Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History

00:00:00.000 | The big question for me in that timeline

00:00:02.320 | is why didn't we do it sooner?

00:00:03.980 | Why did it take so long?

00:00:05.160 | Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago,

00:00:08.580 | really after 10,000 years ago,

00:00:10.260 | to start seeing the beginnings of civilization?

00:00:12.900 | The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock,

00:00:18.660 | a journalist and author who for over 30 years

00:00:21.880 | has explored the controversial possibility

00:00:24.500 | that there existed a lost civilization

00:00:26.460 | during the last ice age, and that it was destroyed

00:00:30.120 | in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.

00:00:33.820 | He is the presenter

00:00:35.300 | of the Netflix documentary series "Ancient Apocalypse,"

00:00:39.060 | the second season of which has just been released,

00:00:42.380 | and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas,

00:00:46.420 | a topic I recently discussed

00:00:49.020 | with the archeologist Ed Barnhart.

00:00:52.720 | Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archeologist,

00:00:56.780 | scholar I love talking to on the podcast,

00:00:59.780 | extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded,

00:01:02.820 | and respectful in disagreement.

00:01:05.660 | I'll do many more podcasts on history,

00:01:08.160 | including ancient history.

00:01:09.560 | Our distant past is full of mysteries,

00:01:13.700 | and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries

00:01:17.100 | with people both on the inside

00:01:19.260 | and the outside of the mainstream

00:01:21.260 | in the various disciplines involved.

00:01:23.980 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:26.000 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:28.100 | in the description.

00:01:29.380 | And now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.

00:01:33.300 | Let's start with a big foundational idea

00:01:36.380 | that you have about human history,

00:01:38.620 | that there was an advanced ice age civilization

00:01:42.700 | that came before and perhaps seeded

00:01:45.460 | what people now call the six cradles of civilization,

00:01:48.320 | Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China,

00:01:50.420 | Andes, and Mesoamerica.

00:01:52.500 | So let's talk about this idea that you have.

00:01:54.540 | Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?

00:01:56.980 | - It would be better to describe it

00:01:59.620 | as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness

00:02:03.940 | in the story that we are taught about our past,

00:02:09.640 | which envisages more or less,

00:02:12.780 | there have been a few ups and downs,

00:02:14.400 | but more or less straightforward evolutionary progress.

00:02:20.180 | We start out as hunter-foragers.

00:02:23.820 | Then we become agriculturalists.

00:02:27.300 | The hunter-forager phase could go back

00:02:30.420 | hundreds of thousands of years.

00:02:32.220 | I mean, this is where it's also important to mention

00:02:36.260 | that anatomically modern humans were not the only humans.

00:02:38.980 | We had Neanderthals from, I don't know,

00:02:41.220 | 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago.

00:02:45.280 | They were certainly human

00:02:46.380 | because anatomically modern humans interbred with them

00:02:49.300 | and we carry Neanderthal genes.

00:02:52.380 | There were the Denisovans, maybe 300,000

00:02:55.340 | to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago.

00:02:57.980 | And again, interbreeding took place.

00:02:59.980 | They're obviously a human species.

00:03:02.180 | So, you know, we've got this background

00:03:05.060 | of humans who didn't look quite like us.

00:03:08.180 | And then we have anatomically modern humans.

00:03:10.300 | And I think the earliest anatomically modern

00:03:13.460 | human skeletal remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco

00:03:17.940 | and date to about 310,000 years ago.

00:03:22.220 | So the question is what were our ancestors doing after that?

00:03:27.020 | And I think we can include the Neanderthals

00:03:28.900 | and the Denisovans in that general picture.

00:03:31.420 | And why did it take so long?

00:03:33.520 | This is one of the puzzles,

00:03:34.860 | one of the questions that bother me.

00:03:36.620 | Why did it take so long when we have creatures

00:03:39.400 | who are physically identical to us?

00:03:41.500 | We cannot actually weigh and measure their brains,

00:03:44.760 | but from the work that's been done on the crania,

00:03:47.220 | it looks like they had the same brains

00:03:48.660 | that we do with the same wiring.

00:03:51.200 | So if we've been around for 300,000 plus years at least,

00:03:56.200 | and if ultimately in our future was the process

00:04:02.740 | to create civilization or civilizations,

00:04:06.420 | why didn't it happen sooner?

00:04:07.420 | Why did it take so long?

00:04:08.580 | Why was it such a long time?

00:04:10.860 | Even the story of anatomically modern humans

00:04:13.420 | has kept on changing.

00:04:15.140 | I remember a time when it was said

00:04:17.300 | that there hadn't been anatomically modern humans

00:04:19.660 | before 50,000 years ago.

00:04:21.820 | And then it became 196,000 years ago

00:04:24.620 | with the findings in Ethiopia,

00:04:26.220 | and then 310,000 years ago.

00:04:30.180 | There's a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle there.

00:04:35.180 | But the big question for me in that timeline

00:04:38.180 | is why didn't we do it sooner?

00:04:39.820 | Why did it take so long?

00:04:41.940 | Why do we wait until after 12,000 years ago,

00:04:45.380 | really after 10,000 years ago,

00:04:47.060 | to start seeing the beginnings,

00:04:48.660 | what are selected as the beginnings of civilization

00:04:52.220 | in places like Turkey, for example?

00:04:55.220 | And then there's a relatively slow process

00:04:58.060 | of adopting agriculture.

00:04:59.500 | And by 6,000 years ago,

00:05:01.740 | we see ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization.

00:05:06.740 | And we're then in the pre-dynastic period

00:05:09.620 | in ancient Egypt as well, 6,000 years ago,

00:05:13.260 | beginning to see definite signs

00:05:15.700 | of what will become the dynastic civilization of Egypt

00:05:19.260 | about 5,000 years ago.

00:05:21.660 | And interestingly, round about the same time,

00:05:24.500 | you have the Indus Valley Civilization

00:05:26.820 | popping up out of nowhere.

00:05:28.460 | And by the way, the Indus Valley Civilization

00:05:31.140 | was a lost civilization until the 1920s,

00:05:34.900 | when railway workers accidentally stumbled

00:05:38.460 | across some ruins.

00:05:40.060 | I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro,

00:05:43.020 | and these are extraordinarily beautifully

00:05:45.460 | centrally planned cities.

00:05:47.940 | Clearly, they're the work

00:05:48.980 | of an already sophisticated civilization.

00:05:52.940 | One of the things that strikes me

00:05:54.180 | about the Indus Valley Civilization

00:05:55.820 | is that we find a steatite seal

00:05:59.180 | of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture.

00:06:03.020 | And that seal is 5,000 years old.

00:06:05.460 | And the yoga posture is Mula Bandhasana,

00:06:07.660 | which involves a real contortion of the ankles

00:06:11.100 | and twisting the feet back.

00:06:13.700 | It's an advanced yoga posture.

00:06:15.260 | So there it is 5,000 years ago.

00:06:17.140 | And that then raises the question,

00:06:18.220 | well, how long did yoga take to get to that place

00:06:20.860 | when it was already so advanced 5,000 years ago?

00:06:23.780 | What's the background to this?

00:06:26.540 | China, the Yellow River Civilization.

00:06:29.300 | Again, it's around about the same period,

00:06:30.980 | 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.

00:06:32.260 | You get these first signs of something happening.

00:06:34.180 | So it's very odd that all around the world

00:06:38.540 | we have this sudden upsurge of civilization

00:06:41.500 | about 6,000 years ago,

00:06:43.340 | preceded by what seems like a natural evolutionary process

00:06:47.460 | that would lead to a civilization.

00:06:50.220 | And yet certain ideas being carried down

00:06:54.300 | and manifested and expressed

00:06:55.940 | in many of these different civilizations.

00:06:59.900 | I just find that whole idea very puzzling

00:07:04.740 | and very disturbing,

00:07:07.660 | especially when I look at this radical break

00:07:11.340 | that takes place in not just the human story,

00:07:13.940 | but the story of all life on Earth,

00:07:15.500 | which was the last great cataclysm

00:07:17.660 | that the Earth went through,

00:07:19.140 | which was the Younger Dryas event.

00:07:21.940 | It was an extinction-level event.

00:07:24.500 | That's when all the great megafauna

00:07:26.300 | of the Ice Age went extinct.

00:07:28.500 | It's after that, it's after that event

00:07:31.140 | that we start seeing this,

00:07:33.100 | what are taken to be the beginnings

00:07:35.140 | of the first gradual steps towards civilization.

00:07:37.380 | We come out of the Upper Paleolithic

00:07:39.540 | as it's defined, the old end of the old Stone Age,

00:07:42.940 | and into the Neolithic.

00:07:44.460 | And that's when the wheels are supposedly set in motion

00:07:47.820 | to start civilization rolling.

00:07:49.260 | But what happened before that?

00:07:51.100 | And why did that suddenly happen then?

00:07:53.460 | And I can't help feeling,

00:07:54.620 | and I've felt this for a very long while,

00:07:56.700 | that there are major missing pieces in our story.

00:08:00.340 | It's often said that I'm claiming to have proved

00:08:03.780 | that there was an advanced lost civilization

00:08:06.980 | in the Ice Age.

00:08:07.940 | And I am not claiming to have proved that.

00:08:10.060 | That is a hypothesis that I am putting forward

00:08:13.700 | to answer some of the questions

00:08:15.420 | that I have about prehistory.

00:08:19.380 | And I think it's worthwhile

00:08:23.300 | to inquire into those possibilities,

00:08:25.820 | because the Younger Dryas event

00:08:27.260 | was a massive global cataclysm,

00:08:31.180 | whatever caused it.

00:08:32.740 | And it's strange that just after it,

00:08:36.900 | we start seeing these first signs.

00:08:39.700 | - So the current understanding in mainstream archeology

00:08:43.780 | is that after the Younger Dryas

00:08:45.700 | is when the civilizations popped up

00:08:48.420 | in different places of the globe

00:08:50.700 | with a lot of similarities,

00:08:52.260 | but they popped up independently.

00:08:54.140 | - Yeah, independently, and by coincidence.

00:08:57.180 | And by coincidence, those big civilizations

00:08:59.820 | that we all remember as the first civilizations,

00:09:02.220 | Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization, China,

00:09:05.020 | they all pop up at pretty much the same time.

00:09:08.500 | That is the mainstream view.

00:09:10.740 | - And they don't just pop up,

00:09:11.940 | they kind of build up gradually.

00:09:14.340 | First, there's some settlements.

00:09:15.660 | - Oh, definitely, yes.

