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.
00:52:17 Speaker_00
But what's not really been addressed before is why that happened. 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.
00:52:32 Speaker_00
That's where the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem. The hypothesis, of course, is broader than that.
00:52:44 Speaker_00
Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. They have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact
00:52:58 Speaker_00
event or events was what we now call the Taurid 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.
00:53:14 Speaker_00
It passed through it in June, and it passes through it at the end of October.
00:53:18 Speaker_00
The suggestion is that the Taurid 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.
00:53:39 Speaker_00
However, when it was one object, the likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.
00:53:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:54:00 Speaker_00
As it passed through that, its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider.
00:54:05 Speaker_00
And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the Taurid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America, as far east as Syria.
00:54:23 Speaker_00
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
00:54:34 Speaker_00
a hundred or a hundred and fifty 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.
00:54:47 Speaker_00
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.
00:55:03 Speaker_00
And the date is interesting because the 30th of June is the height of the Beta Taurids. It's one of the two times when the Earth is going through the Taurid meteor stream.
00:55:13 Speaker_00
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 Taurid meteor stream and about the risk of...
00:55:28 Speaker_00
cosmic impact.
00:55:29 Speaker_00
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.
00:55:45 Speaker_00
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.
00:55:59 Speaker_00
But this was a disaster for life all over the planet.
00:56:03 Speaker_00
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,
00:56:19 Speaker_00
All of those impact proxies are found at Abu Huraira. That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago, and it was obliterated.
00:56:32 Speaker_00
Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time.
00:56:41 Speaker_00
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 Abajurera. This is a theory.
00:56:57 Speaker_00
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.
00:57:06 Speaker_00
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.
00:57:22 Speaker_00
It was called a Requiem for the Younger-Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
00:57:26 Speaker_00
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.
00:57:42 Speaker_00
And even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view.
00:57:48 Speaker_00
Robert Shock 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.
00:58:04 Speaker_00
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.
00:58:13 Speaker_00
So what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.
00:58:29 Speaker_01
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.
00:58:46 Speaker_00
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.
00:58:58 Speaker_00
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,
00:59:08 Speaker_00
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.
00:59:20 Speaker_00
And that word advanced civilization This is another word that is easily misunderstood.
00:59:27 Speaker_00
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.
00:59:40 Speaker_00
We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved certain things.
00:59:46 Speaker_00
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.
01:00:05 Speaker_00
The Portolanos suddenly start to appear. and they're extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas.
01:00:18 Speaker_00
For example, on these Portolano style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again.
01:00:24 Speaker_00
And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the map makers state that they based their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived. These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes.
01:00:40 Speaker_00
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.
01:00:50 Speaker_00
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.
01:01:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:01:18 Speaker_00
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.
01:01:28 Speaker_00
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.
01:01:46 Speaker_00
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.
01:01:59 Speaker_00
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, very, very, were made a very, very long time ago.
01:02:15 Speaker_00
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.
01:02:30 Speaker_00
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
01:02:40 Speaker_00
they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.
01:02:47 Speaker_01
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 They're scholars of the stars and they're expert seafaring navigators.
01:03:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:03:16 Speaker_00
I'm not saying that they were building steam engines. I don't see any evidence for that.
01:03:21 Speaker_01
And perhaps some, building tricks and skills of how to... Well, definitely.
01:03:28 Speaker_00
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.
01:03:39 Speaker_00
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.
01:03:55 Speaker_01
Or 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.
01:04:04 Speaker_00
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.
01:04:22 Speaker_00
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.
01:04:35 Speaker_00
He spent most of his life in Egypt, and he was hugely versed in ancient Egypt.
01:04:40 Speaker_00
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.
01:04:51 Speaker_00
Maybe there was some sign of some sort of flooding here. And that's when he brought Robert Shock, second person I'd like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Shock to Giza and Shock
01:05:02 Speaker_00
was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the ryre, the ire of Egyptologists, and say, well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least 1,000 years of heavy rainfall.
01:05:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:05:27 Speaker_00
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.
01:05:39 Speaker_00
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.
01:05:52 Speaker_00
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.
01:06:04 Speaker_00
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
01:06:22 Speaker_00
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.
01:06:34 Speaker_00
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.
01:06:45 Speaker_00
The ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu, and they recognised it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. what's being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It's not just a random constellation.
01:07:01 Speaker_00
And then, when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening.
01:07:08 Speaker_00
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.
01:07:25 Speaker_00
There's a bit of a twist. They're not quite right. But as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back,
01:07:34 Speaker_00
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
01:07:50 Speaker_00
an equinoctial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this for themselves.
01:07:55 Speaker_00
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?
01:08:09 Speaker_00
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.
01:08:24 Speaker_00
And that it, 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.
01:08:39 Speaker_00
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.
01:08:51 Speaker_00
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 nemesis headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.
