#2051 - Graham Hancock
2023-10-25 03:14:26
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
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Hello, Joe Rogan.
Good to see you, my friend.
Good to be back with you.
Congratulations on the success of your show. It's been very awesome to see, and it's been really awesome to hear from so many people about it that know that I'm really fascinated by the subject. And the reviews have all been super positive for my friend, so I'm really excited about it.
Well, thank you for appearing on Ancient Apocalypse as well.
My pleasure, my pleasure. It's a subject to me that is so unbelievably fascinating and so bizarre that it's controversial. I do not understand. I mean, we were just talking about this, and I said, let's stop talking when we're getting coffee. To me, it seems like there's things that are concrete, right?
We know when Genghis Khan lived. We know when they built the 16th chapel. We know a lot about the Parthenon, the Acropolis. We know about 2,000 years ago. When you start going way, way, way, way, way back, things get real sketchy.
And to not admit that seems so crazy. When they find things, when they're making apartment buildings sometimes, they're digging into the ground, they go, oh, hold on a second. What is this? Doesn't it happen in Mexico City all the time?
Yeah, it does. And actually, that's how a lot of archaeology happens. Somebody's building a road or building apartment buildings or building a dam, and they call in archaeologists to see if there's anything, any interesting archaeology there. And this is part of the problem I have with archaeology as a discipline. It likes to think of itself as scientific.
But what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.
Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?
Yeah, I think it's a complicated mixture of things. First of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo. You know, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with. And then it takes the next step and really seeks to attack out-on-the-edge ideas. Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out-on-the-edge idea.
We've had lost civilizations before. The Indus Valley. civilization today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s. It was found by accident. And, you know, every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal new information.
But the reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995.. But with Ancient Apocalypse, a much bigger platform reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical. And it went on for a very long time. And it appeared to be, it appeared to me, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy.
I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying, and they genuinely think I'm harmful. But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix.
How did they come up with that? How is it harmful to be speculating about ancient structures? It's interesting. Yeah.
That's what I don't get.
The other thing is the racist angle. Like, we're talking about the exact same people. Yeah. We're just talking about an older time. It doesn't make any sense at all.
In fact, it kind of points to the superiority of the Egyptian race.
Absolutely.
I mean, whatever they did, however they did, it, is unbelievably extraordinary. Yeah. And I think pointing that out is amazing. Yeah. I mean, what you're discovering and what you're showing on that show is that there are a lot of mysteries when it comes to the history of human beings, and we should embrace those mysteries.
Because there's concrete, irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of like Gobekli Tepe and some of the other structures. I mean, this is wild stuff. Yeah. The idea that human beings had an advanced civilization 10,000, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, what happened? That's what's really interesting.
What happened? And that's why it's ancient apocalypse. Yeah. Because we know that there was a global cataclysm, a slow one, 1,200 years long, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, called the Younger Dryas. There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not really disputed.
The accusations that were put against me and the show of being, the accusations included the words racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic.
They give you the full hand.
The show doesn't touch on any of these issues. Race is not mentioned in the show. So what the archaeologists were doing there, they were going back to Fingerprints of the Gods. that I wrote in 1995, in which I reported indigenous traditions about the appearance of bearded foreigners bringing knowledge after a cataclysm to the shattered survivors of that cataclysm. And in some cases in those traditions, those knowledge bringers are described as white-skinned.
And that is why the show was accused of racism, because archaeology has since taken the view that all of those stories were made up by the Spanish. And that seems to me completely ridiculous, both in Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia. We have traditions. We have them, Viracocha. We have Quetzalcoatl.
We have Bochica. This is a Pan-American myth. And actually I think it's racist of archaeology to imagine that the magic powers of the Spaniards could impose a myth upon indigenous peoples all over the Americas, that they'd just be so stupid that they would fall for this story told by the Spaniards. Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions. And I was reporting them in that book and I stand by them.
And it turns out that there's actually a huge argument within academia about this. And my critics were just giving one side of that argument.
And what is the rest of the argument? What is the other side of it?
Well, the other side of the argument that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards made up these stories. These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru. They were reported to them by indigenous peoples as indigenous myths. And the fact that they're widespread across the Americas makes it very unlikely. I mean, if it was one story, but if it's a dozen stories and they're told over a huge geographical region, the notion that this is a Spanish conspiracy, it's an ultimate conspiracy theory.
I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who reported them, but it gave a very useful handle for people to attack this series on.
So, the theory is that it was an uneven destruction, right? And that some places fared better than other places in terms of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, right? Yeah. And that those people might have reclaimed a modicum of civilization.
Yeah, that's the idea. And, by the way, on that point, I have never, in anything that I've written or anything that I've broadcast ever myself, suggested that white races were involved. Actually, it would be quite stupid to do so, because if you look at Europe during the Ice Age, and I'm talking about a lost civilization of the Ice Age, Northern Europe and North America were absolutely inhospitable wildernesses during the Ice Age. They were frozen, they were dry, and they were dangerous. And they were not the places that people would go.
People naturally gravitated south, towards the equator, towards the tropics. That's where I would expect to find traces of a lost civilization. And that's where I do find traces of a lost civilization. You don't really find... I've never reported anything about the UK.
For example, in my books, we have Stonehenge, we have Avery, we have these stone circles, but they're not old enough. That was the time when the UK started to get warmer. And it's the same with the rest of Northern Europe. And it's the same with the northern part of North America. You have to go down to the southern part of North America.
You have to go into Mexico. You have to go into South America to really find an environment during the Ice Age that would have nurtured a high civilization.
And there's a lot of speculation as to why they weren't able to cross the Bering landmass too, right?
Well, again, this is an area where there has been a narrative that archeology has sought to impose upon us. And this was, this was called the Clovis first idea that there was a people who archeologists, called the Clovis people. We don't know what they called themselves, uh, in North America and traces of their characteristic, uh, tools, particular sort of fluted points, arrowhead spear points, turn up from about 13,400 years ago and end abruptly 12,800 years ago. And for a long time with the beginning of the younger dryers. and for a long time, archeology maintained that this Clovis culture, so-called Clovis culture, we don't know what they call themselves were the first Americans and that there were no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago.
And bit by bit, the new evidence has come in, which has forced archeologists, screaming and tearing out their hair, to back away from the Clovis first paradigm and admit that actually, yes, there were people here before that, but even then they're reluctant to go very far back. We've recently had these, these footprints in, in white sands in, in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so. that's largely being accepted now, but there are much earlier dates. There's 130,000 years ago from the Cerruti Mastodon site near San Diego.
That's the one that's being disputed, because they say it could have been rocks that crushed the bones and made them that way. Yeah.
What I, what I see again, is a, is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by masses of evidence and published in nature. You know, nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts. And, and then the critics look for any way to get rid of it.
Can I stop you here? Are you aware of the bone yard in Alaska?
I've heard of it and it sounds fascinating. I don't think he's revealed much about that.
it's an amazing, amazing discovery. This guy's a gold miner and he has this large piece of land. In Alaska, they're mining for gold and they start finding like tusks and bones. And in one area, that's only a few acres, they found thousands and thousands of woolly, mammoth, bones and tusks and, and, um, a saber tooth tiger. It wasn't saber tooth tiger.
No, it was short face bear. They found all these,
like all the megafauna,
many animals that weren't even supposed to exist in Alaska. And he's like, look, we have the bones of it. And one of the things they found recently was bones that were sawed, clearly sawed.
Human workmanship.
But like a sophisticated tool. Let me see, see if you could pull it up so you could see how it looked.
Clearly cut.
Isn't that amazing?
Absolutely.
So they're trying to find out what the dates on these are.
That was my next question. Have they, have they dated it?
They just got these recently. This is fairly recent. So I, I believe he's had some issues with universities, not giving back his stuff and selling off his stuff. Oh dear. Yeah.
Well, he recently started a bone rush in the East river. They, because it turns out that during the, like the 1920s and 1930s stuff that they had taken from his land before he owned it, they had dumped some of it because they had so much of it. They dumped it in the East river and, you know, they were balking at it. But meanwhile, these people have found it there. Yeah.
So here it goes. I think many of you are intrigued by these ice age bones found, the bone urine, Alaska. If you zoom in, you'll see that it's been sanded or somehow been worked down to a smooth finish on the end. I'm going to carbon date. One of them will post the results when I do.
So. this is three weeks ago. So it's probably going to take a little longer, but look how smooth it is.
Perfectly cut. And we'll, we'll look forward to, to seeing the dating results. But the fact that we're dealing with megafauna that went extinct between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, uh, implies very strongly that it's at least that old.