00:09:16.540 | - And then there's different dynamics

00:09:17.860 | of how they build up,

00:09:18.820 | and the role of agriculture in that is also not obvious,

00:09:23.820 | but it's just, there's first a kind of settlement,

00:09:27.540 | a stabilization of where the people are living,

00:09:29.580 | then they start using agriculture,

00:09:31.380 | then they start getting urban centers

00:09:33.020 | and that kind of stuff.

00:09:33.860 | - It seems like an entirely reasonable argument.

00:09:35.540 | Everything about that makes sense.

00:09:37.300 | There is no doubt that you're seeing evolutionary progress,

00:09:41.660 | social evolution taking place in those thousands of years

00:09:45.460 | before Sumer emerges.

00:09:49.020 | But what's happening now,

00:09:51.580 | I spent much of the '90s and the late 1980s

00:09:56.100 | investigating this issue of a lost civilization.

00:09:58.460 | I wrote a series of books about it.

00:10:00.340 | But by 2002, when I published a book called "Underworld,"

00:10:04.100 | which was the most massive and most heavy book

00:10:06.940 | that I've ever written,

00:10:07.780 | because I was writing very defensively at the time,

00:10:11.020 | by the time I finished that book,

00:10:12.260 | my wife, Santha, and I spent seven years

00:10:13.980 | scuba diving all around the world,

00:10:15.460 | looking for structures underwater,

00:10:17.180 | often led by local fishermen or local divers,

00:10:20.020 | to anomalies that they'd seen underwater.

00:10:21.820 | By the time that book was finished,

00:10:23.340 | I thought, actually, I've done this story,

00:10:25.700 | I've walked the walk,

00:10:26.540 | I really don't have much more to say about it.

00:10:28.580 | And I turned in another direction

00:10:31.140 | and I wrote a book called "Supernatural,

00:10:33.620 | "Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind,"

00:10:35.700 | recently retitled "Visionary."

00:10:38.260 | And that was about the role of,

00:10:40.700 | fundamentally about the role of psychedelics

00:10:42.980 | in the evolution of human culture.

00:10:46.100 | And I didn't think that I would go back

00:10:48.540 | to the lost civilization issue,

00:10:50.700 | but Gobekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me.

00:10:55.180 | The more and more discoveries there,

00:10:56.620 | the 11,600 year date from enclosure D,

00:11:00.020 | which has the two largest megalithic pillars.

00:11:02.220 | And I reached a point where I realized

00:11:04.260 | I have to get back in, I have to get back in the water,

00:11:07.180 | and I have to investigate this again.

00:11:08.980 | And Gobekli Tepe was a game changer,

00:11:11.900 | but I think it's a game changer for everything,

00:11:14.060 | because Gobekli Tepe, the extraordinary nature of it,

00:11:18.260 | we're looking at a major megalithic site,

00:11:20.740 | which is at least 5,500 years older

00:11:24.820 | than, say, Gigantia in Malta,

00:11:27.340 | which was previously considered

00:11:29.340 | to be the oldest megalithic site in the world.

00:11:32.580 | And this led, of course,

00:11:34.060 | to a huge amount of interest and attention,

00:11:36.380 | both from the Turkish government,

00:11:38.940 | who see the potential tourism potential

00:11:40.820 | of having the world's oldest megalithic site,

00:11:43.380 | and from archeologists.

00:11:44.540 | And this, in turn, has led to exploration and excavation

00:11:48.740 | throughout the region.

00:11:49.820 | And what they're finding throughout that whole region

00:11:52.060 | around Gobekli Tepe,

00:11:53.500 | and going down into Syria

00:11:56.740 | and further down into the Jordan Valley,

00:11:58.860 | as far as Jericho,

00:12:01.020 | and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus,

00:12:05.620 | is what Turkish archeologists

00:12:07.260 | are now calling the Tas Tepeler civilization.

00:12:10.060 | They're calling it a civilization,

00:12:11.620 | the Stonehills civilization,

00:12:14.580 | with very definite identifying characteristics,

00:12:18.380 | semi-subterranean circular structures,

00:12:21.340 | the use of T-shaped megalithic pillars,

00:12:23.900 | sometimes not anywhere near as big

00:12:25.820 | as those at Gobekli Tepe.

00:12:27.660 | It's clear that Gobekli Tepe now

00:12:29.100 | was not the beginning of this process.

00:12:31.100 | It was actually, in a way, the end of this process.

00:12:33.260 | It was the summation of everything

00:12:35.460 | that that Stonehills civilization had achieved.

00:12:39.700 | But what is becoming clear is that this is a period

00:12:42.500 | between before the foundation of Gobekli Tepe.

00:12:45.580 | As far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago

00:12:49.500 | is the oldest date for Gobekli Tepe.

00:12:51.740 | But of course, there's a lot of Gobekli Tepe

00:12:53.260 | still underground.

00:12:54.580 | So we can't say for sure that that's the oldest,

00:12:57.540 | but it's the oldest so far excavated.

00:13:01.220 | What we're seeing is that in that whole region around there,

00:13:05.620 | there was something was in motion,

00:13:07.500 | and it began to go into motion

00:13:09.460 | round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

00:13:11.860 | And this is where these two dates are really important.

00:13:15.220 | The Younger Dryas, I'll round the figures off,

00:13:18.060 | begins around 12,800 years ago,

00:13:21.780 | and it ends around 11,600 years ago.

00:13:24.780 | So Gobekli Tepe's construction date,

00:13:26.580 | if it is 11,600 years ago,

00:13:29.100 | if they don't find older materials,

00:13:30.700 | marks the end of the Younger Dryas.

00:13:33.380 | But the beginning of the Younger Dryas,

00:13:35.660 | we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture

00:13:39.300 | that manifests in full form at Gobekli Tepe.

00:13:43.420 | And after the construction of Gobekli Tepe,

00:13:46.900 | in fact, even during the construction of Gobekli Tepe,

00:13:50.300 | we see agriculture beginning to be adopted.

00:13:53.020 | The people who created Gobekli Tepe

00:13:55.900 | were all hunter-foragers at the beginning.

00:13:59.500 | But by the time Gobekli Tepe was finished,

00:14:02.460 | and it was definitely deliberately finished,

00:14:06.220 | closed off, closed down, deliberately buried,

00:14:09.700 | covered with earth, covered with rubble,

00:14:12.540 | and then topped off with a hill,

00:14:14.940 | which is why Gobekli Tepe is called what it is.

00:14:18.380 | Gobekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill,

00:14:20.700 | or the hill of the navel.

00:14:22.500 | For a long time, Gobekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill

00:14:27.380 | that looked a bit like a pot belly.

00:14:29.060 | - Can you say how it was discovered?

00:14:30.620 | I think this is one of the most fascinating things

00:14:32.660 | on earth, period.

00:14:33.660 | So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?

00:14:37.780 | - Well, Gobekli Tepe is, first of all,

00:14:41.280 | the oldest fully elaborated megalithic site

00:14:45.300 | that we know of anywhere in the world.

00:14:47.260 | It doesn't mean the older ones won't be found,

00:14:49.740 | but it is the oldest so far found.

00:14:52.740 | The part of the site that's been excavated,

00:14:55.040 | which is a tiny percentage of the whole site,

00:14:56.820 | we do know, my first visit to Gobekli Tepe was in 2013,

00:15:00.380 | and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt,

00:15:03.100 | who died a year later, was very generous to me

00:15:07.140 | and showed me around the site for over a period

00:15:09.300 | of three days, and he explained to me

00:15:11.860 | that they've already used ground-penetrating radar

00:15:14.100 | on the site, and they know that there's much more

00:15:16.380 | Gobekli Tepe still underground.

00:15:19.300 | So anything is possible in terms of the dating

00:15:23.620 | of Gobekli Tepe.

00:15:24.460 | But what we have at the moment is a series

00:15:26.820 | of almost circular, but not quite circular enclosures,

00:15:30.420 | which are walled with relatively small stones,

00:15:34.500 | and then inside them, you have pairs of megalithic pillars.

00:15:38.260 | And the archetypal part of that site is enclosure D,

00:15:43.260 | which contains the two largest upright megaliths,

00:15:46.680 | about 18 feet tall, and reckoned to weigh somewhere

00:15:49.860 | in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct.

00:15:53.700 | They're substantial, hefty pieces of stone.

00:15:56.280 | It isn't some kind of extraordinary feat

00:15:59.380 | to create a 20-foot tall or 20-ton megalith,

00:16:02.900 | nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it.

00:16:05.500 | There's nothing magical or really weird about that.

00:16:09.460 | Human beings can do that and always have.

00:16:12.120 | Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there.

00:16:16.220 | It's within 200 meters of the main enclosure.

00:16:19.700 | So that's not a mystery, but the mystery is why suddenly

00:16:23.620 | this new form of architecture, this massive,

00:16:26.760 | massive megalithic pillars appear.

00:16:30.280 | And the pillars, one of the things that interests me

00:16:33.200 | about the pillars is their alignment.

00:16:36.040 | And there is good work that's been done,

00:16:37.840 | which suggests that enclosure D aligns

00:16:40.840 | to the rising of the star Sirius.

00:16:42.800 | And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped

00:16:45.680 | by the other enclosures, which are all oriented

00:16:49.480 | in slightly different directions.

00:16:52.440 | It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers,

00:16:56.240 | but by the time Gobekli Tepe was completed,

00:16:59.880 | agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there.

00:17:04.480 | Now you asked how Gobekli Tepe was found.

00:17:07.040 | The answer to that is that there was a survey

00:17:09.840 | of that pot-bellied hill in the 1960s

00:17:12.720 | by some American archeologists.

00:17:16.680 | And they were looking, absolutely looking

00:17:19.120 | for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic.

00:17:23.680 | And they had found some Paleolithic flints,

00:17:26.360 | upper Paleolithic flints around there,

00:17:27.860 | so it looked like a good place to look.

00:17:29.520 | But then they noticed, sticking out of the side of the hill,

00:17:32.480 | some very finely cut stone, bits of very large

00:17:36.880 | and very finely cut stone.

00:17:38.760 | And looking at that, the workmanship was so good

00:17:41.120 | that those archeologists were confident

00:17:44.140 | that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age.

00:17:46.480 | And they thought they were looking

00:17:47.720 | at perhaps some Byzantine remains.

00:17:51.040 | And they abandoned the site and never looked at it further.

00:17:53.580 | And it wasn't until the German Archeological Institute

00:17:55.760 | got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt,

00:17:58.360 | who I think was a genius, had real insight into this

00:18:02.080 | and started to dig at Gobekli Tepe

00:18:04.480 | that they realized what they'd found,

00:18:06.960 | that they'd found potentially

00:18:08.600 | the oldest megalithic site in the world.