01:09:07 Speaker_00
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.
01:09:14 Speaker_00
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.
01:09:29 Speaker_00
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?
01:09:44 Speaker_00
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
01:10:01 Speaker_00
It's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute.
01:10:04 Speaker_00
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.
01:10:18 Speaker_00
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
01:10:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:10:52 Speaker_00
From the ancient Egyptian point of view, you're there 4,500 years ago and there's a time
01:10:59 Speaker_00
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.
01:11:16 Speaker_00
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 valley temple, which stands just
01:11:31 Speaker_00
just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx Temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.
01:11:38 Speaker_00
The Sphinx Temple has largely been destroyed, but the Valley 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
01:11:56 Speaker_00
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?
01:12:10 Speaker_00
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.
01:12:23 Speaker_00
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.
01:12:36 Speaker_00
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.
01:12:56 Speaker_00
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.
01:13:08 Speaker_01
So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptian to celebrate further an already holy place.
01:13:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, and there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today, but the the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time.
01:13:31 Speaker_01
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?
01:13:40 Speaker_00
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,
01:13:56 Speaker_00
that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid, is the pyramid of the pharaoh Djoser, the step pyramid at Saqqara, about a hundred years or so before the Giza pyramids are built.
01:14:13 Speaker_00
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 Dahshur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid.
01:14:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:14:46 Speaker_00
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
01:14:59 Speaker_00
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.
01:15:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:15:29 Speaker_00
It's aligned almost perfectly to true North, South, East, and West within three sixtieths of a single degree. Sixtieth because degrees are divided into It's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing.
01:15:48 Speaker_00
Plus it's very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it.
01:15:56 Speaker_00
You know, in the ninth 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.
01:16:11 Speaker_00
Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was, but he figured if there's an entrance to this thing, it's gonna be in the North Face somewhere.
01:16:19 Speaker_00
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.
01:16:33 Speaker_00
And then the hammering that they did
01:16:36 Speaker_00
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 of the great pyramid the descending and the ascending corridors that go up when you go up the ascending corridor every
01:16:55 Speaker_00
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.
01:17:07 Speaker_00
So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.
01:17:14 Speaker_00
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.
01:17:29 Speaker_00
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.
01:17:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:17:53 Speaker_00
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.
01:18:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:18:23 Speaker_00
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
01:18:30 Speaker_00
is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the Old Kingdom or whether Howard Weiss 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.
01:18:45 Speaker_00
Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu.
01:18:54 Speaker_00
Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, 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.
01:19:09 Speaker_00
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.
01:19:19 Speaker_00
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.
01:19:33 Speaker_00
And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there.
01:19:46 Speaker_00
You gotta 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 gonna walk a distance of about, not walk, you're gonna ape walk. You're almost gonna have to crawl.
01:20:01 Speaker_00
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.
01:20:11 Speaker_00
You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu.
01:20:24 Speaker_00
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 and gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there, and they built
01:20:41 Speaker_00
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.
01:20:50 Speaker_00
Those Arab raiders under Caliph Mahmoud didn't find anything in the Great Pyramid at all.
01:20:56 Speaker_01
So your idea is that the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid or 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.
01:21:14 Speaker_01
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.
01:21:34 Speaker_01
Their knowledge about the stars and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.
01:21:41 Speaker_00
That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when the gods walked the earth.
01:21:59 Speaker_00
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.
01:22:11 Speaker_00
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.
01:22:27 Speaker_00
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.
01:22:43 Speaker_00
The souls of Pei and Neken 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 Darius Cataclysm
01:23:00 Speaker_00
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.
01:23:12 Speaker_00
It's also in Mesopotamia, it's seven sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy.
01:23:27 Speaker_00
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.
01:23:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:23:56 Speaker_00
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.
01:24:12 Speaker_00
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.
01:24:24 Speaker_00
So if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for 8.
01:24:29 Speaker_01
Now, of course, the airbars on this are quite large, but if an advanced Ice Age 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?
01:24:44 Speaker_00
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.
01:24:55 Speaker_00
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 archeological record.
01:25:06 Speaker_00
It's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Ice Age.
01:25:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:25:30 Speaker_00
And I think if we want to get into the origins, 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.
01:25:47 Speaker_00
I think the Sahara is about nine million square kilometers. The Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest is about five million square kilometers, maybe closer to six.
01:25:59 Speaker_00
And then you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. 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.
01:26:14 Speaker_00
There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more. much more slowly. So that 400-foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years.
01:26:28 Speaker_00
But there are episodes within it, like meltwater pulse 1B, like meltwater pulse 1A, when the flooding was really immense.
01:26:37 Speaker_01
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?
01:26:47 Speaker_00
Well, the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based.
01:26:55 Speaker_00
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.
01:27:09 Speaker_00
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 hideous, frozen wasteland.