Not only that is area has a very thick layer of carbon that seems to indicate some sort of a mass burn or some sort of a horrible disaster. So they're, they're going through these layers of things and they're finding an unbelievable amount of animals that died in this area, just a mass die out.
Yes. And, and what would cause a mass die out? Not human hunting, right? This is, I'm, I'm strongly opposed to what they call the overkill hypothesis. This is one of the alternative explanations for why the megafauna went extinct at that time.
Is that hunter gatherers literally wiped out all the megafauna. And to me that for a couple of reasons, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. First of all, because hunter gatherers we know in the world today do not wipe out their prey animals. They live in coexistence with them.
They live in balance with them. They don't just destroy them all. It's our kind of culture that destroys animals.
Like what we did with the bison.
What we did with the bison. Yeah. And, and therefore it seems very unhunter gatherer like activity to completely destroy the, the, the megafauna. And the other thing is the simultaneous extinction of large numbers of creatures. that is happening very, very, very quickly, suggests to me that we're looking at a disaster of some sort.
And that's why the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which is solid science, although undoubtedly disputed, which suggests that multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet hit the earth 12,800 years ago. Many of them didn't hit the earth. Many of them exploded in the sky. They were not that big, maybe a hundred meters in diameter. So they were air bursts, but they leave these characteristic signatures in the ground.
Like Tunguska.
Exactly like Tunguska. The Tunguska event is a recent example of that. 30th of June, 1908 happens to be at the peak of the Beta Taurids. And the Taurid meteor stream is identified as the likely culprit for what happened in the, in the Younger Dryas.
Wildfires burning, you get these impacts smashing into, smashing into the earth, bursting in the air over forests. They cause huge fires and huge, and that's why you get enormous amounts of charcoal as a result. And then the larger objects, it's thought, hit the North American ice cap and caused a very large amount of meltwater to flow into the world ocean. And that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the, of, of the Younger Dryas. We can argue there, there are alternative theories.
Maybe solar activity was involved. Robert Shock prefers a change in solar activity. And, and, you know, kudos to Robert. He's a, he's a brilliant scientist and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx. Any scientist these days in the field of archaeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archaeological narrative is wrong, immediately gets massively attacked.
And I think that's, I think that's most unfortunate. A couple of points I'd like to make about this. First of all, we said at the beginning, most archaeology, certainly in the industrialized countries, is a result of a dam or a road being built. An archaeologist being called in to see if there's anything there. It's not a targeted search.
It's kind of random. Something's happening and archaeologists go in there. And then there's huge areas of the world that have had very little archaeology done in them. Those include the Amazon rainforest, where I've just been. I've been three weeks in the Brazilian Amazon and another couple of weeks in Peru.
And there are extraordinary revelations coming out of the Amazon rainforest. Now, the Amazon rainforest, up until very recently, had very little archaeology done. You're talking about 6 million square kilometers of the earth's surface, which has hardly been touched by archaeology. And now it is being touched by archaeology, thanks to LIDAR, which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy. We're finding that we have to rewrite the whole story of the Amazon, that there were potentially populations of millions living in the Amazon, that there were cities, they were joined by roads hundreds of kilometers in length.
All of these things are recent discoveries, which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon. Same goes for the submerged continental shelves. 27 million square kilometers of the best real estate on earth that were above water during the ice age are underwater. now. Yes, there's been some marine archaeology, but not enough to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
And the same with the Sahara desert, 9 million square kilometers, a little bit of archaeology done. But before archaeologists say there was no lost civilization, this is what the Society for American Archaeology said in their open letter to Netflix, complaining about my show. They said, we know that there was no lost civilization during the ice age. And my question to them is how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the earth, the picture is not complete. They should be saying, we don't think there was a lost civilization during the ice age.
Fine. But to say, we know there wasn't, that's, that's completely wrong.
Well, it's silly, and it's also, it becomes more and more of a problem. The more things get discovered and the more they push back harder and more emotionally and more religiously. Yeah. It's really kind of crazy the way they behave. That is, as if they have like an accurate map, like the way they viewed some of the older hieroglyphs that depict civilizations that were 30,000 years ago, like Kings and the lineage.
The King lists from ancient Egypt go back 30,, 30 plus thousand years.
But they want to pretend that those are myth.
Yeah. And yet for their chronology of ancient Egypt, they actually use the King lists. The moment those King lists start giving dates that fall within dates that archaeologists like, everything before those dates, they say, Oh, they just made it up.
How crazy is that? Wouldn't it be a fascinating alternative? If you were an archaeologist to go, you know what? Maybe this King's list is legit. Maybe this thing really is 30, 40,000 years old, and maybe that explains a lot.
And now we have to figure out how, how'd they do it.
It would be a fascinating alternative, but, but unfortunately it's not the way that archaeology works at the moment. I repeat, I, a lot of archaeologists have accused me of accusing them of a conspiracy against me.
I'm trying to make you a very cook.
Yeah. I don't see any conspiracy. I see people who do believe what they're saying and, uh, who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present, that I must be neutralized in, in any way possible. And that's a sad state of affairs. Science should embrace and explore new and different ideas.
Uh, and particularly when it comes to the human past, uh, there look, I mean, if, if I get in an airplane, I do want the pilot to be a properly qualified pilot. I want him to have undergone all the training and to be really good at what he does. But flying an airplane and studying the human past are two different things. And archaeologists often compare themselves to airline pilots. They say you wouldn't get in an airplane without a properly trained pilot.
So why are you studying the past without a properly trained archaeologist? And what I say is you've got blinkers on. You're very, you've got a very narrow perspective of what the past could be, and you're defending and protecting that perspective and imposing a narrative about the past on the public. And that's where we get into a kind of religious aspect of this, that they become the high priests of the past.
like Zahi Hawass, is an excellent example in Egypt.
Zahi is an excellent example. Um,
he does not want to even entertain the notion that there's some sort of a gap in the knowledge of history.
If you, if you just say the word Atlantis to Zahi Hawass, he goes berserk. He absolutely goes nuts. Um, and that's irrational too. Um, since we know that the Atlantis story comes from Plato, we know that Plato said the source of that story was in ancient Egypt, uh, in the temple of Neith at Sisa in the Delta, an ancestor, Solon, visited that temple and was told the story, which he put into the word. Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word.
That's one of the problems, but he called it Atlantis. But, uh, at Edfu in upper Egypt, there's, there's a whole story of a homeland of the primeval ones that was destroyed in a great cataclysm and flooded by the sea, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world, seeking to restart civilization. It's told very clearly in the Edfu building text, which fortunately have now been completely translated, sadly, only into German. I hope we'll see the full English translation in due course, but the translations I was working from when I first studied them are very good and they've been reinforced and supported by this new, fuller translation. So I think the Atlantis story does have an ancient Egyptian origin.
And I think the ancient Egyptians, Egyptians, should be proud of it rather than throwing it away. And also archaeologists should not seek to isolate the story of Atlantis from other flood myths and traditions all around the world. And that's a problem too. I mean, we have hundreds of myths and traditions from countries all around the globe, which speak of a great global cataclysm, a huge flood, often wildfires,
destruction of human beings and, and, and of animals, a few survivors who seek to restart civil, it's a global story, not a, not a single story told by Plato.
And I mean, if you hear the same story from so many different cultures, at what point in time do you go, maybe there's something to this? I mean, it's just very strange to try to deny that.
Again, we have this,
especially with the physical evidence.
Yeah. Especially with the physical evidence. And it's interesting with the physical evidence, like, like Gobekli Tepe, which is 11,600 years old. I mean, it used to be argued, Robert Shock and John Anthony West work on the great Sphinx, suggesting that the Sphinx could be 12,000 plus years old. It used to be argued that was impossible because there was no other site anywhere in the world, no other megalithic site of the same age.
And then we discover Gobekli Tepe and it's 11,600 years old. Now, if you can make Gobekli Tepe with his 20 ton megaliths, beautifully carved representations of human and animal figures in those, in those pillars, if you can do that, you can cut the great Sphinx out of bedrock as well. There's no reason to, to dismiss the geological evidence of the great Sphinx anymore. But instead what archeology is doing is trying to finesse Gobekli Tepe. They're trying to say, Oh, there was this gradual buildup to Gobekli Tepe.
And they now talk about a people who they call the Natufians. Again, we don't know what they called themselves, who were predecessors of Gobekli Tepe around 14,000 years ago. And they show things that look like a tiny little stone wall that they built. The sort of thing that you can find a dry stone wall that you can find anywhere in Wales to this day, you know, and this is supposed to be a prequel to Gobekli Tepe. You, I'm sorry, you just don't start off making dry stone walls and then wake up one morning and create 20 ton megaliths in huge stone circles, perfectly astronomically aligned, as we have at Gobekli Tepe.