00:18:10.720 | And they'd found it at a place where agriculture,

00:18:14.160 | according to the established historical timeline,

00:18:17.240 | that's where agriculture, at any rate,

00:18:19.000 | in Europe and Western Asia begins.

00:18:21.720 | It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey,

00:18:24.520 | and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.

00:18:27.600 | - And yet the understanding is

00:18:29.440 | it was created by hunter-gatherers.

00:18:31.920 | - It was created by hunter-gatherers, yeah.

00:18:34.440 | There was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Gobekli Tepe.

00:18:39.080 | But by the time Gobekli Tepe was decommissioned,

00:18:42.440 | and I use that word deliberately,

00:18:43.820 | was closed down and buried,

00:18:47.220 | agriculture was all around it.

00:18:49.220 | And this was agriculture of people

00:18:51.940 | who knew how to cultivate plants.

00:18:54.500 | - Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a,

00:18:59.020 | if I could say, a time capsule,

00:19:00.980 | so protected by forming a mound around it?

00:19:03.700 | Is it around that similar time?

00:19:05.380 | - It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago

00:19:09.220 | to about 10,400 years ago, to about 8,400 BC.

00:19:14.160 | So around 1,200 years, it was there,

00:19:17.580 | and it continued to be elaborated as a site.

00:19:20.100 | And while it was being elaborated as a site,

00:19:22.520 | we see agriculture, I'm gonna use the word, being introduced.

00:19:27.520 | There'd been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there.

00:19:30.500 | And to me, that's another of the mysteries

00:19:32.140 | about Gobekli Tepe.

00:19:33.540 | And then, with the new work that's being done,

00:19:35.820 | we realize that it's part of a much wider phenomenon,

00:19:38.860 | which spreads across an enormous distance.

00:19:42.460 | And the puzzling thing is that after Gobekli Tepe,

00:19:46.620 | there almost seems to be a decline.

00:19:48.420 | Things fall down again.

00:19:50.300 | And then we enter this long, slow process

00:19:52.620 | of the Neolithic, thousands of years,

00:19:55.740 | gradual developments, until we come

00:19:58.460 | to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia.

00:20:02.380 | But agriculture has taken a firm root by then.

00:20:06.460 | Actually, one other thing, I'll just say this in passing.

00:20:08.820 | When I talk about a lost civilization,

00:20:11.260 | introducing ideas to people,

00:20:13.460 | I'm often accused of stealing credit

00:20:15.580 | from the indigenous people who had those ideas

00:20:17.560 | in the first place.

00:20:18.740 | So I do find it slightly hypocritical

00:20:20.940 | that archeology fully accepts that the idea

00:20:24.420 | of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey,

00:20:28.740 | and that Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture.

00:20:32.620 | It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers

00:20:35.500 | who traveled west.

00:20:36.860 | So the notion of dissemination of ideas

00:20:39.900 | perhaps shouldn't be so annoying to archeologists as it is.

00:20:43.820 | - And perhaps we should also state,

00:20:45.860 | if we look at the entirety of history of hominids,

00:20:49.960 | humans or hominids have been explorers.

00:20:54.300 | I didn't even know this when I was preparing for this,

00:20:57.320 | looking at Homo erectus.

00:20:59.460 | 1.9 million years ago, almost right away,

00:21:03.060 | they spread out through the whole world.

00:21:05.940 | And we Homo sapiens evolved from them.

00:21:09.180 | And we should also mention,

00:21:10.460 | since we're talking about controversial debates going on,

00:21:14.620 | as I understand, there's still debates

00:21:16.140 | about the dynamics of all that was going on there,

00:21:18.700 | like we mentioned in Africa,

00:21:20.260 | that it's, I think the current understanding,

00:21:23.940 | we didn't come from one particular point of Africa,

00:21:26.940 | that there's multiple locations.

00:21:29.020 | - This is the out of Africa theory.

00:21:30.900 | I think it's more than a theory.

00:21:31.940 | It's really strongly evidenced.

00:21:34.020 | - Why? Because we're part of the great ape family

00:21:36.240 | and it's an African family.

00:21:39.460 | There's no doubt that human beings,

00:21:41.820 | our deep origins are in Africa.

00:21:43.540 | But then there, as you rightly say,

00:21:45.900 | there were these very early migrations out of Africa

00:21:50.380 | by species that are likely ancestral

00:21:53.580 | to anatomically modern humans,

00:21:55.080 | including definitely Homo erectus

00:21:57.220 | and the astonishingly distant travels that they undertook.

00:22:01.300 | Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity.

00:22:06.300 | I think there is an urge to find out

00:22:07.900 | what's around the next corner,

00:22:09.160 | what's over the brow of the next hill.

00:22:12.420 | And I think that goes very deep into human character.

00:22:15.700 | And I think it was being manifested

00:22:17.960 | in those early adventures of people who left Africa

00:22:21.980 | and traveled all around the world.

00:22:23.400 | And then settling in different parts of the world,

00:22:26.220 | I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution

00:22:29.540 | took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.

00:22:32.940 | - So I guess the general puzzlement that you're filled with

00:22:37.160 | is given that these creatures explore and spread

00:22:42.160 | and try out different environments,

00:22:46.180 | why did it take hundreds of thousands of years

00:22:49.380 | for them to develop complicated society settlements?

00:22:51.860 | - That's the first big question.

00:22:52.980 | Why did it take so long?

00:22:54.020 | And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility.

00:22:58.300 | Maybe it didn't take so long.

00:22:59.700 | Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of

00:23:04.220 | in the archeological record which await to be discovered.

00:23:08.220 | And of course, there are huge parts of the world

00:23:10.460 | that have not been studied at all by archeology.

00:23:14.220 | But the fact that huge parts of the world

00:23:17.140 | have not been studied at all by archeology

00:23:19.140 | is not on its own enough to suggest

00:23:21.860 | that we're missing a chapter in the human story.

00:23:24.860 | The reason that I come to that

00:23:26.420 | isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap.

00:23:31.020 | It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography

00:23:35.420 | there's common myths and traditions

00:23:37.820 | and there's common spiritual ideas

00:23:40.680 | that are found all around the world.

00:23:43.220 | And they're found amongst cultures

00:23:47.220 | that are geographically distant from one another

00:23:50.580 | and that are also distant from one another in time.

00:23:53.300 | They don't necessarily occur at the same time.

00:23:56.540 | And this is where I think that archeology

00:23:58.500 | is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas

00:24:01.380 | as well as just a history of things.

00:24:03.820 | Because an idea can manifest again and again

00:24:08.820 | throughout the human story.

00:24:11.060 | So there are particular issues, for example,

00:24:15.900 | the notion of the afterlife destiny of the soul.

00:24:19.120 | What happens to us when we die?

00:24:22.300 | And believe me, when you reach my age,

00:24:24.460 | that's something you do think about what happens.

00:24:28.260 | I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s,

00:24:30.260 | but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm not.

00:24:34.340 | Well, it would be natural for human beings

00:24:36.160 | all around the world to have that same feeling,

00:24:38.540 | that same idea.

00:24:39.940 | But why would they all decide

00:24:42.780 | that what happens to the soul after death

00:24:44.720 | is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way,

00:24:48.380 | that it makes a journey along the Milky Way,

00:24:50.420 | that there it is confronted by challenges,

00:24:52.780 | by monsters, by closed gates.

00:24:54.900 | The course of the life that that person has lived

00:24:57.540 | will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey.

00:25:01.580 | And this idea, the path of souls,

00:25:03.740 | the Milky Way is called the path of souls.

00:25:05.420 | It's very strongly found in the Americas,

00:25:08.420 | right from South America through Mexico

00:25:10.500 | through into North America.

00:25:11.500 | But it's also found in ancient Egypt,

00:25:15.060 | in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea.

00:25:19.500 | And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence.

00:25:22.060 | I feel that what we're looking at

00:25:23.580 | is an inheritance of an idea,

00:25:26.540 | a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source

00:25:30.500 | to cultures all around the world.

00:25:32.900 | And then has taken on a life of its own

00:25:35.020 | within those cultures.

00:25:36.380 | So the remote common source would explain

00:25:38.500 | both the similarities and the differences

00:25:40.540 | in the expression of these ideas.

00:25:43.220 | The other thing, very puzzling thing,

00:25:46.020 | is the sequence of numbers

00:25:49.500 | that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes.

00:25:54.340 | At least I think that's the best theory to explain them.

00:25:57.140 | Here, I think it's important to pay tribute

00:26:03.340 | to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend.

00:26:07.780 | Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science,

00:26:11.060 | actually at MIT, where you're based, back in the '60s.

00:26:15.540 | And Hertha von Deschend was professor

00:26:17.180 | of the history of science at Frankfurt University.

00:26:19.620 | And they wrote an immense book in the 1960s

00:26:23.340 | called "Hamlet's Mill."

00:26:25.540 | And "Hamlet's Mill" differs very strongly

00:26:30.540 | from established opinion

00:26:33.020 | on the issue of the phenomenon of precession.

00:26:35.700 | And I'll explain what precession is in a moment.

00:26:38.820 | Generally, it's held that it was the Greeks

00:26:42.540 | who discovered the precession.

00:26:45.780 | And the dating on that is put back not very far,

00:26:48.420 | maybe 2,300 years ago or so.

00:26:51.620 | Santillana and von Deschend are pointing out

00:26:53.780 | that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that,

00:26:56.580 | thousands of years older than that.

00:26:58.140 | And they do actually trace it,

00:27:00.500 | I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly,

00:27:02.740 | to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization.

00:27:06.180 | Reading that book was one of the several reasons

00:27:09.060 | that I got into this mystery in the first place.

00:27:12.660 | Okay, now, the precession of the equinoxes,

00:27:15.900 | to give it its full name,

00:27:17.260 | results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform

00:27:23.380 | from which we observe the stars.

00:27:25.660 | And our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis

00:27:28.740 | at roughly 1,000 miles an hour at the equator.

00:27:31.700 | But what's less obvious is that

00:27:33.100 | it's also wobbling on its axis.

00:27:35.500 | And so if you imagine the extended north pole of the Earth

00:27:39.260 | pointing up at the sky,

00:27:40.940 | in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris,

00:27:43.980 | and that is our pole star.

00:27:45.860 | But Polaris has not always been the pole star,

00:27:48.500 | precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth.

00:27:52.100 | Other stars have occupied the pole position,

00:27:55.140 | and sometimes the extended north pole of the Earth

00:27:57.460 | points at empty space, there is no pole star.

00:28:00.500 | That's one of the obvious results

00:28:02.260 | of the wobble on the Earth's axis.