01:27:22 Speaker_00
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.
01:27:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:27:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:27:58 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:14 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:30 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:49 Speaker_01
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.
01:29:02 Speaker_01
But like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been studied by archeologists.
01:29:10 Speaker_00
That's right, very tiny percent. And even a tiny percent of every archeological site has been studied by archeologists too. Typically, one to five percent of any archeological site is excavated.
01:29:20 Speaker_01
I mean, that's why, go back a type that fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing as the time capsule,
01:29:28 Speaker_01
you know, it's almost certain that there's 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.
01:29:40 Speaker_01
Do you think there's going to be a place, like what will be your dream thing to discover? like Gobekli Tepe that says a definitive perturbation to our understanding of ice age history.
01:29:53 Speaker_00
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,
01:30:05 Speaker_00
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.
01:30:19 Speaker_00
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.
01:30:33 Speaker_00
But I think in a way, that's what Gobekli Tepe is. Gobekli Tepe is a hall of records.
01:30:39 Speaker_00
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.
01:30:57 Speaker_00
Pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram.
01:31:06 Speaker_00
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.
01:31:24 Speaker_00
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.
01:31:38 Speaker_00
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 40.
01:31:56 Speaker_00
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.
01:32:06 Speaker_00
So we have a time capsule at Göbekli Tepe, which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before Göbekli Tepe was built. if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date as it is at present.
01:32:24 Speaker_00
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.
01:32:39 Speaker_00
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.
01:32:55 Speaker_00
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.
01:33:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:33:23 Speaker_00
And what it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion.
01:33:30 Speaker_00
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.
01:33:41 Speaker_00
So you can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date.
01:33:47 Speaker_01
Quick pause, bathroom break? Sounds good. So to me, the story that we've been talking about, it is, both exciting if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct and the one you're constructing is correct.
01:34:03 Speaker_01
Both are super interesting because the mainstream archeology perspective means that there is something about the human mind from which the pyramids, these ideas spring naturally.
01:34:15 Speaker_01
You place humans anywhere, you place them on Mars, it's gonna come out that way. So that's an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve to
01:34:27 Speaker_01
out of Africa with Homo sapiens, how they think about the world, that's super interesting.
01:34:31 Speaker_01
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.
01:34:43 Speaker_01
yeah still yeah 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 um
01:34:59 Speaker_00
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.
01:35:21 Speaker_00
I 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.
01:35:38 Speaker_00
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.
01:35:53 Speaker_00
That is why Ancient Apocalypse season one 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.
01:36:08 Speaker_00
It's why they accused the series of anti-Semitism, misogyny, white supremacism, and a whole bunch of other things that have nothing to do with anything that's in the series. It was like, we must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us.
01:36:29 Speaker_00
There are many more dangerous things in the world than a television series going on right now.
01:36:38 Speaker_00
But maybe it was seen as a danger to archaeology, that this non-archaeologist was in archaeological terrain and being viewed and seen and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem. And human nature being what it is,
01:36:55 Speaker_00
I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoopes 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.
01:37:12 Speaker_00
John Hoopes has just recently started a YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for for quite a while, pretty small number of followers.
01:37:20 Speaker_00
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
01:37:30 Speaker_00
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.
01:37:48 Speaker_00
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
01:37:59 Speaker_00
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.
01:38:18 Speaker_00
And sometimes I'm perhaps over vigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archeology in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse. Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder.
01:38:29 Speaker_00
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 archeologists.
01:38:41 Speaker_01
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
01:38:59 Speaker_01
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.
01:39:13 Speaker_01
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.
01:39:25 Speaker_01
He's basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity.
01:39:29 Speaker_00
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.
01:39:41 Speaker_01
So given that, can you maybe steel man the case that archaeologists make about this period that we've been talking about?
01:39:53 Speaker_01
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 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.
01:40:13 Speaker_01
Can you sort of make the case for that?
01:40:15 Speaker_00
No, I completely understand why that is the position of archaeology because that's what they found.
01:40:20 Speaker_00
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.
01:40:33 Speaker_00
And in what they found and what they've studied around the world, they don't see any traces of a lost civilization and the idea that
01:40:45 Speaker_00
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
01:41:01 Speaker_00
it triggers that aspect as well. But basically, I think majority of archaeologists are in complete good faith on this. I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me.
01:41:12 Speaker_00
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
01:41:28 Speaker_00
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.
01:41:41 Speaker_00
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.
01:41:58 Speaker_00
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.
01:42:07 Speaker_00
It took decades in the case of the Clovis First 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.
01:42:22 Speaker_01
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?
01:42:35 Speaker_01
You said that he's one of your big critics, but what do you like about his ideas and what were you maybe bothered by?
01:42:42 Speaker_00
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,
01:42:51 Speaker_00
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
01:43:12 Speaker_00
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.