Not only that, but how, like, what did, what did they do? How are you even, where are you getting those 20 ton megaliths from? How far do they have to transport?
In the case of Gobekli Tepe, not far. How far? Oh, hundreds of meters. I've stood on top of one megalith that they partially cut out of the bedrock with the T shape, but then they found a fault in it and they left it there. It would have been a 30 ton megalith.
They clearly intended to release it from the bedrock, but it had a fault. So they, they left it alone. The quarries, the, the issue of the quarries for the rock at Gobekli Tepe is not too big a problem.
But the transportation of those?
Even the transportation, you get enough people working together and they can, and they can move large stones. There's, that's, that's not in dispute, but that's where the question comes. How do you get enough people together? How do you have the organizational skills? Where do you have the mindset that plans something like this at the beginning?
And, and that is the problem, that is not answered in the case of Gobekli Tepe, that happening suddenly.
And what were they using for tools?
They're supposed to have just been using stone. There's not supposed to have been any, any metals at, at, at that period.
Not even brass?
Not even brass, not even copper. I have, I have a complicated view on Gobekli Tepe. Let's say it's my hypothesis. It's not a fact. I don't claim this as a fact.
I think that what we're looking at at Gobekli Tepe, there's no doubt that the population of, around Gobekli Tepe were all hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe started to be made. And that's the weirdest thing of all, because previously archaeology always used to say hunter-gatherer cultures did not have the manpower, did not have the organizational skills, could not generate the surpluses that would allow people to specialize in architecture and engineering and astronomy, and so on. So it used to be said that hunter-gatherers couldn't do that. Now archaeologists have backpedaled on that and they're saying, well, yeah, clearly hunter-gatherers did it. The funny thing is that, that during the thousand years that Gobekli Tepe functions, and it runs from roughly 11,600 years ago to say 9,600 years ago, during, during the 10,600 years ago, during those thousand years, the population of Gobekli Tepe transitions from being hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists.
So we see two new ideas suddenly appearing at Gobekli Tepe, enormous megalithic architecture and a shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture. And what Gobekli Tepe looks like to me is a transfer of technology. The people who already knew how to work megalithic architecture and align it precisely to the risings of particular stars, for example, Sirius, came to Gobekli Tepe at a time of chaos and cataclysm in the world. And they sought to introduce a new way of thinking. I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together.
And it's not an accident that during that thousand years, they transitioned from hunting, hunter-gathering to, to agriculture. I don't see massive technical complications in creating Gobekli Tepe, except those very precise alignments. But what I do see is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there. And that requires explanation.
How did they determine the emergence of agriculture versus agriculture that had existed in some areas and not others? Like it does now, like you can go to the Amazon and you can see hunter-gatherers, and then you can go to Sao Paulo and see a major metropolitan city.
I was just in Manaus, and it's fascinating, actually. They have a tower up there on the edge of the jungle. You can go up that tower 150 meters up, and on one side, extending endlessly, infinitely into the distance, is the Amazon rainforest. Wow. Turn the other way, and there's the city of Manaus.
Wow. Looking at you with its skyscrapers.
That's got to be wild.
It's a wild sight to see. And actually, the interesting thing about the Amazon, Joe, is it's been grievously misunderstood over the years. And fortunately, archaeology is beginning to come to terms with it. There was agriculture in the Amazon going back a very long way, going back at least 10,000 years, maybe further. We may have discussed this before, but there's this curious soil that exists in the Amazon, that they call terra preta, or Amazonian dark earth.
Recent investigations have shown, without doubt, that it's man-made, and deliberately man-made, not an accidental result of refuse tips, but a deliberate attempt to make the Amazon fertile.
And how do they know that it's deliberate?
Because they find in it the same ingredients, and amongst those ingredients are always broken bits of ceramics. That's one of the odd things. They seem to be part of what makes it work.
Really? Ceramics?
Ceramics. Ceramics mixed in there with dung, with human refuse, all deliberately put in there, not an accidental dung heap, but a place that human beings said, we're going to make this ground fertile. Because rainforest soils are not particularly fertile. The fertility of the Amazon comes entirely from the fall of leaves onto the soil. It re-fertilizes itself.
But to grow crops on the Amazon is a very different prospect. And this is where terra preta really comes into its own. And I've been standing in a pit with an archaeologist there, a terra preta pit, and you can see this beautiful, rich soil. And it is a mystery. It constantly replenishes itself.
It never gets used up. Settlers seek it out, seek out areas of terra preta. And it fits with this notion. that, no longer a notion, it's a fact, that there was a population of millions in the Amazon 10,000 years ago. And they were living a highly productive, sophisticated life.
They were using agriculture. They also gardened the Amazon. The hyperdominant trees in the Amazon are all foot-bearing trees. The Brazil nut tree, for example, which is a huge, tall tree, is a food-bearing tree. And they exist in far greater numbers than they should do if they developed naturally.
Humans manipulated the Amazon and made it serve human needs thousands and thousands of years ago. And then we have these enormous structures that are appearing in the Amazon, which are being referred to as geoglyphs. They call them geoglyphs after the Nazca Lines, actually. The Nazca Lines in Peru are huge ground images, sometimes geometrical in form, sometimes showing animals or birds or spiders, other creatures, often actually showing Amazonian animals. But in the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Acre, as a result of clearances of the Amazon that have been done for farming purposes, there's this rush to just cut the Amazon down and replace it with cattle ranches and soybean farms.
Those clearances have revealed something that, again, according to the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't be there, which is gigantic earthworks, huge ones, a bit like the henges in Europe,
enormous embankments, ditches, and in geometrical form. So you get enormous squares, enormous circles. You get a circle within a square. They keep repeating these geometrical images, and they're thousands of years old. When we were down there just recently, we had a local LIDAR guy working with us.
These days, you don't have to even use an airplane to find things with LIDAR. You can fly LIDAR off a drone. And flying his drone within a mile of known structures that are outside the rainforest. now, he found two more huge geoglyphs under the rainforest canopy, which will be investigated. And this is bizarre and puzzling.
They reckon the team working on this, that's Marty Parson of the University of Helsinki and Alceu Ranzi, who is a Brazilian archaeologist and geologist, they reckon that there's thousands of these things still under the rainforest canopy, and there's a huge, untold story. So one of the places I would look for a lost civilization is the Amazon rainforest.
How do they know that the Terra Preta replenishes itself? How does it do that?
It's something to do with microbes and bacteria that are in the soil, and they keep on regenerating. They don't get used up. It's a kind of miracle. It's not fully understood. Nobody can say they fully understand Terra Preta.
But what is fully understood, and it's understood by settlers, is that if they plant on Terra Preta, they're going to get rich crops coming out of it.
Is there a way to reproduce that in America?
Attempts have been made to reproduce it, and biochar is one of the words that comes to mind. There's even indications that some of the modern indigenous peoples of the Amazon are still creating Terra Preta. This is a whole mystery that needs to be investigated much further. We're looking at the oldest examples are more than 8,000 years old, and that's just in the areas that have been surveyed. Very likely, Terra Preta goes back much, much, much earlier than that.
Because it's such an issue with modern farmlands where they have to use these modern fertilizers.
Which are not helpful in many ways.
And they run off. The topsoil is worn out. So if they could figure out a way to reproduce Terra Preta.
This would be one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures. We could learn a lot from them about living in harmony with the environment and about clever things like Terra Preta. Clever things like curare, which is another Amazonian invention, which is the basis of modern anesthesiology. How did they do that? There's 11 ingredients in curare.
And those ingredients are not active on their own. You have to cook them all together to get this poison, which is a muscle relaxant. Why a muscle relaxant? Because if you're going to shoot a monkey 200 feet up a tree with your arrow, you don't want it coiling its tail around the tree when it dies. You want it to drop to the ground.
Ayahuasca is another Amazonian invention. And again, it consists of several ingredients, two in particular, neither of which are active on their own, but which only work when cooked together. So what I see in the Amazon is traces of a lost science, a scientific mindset.
Can I show some pictures of these neoglyphs? We have to hook up the magical HDMI.
I'll just show a few slides of them.
I forget which side the HDMI is in. I think it's in that side.
Careful with the water.
Got it? Okay.
Are we on screen?
We will be momentarily.
Here we go. Yeah, so this shows the Amazon. 6.7 million square kilometers. There's still 5.5 million left covered by rainforest. That's bigger than the entire subcontinent of India.
And hardly any archaeology has been done. And the archaeology that is being done is fascinating. And it's particularly in the state of Acre, in the southwest of Brazil, that we're seeing these extraordinary geoglyphs. Now I'm here with, I'm on the left there, that's Marti Parsonen from the University of Helsinki. And that is Fabio Filho, who's the LIDAR expert.