00:28:04.020 | The other one is that there are 12

00:28:06.540 | well-known constellations in our time,

00:28:08.620 | the 12 constellations of the zodiac,

00:28:10.980 | that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun.

00:28:14.900 | The Earth is orbiting the sun,

00:28:16.980 | and we are seeing what's behind it,

00:28:19.900 | what's in direct line with the sun in our view.

00:28:23.900 | And the zodiacal constellations

00:28:25.580 | all lie along the path of the sun.

00:28:27.660 | So at different times of the year,

00:28:29.420 | the sun will rise against the background

00:28:31.180 | of a particular zodiacal constellation.

00:28:34.220 | Today, we live in the age of Pisces,

00:28:37.140 | and it's definitely not an accident

00:28:39.180 | that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol.

00:28:43.620 | This is another area where I differ from archeology.

00:28:46.020 | I think the constellations of the zodiac

00:28:48.660 | were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose.

00:28:52.500 | Anyway, to get to the point,

00:28:54.620 | the key marker of the year,

00:28:56.580 | certainly in the northern hemisphere,

00:28:58.060 | was the spring equinox.

00:29:00.380 | This was, the question was,

00:29:02.060 | what constellation is rising behind the sun?

00:29:05.660 | What constellation is housing the sun

00:29:08.380 | at dawn on the spring equinox?

00:29:10.820 | Right now, it's Pisces.

00:29:12.180 | In another 150 years or so, it'll be Aquarius.

00:29:15.220 | We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

00:29:18.060 | Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians,

00:29:23.660 | it was Aries, going back to the time of Ramesses or before.

00:29:27.340 | Before that, it was Taurus, and so on and so forth.

00:29:29.980 | It's backwards through the zodiac

00:29:32.420 | until 12,500 years ago, you come to the age of Leo

00:29:36.420 | when the constellation of Leo

00:29:38.260 | houses the sun on the spring equinox.

00:29:40.980 | Now, this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly.

00:29:45.260 | The whole cycle, and it is a cycle,

00:29:47.460 | it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years.

00:29:51.300 | Put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years.

00:29:56.180 | That may be a convention.

00:29:57.500 | Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that,

00:29:59.820 | a bit more, but you're talking fractions.

00:30:01.180 | It's in that area, 25,920 years.

00:30:04.940 | To observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime

00:30:10.940 | because it unfolds very, very slowly

00:30:14.140 | at a rate of one degree every 72 years.

00:30:16.660 | The parallel that I often give

00:30:18.420 | is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon.

00:30:21.820 | The movement in one lifetime in a period of 72 years

00:30:25.580 | is about the width of your finger.

00:30:28.180 | It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime,

00:30:30.140 | but it's difficult.

00:30:31.300 | You gotta pass it on.

00:30:33.100 | And what seems to have happened

00:30:35.460 | is that some ancient culture,

00:30:36.860 | the culture that Santillana and Vondesan

00:30:38.820 | call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture,

00:30:41.620 | worked out the entire process of precession

00:30:45.620 | and selected the key numbers of precession,

00:30:49.340 | of which the most important number,

00:30:51.300 | the governing number, is the number 72.

00:30:54.220 | But we also have numbers related to the number 72.

00:30:59.080 | 72 plus 36 is 108.

00:31:02.620 | 108 divided by two is 54.

00:31:05.900 | These numbers are also found in mythology

00:31:09.700 | all around the world.

00:31:10.720 | There were 72 conspirators

00:31:13.780 | who were involved in killing the god Osiris in ancient Egypt

00:31:18.660 | and nailing him up in a wooden coffer

00:31:20.660 | and dumping him in the Nile.

00:31:23.900 | There are 432,000 in the Rig Vesa.

00:31:28.460 | 432,000 is a multiple of 72.

00:31:31.740 | And at Angkor in Cambodia, for example,

00:31:36.800 | you have the bridge to Angkor Thom.

00:31:40.300 | And on that bridge, you have figures on both sides,

00:31:44.780 | sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent.

00:31:49.780 | That serpent is Vazuki.

00:31:52.340 | And what they're doing is they're churning the milky ocean.

00:31:55.580 | It's the same metaphor of churning and turning

00:31:58.420 | that's defined in the story of "Hamlet's Mill"

00:32:00.520 | of Amlodi's Mill.

00:32:02.260 | There are 54 on each side.

00:32:04.380 | 54 plus 54 is 108.

00:32:07.380 | 108 is 72 plus 36.

00:32:09.460 | It's a precessional number,

00:32:11.100 | according to the work that Santayana and Vandesan did.

00:32:13.860 | And the fascination with this number system

00:32:16.780 | and its discovery all around the world

00:32:19.780 | is one of the puzzles that intrigue me

00:32:22.780 | and suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge

00:32:27.220 | that was passed down and probably was passed down

00:32:29.900 | from a specific single common source at one time,

00:32:34.380 | but then was spread out very, very widely around the world.

00:32:37.300 | - So one of the defining ways that you approach

00:32:40.740 | the study of human history

00:32:43.220 | that I think contrasts with mainstream archeology

00:32:46.220 | is you take this sort of astronomical symbolism

00:32:50.260 | and the relationship between humans

00:32:53.100 | and the stars very seriously.

00:32:55.140 | - I do, as I believe the ancients did.

00:32:57.180 | - I think it's important to sort of consider

00:33:01.100 | what humans would have thought about back then.

00:33:04.640 | Now we have a lot of distractions.

00:33:06.140 | We have social media.

00:33:07.220 | We can watch videos on YouTube and whatever.

00:33:09.900 | But back then, especially before sort of electricity,

00:33:14.700 | the stars is like the sexiest thing to talk about.

00:33:18.580 | - There's no light pollution.

00:33:19.900 | - There's no light pollution.

00:33:20.740 | So there's, in your space- - There's the majesty

00:33:22.660 | of the heavens.

00:33:23.500 | - Every single night,

00:33:24.820 | you're spending looking up at the stars.

00:33:27.060 | And you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value

00:33:30.700 | to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars

00:33:33.780 | and sort of the scientists of the day.

00:33:35.660 | And I'm sure there's going to be these geniuses that emerge.

00:33:39.180 | They're able to do two things.

00:33:41.560 | One, tell stories about the gods or whatever

00:33:45.300 | based on the stars.

00:33:46.740 | And then also, as we'll probably talk about,

00:33:48.860 | use the stars practically for navigation, for example.

00:33:52.180 | - Oh yeah, definitely.

00:33:53.220 | - So like, it makes sense that the stars

00:33:56.300 | had a primal importance for the ideas of the times,

00:34:01.300 | for the status, for religious explorations.

00:34:07.320 | - It was an ever-present reality.

00:34:08.820 | - Yes. - And it was bright.

00:34:10.140 | And it was brilliant. - Yeah.

00:34:11.560 | - And it was full of lights.

00:34:13.980 | It's inconceivable that the ancients

00:34:16.260 | would not have paid attention to it.

00:34:17.760 | It was an overwhelming presence.

00:34:19.660 | And that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident

00:34:22.260 | that the constellations that we now recognize

00:34:24.700 | as the constellations of the zodiac

00:34:26.700 | were recognized much earlier.

00:34:28.080 | Because it's hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky

00:34:31.460 | that the sun, over the course of the solar year,

00:34:34.420 | is month by month rising against the background

00:34:37.060 | of different constellations.

00:34:38.340 | And then there's a much longer process,

00:34:40.580 | the process of precession,

00:34:42.060 | which takes that journey backwards.

00:34:44.180 | And where we have a period of 2,160 years

00:34:48.220 | for each sign of the zodiac.

00:34:49.280 | I think it would have been hard

00:34:50.180 | for the ancients to have missed that.

00:34:51.620 | They might not have identified the constellations

00:34:54.060 | in exactly the same way we do today.

00:34:56.140 | That may well be a Babylonian or Greek convention.

00:34:59.860 | But that the constellations were there,

00:35:02.340 | I think was very clear.

00:35:03.660 | And that they were special constellations,

00:35:05.220 | unlike other ones higher up in the sky,

00:35:07.580 | which were not on the path of the sun

00:35:10.060 | that people paid attention to.

00:35:11.460 | - Well, but detecting the precession of the equinox is hard.

00:35:14.800 | Because especially, they don't have any writing systems,

00:35:18.020 | they don't have any mathematical systems.

00:35:20.420 | So everything is told through words.

00:35:22.460 | - Yeah, and they have,

00:35:23.900 | let's not underestimate oral traditions.

00:35:26.180 | Oral traditions, that's something we've lost

00:35:29.900 | in our culture today.

00:35:31.340 | One of the things that happens with the written word

00:35:34.340 | is that you gradually lose your memory.

00:35:37.540 | Actually, there's a nice story from ancient Egypt

00:35:40.620 | about the god Thoth, the god of wisdom,

00:35:43.460 | who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing.

00:35:48.460 | Look at this gift, he says to a mythical pharaoh

00:35:52.100 | of that time, look at the gift

00:35:53.500 | that I am giving humanity, writing.

00:35:55.680 | This is a wonderful thing.

00:35:57.420 | It'll enable you to preserve so much

00:36:00.200 | that you would otherwise lose.

00:36:01.340 | And the pharaoh in this story replies to him,

00:36:05.300 | no, you have not given us a wonderful gift.

00:36:07.980 | You have destroyed the art of memory.

00:36:10.040 | We will forget everything.

00:36:12.380 | Words will roam free around the world,

00:36:15.180 | not accompanied by any wise advice

00:36:17.620 | to set them into context.

00:36:19.020 | And actually, that's a very interesting point.

00:36:21.580 | And we do know that cultures

00:36:23.020 | that still do have oral traditions

00:36:24.740 | are able to preserve information

00:36:26.140 | for very long periods of time.

00:36:27.980 | One thing I think is clear in any time,

00:36:31.140 | in any period of history, is human beings love stories.

00:36:33.940 | We love great stories.

00:36:35.700 | And one way to preserve information

00:36:38.620 | is to encode it, embed it in a great story.

00:36:42.620 | And so carefully done that actually it doesn't matter

00:36:46.860 | whether the storyteller knows

00:36:48.460 | that they're passing on that information or not.

00:36:51.420 | The story itself is the vehicle.

00:36:53.500 | And as long as it's repeated faithfully,

00:36:55.700 | the information contained within it will be passed on.

00:36:58.820 | And I do think this is part of the story

00:37:01.820 | of the preservation of knowledge.

00:37:03.380 | - But that's one of the reasons

00:37:04.300 | that you take myths seriously.