01:43:23 Speaker_00
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
01:43:34 Speaker_00
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.
01:43:45 Speaker_00
I thought, my God, Flint has a point here. If there'd been 3 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.
01:43:58 Speaker_00
But then I discovered that it isn't 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It's much, much less than that. Maybe it's 250,000, still a large number, but most of them from the last 1,000 years.
01:44:12 Speaker_00
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.
01:44:26 Speaker_00
The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, 100 kilometer ocean voyage, but nevertheless it was an ocean voyage.
01:44:34 Speaker_00
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.
01:44:47 Speaker_00
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.
01:44:57 Speaker_01
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, 50,000 years ago.
01:45:12 Speaker_01
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.
01:45:28 Speaker_00
I don't know what's on the other side of that water. You can't see 90 kilometers. Humans did it. Yeah. And again, it's that urge to explore. And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made the journey there and back.
01:45:41 Speaker_00
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.
01:45:52 Speaker_00
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.
01:46:05 Speaker_00
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.
01:46:19 Speaker_00
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.
01:46:31 Speaker_00
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 landmass.
01:46:50 Speaker_00
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.
01:47:08 Speaker_00
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.
01:47:20 Speaker_00
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.
01:47:35 Speaker_00
And this certainly would have involved multiple boats and boats of a significant size.
01:47:40 Speaker_01
And there's no archaeological evidence of those boats?
01:47:43 Speaker_00
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.
01:47:55 Speaker_00
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.
01:48:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:48:17 Speaker_00
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.
01:48:25 Speaker_00
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.
01:48:34 Speaker_01
Do you think one day we'll find a ship that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old?
01:48:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:48:54 Speaker_00
And then the other thing to take into account is the Younger Dryas event itself and the cataclysmic circumstances of that event.
01:49:05 Speaker_00
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.
01:49:19 Speaker_01
So okay, so that's back to the three million shipwrecks.
01:49:23 Speaker_00
Yeah.
01:49:23 Speaker_01
So what's your takeaway from that debate?
01:49:26 Speaker_00
Well, my takeaway from that debate is that I should have been better prepared and I should have been less angry.
01:49:34 Speaker_00
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.
01:49:55 Speaker_00
He's always avoided taking direct responsibility, pretty much always avoided.
01:49:59 Speaker_00
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.
01:50:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:50:27 Speaker_00
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,
01:50:39 Speaker_00
and that somehow I'm to deduce that from what they have found, they're not gonna find anything else, at least not anything to do with the lost civilization.
01:50:48 Speaker_01
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.
01:50:55 Speaker_01
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 has is the opposite of racist very often.
01:51:08 Speaker_01
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.
01:51:23 Speaker_01
Oh, I didn't know you're, 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 people that just kind of are learning about you for the first time.
01:51:36 Speaker_01
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.
01:51:49 Speaker_01
It can really bother a person who is actually trying to do good science or just trying to inspire people with different ideas.
01:51:55 Speaker_00
was being deliberately misrepresented and I felt that I as a human being was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful.
01:52:07 Speaker_00
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.
01:52:18 Speaker_00
And these are kids who are gonna grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that grandpa was some kind of racist.
01:52:26 Speaker_00
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.
01:52:41 Speaker_00
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.
01:52:57 Speaker_00
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.
01:53:06 Speaker_00
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.
01:53:19 Speaker_00
At least Flint was willing to do that, and I'm grateful to him for that.
01:53:22 Speaker_00
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.
01:53:35 Speaker_00
He doesn't give up. So all of those things about him I admire and 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 You
01:53:51 Speaker_01
to say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end in him speaking about agriculture, it was pretty interesting.
01:53:58 Speaker_01
So the techniques of archeology are pretty interesting, like where you can get some insights through the fog of time about what people were doing, how they were living.
01:54:11 Speaker_00
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 archeologists do.
01:54:21 Speaker_00
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.
01:54:36 Speaker_00
But 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.
01:54:47 Speaker_00
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.
01:54:59 Speaker_00
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 precession of the star Sirius over a period of time. Archaeologists aren't interested in any of that.
01:55:13 Speaker_00
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
01:55:26 Speaker_00
and also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds.
01:55:33 Speaker_00
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.
01:55:49 Speaker_00
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.
01:56:00 Speaker_00
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.
01:56:15 Speaker_00
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.
01:56:23 Speaker_00
It was very much the case with archaeologist Marti Passanen from the University of Helsinki and with geographer Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian geographer, very, very senior figure.
01:56:36 Speaker_00
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.
01:56:47 Speaker_00
Indeed, we found some of them ourselves with LiDAR while we were there.
01:56:50 Speaker_01
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.
01:57:09 Speaker_01
So the idea that they built stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very kind of deep relationship with the the sky.
01:57:19 Speaker_00
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 like squaring the circle.
01:57:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:57:41 Speaker_00
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.