And that's Alceu Ranzi, who's a Brazilian geographer and archaeologist. And we're looking at the latest LIDAR discoveries. And there I'm about to take off in a plane with these two guys. It's just incredible to fly over there. I've flown over the Nazca Lines many times.
But to fly over this and to see these huge earthworks on a scale of hundreds of meters, sitting there, often encroached on by farms, was very, very, very exciting.
And what's the conventional explanation for these things?
There is no conventional explanation, because really it's only begun to be studied. Alceu first noticed them on an overflight more than 20 years ago, but it's only relatively recently that they've started to get the funding. And I want to pay tribute to Eugene Jong, who is a philanthropist, who has provided funding for these guys to continue their work and who's also provided funding to the Comet Research Group and has also provided funding for the DMT research that's being done at UCSD.
What's his name?
Eugene Jong. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. J-O-N-G. He's a brilliant philanthropist. And he's so open-minded.
And he's looking to support research in areas that the mainstream just won't touch.
That's amazing.
So we're looking at Fazenda Cipoal here, where we have an octagon with rounded corners. And then this is Santa's shot of the same place. And you can see what's going on. You see the smoke in the background there? That's the Amazon burning.
That's settlers clearing the Amazon to create more farms. But in the foreground, we have this enormous geometrical event, which is a huge oval surrounding a square.
And did they find this once they started clearing?
This was found as a result of the clearances. That's how archaeologists became aware that these things exist.
So before that, this was completely covered with trees?
Completely covered with rainforest. It's a sort of mixed blessing or mixed curse, if you like, because the clearances made it possible for us to know that these things exist. But the clearances ultimately will destroy the entire Amazon if they're allowed to continue. Jacossa, on the left, a square surrounding a circle. And here's a couple of Santa's shots of Jacossa.
You can see there's a large square earthwork and a circle in it. That's almost, not quite, but almost like the Greek exercise of squaring the circle. It's like geometrical exercises are taking place here in the Amazon. And again, a square with these curious scallops cut into the side of it and a circle. There's just so much of this stuff to Keno.
Absolutely giant, giant geoglyph. And these things really, on the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't exist. They involve enormous expenditure of effort. Creating these earthworks is a huge job. If there was a lot of stone in the Amazon, I think we'd see stone circles on them as well.
There's one place further north, called Rego Grande, where there is an earthwork with a stone circle in it, because stone is locally available.
So do you think this was the base of a structure? What is the speculation?
No, I don't think so. I've talked to indigenous people there who still respect and revere them. And they say that they were for shamanic journeying, that the population would gather within them. There would be certain areas that might be reserved for the shamans. For example, the square on the left, those two cut out areas, top, left and right of that square, it's suggested that shamans were in there and the rest of the population were in the other area.
And they were undertaking visionary journeys, perhaps using ayahuasca. Of course, the Amazonian peoples are experts in the properties of indigenous plants.
So this is their folklore, or this is their story?
Yes, this is the story of indigenous people. I talked to an Apurina elder and he said, we don't know exactly why these places were made. They were made so long ago, but we respect them. We revere them. And we think that they were used by shamans in the distant past.
So they were aware of them before the clearing?
Yes, they were aware of them before the clearing. Did they use them? Yes, they used them. And they still have community gatherings in them. No, they weren't a base for structures.
I'm drawing attention here to Severino Calazans, this large square on the left there, which has, coincidentally the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It just shows you the size of that enormous earthwork. But it's a mystery. More work needs to be done and much more needs to be surveyed. And thanks to LIDAR, that can be done non-invasively.
We can spot these things. Very small teams can go in and do a bit of excavation there and figure out what was going on. I think the story is going to go back further and further into the past.
Is there any evidence of wood structures? Did they make buildings out of wood back then?
Not that I'm aware of.
When did people start using wood as a structure?
I think you can trace wood back as a structure hundreds of thousands of years.
But when did they start using it? If you see the ancient Mayan civilizations, what you find in the Amazon, you don't find ancient wood structures, do you?
I think that's largely an artifact of the fact that wood doesn't preserve very well.
Right. So how do we know that there weren't wood structures?
There may well have been. Which have just rotted away and gone. There may well have been wooden structures there.
Because it kind of looks like foundations.
It does look like foundations. And it's just a very weird thing. But I think the main point is...
Someone made it.
Someone made it. And it involved a very large amount of organized labor in order to make it. There had to be the will and the intent in order to do that. It's interesting that the patterns are geometrical.
And are they geometrical, like with the perfect length? Yes. They match up with each other.
They're very, very good. Pazenda Parana and Severino Calazans are both aligned to true astronomical north. That's different from compass north. That requires astronomy. You can't get true north without using astronomy.
So this tells us not only was there a culture that was capable of creating large-scale public projects, but also they had astronomers amongst them.
Wow.
It's a good mystery. The other thing is, the geometrical patterns are a very common experience in ayahuasca visions, in altered states of consciousness. Our culture tends to despise altered states of consciousness, although fortunately that's changing. But in the Amazon and many indigenous cultures, they're regarded as extremely important. We can't confine ourselves to the everyday, wide-awake state of consciousness that requires us to interface with the physical world.
There are other states of consciousness which are also valuable and which bring teachings. It's just one of those facts that most people who drink ayahuasca, most of the time, at some point will experience geometrical visions. So there's a question, is there a connection here between the use of ayahuasca and the geometrical patterns?
There's a huge rock wall that has been found in the Colombian Amazon, Cerro de la Lindosa, which I'm hoping to get to this year. Eight kilometers long, covered in rock paintings. The rock paintings are dated more than 12,000 years old. They show extinct megafauna. They show giant sloths which went extinct during the Younger Dryas, for example.
And they also show the kind of entities that are seen in ayahuasca visions. They show the same sort of patterns, the same geometric patterns that are seen in ayahuasca. So there's a sense that...
Do you have any images of this place?
Cerro de la Lindosa.
You're connected to the...
Yeah, I don't have images of la Lindosa.
Oh, maybe you could Google it.
Or give the plug back to Jane.
Yeah, I'll give the plug back. I was trying to Google it and I didn't find anything. And I might have spelled her guest wrong.
How do you spell it?
La Lindosa. La Lindosa? Yeah.
Let me just...
I got it. I got it. You got it? Yeah. You're going to have to give him the cord real quick and then he'll give it back to you.
Okay. There you go.
It's literally an eight kilometer Sistine Chapel in the Colombian Amazon. That's the other thing. I mentioned. there's not a lot of rock in the Amazon. Where there is rock, they used it.
There's rock paintings all over the Amazon where rock is available. These kind of things. Yeah, that's it. These are characteristic of ayahuasca visions. But in this case, they're more than 12,000 years old.
Now, does that prove they were using ayahuasca 12,000 years ago? No.
That's very similar to like a tryptamine vision.
Totally. Totally. It does suggest that some tryptamine was being accessed at that time and resulting in these visionary images.
Boy, they were shitty drawers, weren't they? Their drawing was terrible.
But bear in mind that they're clambering 100 feet up a sheer cliff in order to-.
Still, guys, do a better job. Ridiculous.
Create these paintings.
The people were so fat. Are those people or sea turtles? What are those things? It's really interesting to see. So this is 11,000 how old?
12,000 plus.
12,000 plus?
Yeah. 12,000 plus years old.
It's interesting because if you see the paintings that they found in that cave in France, those are 30 plus thousand years old, right?
Oh, yeah. There's paintings in France. If you go to Chauvet, you're looking 36,000 years old.
Can you go to those, James?
Hollenstein Stadel in Germany.
That's that amazing Werner Herzog documentary.
They often have-.
I think it was the Cave of Dreams.
Cave of Dreams. Yeah. Look at that. We're looking at Lascaux. Hang on.
Yeah, we're looking at Lascaux. there. The bull painting there is interesting.
They were better artists.
They were.
They were.
I have to confess. They were quite a bit better. This art is very good. Jamie, if you go to the NPR, the painting of a bull, one step left from where you are, that one. This is very interesting.
There has been an argument made by a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus. And that in itself is heresy, because archaeologists who want to give everything to the Greeks say that it was the Greeks who invented the constellations of the zodiac.
Why do they think that that represents the constellation?
Because of the six little dots, which are not, I think, on the head. I think they're somewhere behind, not in this picture, which is often how the Pleiades are seen. Actually, there are seven Pleiades, but often to the naked eye you see six. And the positioning of the Pleiades in relation to the constellation of Taurus is the basis for that argument. It could be.
I'm not sure. It's been so long since I've looked at this, but I know that there are six dots there. So this cave art was going on all around the world. Some of the oldest art has been found in Indonesia. Oh, here it is.