00:37:06.500 | - I take them very seriously.

00:37:07.740 | And the other, there's many reasons,

00:37:10.620 | but I can't help being deeply impressed

00:37:15.620 | and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition

00:37:21.060 | of a global cataclysm within human memory.

00:37:24.020 | I mean, we know that, we know scientifically

00:37:26.220 | that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past

00:37:29.800 | going back millions of years.

00:37:31.320 | I mean, the best known one, of course,

00:37:32.780 | is the KPG event as it's now called

00:37:35.700 | that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million

00:37:38.620 | or 66 million years ago.

00:37:42.460 | But has there been such a cataclysm

00:37:45.460 | in the lifetime of the human species?

00:37:47.540 | Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption

00:37:50.100 | about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad.

00:37:53.260 | But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas

00:37:56.740 | really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster,

00:38:01.700 | which definitely involved sea level rise,

00:38:04.000 | both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas.

00:38:07.860 | It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands

00:38:10.140 | that previously had been above water.

00:38:12.300 | And I think it's an excellent candidate

00:38:15.600 | for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm

00:38:18.140 | of which one of, but not the only,

00:38:20.700 | distinguishing characteristics was a flood,

00:38:23.220 | an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands

00:38:26.700 | that had previously been above water, underwater.

00:38:29.840 | The fact that this story is found all around the world

00:38:32.780 | suggests to me that the archeological explanation is,

00:38:37.540 | look, people suffer local floods all the time.

00:38:40.500 | I mean, as we're talking, there's flooding in Florida.

00:38:44.900 | But I don't think anybody in Florida

00:38:47.020 | is going to make the mistake of believing

00:38:48.740 | that that's a global flood.

00:38:50.220 | They know it's local.

00:38:52.620 | But that's the argument largely of archeology

00:38:54.740 | dealing with the flood myths,

00:38:56.020 | or that some local population

00:38:58.400 | experienced a nasty local flooding event,

00:39:01.660 | and they decided to say that it affected the whole world.

00:39:05.060 | I'm not persuaded by that,

00:39:06.360 | particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch,

00:39:10.020 | the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur,

00:39:12.200 | and when the Earth was subjected to events

00:39:15.200 | cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely

00:39:18.600 | the megafauna of the Ice Age.

00:39:20.440 | - So there is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis

00:39:23.960 | that provides an explanation

00:39:26.200 | of what happened during this period

00:39:28.420 | that resulted in such a rapid environmental change.

00:39:31.340 | So can you explain this hypothesis?

00:39:32.720 | - Yes.

00:39:34.160 | The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short,

00:39:38.620 | is not a lunatic fringe theory,

00:39:42.280 | as its opponents often attempt to write it off.

00:39:46.780 | It's the work of more than 60 major scientists

00:39:50.200 | working across many different disciplines,

00:39:53.340 | including archeology, and including oceanography as well.

00:39:57.860 | They are collectively puzzled

00:40:02.980 | by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas,

00:40:06.700 | and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago

00:40:10.980 | by a distinct layer in the Earth.

00:40:14.020 | You can see it most clearly

00:40:16.580 | at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example.

00:40:19.620 | You can see it's about the width of a human hand,

00:40:22.900 | and there's a draw there

00:40:24.660 | that's been cut by flash flooding at some time.

00:40:27.100 | And that draw has revealed the sides of the draw.

00:40:29.620 | And you can see the cross section,

00:40:31.540 | and in the cross section is this distinct dark layer

00:40:34.180 | that runs through the Earth.

00:40:35.580 | And it contains evidence of wildfires.

00:40:38.980 | There's a lot of soot in it.

00:40:41.420 | There are also nanodiamonds in it.

00:40:44.620 | There is shocked quartz in it.

00:40:47.060 | There is quartz that's been melted at temperatures

00:40:49.480 | in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade.

00:40:52.880 | There are carbon microspherules.

00:40:54.980 | All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact.

00:40:59.420 | I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

00:41:02.580 | Lewis and Walter Alvarez,

00:41:03.780 | who made that incredible discovery,

00:41:06.700 | initially their discovery was based entirely

00:41:09.540 | on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryases.

00:41:12.500 | There was no crater.

00:41:13.580 | And for a long time, they were disbelieved

00:41:15.360 | because they couldn't produce a crater.

00:41:17.380 | But when they finally did produce that deeply buried

00:41:20.180 | Chicxulub crater, that's when people started to say,

00:41:23.660 | "Yeah, they have to be right."

00:41:24.960 | But they weren't relying on the crater.

00:41:26.580 | They were relying on the impact proxies.

00:41:28.700 | And they're the same impact proxies that we find

00:41:31.300 | in what's called the Younger Dryas boundary layer

00:41:34.240 | all around the world.

00:41:36.220 | So it's the fact that at the moment

00:41:39.980 | when the Earth tips into a radical climate shift,

00:41:42.580 | it's been warming up for at least 2,000 years

00:41:46.040 | before 12,800 years ago.

00:41:48.300 | People at the time must have been feeling

00:41:49.900 | a great sense of relief.

00:41:51.440 | We've been living through this really cold time,

00:41:53.700 | but it's getting better.

00:41:54.920 | Things are getting better.

00:41:56.060 | And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago,

00:41:58.860 | some might say 12,860 years ago,

00:42:02.240 | there's a massive global plunge in global temperatures.

00:42:05.460 | And the world suddenly gets as cold as it was

00:42:09.100 | at the peak of the Ice Age.

00:42:10.300 | And it's almost literally overnight.

00:42:13.020 | It's very, very, very rapid.

00:42:15.700 | Normally in an epoch when the Earth is going into a freeze,

00:42:18.600 | you would not expect sea levels to rise,

00:42:21.060 | but there is a sea level rise, a sudden one,

00:42:23.280 | right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

00:42:25.980 | And then you have this long frozen period

00:42:28.820 | from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.

00:42:33.140 | And then equally dramatically and equally suddenly,

00:42:36.300 | the Younger Dryas comes to an end

00:42:37.940 | and the world very rapidly warms up

00:42:39.940 | and you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time

00:42:43.640 | as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea

00:42:46.500 | called Meltwater Pulse 1B, around about 11,600 years ago.

00:42:50.820 | So this is a period which is very tightly defined.

00:42:55.820 | It's a period when we know

00:42:58.820 | that human populations were grievously disturbed.

00:43:01.860 | That's when the so-called Clovis culture of North America

00:43:05.920 | vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas.

00:43:09.460 | And it's the time when the mammoths

00:43:10.740 | and the saber-toothed tigers

00:43:12.020 | vanished from the record as well.

00:43:13.680 | - Is there a good understanding

00:43:14.900 | of what happened geologically,

00:43:16.480 | whether there was an impact or not?

00:43:18.960 | Like what explains this huge dip in temperature

00:43:22.480 | and then rise in temperature?

00:43:24.160 | - The abrupt cessation

00:43:26.960 | of the global meridional overturning circulation

00:43:30.680 | of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part.

00:43:34.240 | The main theory that's been put forward up to now,

00:43:38.640 | and I don't dispute that theory at all,

00:43:40.900 | is that the sudden freeze was caused

00:43:44.700 | by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream, basically,

00:43:48.180 | which is part of the central heating system of our planet.

00:43:50.540 | So no wonder it became cold.

00:43:53.120 | But what's not really been addressed before

00:43:55.260 | is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut,

00:43:58.700 | why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean,

00:44:02.500 | and it was so much of it, and it was so cold

00:44:04.980 | that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks.

00:44:07.500 | And that's where the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

00:44:09.700 | offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution

00:44:13.380 | to the problem.

00:44:14.540 | Now, the hypothesis, of course, is broader than that.

00:44:18.980 | Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example,

00:44:22.860 | Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer.

00:44:26.300 | They have assembled a great deal of evidence

00:44:29.000 | which suggests that the culprit

00:44:31.240 | in the Younger Dryas Impact event or events

00:44:35.900 | was what we now call the Taurid Meteor Stream,

00:44:39.660 | which the Earth still passes through twice a year.

00:44:43.140 | It's now about 30 million kilometers wide,

00:44:46.620 | takes the Earth a couple of days

00:44:48.300 | to pass through it on its orbit.

00:44:50.220 | It passed through it in June,

00:44:51.740 | and it passes through it at the end of October.

00:44:54.220 | The suggestion is that the Taurid Meteor Stream

00:44:57.440 | is the end product of a very large comet

00:45:02.500 | that entered the solar system

00:45:04.380 | round about 20,000 years ago,

00:45:06.180 | came in from the Oort cloud,

00:45:07.820 | got trapped by the gravity of the sun,

00:45:09.980 | and went into orbit around the sun,

00:45:11.740 | an orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth.

00:45:14.000 | However, when it was one object,

00:45:17.460 | the likelihood of a collision with the Earth

00:45:20.140 | was extremely small.

00:45:22.060 | But as it started to do what all comets do,

00:45:24.820 | which was to break up into multiple fragments,

00:45:27.020 | 'cause these are chunks of rock held together by ice,

00:45:31.220 | and as they warm up, they split and disintegrate

00:45:34.600 | and break into pieces.

00:45:36.060 | As it passed through that,

00:45:37.060 | its debris stream became larger and larger

00:45:39.380 | and wider and wider.

00:45:41.020 | And the theory is that 12,800 years ago,

00:45:44.620 | the Earth passed through a particularly dense part

00:45:47.460 | of the Taurid Meteor Stream

00:45:49.220 | and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet,

00:45:52.900 | certainly from the west of North America

00:45:55.660 | as far east as Syria.

00:45:58.460 | And that we are by and large not talking

00:46:01.180 | about impacts that would have caused craters,

00:46:04.380 | although there certainly were some.

00:46:06.620 | We're talking about airbursts.

00:46:08.660 | When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter,

00:46:13.660 | and it's coming in very fast into the Earth's atmosphere,

00:46:18.740 | it is very unlikely to reach the Earth.

00:46:21.140 | It's going to blow up in the sky.

00:46:23.180 | And the best known recent example of that

00:46:26.300 | is the Tunguska event in Siberia,

00:46:29.140 | which took place on the 30th of June, 1908.

00:46:32.980 | The Tunguska event was, nobody disputes,

00:46:35.740 | it was definitely an airburst of a cometary fragment.

00:46:39.300 | And the date is interesting because the 30th of June

00:46:43.100 | is the height of the Beta Taurids.

00:46:45.180 | It's one of the two times when the Earth

00:46:46.460 | is going through the Taurid Meteor Stream.

00:46:48.820 | Well, luckily that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited,

00:46:51.740 | but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed.