01:57:56 Speaker_01
Everything we're talking about is so full of mystery. It's just fascinating, especially the farther back we go.
01:58:01 Speaker_00
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.
01:58:12 Speaker_00
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.
01:58:28 Speaker_00
The whole story of life on Earth is deeply mysterious. I mean, we were talking about the timeline of human beings, but if you go back to the formation of the Earth itself,
01:58:39 Speaker_00
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.
01:58:54 Speaker_00
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.
01:59:09 Speaker_00
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.
01:59:19 Speaker_00
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.
01:59:30 Speaker_00
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.
01:59:48 Speaker_00
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
02:00:02 Speaker_00
put bacteria, genetically engineered bacteria, into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions.
02:00:10 Speaker_00
And the 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.
02:00:23 Speaker_01
If we as a human civilization continue, I think that is the 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 there's just plants.
02:00:39 Speaker_01
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,
02:00:52 Speaker_00
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.
02:01:03 Speaker_00
If we were facing a complete extinction of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be made to preserve it somehow.
02:01:13 Speaker_00
And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable.
02:01:20 Speaker_01
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.
02:01:32 Speaker_01
So it seems like life was pretty good for single cell organisms, that there was no need for multicellularity, that like for animals, for any of this kind of stuff. Why is that?
02:01:43 Speaker_01
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 forcing function to do that kind of leap?
02:01:58 Speaker_01
And the same, I mean, for us to be selfish and self-obsessed, for us humans, 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?
02:02:13 Speaker_01
Why are they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries and it feels like the more we
02:02:23 Speaker_01
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.
02:02:38 Speaker_00
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.
02:02:50 Speaker_00
because this planet is part of the universe, and God knows what else is out there in the universe.
02:02:55 Speaker_01
Why do you think Homo sapiens evolved? What was the magic thing? There's a bunch of theories about fire leading to cooking, which can fuel the brain, that's one. The other is like social interaction. We're able to
02:03:12 Speaker_01
use their imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas and tell great stories, and that is somehow an evolutionary advantage. Do you have any favorite conception of?
02:03:22 Speaker_00
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.
02:03:33 Speaker_00
And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals, that we killed them off. But at the same time, we were into breeding with the Neanderthals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone.
02:03:47 Speaker_00
They are still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There's another theory that I've read about.
02:03:55 Speaker_00
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.
02:04:11 Speaker_00
That's another suggestion of why the Neanderthals died out. There's lots of possibilities that have been put forward. Maybe we just out-competed them.
02:04:20 Speaker_00
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.
02:04:33 Speaker_00
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.
02:04:45 Speaker_01
For our discussion, though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers.
02:04:50 Speaker_00
Yes.
02:04:51 Speaker_01
They spread. I mean, I didn't know this
02:04:53 Speaker_00
The fact that Homo erectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say that's what I think I'm doing.
02:05:08 Speaker_00
I'm exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way, making my own path and defining my own route.
02:05:17 Speaker_01
That's the leap from non-human to human. 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.
02:05:37 Speaker_01
Can you explain what that means?
02:05:38 Speaker_00
I think that shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science. When I spend time with shamans in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way.
02:06:01 Speaker_00
They're always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms, for example, of the ayahuasca brew to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way.
02:06:12 Speaker_00
The invention of curare is a remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down to shamans in the Amazon. They are the scientists of the hunter-forager state of society. And they were the ancient leaders of human civilization.
02:06:33 Speaker_00
So I think all civilization arises out of shamanism. And shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor where experimentation is undertaken and exploration and investigation of the environment around us.
02:06:46 Speaker_00
And what I'm suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did and used that study of the skies. And develop navigational techniques and were able to sail and explore the Earth.
02:07:05 Speaker_00
But that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shamans are still using in the Amazon to this day. And I do see them as scientists in a very proper use of the word.
02:07:21 Speaker_01
But do you think something like ayahuasca was a part of that process?
02:07:25 Speaker_00
Yes, Ayahuasca is the result of shamanistic investigation of what's available in the Amazon.
02:07:34 Speaker_00
Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today, and some people see it as a miracle cure for all kinds of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is, perhaps it can be in certain ways.
02:07:48 Speaker_00
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. But the ayahuasca vine is only one of two principal ingredients in the ayahuasca brew.
02:08:04 Speaker_00
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.
02:08:17 Speaker_00
and its leaves are rich in dimethyltryptamine DMT, which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic known to science. And the other source comes from another vine, Diplopteris cabrerana, which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT.
02:08:37 Speaker_00
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.
02:08:51 Speaker_00
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.
02:09:04 Speaker_00
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.
02:09:16 Speaker_00
And they've gone around and they found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary visionary experiences.
02:09:23 Speaker_01
Just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten. Yeah. It consumed and smoked or all kinds of combinations.