Yeah, there's the Pleiades, the whole argument about the Pleiades. It's those dots, exactly, the ones you pointed to above the back of the bull. One, two, three, four, five, six. That is how the Pleiades are often seen with the naked eye.
Can you go back to the other image? Wow.
It's an argument. It's not accepted by mainstream archaeology because of their narrative, which is that the discovery of the constellations of the Zodiac is given to the Greeks, or perhaps to the Mesopotamians before the Greeks. It's not thought that any human culture could have noticed the constellations of the Zodiac before that. And that's really absurd, because the constellations of the Zodiac are on the path of the sun. The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month.
And how would the ancients have missed that, especially since the skies were an ever-present phenomenon to them in a way that they are not to us? Right. We're cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not.
What a fascinating concept that they knew about the constellations 30-plus thousand years ago.
Yeah, and I believe they did. And we see that again in Gobekli Tepe, in Pillar 43, in Enclosure D. You see a constellation that we recognize as Sagittarius.
Brian and I were talking about one of the ancient versions of human beings, and I sent him this the other day because I read this article that I thought was amazing, where it was talking about, they found wooden structures that were half a million years old.
That's right.
Yeah, so I'll send you this, Jamie.
You sent that to me as well.
Yes, I did, yeah. This is very wild, right, because that's, what is that?
Well, half a million years ago is pre-anatomically modern humans. Right. The earliest example of anatomically modern humans so far found is about 300,000 years, and that's from Morocco. But there's a new thinking going on now. What about the Neanderthals, who we know that anatomically modern humans interbred with?
Maybe the Neanderthals are just another anatomically modern human form. Maybe they're not a different species. They're Homo neanderthalensis as opposed to Homo sapiens. But maybe it was all one, and there were different forms of human beings in that time. In that case, these wooden structures would fit within the Neanderthal time frame.
This is that same culture, Jamie, that Brian was telling us buried their dead in a very sophisticated way, where they had to crawl through these cave systems.
No, Brian was talking about Homo naledi.
I think this is Homo naledi.
This is from South Africa?
I think that's what they're talking about. I believe that's what they were talking about.
A wooden structure from Zambia.
Homo naledi is in South Africa, and it is fascinating. Lee Berger, who I mentioned to you— Here it is.
A species similar to Homo naledi. Yeah. See, Homo—how do you say that word? Homo naledi. No, the other one.
Homo heidelbergensis.
Heidelberg. Some remains found near Heidelberg in Germany.
This is what it says. We don't know exactly what species made the structure, but Homo—how do you say it again?
Heidelbergensis.
Heidelbergensis, or a species similar to Homo naledi.
Might be candidates. Yeah.
Interesting.
Homo naledi is interesting. That's the result of a National Geographic explorer in residence called Lee Berger. As you discussed with Brian, we won't go over it again, but he found evidence of deliberate burial in a very complicated, difficult cave system, which you can hardly access. And, of course, immediately this was published, and it was published in a Netflix documentary. The archaeological establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks and tried to find all kinds of reasons why it couldn't possibly be deliberate burial.
Whereas I think it would be much more interesting if archaeology tried to, first of all, look at all kinds of reasons why it could be deliberate burial, because that opens many doors. Whereas saying, no, it's impossible, just closes all the doors.
Well, what are the alternative explanations for why they had mass burial sites inside of a cave?
They fell there, something like that.
All of them? Yeah, all of them.
Over many, many, many years? And somehow buried themselves under the topsoil, and then left engravings on the cave walls, which are very similar to engravings that we find in the caves of France, for example.
Well, it does make sense, though, that ancient human species would slowly learn the things that we learned. They would slowly pick up toolmaking, they would slowly pick up the ability to harness fire, and that, as time went on, as the species became more sophisticated and more advanced, as it evolved, it would just refine those methods.
Yeah, that does make sense. The question is, when did it happen? This is why I sometimes wear a T-shirt, and I did on the last show with you, which says, stuff just keeps on getting older. And a lot of people don't understand what I mean by that. But what I mean by it is that archaeological discoveries are constantly pushing horizons back, but not considering the implications of that.
It wasn't so long ago that anatomically modern humans were thought to be just 50,000 years old. Now, if anatomically modern humans, with the modern brain, with our capacities and abilities, have only existed for 50,000 years, that doesn't leave a lot of room for a lost civilization to come and go. But then we find 196,000 years ago from Ethiopia, and then more recently, 300,000 years ago from Morocco, and suddenly the expanses of time that have not been investigated, in which a civilization could have risen and fallen, become much greater. And that's why it's important that stuff just keeps on getting older.
Very fascinating also that the oldest known ones are from Africa. Yeah. And obviously, that's where Egypt is.
Yes, that's exactly where Egypt is. And, you know, we must recognize Egypt as an African culture. Yeah. That is what the ancient Egyptians were. I believe their language belonged to the Hamitic language family, which is closely related to the Somali language, for example, in East Africa.
African culture, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly advanced, doing stuff that we just don't know how to do. today. Archaeologists will tell you they could build the Great Pyramid, but I defy them to do that. The Great Pyramid is literally impossible. It's something that doesn't make any sense.
It certainly doesn't make sense as the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, which is what we're told it was.
Well, it's also sort of the ultimate, if you wanted to leave behind evidence of your culture, something that if there was a cataclysm and people did have to sort of rethink the history of the world, that would be the best thing to leave.
Time capsule.
Because it's so insanely sophisticated that you're forced to sort of reckon with this idea that something might have existed before us.
Yeah, definitely. And it incorporates all kinds of interesting math. It incorporates pi, which again is supposed to have been discovered by the Greeks. It incorporates the dimensions of the earth on a particular scale. There's a lot about the Great Pyramid which suggests that it was intended to transmit information to the future.
And that's one of the reasons why it's so big and so enormous, and why we keep on finding new chambers and passageways inside the Great Pyramid. There's a thing called Scan Pyramids, which is now going on, which is using the latest tech. And they've identified a second Grand Gallery above the Grand Gallery. The Grand Gallery is one of the wonderful features of the Great Pyramid. It's 30 feet high, 120 feet long, rising up through the center of the pyramid.
But now we know there's a second one above it that hasn't been explored yet. And that's a result of Scan Pyramids. There's corridors and passageways that we didn't know were there. So the Great Pyramid is gradually, bit by bit, revealing its secrets. And it's almost as though it was waiting for a time when human beings were ready to receive those secrets and had the ability to decode them.
How do they access the second Grand Gallery?
Scanning.
I mean humans. How can humans get into it?
Well, it could, it could, that's a very good question. It's there. The question is, at what point was it made? Was it, was it part, it should have been part of the original construction of the Great Pyramid. As they were building the Great Pyramid, they created one Grand Gallery and they created another.
Is it the same size?
It looks to be the same size, yeah. Wow. From the scanning, the scanning just shows a void. But I'm informed reliably that the recent investigation has identified that void as another Grand Gallery, which is inside the Great Pyramid. And the Grand Gallery is one of the wonders of the world.
So it could have artifacts in it.
It could have artifacts in it. Same goes for those shafts that cut through the walls of the Queen's, so-called Queen's Chamber and King's Chamber. I resist these names that archaeologists have applied to the Great Pyramid. I resist the notion that it was the tomb of Khufu. I resist the notion that the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid, was intended to be Khufu's tomb chamber.
But then they just changed their minds and abandoned it. And then they built the one that's now called the Queen's Chamber. That was intended to be for Khufu, but they abandoned that as well. Then they went up the Grand Gallery and they created the so-called King's Chamber. And because it has a sarcophagus in it, and for no other reason, that is said to have been the original burial place of Khufu.
It's not enough evidence in my view.
And the connections to Khufu are from hieroglyphs depicting his vision that if he uncovered the Sphinx, he would become the pharaoh of Egypt. Isn't there something along those lines?
There is something along those lines. And it's Thutmose IV or III, if I remember correctly. In other words, he's a later pharaoh from the time of the Old Kingdom. And he put between the paws of the Sphinx a stele, which is called the Dream Stele. And in it, he records a dream that he had, that that time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand.
And the dream was that he should clear the Sphinx. Because the Sphinx requested him or ordered him to free it of sand and reveal it again in its true form. This was at least 1,200 years after the Sphinx is supposed to have been built, 4,500 years ago. But as you know, Robert Shock and I and many others are convinced the Sphinx is much, much older than that, that it goes back 12,000 plus years.
And this is based on geological evidence of heavy rainfall. Which is another interesting thing about the climate and the environment of that area, that we think of it as being desert. But at one point in time, it wasn't.
Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frustrated by archaeologists claiming that they could know there was no lost civilization when they've done so little work in the Sahara. When the Sahara was, in a number of occasions during the Ice Age, incredibly fertile. Very, very nurturing environment, with huge river systems running through it and lakes. It's not disputed that that was the case. It was a kind of environment that would have nurtured human civilization.