00:46:54.660 | If that had happened over a major city,

00:46:56.780 | we would all be thinking very hard

00:46:59.180 | about objects out of the Taurid Meteor Stream

00:47:01.780 | and about the risk of cosmic impact.

00:47:05.060 | So the suggestion is that it wasn't one impact,

00:47:07.620 | it wasn't two impacts, it wasn't three impacts,

00:47:09.380 | it was hundreds of airbursts all around the planet,

00:47:12.740 | coupled with a number of bigger objects,

00:47:15.620 | which the scientists working on this think

00:47:18.140 | hit the North American ice cap, largely.

00:47:20.840 | Some of them may also have hit

00:47:21.980 | the Northern European ice cap,

00:47:23.660 | resulting in that sudden, otherwise unexplained

00:47:26.700 | flood of melt water that went into the world ocean

00:47:29.620 | and caused the cooling that then took place.

00:47:34.620 | But this was a disaster for life all over the planet.

00:47:39.300 | And it's interesting that one of the sites

00:47:42.180 | where they find the Younger Dryas Boundary

00:47:44.140 | and where they find overwhelming evidence of an airburst

00:47:47.500 | and where they find all the shocked quartz,

00:47:49.540 | the carbon microspherules, the nanodiamonds,

00:47:52.180 | the trinitite, and so on and so forth,

00:47:54.380 | all of those impact proxies are found at Apo Herrera.

00:47:59.380 | That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe,

00:48:03.220 | and it was hit 12,800 years ago, and it was obliterated.

00:48:07.720 | Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings

00:48:10.620 | within probably five years,

00:48:12.580 | but it was completely obliterated at that time.

00:48:16.540 | And it's difficult to imagine that the people

00:48:19.380 | who lived in that area would not have been very impressed

00:48:22.820 | by what they saw happening by these massive explosions

00:48:26.660 | in the sky and the obliteration of Apo Herrera.

00:48:30.860 | Now, this is a theory.

00:48:32.900 | The Younger Dryas Impact, it's a hypothesis, actually.

00:48:35.340 | It's not even a theory.

00:48:36.400 | A theory is, I think, considered a higher level

00:48:38.260 | than a hypothesis.

00:48:39.620 | That's why it's the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

00:48:41.940 | And of course, it has many opponents,

00:48:43.980 | and there are many who disagree with it.

00:48:46.060 | And there have been a series of peer-reviewed papers

00:48:51.060 | that have been published supposedly debunking

00:48:54.060 | the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

00:48:55.780 | One, I think, was in 2011.

00:48:57.620 | It was called a Requiem

00:48:59.900 | for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

00:49:02.060 | And there's one just been published a few months ago

00:49:04.660 | or a year ago called a Complete Refutation

00:49:08.700 | of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,

00:49:10.380 | something like that, some lengthy title.

00:49:13.780 | So it's a hypothesis that has its opponents.

00:49:17.580 | And even within those of us who are looking

00:49:20.220 | at the alternative side of history,

00:49:22.020 | there are different points of view.

00:49:24.380 | Robert Shock from Boston University,

00:49:26.500 | the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion

00:49:29.960 | on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure

00:49:32.460 | to a long period of very heavy rainfall,

00:49:35.460 | he doesn't go for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

00:49:38.260 | He fully accepts that the Younger Dryas

00:49:41.740 | was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place,

00:49:45.460 | but he thinks it was caused

00:49:46.620 | by some kind of massive solar outburst.

00:49:49.340 | So what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad,

00:49:53.780 | but there is dispute about what caused it.

00:49:56.220 | I personally have found the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

00:49:59.740 | to be the most persuasive,

00:50:01.900 | which most effectively explains all the evidence.

00:50:05.080 | - How important is the impact hypothesis

00:50:06.980 | to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations?

00:50:11.260 | So is it possible to have another explanation

00:50:13.680 | for environmental factors that could have erased

00:50:18.560 | most of an advanced civilization during this period?

00:50:21.500 | - In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis

00:50:24.280 | that is central to what I'm saying.

00:50:26.220 | It's the Younger Dryas that's central to what I'm saying.

00:50:29.020 | And the Younger Dryas required a trigger.

00:50:31.260 | Something caused it.

00:50:33.780 | I think the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,

00:50:35.860 | the notion that we're looking at a debris stream

00:50:39.480 | of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see

00:50:41.580 | that debris stream because it's still up there,

00:50:43.620 | and we still pass through it twice a year,

00:50:45.960 | is the best explanation.

00:50:47.680 | But I don't mind other explanations.

00:50:49.980 | It's good that there are other explanations.

00:50:51.940 | The Younger Dryas is a big mystery,

00:50:53.520 | and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet.

00:50:55.620 | And that word advanced civilization,

00:50:58.480 | this is another word that is easily misunderstood.

00:51:03.220 | And I've tried to make clear many, many times

00:51:06.060 | that when we consider the possibility

00:51:09.500 | of something like a civilization in the past,

00:51:12.580 | we shouldn't imagine that it's us,

00:51:14.860 | that it's something like us.

00:51:16.100 | We should expect it to be completely different from us,

00:51:19.220 | but that it would have achieved certain things.

00:51:21.980 | So amongst the clues that intrigue me

00:51:25.420 | are those precessional numbers

00:51:27.360 | that are found all around the world,

00:51:29.420 | and are a category of ancient maps called Portolanos,

00:51:33.180 | which suddenly started to appear

00:51:35.540 | just after the crusade that entered Constantinople

00:51:38.980 | and sacked Constantinople.

00:51:41.120 | The Portolanos suddenly start to appear,

00:51:44.280 | and they're extremely accurate maps.

00:51:46.060 | The most of the ones that have survived

00:51:47.740 | are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone,

00:51:51.340 | but some of them show much wider areas.

00:51:53.980 | For example, on these Portolanos-style maps,

00:51:56.500 | you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again.

00:52:00.320 | And another thing that these maps have in common

00:52:02.420 | is that many of the mapmakers state

00:52:04.660 | that they based their maps on multiple older source maps,

00:52:08.860 | which have not survived.

00:52:10.460 | These maps are intriguing

00:52:12.060 | because they have very accurate relative longitudes.

00:52:14.960 | Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem

00:52:20.220 | until the mid-18th century with Harrison's chronometer,

00:52:23.540 | which was able to keep accurate time at sea.

00:52:26.040 | So you could have the time in London,

00:52:29.780 | and you could have the local time at sea

00:52:31.540 | at the same time,

00:52:32.380 | and then you could work out your longitude.

00:52:35.060 | There might be other ways of working out longitude as well,

00:52:37.360 | but there it is.

00:52:38.860 | The fact is these Portolanos

00:52:40.520 | have extremely accurate relative longitudes.

00:52:43.140 | Secondly, some of them show the world to my eye

00:52:47.340 | as it looked during the Ice Age.

00:52:48.900 | They show a much extended Indonesia

00:52:52.580 | and Malaysian Peninsula,

00:52:54.280 | and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today

00:52:57.020 | are all grouped together into one landmass.

00:52:59.540 | And that was the case during the Ice Age.

00:53:01.300 | That was the Sunda Shelf.

00:53:03.900 | And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps

00:53:06.500 | also puzzles and intrigues me

00:53:08.100 | and is not satisfactorily explained,

00:53:10.220 | in my view, by archeology,

00:53:11.420 | which says, oh, those mapmakers,

00:53:13.700 | they felt that the world needed

00:53:15.300 | something underneath it to balance it,

00:53:17.340 | so they put a fictional landmass there.

00:53:20.560 | I don't think that makes sense.

00:53:23.080 | I think somebody was mapping the world

00:53:25.460 | during the last Ice Age,

00:53:26.500 | but that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech.

00:53:29.560 | It means that they were following that exploration instinct,

00:53:32.980 | that they knew how to navigate.

00:53:35.220 | They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before.

00:53:38.700 | They knew how to navigate,

00:53:39.780 | and they knew how to build seagoing ships,

00:53:42.940 | and they explored the world, and they mapped the world.

00:53:46.000 | Those maps were made a very, very long time ago.

00:53:51.000 | Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved

00:53:53.780 | in the Library of Alexandria.

00:53:56.380 | I think even then, they were being copied and recopied.

00:53:59.880 | We don't know exactly what happened

00:54:01.280 | to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed.

00:54:04.240 | I suggest it's likely.

00:54:06.600 | This was during the period of the Roman Empire.

00:54:08.520 | I suggest it's likely that some of those maps

00:54:10.540 | were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople,

00:54:14.040 | and that's where they were liberated during the crusade

00:54:18.640 | and entered world culture again

00:54:20.240 | and started to be copied and recopied.

00:54:23.160 | - So, from this perspective, when we talk

00:54:26.440 | about advanced Ice Age civilization,

00:54:28.200 | it could have been a relatively small group of people

00:54:30.880 | with the technology of their scholars of the stars

00:54:35.200 | and their expert seafaring navigators.

00:54:38.600 | - Yes, that's about as far as I would take it.

00:54:40.800 | And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions,

00:54:43.960 | that it had technology equivalent to ours

00:54:46.480 | in the 18th century, I'm referring specifically

00:54:49.480 | to the ability to calculate longitude.

00:54:51.640 | I'm not saying that they were building steam engines.

00:54:54.720 | I don't see any evidence for that.

00:54:57.040 | - And perhaps some building tricks and skills

00:55:01.680 | of how to- - Well, definitely.

00:55:03.760 | And this, again, is where you come to a series of mysteries

00:55:08.240 | which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau

00:55:11.640 | in Egypt with the three great pyramids

00:55:15.340 | and the extraordinary megalithic temples

00:55:17.800 | that many people don't pay much attention to.

00:55:21.760 | On the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself,

00:55:25.600 | this is an area of particular importance

00:55:29.040 | in understanding this issue.

00:55:31.280 | - Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx

00:55:33.800 | and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious

00:55:36.200 | and interesting about them?

00:55:37.160 | - Well, first of all, the astronomy.

00:55:39.340 | And here, I must pay tribute to two individuals,

00:55:45.000 | actually three individuals in particular.

00:55:46.720 | One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018.

00:55:50.880 | He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder

00:55:55.160 | if the Sphinx was much older than it had been.

00:55:57.500 | Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher

00:56:00.000 | called Schwaller de Lubix,

00:56:01.480 | who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion

00:56:04.160 | on the body of the Sphinx.

00:56:05.640 | John West picked that up,

00:56:06.920 | and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself.

00:56:10.800 | He spent most of his life in Egypt,

00:56:12.320 | and he was hugely versed in ancient Egypt.