02:09:30 Speaker_00
to arrive at that. Exactly, exactly. To realize that this is something very special. And then to use the principles there 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.
02:09:47 Speaker_00
But Yahé is made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another vine, Diplopteris cabrerana, which contain not only NMDMT, which is the DMT that everybody's pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO DMT.
02:10:04 Speaker_00
And the Yahé experience, which I have also had, in my view, is more intense and more powerful, almost to the point of being overwhelming, than the Ayahuasca experience.
02:10:18 Speaker_00
But the result of this sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just smelling it in the cup. But then unleashes these...
02:10:42 Speaker_00
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.
02:11:00 Speaker_00
And that what the ayahuasca brew and certain other psychedelics, like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well.
02:11:08 Speaker_00
LSD can do it, but ayahuasca is the master in this, 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.
02:11:25 Speaker_00
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.
02:11:41 Speaker_00
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 consciousness
02:11:56 Speaker_00
we locked into 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.
02:12:11 Speaker_00
But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important.
02:12:22 Speaker_00
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.
02:12:35 Speaker_00
There's the classic example of Kerry Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD.
02:12:42 Speaker_00
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
02:12:57 Speaker_00
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.
02:13:08 Speaker_00
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.
02:13:20 Speaker_00
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?
02:13:31 Speaker_00
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.
02:13:45 Speaker_00
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 in ayahuasca and in yagé.
02:14:02 Speaker_00
And that's one of the reasons why the shamans say 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.
02:14:13 Speaker_00
And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or yahweh, you drink it enough times, I've had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca.
02:14:25 Speaker_00
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.
02:14:38 Speaker_00
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.
02:14:53 Speaker_00
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.
02:15:09 Speaker_00
The more baggage you carry in your life, part of 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.
02:15:27 Speaker_00
And I think, 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.
02:15:42 Speaker_00
you can access them through LSD and you certainly can access them through psilocybe mushrooms as well in large enough dose.
02:15:49 Speaker_01
Both possibilities as you described are interesting and to me they're kind of akin to each other.
02:15:56 Speaker_01
is 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.
02:16:18 Speaker_01
So it's almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit.
02:16:25 Speaker_00
It is. And the curious thing is that the same iconography, people paint their visions after ayahuasca sessions.
02:16:34 Speaker_00
People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lascaux, for example, and of course they had access to silicide mushrooms in prehistoric Europe. There's a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is painted.
02:16:51 Speaker_00
I like to give credit where credit is due, and there are two names that need to be mentioned here.
02:16:55 Speaker_00
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 what switched on the modern human mind.
02:17:11 Speaker_00
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, a 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
02:17:29 Speaker_00
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.
02:17:47 Speaker_00
So typically you get a lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities. And those entities often are therianthropes,
02:17:56 Speaker_00
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.
02:18:10 Speaker_00
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
02:18:22 Speaker_00
and at the University of California at San Diego, where volunteers are being given extended DMT.
02:18:30 Speaker_00
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.
02:18:49 Speaker_00
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.
02:19:04 Speaker_00
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.
02:19:15 Speaker_00
It's still going to have that same power. There's no tolerance there. So that's how they can use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state.
02:19:24 Speaker_00
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. about encounters with sentient others.
02:19:35 Speaker_00
There's even a group now called Sentient Others, where people are exchanging, volunteers are now exchanging their experiences.
02:19:41 Speaker_00
They didn't do, 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 within sentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons.
02:19:53 Speaker_00
Now, to me, that's wild. What is going on here? 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.
02:20:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, and would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization, is it because 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.
02:20:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, and can help us to be better members of our own community with moral lessons. Yeah, more contributing members of our community, more caring, more nurturing members of our community. That's got to be good for any community.
02:20:40 Speaker_00
I've said this a dozen times, but I'll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would
02:20:48 Speaker_00
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.
02:21:02 Speaker_00
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.
02:21:19 Speaker_00
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.
02:21:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, they would be doing it for the right reasons.
02:21:33 Speaker_01
I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump and actually brought up this 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.
02:21:45 Speaker_00
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.
02:21:56 Speaker_00
In my opinion, the so-called war on drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue.
02:22:08 Speaker_00
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.
02:22:21 Speaker_00
In the case of even cannabis, I know that's one of the great things that's happening in America.
02:22:27 Speaker_00
It's happening state by state where cannabis is being legalized and that draconian hand of government is being taken off the back of people who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol, which is glorified in our society.
02:22:44 Speaker_00
We cannot say that we are free if we allow a government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness while doing no harm to others.
02:22:55 Speaker_00
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 or may not experience in the inner sanctum of our own consciousness?
02:23:08 Speaker_00
I think it's a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty. And we would have much less drug problems
02:23:17 Speaker_00
these drugs were all legalized and made available to people without shaming them, without punishing them in any way, but just part of normal social life.