And we really can't write off the possibility of a lost civilization until we take a much closer, much more detailed look at the Sahara. Of course, that's expensive. And then Egypt itself is in the Sahara.
Didn't? they find fossilized whale bones in the Sahara?
Yeah, that would go back a lot further. That would go back to millions of years. To a time when the oceans were different. Perhaps even hundreds of millions of years.
So Sahara, at one point in time, was an ocean.
As many places were. Pretty much anywhere where you find limestone was once covered by ocean. The world has changed. The world is constantly changing. It's like one of those magic kid's toys where you pull a lever and it wipes out the diagram you just made.
It just keeps on. The world keeps on recreating itself. And we human beings make our journey through this changing world. And we try to fix it and say this is how things were. This is how things will be.
And it never cooperates with us on that.
It's just incredibly fascinating that the timeline, when you go beyond the traditional timeline. And you get back into where you and Robert Shock have speculated the age of the Sphinx. Now you're talking about a completely different environment of lush rainforest and many, many, many resources.
Absolutely. We're talking about a completely different Sahara. And Shock's evidence is of a thousand years of heavy rainfall. That's what the Sphinx bears witness to. That it was already there when the rains of the Younger Dryas.
And the Younger Dryas affected the Sahara with heavy rainfall. Just as further north, it changed the climate and made it much colder. In the Sahara, it became much wetter. And it's that period of rains that are the most likely culprit for weathering the Sphinx in the way it is. But it could have stood there thousands of years before that.
There's also very clear evidence that the face in the Sphinx is much younger, right?
No doubt about that whatsoever. The evidence takes, excuse me, a frog in my throat.
There's a little cough button. if you want to hit that. Do I have a cough button? Yeah, you have a little red button there. Is that this red button?
Yeah, if you feel it coming on, just press the elbow sucker.
I'll do that. Where were we, Joe?
The Sphinx's face. Yeah. Much younger.
The first problem is, the ancient Egyptians were masters of proportion. The ancient Egyptian art is rightly world famous for its quality. And they didn't get things out of proportion. They wouldn't make that elementary error when they create this giant statue, carving it out of solid bedrock. But the head of the Sphinx is way too small in relation to the body.
It looks like the head of a pin. It doesn't fit with that 270-foot long, 70-foot high body. It looks very much as though the Sphinx once had a much larger head.
Can you show us a photo of it, Jamie? It's also much less weathered, right?
And it's much less weathered. And this is, again, where Egyptology tries to attach the Sphinx to a particular period. Egyptology claims that's the face of Khafre, who was the successor to Khufu. It doesn't look like any statues, known statues of Khafre that I can see. But let's not worry about that.
It wears the headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left or the Quora picture. That headdress is called the Nemes headdress. It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. Not, in my view, Khafre, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body.
And both Shock and I and John Anthony West, Manu Seifzada, who's another excellent researcher in this field, we all feel that the Sphinx was almost certainly a complete lion. at one point. It was a lion with a huge mane. And that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded. And by the time the ancient Egyptians inherited it, they decided to improve it a little bit, to cut down that heavily eroded head and put the head of a pharaoh on it.
Does it have the same sort of sophisticated proportions, where they're perfect left and right as some of the other statues do, which is another incredible mystery, that when they look at the measurements of these immense statues, somehow or another, they're completely symmetrical on both left and right side.
Completely symmetrical. I'm actually not sure whether that's the case with the Sphinx. I wouldn't be surprised because I have no doubt whatsoever that the head of the Great Sphinx was carved by the ancient Egyptians who made those statues. But the question is, what was it carved from? What was it cut down from?
So the geology, the precipitation-induced weathering, is one of the pieces of evidence for a much older Sphinx. But the other thing is the astronomy, the fact that the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker. If you stand looking due east, at Giza or anywhere in the northern hemisphere, on the spring equinox, there's three key moments of the year. Four, actually. There's the winter and summer solstice, and there's the equinoxes, the spring and fall equinoxes.
On the summer solstice, the sun rises far to the north of east. On the winter solstice, it rises far to the south of east. But on the equinoxes, it aligns perfectly due east. And that's what the Sphinx is. It's aligned perfectly to due east.
And it's gazing at the horizon. And then we come to this contentious issue of who discovered the zodiacal constellations. Because the Sphinx, 12,500 years ago, was gazing at dawn on the spring equinox at the constellation of Leo. In other words, this lion monument on the ground was looking at its own celestial counterpart in the sky. Egyptologists dismiss that.
They say that nobody had any idea of the constellations until the Greeks. I just think they're wrong. So astronomy and geology together combine to invite us to consider the possibility that the Sphinx may be much older than 4,500 years old.
And didn't the Greeks learn from the Egyptians as well?
Not only did they learn, but they said they learned. The Greeks were very honest about it. They sat at the feet of the ancient Egyptians. They said they learned everything they knew from the ancient Egyptians. But somehow, archaeology has rewritten the narrative.
And gives far too much to the Greeks. Ancient Greek was a wonderful culture. Magical culture. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful work. But a relatively recent culture.
And it was channeling knowledge from much earlier times. In a way, ancient Greece is the meeting point between the lost ancient world and the modern world in which we live. And that's why the Greeks and the Greek texts are so useful to us. And that's why I think the Atlantis story is a very important story.
Well, it's also we do that today. If you look at the Lincoln Monument. And you look at the Parthenon. I mean, we mimic ancient Greek architecture today.
Absolutely. We're still copying it. And what were the ancient Greeks copying? They were copying the Egyptians.
It just completely makes sense.
Go to the Temple of Karnak. Go to the Temple of Luxor. You're looking at the model for the later Greek temples. They followed that example. And they were honest about it.
It's modern archaeology that has kind of rewritten the story and given way too much to the Greeks.
When you say that in Gobekli Tepe, the speculation is that they use stone tools.
Yes.
Is there any evidence of bizarre cutting like they find in Egypt, where it looks like they're using some sort of a cylindrical drill? Or whether it looks like the stone is somehow scooped out in some method? that we don't understand?
I've not seen evidence of a cylindrical drill at Gobekli Tepe. But what you do see—I'm going to press that red button. Ah, there it is.
There you go.
What you do see at Gobekli Tepe is pillars with carvings in relief on them.
Three-dimensional.
Three-dimensional carvings which stand out. That means that all of the stone around the carving had to be cut away. It wasn't a matter of incising the carving into the stone. You had to remove the stone around it and leave it standing proud.
Much more sophisticated.
It's much more sophisticated. It's on the oldest so far identified pillar in Gobekli Tepe, which maybe Jamie can call up. It's pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe.
Any chance of getting that up? Yes, I can.
It's a remarkable piece of ancient art. It's definitely 11,600 years old. So often, yeah, the Tepe telegrams, for example, will show it. On the right there, another wonderful piece of relief carving. But there, pillar 43,, this vulture is in exactly the position of the constellation of Sagittarius.
And the disk over its wing suggests the sun against the background of the constellation of Sagittarius. Below it, we have a scorpion, so like the constellation of Scorpio, and roughly in the right place. Above it, we have a serpent descending, a bit like Ophiuchus. It seems to speak to a knowledge of astronomy of an ancient time. Again, it's controversial, but a lot of work has been done on this.
But the point is, the carving of that is highly sophisticated at 11,600 years old.
That creature, whatever it is, Jamie, that one that's sort of black and white, that image in the center says visual arts cork. Yeah, that one's amazing.
It's amazing. They cut away the whole pillar to leave that creature there, which itself is hard to identify. Is it a crocodile? We found something very similar in Peru, as a matter of fact.
Well, the proportions are off. for a crocodile. It looks more like a cat.
Yeah, I think it looks more like some kind of feline. Exactly what creature it is.
Something with a tail.
Yeah, it's hard to identify.
This is all so interesting to me. When these people are trying to date this to 11,800 years ago and say that people only had stone tools, how do they speculate that these people did this stuff?
You can do stuff with stone tools.
They used harder stone to carve this stone.
That's the argument.
Is there evidence of these stones?
No, not that I'm aware of. There are some so-called pounding stones, but I find it difficult to see how pounding stones, how pounding away, could have created this very fine result. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. It's the same with the incredible work that you find at Cuzco and Sacsayhuaman in Peru. Again, this is supposedly recent.
I think it's much older. The Incas are not supposed to have had metal tools. They're supposed to have done all the work with stone tools. I think it's a reach. I think we're looking at a technology we don't understand.
One of them looks like a wild boar, that one to the left. Definitely a wild boar. Yeah, definitely. That's identifiable, which is interesting when you look at the other ones that aren't that identifiable.