00:56:15.640 | And when he looked at the Sphinx

00:56:16.880 | and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns

00:56:20.080 | and the vertical fissures,

00:56:21.000 | particularly in the trench around the Sphinx,

00:56:23.960 | he began to think maybe Schwaller was right.

00:56:26.840 | Maybe there was some sort of flooding here,

00:56:29.280 | and that's when he brought Robert Shock,

00:56:31.200 | second person I'd like to recognize,

00:56:33.720 | geologist at Boston University.

00:56:35.560 | He brought Shock to Giza,

00:56:37.240 | and Shock was the first geologist to stick his neck out,

00:56:40.700 | risk the ire of Egyptologists,

00:56:43.840 | and say, "Well, it looks to me like the Sphinx

00:56:46.040 | "was exposed to at least 1,000 years of heavy rainfall."

00:56:49.320 | And as Shock's calculations have continued,

00:56:51.600 | as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery,

00:56:53.760 | he's continuously pushed that back.

00:56:55.640 | And he's now, again, looking at the date

00:56:57.800 | of around 12,000, 12 1/2 thousand years ago

00:57:01.480 | during the Younger Dryas

00:57:03.320 | for the creation of the Great Sphinx.

00:57:05.480 | And then, of course, this is the period

00:57:08.120 | of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara.

00:57:11.600 | The Sahara was a completely different place

00:57:14.560 | during the Ice Age.

00:57:15.400 | There were rivers in it.

00:57:16.240 | There were lakes in it.

00:57:17.160 | It was fertile.

00:57:18.380 | It was possibly densely populated.

00:57:21.560 | And there was a lot of rain.

00:57:23.280 | There's not no rain in Giza today,

00:57:25.480 | but there's relatively little rain.

00:57:28.160 | The next person, not enough rain

00:57:29.680 | to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.

00:57:31.800 | The next person who needs to be mentioned

00:57:34.000 | in this context is Robert Boval.

00:57:36.680 | Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together.

00:57:40.040 | Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill

00:57:42.120 | for the last seven years.

00:57:44.140 | He's got a very bad chest infection.

00:57:48.780 | And I think also that Robert became very demoralized

00:57:52.260 | by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work.

00:57:55.260 | But Robert is the genius,

00:57:58.300 | and it does take a genius sometime

00:57:59.820 | to make these connections,

00:58:00.960 | 'cause nobody'd noticed it before,

00:58:03.060 | that the three pyramids of Giza

00:58:04.940 | are laid out on the ground

00:58:06.260 | in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's Belt.

00:58:09.620 | And skeptics will say, "Well, you can find any buildings

00:58:11.900 | "and line them up with any stars you want."

00:58:13.460 | But Orion actually isn't any old constellation.

00:58:17.460 | Orion was the god Osiris in the sky.

00:58:20.820 | He was, the ancient Egyptians

00:58:22.580 | called the Orion constellation Sahu,

00:58:25.060 | and they recognized it as the celestial image

00:58:27.100 | of the god Osiris.

00:58:28.080 | So what's being copied on the ground

00:58:30.360 | is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity.

00:58:33.400 | It's not just a random constellation.

00:58:36.560 | And then when we take precession into account,

00:58:40.280 | you find something else very intriguing happening.

00:58:43.720 | First of all, you find that the exact orientation

00:58:47.920 | of the pyramids as it is today,

00:58:49.840 | and pretty much as it was when they're supposed

00:58:51.840 | to have been built 4,500 years ago,

00:58:55.560 | it's not precisely related

00:58:57.840 | to how Orion's Belt looked at that time.

00:59:00.640 | There's a bit of a twist.

00:59:03.080 | They're not quite right.

00:59:04.560 | But as you precess the stars backwards,

00:59:07.120 | as you go back, and back, and back,

00:59:10.600 | and you come to around 10,500 BC,

00:59:13.040 | 12,500 years ago in the Younger Dryas,

00:59:15.820 | you find that suddenly they lock perfectly.

00:59:18.100 | They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground.

00:59:20.840 | And that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx,

00:59:24.020 | an equinoctial monument aligned perfectly

00:59:27.960 | to the rising sun on the spring equinox.

00:59:29.720 | Anybody can test this for themselves.

00:59:31.200 | Just go to Giza on the 21st of March,

00:59:33.960 | be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx,

00:59:36.440 | and you will see the sun rising directly in line

00:59:38.760 | with the gaze of the Sphinx.

00:59:40.640 | But the question is,

00:59:41.920 | what constellation was behind the Sphinx?

00:59:44.040 | And 12,500 years ago, it was the constellation of Leo.

00:59:47.880 | And actually, the constellation of Leo

00:59:49.480 | has a very Sphinx-like look.

00:59:50.920 | And I and my colleagues are pretty sure

00:59:55.360 | that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely,

00:59:59.720 | and that it, over the thousands of years,

01:00:01.760 | it became damaged, it became eroded,

01:00:04.800 | particularly the part of it that sticks out the head.

01:00:07.940 | There were periods when the Sphinx

01:00:10.480 | was completely covered in sand,

01:00:11.960 | but still the head stuck out.

01:00:14.560 | By the time you come to the fourth dynasty,

01:00:17.600 | when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built,

01:00:20.160 | by the time you come to the fourth dynasty,

01:00:22.200 | the head of the lion, original lion head,

01:00:25.400 | would have been a complete mess.

01:00:27.320 | And we suggest that it was then recarved

01:00:29.720 | into a pharaonic head.

01:00:31.840 | Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre,

01:00:35.160 | but there's no real strong resemblance.

01:00:37.680 | But it's definitely wearing the nemesis headdress

01:00:39.960 | of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

01:00:42.760 | And we think that that's the result of a recarving

01:00:45.440 | of what was originally not only a lion-bodied,

01:00:48.040 | but also a lion-headed monument.

01:00:50.440 | It wouldn't make sense

01:00:51.880 | if you create an equinoctial marker

01:00:54.160 | in the time of Khafre, 4,500 years ago,

01:00:57.960 | and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.

01:01:00.120 | I mean, it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high,

01:01:02.440 | and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox.

01:01:05.160 | If you create it then, you would be better,

01:01:08.960 | you'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull,

01:01:11.960 | because that was the age of Taurus

01:01:13.440 | when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun

01:01:15.840 | on the spring equinox.

01:01:17.200 | So why is it a lion?

01:01:19.360 | And again, we think that's because

01:01:22.240 | of that observation of the skies,

01:01:24.240 | and putting on the ground, as above, so below,

01:01:29.000 | putting on the ground an image of the sky

01:01:31.360 | at a particular time.

01:01:32.360 | Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau,

01:01:37.040 | it's a fact, of course,

01:01:37.880 | that Egyptologists completely dispute,

01:01:40.240 | but the fact that the principal monuments

01:01:42.160 | of the Giza Plateau, the Three Great Pyramids,

01:01:44.320 | and the Great Sphinx all lock astronomically

01:01:47.360 | on the date of around 10,500 BC,

01:01:51.920 | to me is most unlikely to be an accident.

01:01:54.320 | And actually, if you look at computer software

01:01:56.240 | at the sky at that time,

01:01:57.200 | you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent,

01:02:01.120 | and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the River Nile.

01:02:04.480 | I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many

01:02:07.040 | why Giza was chosen as the site for this

01:02:11.240 | very special place.

01:02:12.760 | So the point I want to make is that

01:02:15.960 | an astronomical design on the ground,

01:02:20.520 | which memorializes a very ancient date,

01:02:23.640 | does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago.

01:02:26.920 | If from the ancient Egyptian point of view,

01:02:29.360 | you're there 4,500 years ago,

01:02:32.120 | and there's a time 8,000 years before that,

01:02:36.600 | which is very, very, very important to you,

01:02:39.240 | you could use astronomical language

01:02:41.920 | and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date

01:02:44.600 | on the Giza Plateau,

01:02:46.000 | which is what we think we're looking at,

01:02:48.200 | except for one thing,

01:02:49.440 | and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.

01:02:52.080 | And we're pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least,

01:02:54.880 | does date back to 12,500 years ago.

01:02:58.560 | And with it, the megalithic temples,

01:03:02.200 | the so-called Vali Temple,

01:03:04.280 | which stands just to the east

01:03:08.440 | and just to the south of the Sphinx,

01:03:10.960 | and the Sphinx Temple,

01:03:11.920 | which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.

01:03:13.840 | The Sphinx Temple has largely been destroyed,

01:03:16.120 | but the Vali Temple, attributed to Khafre,

01:03:19.080 | on no good grounds whatsoever,

01:03:22.000 | is a huge megalithic construction

01:03:24.920 | with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each.

01:03:29.400 | And yet, it has been remodeled, refaced with granite.

01:03:34.400 | There are granite blocks that are placed

01:03:37.120 | on top of the core limestone blocks.

01:03:40.400 | And those core limestone blocks were already eroded

01:03:43.520 | when the granite blocks were put there.

01:03:45.280 | Why?

01:03:46.120 | Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully

01:03:48.360 | and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks

01:03:52.000 | on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there.

01:03:55.720 | So I think Giza is a very complicated site.

01:03:59.360 | I would never seek to divorce

01:04:01.800 | the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids.

01:04:05.520 | They were closely involved in the construction

01:04:08.480 | of the Great Pyramids as we see them today.

01:04:10.640 | But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms

01:04:16.120 | on the Giza Plateau that are much older.

01:04:18.720 | And that when we look at the three Great Pyramids,

01:04:21.320 | we're looking at a renovation and a restoration

01:04:24.080 | and a enhancement of much older structures

01:04:28.040 | that had existed on the Giza Plateau

01:04:30.520 | for a much longer period before that.

01:04:32.280 | Actually, the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill.

01:04:36.600 | And that natural hill might have been seen

01:04:39.320 | as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians.

01:04:44.360 | - So the idea is that the Sphinx was there

01:04:46.520 | long before the pyramids.

01:04:49.600 | And the pyramids were built by the Egyptian

01:04:51.120 | to celebrate further an already holy place.

01:04:55.040 | - Yeah, and there were platforms in place

01:04:57.560 | where the pyramids stand.

01:04:58.540 | Not the pyramids as we see them today,

01:05:01.200 | but the base of those pyramids

01:05:05.760 | was already in place at that time.

01:05:07.480 | - So what's the case, what's the evidence

01:05:09.520 | that the Egyptologists used to make the attributions

01:05:12.680 | that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?

01:05:16.200 | - Well, the three Great Pyramids of Giza

01:05:19.800 | are different from later pyramids.

01:05:21.680 | This is another problem that I have with the whole thing,

01:05:24.820 | is the story of pyramid building.