02:23:28 Speaker_00
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,
02:23:36 Speaker_00
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.
02:23:49 Speaker_01
And for me also it's exciting some of these substances like psilocybin are being integrated into scientific studies at large scales. It's really interesting.
02:23:58 Speaker_00
We've seen a revolution in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20-25 years. They were in that highly demonized category.
02:24:07 Speaker_00
But again, it's one of those paradigms which gets overwhelmed by new evidence and it began to be realized that psilocybin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people suffer.
02:24:21 Speaker_00
Post-traumatic stress disorder, the fear of death when you're suffering from terminal cancer can be overwhelming and it's been found that psilocybin can remove that. Deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive psilocybin journey.
02:24:41 Speaker_00
They just go away. There's really good science on this, and they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more. We'll see it happening.
02:24:48 Speaker_00
I'm not sure if it'll happen as fast as I would like to see it happen in my lifetime, but it is going to happen.
02:24:53 Speaker_01
Yeah, actually, just recently found out that you had a TED Talk, War on Consciousness, that was taken down. And that was just part of just the general resistance, because it was a pretty, it wasn't a radical.
02:25:09 Speaker_00
No, 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 shaming as a result.
02:25:24 Speaker_00
So it was a TEDx talk, not a TED talk, organized by a local TED group. They call them TEDx talks. And I gave this talk about the war on consciousness.
02:25:37 Speaker_00
And it was immediately pulled down from Ted's main channel 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.
02:25:50 Speaker_00
And actually their banning of it made it go viral in a way that would not have happened otherwise. But again, it's a sign that
02:25:57 Speaker_00
that points of view that are not acceptable to those in positions of power are simply dismissed and shut down, or at least attempts are made to do so.
02:26:08 Speaker_01
In general, just along that line of thinking, I'm pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today will seem silly. to humans from a hundred years from now.
02:26:17 Speaker_00
You bet it will, especially if we harness psychedelics to investigate consciousness. And you know, that is what is happening at Imperial College right now, is the investigation of the experience.
02:26:32 Speaker_00
They're not looking, there are other trials that are looking for the therapeutic potential of DMT, but in this case,
02:26:38 Speaker_00
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.
02:26:48 Speaker_01
And for me, from an engineer perspective, it's interesting if it's possible to engineer consciousness in artificial beings. It's another way to approach the question of how special is human consciousness. From where does it arise?
02:27:07 Speaker_01
Is it something that permeates all of life? And then 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 that evolved to create humans? And what is truly special about humans?
02:27:21 Speaker_01
And it's both scary and exciting to consider the possibility that we can create something like this.
02:27:26 Speaker_00
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.
02:27:37 Speaker_00
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,
02:27:50 Speaker_00
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. And I think consciousness is everywhere. I think it's the basis of everything.
02:28:03 Speaker_00
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 guess.
02:28:17 Speaker_01
That'd be a fascinating, because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness.
02:28:22 Speaker_00
And see if consciousness enters, if they become consciousness. Isn't there some suggestion that artificial intelligence is already becoming conscious?
02:28:29 Speaker_01
That makes humans really uncomfortable. 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 scary.
02:28:40 Speaker_00
Well, look how other people make us uncomfortable too. I mean, look at the state of the world today. All the conflicts that are raging. That's because we're afraid. When I say we, I'm speaking nation by nation. We are afraid of other people.
02:28:56 Speaker_00
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 root of many, many conflicts, this fear. And so fear of AI may not be such a good idea after all.
02:29:07 Speaker_00
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.
02:29:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive.
02:29:19 Speaker_00
Well, it can be destructive, and it can shut you down completely.
02:29:23 Speaker_01
If you look into the future, maybe the next hundred years, what do you hope are the interesting discoveries in archeology that we'll find?
02:29:31 Speaker_00
Well, I'd really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built. And we now have, with new tech, with scanning technology, it's now become apparent that there are many major voids within the Great Pyramid.
02:29:44 Speaker_00
Right above the Grand Gallery, there's what looks like a second Grand Gallery that has been identified with remote scanning. And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up already, are being found as a result of this.
02:29:59 Speaker_00
So it may be that the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its secrets. I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It's designed to invite its own initiates.
02:30:12 Speaker_00
Some people aren't interested in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it, and they're drawn towards it.
02:30:18 Speaker_00
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.
02:30:31 Speaker_00
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?
02:30:42 Speaker_00
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?
02:30:56 Speaker_00
It's like very frustrating, but it's saying to us, keep on exploring. If you're persistent enough, we'll eventually give you the answer.
02:31:05 Speaker_00
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. later pyramids might have been.
02:31:23 Speaker_00
Actually, no pharaonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid. 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 Saqqara, were tombs.
02:31:38 Speaker_00
But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it six million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device.