Yeah, some of them are identifiable.
Yeah, I don't know what that is. What's that one supposed to be?
That's a fox.
A fox.
But, interestingly, coming out of it are these streamers. And my colleague Martin Swetman from the University of Edinburgh has suggested that that is representing meteors coming down from the sky. Those streamers out of the tail of the fox. And the fox was a constellation.
What's that little fellow right there, Jamie? It says in Turkey, right to the left of your cursor. Yeah, right there. What's that?
A human form.
Is that another one from somewhere else?
No, no. I'm not sure which site that is from. It could be from Göbekli Tepe, judging by the feline figures beside it. Let's find out.
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Too complicated.
Is it letting you go back? Okay. How do they... We have those images from ancient Sumer, which are 6,000 years old or so, that show what appears to be the solar system. So how do they...
Well, first of all, let's remember ancient Sumer was in Mesopotamia. Yes. And Mesopotamia, it's a Greek word, means between the rivers. And the rivers referred to are the Tigris and the Euphrates. And where is Göbekli Tepe?
Right between the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Here it is. Hard to grasp relief of man holding his phallus found in Turkey.
Which site, which site? Suddenly, you're afraid it's the big city nearby. That's where you need to go if you want to go to Göbekli Tepe. I'm not saying which site it was.
Can I see that image again?
It could be Karahan Tepe, where I've been, but I haven't seen that figure.
It looks like he's covering his phallus, like he's embarrassed. Or maybe he's pregnant. Look, maybe it's the first pregnant man.
We don't know. We don't know what it means. I don't want to... But he's definitely holding his dick.
It seems like it. That's for sure. It seems like maybe he's peeing. Noting. What is he doing?
What is he doing? I don't know. And we don't know. The problem is no written texts have come down to us from that time. So everything, in a sense, is speculation.
What isn't speculation is the dating. I have grave doubts about carbon dating in many cases. Because carbon dating doesn't date stone. It dates organic materials. So the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away.
But what tends to be done is that you look for a piece of organic material that is so associated with the megalith you want to date. That you can say or propose that they come from the same period of time. I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island. They're not carbon dated. What's carbon dated is the platforms they stand on.
And there's a lot to suggest that those platforms are much later than the original statues. And the statues were re-erected on those platforms. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, one of the very special things about it is that it was deliberately buried. They ran that site for about 1,000 years. From 11,600 to say 10,600 years ago.
And then they closed it down. And they went to great effort to fill up all the enclosures with rubble. And to create a hill over the top of it. And that's why Gobekli Tepe then remained untouched for the next 10,000 years. There's no danger of contamination with younger carbon from a later culture.
The fact that they found carbon in enclosure D. Right by pillar 43. Dated to 11,600 years ago. Does firmly connect that place to 11,600 years ago. There are later dates from Gobekli Tepe.
It wasn't all built in one go. But it stopped around 1,000 or maybe 1,200 years after it started. As though they'd achieved what they wanted to achieve. The population had all become agriculturalists. We move on into the Holocene.
Into the modern age. And it's that moment of transition following an enormous cataclysm that really fascinates me.
So, if they attribute the constellations to ancient Greece. What do they say about the clay tablets from Sumer?
I've not seen any archaeologist who attributes knowledge of the constellations to the ancient Sumerians. That's a bit too late. The Babylonians maybe.
Pull that image up. Because this image has always been wild to me. Because it kind of shows a sun in the center. And then it shows all of the planets in our solar system. In relatively the correct sizes.
Relatively.
I wouldn't be surprised by that.
In terms of what's the bigger one? What's the smaller one?
I think the ancients had, or certain peoples amongst the ancients did have, a very good idea about our solar system. And about the dimensions of the earth. And about the other planets in our solar system. Again, this is something that archaeology has dismissed. But I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry.
No, it's not that one. That's a different one. Yeah, that's it. There we go. So there's the sun.
And it's surrounded by the planets that we're aware of.
Yeah, it's kind of hard to interpret that any other way, isn't it?
I mean, it seems like that's what it is. It seems like the solar system. I mean, even the way the sun is depicted is the way a little kid depicts the sun.
Yeah, yeah. And it's also depicted as a star, as well as the sun. The circumdisc of the sun. And the sun is a star.
It's such a strange image.
My suggestion is much greater knowledge of the universe than is supposed to have existed at that time. And this is Sumer. Sumer is supposedly the first civilization, the oldest civilization on earth. It goes back about 6,000 years. But then, what about the prequels to Sumer?
And let's take Gobekli Tepe into account, because it's so close to Sumer. And, by the way, just within a few hundred kilometers of Gobekli Tepe is Abu Huraira, where there is compelling evidence of a massive airburst 12,800 years ago and a complete wipeout of the local population. I don't think it's an accident that Gobekli Tepe is where it is.
Is there images of this explosion in the sky?
There's an artist's impression of the explosion in the sky.
Right, but do they have evidence on the ground, like you can see with Tunguska?
Yes, a massive amount of evidence on the ground, particularly what is called shocked quartz, where the quartz has been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade. This is not caused by village fires. This is the characteristic fingerprint of a cosmic impact. Platinum, iridium, carbon microspherules, all of these impact proxies are found in abundance at Abu Huraira.
Is there a cleared area? that's similar to what looks like in Tunguska?
The problem with Abu Huraira is that it's now underwater. The Aswan High Dam flooded it. But before it was submerged, an enormous amount of material was taken from it. And it's that soil that was taken from Abu Huraira to preserve it, which is producing the evidence of a Younger Dryas impact there 12,800 years ago.
So when was this dam? When did this take place?
60s, something like that. Something like that. I think Abu Huraira has been underwater since the 60s, or certainly the 70s, maybe the 70s.
What a bummer. What a bummer.
But in this case, thank you, archaeology, for preserving soil and materials from that site, which allow this work to be done. There's no doubt that a cataclysmic event took place there. There's just a whole bunch of new papers published in the last two or three weeks on Abu Huraira, which are further consolidating this evidence that it was subject to a very large air burst. And that after that, within the 1,000 to 2,000 years after that, just as at Gobekli Tepe, the local population transitioned from hunter gathering to agriculture.
It's fascinating to me how, when you go to these sites and you see where these ancient structures existed and imagine the climate, and what a major factor that plays in what human beings do and what they're able to do, whether they're able to thrive because there's an abundance of resources. And then it seems those are the places where they create these incredible structures, like the Mayans. And where you go to a place like North America, 20,000 years ago, was unbelievably inhospitable. It was terrifying and filled with all sorts of predators.
Massive predators.
Much like parts of Africa, right? I mean, we had a North American lion, which is bigger than the African lion, the North American cheetah. There was all sorts of the short-faced bear.
Saber-toothed tigers.
All sorts of animals that would make it really difficult to thrive. You don't want to meet one of those. So it makes sense that the people that lived there didn't have the sort of technological sophistication that maybe people had in the...
The northern part of North America is certainly the area that was under the ice cap until 11,000 years ago. Waste of time looking for any sign of a lost civilization there. Northern Europe, waste of time. Because it was also a frozen wasteland. But the areas closer to the equator, once you get down into the southern states of North America, get yourself into Mexico, get yourself to the Yucatan, the Maya culture.
Then you're looking at a place where civilizations could really grow and flourish.
Yeah, that's what's really interesting about just the history of North America in general. Is that, when you look at how the Native Americans existed and the way they lived just a few hundred years ago, that seems to be like an artifact of what life was like before that.
Yes. I think we must give full credit to hunter-gatherer civilizations who might do a bit of agriculture on the side. These are the masters of survival on our planet. Right. Not us.
They were the ones who kept the species alive.
They were the ones, after the Younger Dryas, who kept the species alive, in my view, because they knew how to survive. I've made this point before, but if such a cataclysm were to occur to our civilization today, and I don't think it would take much to bring our civilization down. A full-scale nuclear war, end of the story for technological civilization of the 21st century. Another comet impact, something like the Younger Dryas happening again. Sudden sea level rises.
Consider how many cities we have built along coastlines. A 30-foot sea level rise would destroy them. And the psychological nature of our civilization is very entitled. We tend to feel we've got it all made. We take it all for granted.
We're not equipped to think about disaster descending upon us.
If such a thing were to occur, and God forbid that it does, those survivors from our industrialized technological society, those who made it through, would be smart to go take refuge amongst hunter-gatherers. They would be the ones who would preserve them and allow them to continue forwards. And maybe in that process, there would be an exchange of information, just as the survivors of industrial civilization would learn from hunter-gatherers. Also, they might have something to teach to hunter-gatherers. And I think that's what happened 12,800 years ago.