02:31:53 Speaker_00
This is something that is asking us to understand it. And I hope we will understand it, and I hope Egyptologists will be willing to set aside that prejudice that they're only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities.
02:32:05 Speaker_00
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.
02:32:12 Speaker_01
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.
02:32:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, very, very much so. As above, so below. Which is an idea in the Hermetica. 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.
02:32:38 Speaker_00
But it's expressing an ancient Egyptian idea to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.
02:32:44 Speaker_01
So you think there's something interesting to be discovered about how it was built? You mean beyond the ideas of using ramps and wet sand?
02:32:52 Speaker_00
Yeah, ramps won't do it. Ramps won't do it, nor will wet sand. It's true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand.
02:33:03 Speaker_00
There are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the sledge pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath.
02:33:12 Speaker_00
And that's a perfectly respectable way to move a 200-ton block of stone across sand, flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not going to help you get
02:33:25 Speaker_00
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.
02:33:38 Speaker_00
Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there. Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps?
02:33:48 Speaker_00
If you're going to carry 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.
02:34:03 Speaker_00
And it's calculated that a 10-degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp. And that ramp can't just be compacted sand, since heavy objects are being hauled up.
02:34:16 Speaker_00
It's gonna have to be made of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don't see 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.
02:34:28 Speaker_00
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.
02:34:37 Speaker_01
I love the Great Pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved by later peoples. I mean, this is, I don't know if you're aware of the 10,000 year clock.
02:34:50 Speaker_01
That was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas. So they're building a clock that ticks once a year for 10,000 years.
02:35:01 Speaker_01
So it's talking about, and it's supposed to sort of run, you know, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs.
02:35:08 Speaker_01
And it's an example of modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong or the future humans that are way different come back and they, they analyze what happened here.
02:35:26 Speaker_01
How can we create monuments that they can then analyze? And in that way, be curious about, 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?
02:35:43 Speaker_00
And the answer is that the majority of what we build now wouldn't last. It would be gone within a few thousand years. But what would last is massive megalithic structures like the Great Pyramid. That would last.
02:35:58 Speaker_00
And it could be used to send a message to the future. I think Gobekli Tepe serves a similar function. I mean, there it was. It was buried 10,400 years ago. And then for the next 10,000 years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there.
02:36:15 Speaker_00
It took the genius of Klaus Schmidt, the original excavator, to realize what he'd found and what it was. But the great thing about the sealing of Göbekli Tepe, the deliberate burial of Göbekli Tepe,
02:36:30 Speaker_00
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.
02:36:42 Speaker_01
So you mentioned that the pyramids and some of the other amazing things that humans have built was the result of us humans struggling with our mortality.
02:36:53 Speaker_00
That's 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 and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife.
02:37:08 Speaker_00
And this is, of course, the fundamental mystery that all human beings face. 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.
02:37:20 Speaker_00
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?
02:37:31 Speaker_00
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.
02:37:47 Speaker_00
There's no such thing as a 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. That's the great mystery.
02:37:58 Speaker_00
It's a great mystery that we all share. And those cultures that have investigated it, and ancient Egypt is the best example, have investigated it thoroughly and map out the journey that we make after death. But that notion of a journey after death,
02:38:13 Speaker_00
and of hazards and challenges along the way, and ultimately of a judgment. That notion is found right around the world, and it even manifests into the three monotheistic faiths that are still present in the world today.
02:38:25 Speaker_01
Well, you're one such human, and you said you contemplate your own death. Are you afraid of it? No.
02:38:34 Speaker_00
I'm not afraid of death at all. I'm curious about death. I think it could be very interesting. I think it's the beginning of the next great adventure. So I don't fear it.
02:38:46 Speaker_00
And I would like to live as long as my body is healthy enough to make living worthwhile. But I don't fear death. What I do fear is pain. I do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the faculties can bring.
02:39:03 Speaker_00
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 It's going to come to all of us. I accept it. It's going to come to me.
02:39:16 Speaker_00
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 that there's something beyond this life. It isn't heaven. It isn't hell. But there's something.
02:39:32 Speaker_00
The soul goes on. I think reincarnation is a very plausible idea. Again, modern science would reject that.
02:39:40 Speaker_00
But there's the excellent work of Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Past Lives, who found that children up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives. And in cultures
02:39:51 Speaker_00
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.
02:40:00 Speaker_00
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 details.
02:40:13 Speaker_00
So 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.
02:40:24 Speaker_00
All the investment that the universe has put into creating this home for life may have a much bigger purpose than just accident. What a beautiful mystery this whole thing is. Yeah, we are immersed in mystery. We live in the midst of mystery.
02:40:39 Speaker_00
We're surrounded by mystery, and if we pretend otherwise, we're deluding ourselves.
02:40:44 Speaker_01
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.
02:40:54 Speaker_01
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent.
02:41:09 Speaker_01
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.