Well, it seems like there's so much compelling evidence that that's the case. I get so puzzled and baffled by the resistance to it, because it's just interesting.
Well, if it's right, it pulls the rug out completely from under the feet of archaeology. And that's why there's resistance to it. All human beings are territorial in their own way. And archaeologists are no exception. They're territorial.
They've defined their territory. They see a gradual, slow, steady evolution of human society. And they think that we were at a relatively simple stage during the so-called Stone Age. And we just gradually got more and more sophisticated. It's an appealing idea.
And it makes sense in lots of ways. But there isn't room in that for an earlier civilization to have emerged and been destroyed. And that's why the idea is attacked. Because if that idea were true, then the foundations on which archaeology has built the House of History would collapse.
It's so unfortunate. It's so unfortunate that they just don't jump in and enjoy these new discoveries. In a way. And redefine things.
In a way, I've been glad to have received the vituperative level of attack from archaeology that I did. Because it shows I've pressed their buttons. It shows there's something they feel they need to cancel here. There's something they feel they need to get rid of.
It's the most dangerous show on television.
The most dangerous show on Netflix. An absurd idea. Really crazy. But that's cancel language. That's the language you use.
Also, you call somebody anti-Semitic or racist, or white supremacist or misogynist. All of those are easy labels which these days just need to be applied to a person. Nobody even investigates or goes to see.
I think that works less and less now than it ever has before. I hope so. Because I think people are catching on.
Yeah, people are catching on.
It's pretty clear. And also, the belief that everything they read is true, especially from mainstream media. That's been grossly eroded.
This is one of the reasons why... I'm going to press that cough button.
This is one of the reasons why my work has not been canceled and hasn't disappeared. because archaeology dislikes it. Because the general public today distrust experts. And with good reason. There's good reason to distrust experts.
We've been told so many lies by experts over such a long period of time. They so often are confident, absolutely certain, that they're right, and they turn out later to be wrong. That any intelligent person begins to wonder, are these experts really the only people we should listen to in any way? I want to think for myself. I don't want to be told what to think by a group of authority figures called archaeologists.
I want a diverse range of information. And then I will draw my conclusions from it. I'm not speaking of me. I'm speaking of the general public. And I think that attitude is growing.
But at the same time, there still is a slavish adherence to the words of experts. And we've seen that again and again in recent years. Science says it's so. Therefore, it must be so. Well, no.
Science is a work in progress. Science often gets things wrong. And because science says something is so, doesn't mean it is so. It shouldn't be a religion. It shouldn't be like a dictate from a high priest.
It should be one bit of information that is supplied to the public to make up their own minds.
Well, it's also the reality of your book in 1995 being dismissed. And now you see so much evidence. It shows that it's true. That's got to be very satisfying for you. It is.
As time has gone on, more and more of what you were theorizing.
Yeah, it is satisfying to me. For example, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, there was a whole constellation of evidence. Which suggested that something bad had happened to the earth around 12,500 years ago. But the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis didn't exist then. So I looked into a number of possibilities that might have resulted in a cataclysm at that time.
Then, that was 1995.. 2007, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis comes out. Sixty major scientists published in all the big mainstream journals. Proposing that the earth went through an absolutely catastrophic episode between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. Exactly the window that I was proposing.
So yes, that's very pleasant to see. The discovery of Gobekli Tepe. You know, Gobekli Tepe, they began excavations in 1996.. A year after I published Fingerprints of the Gods. But those excavations began to become public knowledge in the 2000s.
And the fact that we now have a giant, sophisticated, megalithic site sitting in Turkey. And not alone, Karahan Tepe. There's about ten other sites in that same neighborhood. Again, was not explained by the archaeology of 1995.. It's something that fits better into the paradigm that I've proposed.
That we're dealing with a lost episode in the human story.
It's also fascinating and somewhat terrifying that, if the Younger Dryas Impact Theory is correct. And it really did reset human civilization. Think of how long it took for Sumer to emerge from total barbarism.
Thousands of years.
Who knows what it was like for thousands of years.
Thousands of years.
Of survival.
I would suggest that there was a method of preserving knowledge. That those survivors of the cataclysm were not just looking at their immediate time. They were also looking to the future. How can we pass down knowledge to the future? And one of the ways you can pass down knowledge to the future is something like the Great Pyramid.
Which is so big it can't be destroyed. And another way you can pass down knowledge to the future is in wonderful stories. That people will keep on telling. And those stories may contain scientific information. The storyteller doesn't even need to know that information.
As long as he or she tells the story true, the information will be passed on. And we are a storytelling species. So that's why I take myths very, very seriously. I think they are important evidence of our past. I think archaeology is making a mistake in ignoring myths.
And it needs to pay much, much more attention to them.
Now, surely there's been positive reactions to the Netflix show.
I've had masses of positive reactions from the general public. And those reactions seem to say that people love the show. And it was a big hit on Netflix. It got number one for quite a while. It was a very, very successful series.
The public reaction to it is very positive. I've been writing about these possibilities since the early 1990s. The possibility of a lost civilization. The first book that really put me on the map and that immediately attracted a lot of criticism was Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995.. And then, from public appearances, later on, appearing on your show in 2011,, people began to know my face.
And I began to be seen and recognized. People would come up to me in various places, often because they'd seen me on your show. Since the Netflix show, that recognition factor has increased enormously. In every airport I go to, I'm stopped. People want to take pictures with me, which I'm delighted to do, because I would be nothing without my readers.
I'm not some special person. I'm a storyteller. And it's the readers who give those stories value and who decide whether they're worth listening to or not. And I'm always grateful to people who read my books and watch my TV. And I try to show that when I meet people.
But the recognition factor has gone up enormously since the Netflix show. And that recognition factor, again and again, I'm stopped in the street and I'm told, we loved your show. I was even stopped by an archaeologist in the street in the city of Bath, where I live in England.
You must have been younger.
Actually, she was in her 50s. And she was with her family. And she said, I just want you to know that not all archaeologists hate your work. I found your work very, very useful. That's nurturing.
That's encouraging to me to hear that kind of thing. And at the same time, the criticism itself, I think there's an old saying, you know, when you get a lot of flack, it tells you you're over the target. And I think I am over some kind of target here. Truth will come out in due course. Whether it happens in my lifetime or much later, I don't know.
But I'm sure we're missing a part of our story.
My fear is that it's going to repeat itself and we're not going to learn before it happens.
That's an unfortunate character of the human race, that we do not learn from past mistakes. And, you know, we live in a world now dominated by hatred, dominated by competing nationalism, dominated by competing religions.
I have no time for, and this is going to annoy some folk, but I have no time for the mainstream monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I think that the three of them are behind so much of the trouble and chaos and hatred in the world. It's okay to have your religious faith. That's great. But to say my faith is right and your faith is wrong, that's the first step on the road to ruin.
And that's what's happening today. is these exclusive religious ideas that compel people to behave in really obnoxious ways towards each other. There's nothing more dangerous than ideas sometimes. And ideas have driven so much of the conflict in the world. Look at the ideas behind Hitler's rise to power and the conflicts that resulted.
People bought into those ideas and it led to disaster. And that is happening in the world today. Most unfortunately.
It's exactly happening. That's what's so terrifying. And if a full scale nuclear war does happen.
God help us.
God help us. I mean, there might not be a human race to reinvent itself.
It's perfectly possible. We could become completely extinct. And nature has a way of doing that. It happened to the dinosaurs too. Well, the chickens survived.
But nature got rid of the dinosaurs. They were not fit to survive in the new world that was created by that impact 6 million years ago. They were not suited for survival in that world. And we may not be suited for survival in this world. Largely through our own behavior and our own mad obsessions with ideas that are filled with hatred and lead people to despise one another.
Instead of looking for the best in one another. I've been lucky enough to travel extensively all my working life. Live in many different countries. And I have no doubt that people are the same all over the world. The same hopes.
The same fears. The same dreams. I love the cultural diversity of humanity. This is one of the beautiful things about the human race. So many different cultures bring different important pieces to the party.
I love that. I would never seek to get rid of that. But underneath that cultural diversity, we are human beings. We love our families. We have hopes and ambitions for the future.
We have dreams. All of us do. Whatever side of a particular argument we're on. You get down to that basic level, we're all the same. And what I believe what unites us as a species is much more significant than what divides us.
And we need to start paying less attention to what divides us and more attention to what unites us. And to celebrate our diversity at the same time, without saying my diversity is better than yours.
It's just so difficult for that message to get through when you have these governments and these groups of control that have the narrative that they speak to. Whether it's like North Korea, where they completely control it, or the United States, where it's a lot of propaganda and they have control of the mainstream media.
It's much more subtle in the United States, but it's still control. It's still mind control.
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