01:05:29.200 | When did it really begin?

01:05:30.960 | And the timeline that we get from Egyptology

01:05:34.080 | is the first pyramid, is the pyramid of the pharaoh Djoser,

01:05:39.080 | the step pyramid at Saqqara.

01:05:42.000 | About a hundred years or so

01:05:46.280 | before the Giza pyramids are built.

01:05:48.520 | And then we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty

01:05:52.460 | of true pyramids.

01:05:55.080 | We have three of them attributed to a single pharaoh,

01:05:58.080 | Sneferu, who built supposedly the pyramid at Maidum

01:06:02.760 | and the two pyramids at Dahshur,

01:06:04.280 | the Bent and the Red Pyramid.

01:06:06.520 | And then within that same hundred year span,

01:06:09.360 | we have the Giza pyramids being built.

01:06:11.760 | This is according to the orthodox chronology.

01:06:14.800 | And then suddenly, once the Giza project is finished,

01:06:18.080 | pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt.

01:06:21.760 | And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty

01:06:24.540 | are frankly speaking a mess outside.

01:06:27.020 | They're very inferior constructions.

01:06:29.800 | You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all.

01:06:32.200 | But what happens when you go inside them

01:06:34.660 | is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs

01:06:39.540 | and imagery repeating the name of the king

01:06:42.460 | who was supposedly buried in that place.

01:06:44.540 | Whereas the Giza pyramids

01:06:45.980 | have no internal inscriptions whatsoever.

01:06:48.340 | What we do have is one piece of graffiti

01:06:52.980 | about which there is some controversy.

01:06:56.380 | Basic statistics, it's a 6 million ton structure.

01:07:01.100 | Each side is about 750 feet long.

01:07:04.900 | It's aligned almost perfectly

01:07:07.100 | to true North, South, East, and West

01:07:09.720 | within 3/60 of a single degree.

01:07:12.300 | It's a 60th because degrees are divided into 60s.

01:07:17.180 | And it's the precision of the orientation

01:07:21.060 | and the absolute massive size of the thing.

01:07:24.120 | Plus it's very complicated internal passageways

01:07:27.940 | that are involved in it.

01:07:30.900 | You know, in the ninth century,

01:07:33.580 | the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place.

01:07:37.220 | But there was an Arab caliph, Caliph al-Mamun,

01:07:42.220 | who had already realized that other pyramids

01:07:45.260 | did have their entrances in the North face.

01:07:47.060 | Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was.

01:07:49.620 | But he figured if there's an entrance to this thing,

01:07:52.540 | it's gonna be in the North face somewhere.

01:07:54.560 | So he put together a team of workers

01:07:57.460 | and they went in with sledgehammers

01:07:58.860 | and they started smashing

01:07:59.980 | where he thought would be the entrance.

01:08:02.260 | And they cut their way into the Great Pyramid

01:08:05.580 | for a distance of maybe a hundred feet.

01:08:08.700 | And then the hammering that they did dislodged something.

01:08:12.500 | They heard a little bit further away, something big falling.

01:08:15.420 | And they realized there was a cavity there.

01:08:17.580 | And they started heading in that direction.

01:08:20.300 | And then they joined the internal passageway

01:08:22.900 | of the Great Pyramid,

01:08:24.780 | the descending and the ascending corridors that go up.

01:08:28.140 | When you go up the ascending corridor,

01:08:29.820 | every one of the internal passageways

01:08:32.780 | in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in,

01:08:35.380 | slopes at an angle of 26 degrees.

01:08:37.500 | That's interesting because the angle of slope

01:08:39.780 | of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees.

01:08:42.740 | So we know mathematicians were at work

01:08:44.620 | as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.

01:08:48.200 | If you go up the Grand Gallery,

01:08:52.940 | which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor,

01:08:56.420 | and it's above the so-called Queen's Chamber,

01:08:58.220 | you go up the Grand Gallery,

01:08:59.620 | you're eventually going to come

01:09:00.860 | to what is known as the King's Chamber,

01:09:02.580 | in which there is a sarcophagus.

01:09:04.620 | And that sarcophagus is a little bit too big

01:09:08.300 | to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway.

01:09:10.620 | It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber

01:09:12.740 | was built around the sarcophagus already in place.

01:09:16.440 | Above the King's Chamber are five other chamberss.

01:09:20.660 | These are known as relieving chambers.

01:09:23.020 | The theory was that they were built

01:09:24.660 | to relieve the pressure on the King's Chamber

01:09:27.140 | of the weight of the monument.

01:09:28.980 | But I think what makes that theory dubious

01:09:31.460 | is the fact that even lower down,

01:09:33.420 | where more weight was involved,

01:09:34.980 | you have the Queen's Chamber,

01:09:36.020 | and there are no such relieving chambers above that.

01:09:38.500 | In the top of these five chambers,

01:09:41.140 | a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vise,

01:09:45.260 | who dynamited his way into those chambers

01:09:47.700 | in the first place, allegedly found,

01:09:50.700 | well, he claims he found the graffiti,

01:09:53.940 | a piece of graffiti left by a work gang

01:09:57.460 | naming the pharaoh Khufu.

01:09:58.940 | And it's true, I've been in that chamber,

01:10:00.400 | and there is the cartouche of Khufu there,

01:10:02.900 | quite recognizable.

01:10:04.220 | But the dispute around it is whether

01:10:06.820 | that is a genuine piece of graffiti

01:10:09.540 | dating from the old kingdom,

01:10:11.540 | or whether Howard Vise actually put it there himself,

01:10:15.920 | because he was in desperate need of money at the time.

01:10:19.460 | I'm not sure what the answer to that question is.

01:10:21.420 | Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons

01:10:24.420 | that Egyptologists feel confident in saying

01:10:27.500 | that the pyramid is the work of Khufu.

01:10:30.180 | Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jarf papyri,

01:10:33.620 | where on the Red Sea, a diary,

01:10:37.280 | the diary of an individual called Merer was found,

01:10:39.620 | and he talks about bringing highly polished limestone

01:10:43.940 | to the Great Pyramid.

01:10:45.340 | And it's clear that what he's talking about

01:10:47.260 | is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid.

01:10:49.280 | He's not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid.

01:10:51.420 | He's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid

01:10:54.060 | during the reign of Khufu.

01:10:55.320 | So that's another reason why the Great Pyramid

01:10:58.100 | is attributed to Khufu.

01:11:00.140 | But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved

01:11:04.100 | in the Great Pyramid and in a big way,

01:11:05.880 | but I think he was building upon and elaborating

01:11:08.020 | a much older structure.

01:11:09.020 | And I think the heart of that structure

01:11:11.180 | is the subterranean chamber,

01:11:13.320 | which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base

01:11:16.220 | of the Great Pyramid.

01:11:17.980 | Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia

01:11:20.040 | will not enjoy being down there.

01:11:22.280 | You got to go down a 26 degree sloping corridor

01:11:25.720 | until a distance of about 300 feet.

01:11:29.920 | It's 100 feet vertically,

01:11:31.080 | but the slope means you're gonna walk a distance of,

01:11:33.660 | not walk, you're gonna ape walk.

01:11:35.300 | You're almost gonna have to crawl.

01:11:37.320 | I've learned from long experience that the best way

01:11:39.680 | to go down these corridors is actually backwards.

01:11:42.980 | If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them

01:11:44.840 | 'cause they're only three feet, five inches high.

01:11:47.360 | You get down to the bottom,

01:11:48.540 | you have a short horizontal passage,

01:11:50.660 | and then you get into the subterranean chamber.

01:11:53.400 | The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed

01:11:58.100 | to be the burial place of Khufu.

01:12:00.260 | But after cutting out that 300 foot long,

01:12:03.100 | 26 degree sloping passage,

01:12:06.980 | a lot of which passes through bedrock

01:12:09.060 | and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock,

01:12:12.020 | gone to all that trouble,

01:12:13.380 | they decided they wouldn't bury him there.

01:12:15.540 | And they built what's now known as the queen's chamber

01:12:19.080 | as his burial chamber.

01:12:20.080 | But then they decided that wouldn't do either,

01:12:22.120 | so they then built the king's chamber.

01:12:24.000 | And that's where the pharaoh

01:12:25.280 | is supposed to have been buried.

01:12:26.400 | Those Arab raiders under Caliph Mamun

01:12:28.680 | didn't find anything in the Great Pyramid at all.

01:12:31.720 | - So your idea is that the Sphinx

01:12:36.640 | and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier.

01:12:40.080 | And why that's important is in that case,

01:12:43.360 | it would be evidence of some transfer of technology

01:12:46.740 | from a much older civilization.

01:12:50.380 | The idea is that during the Younger Dryas,

01:12:54.280 | most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged

01:12:58.260 | and they desperately scattered across the globe.

01:13:01.020 | - Seeking refuge.

01:13:01.940 | - Seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe one,

01:13:06.940 | the importance of the stars,

01:13:09.520 | their knowledge about the stars,

01:13:11.860 | and their knowledge about building

01:13:13.500 | and knowledge about navigation.

01:13:15.220 | - That's roughly the idea.

01:13:18.940 | So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians

01:13:22.300 | have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi,

01:13:27.300 | which is the first time, it means the first time.

01:13:32.220 | This is when the gods walked the earth.

01:13:34.560 | This is when seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt.

01:13:40.580 | And that is seen as the origin

01:13:42.020 | of ancient Egyptian civilization.

01:13:43.520 | There are king lists, by the ancient Egyptians themselves,

01:13:46.820 | there are king lists that go back

01:13:49.900 | way beyond the first dynasty,

01:13:51.540 | go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt,

01:13:55.040 | considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists.

01:13:57.740 | But nevertheless, it's interesting

01:13:59.060 | that there's that reference to remote time.

01:14:02.580 | Now, what you also have in Egypt

01:14:04.620 | are what might almost be described as secret societies.

01:14:08.860 | The followers of Horus are one of those,

01:14:11.020 | specifically tasked with bringing forward

01:14:14.140 | the knowledge from the first time into later periods.

01:14:18.900 | The souls of Pea and Neken are another one

01:14:21.460 | of these mysterious secret society groups

01:14:25.340 | who are possessors of knowledge

01:14:26.920 | that they transmit to the future.

01:14:29.380 | And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors

01:14:33.940 | of the Angadrias Cataclysm who settled in Giza

01:14:38.180 | may have been relatively small in number.

01:14:40.140 | It's interesting that they are referred to

01:14:42.380 | in the Edfu building text as seven sages,

01:14:45.740 | because that repeats again and again.

01:14:47.700 | It's also in Mesopotamia, it's seven sages,

01:14:52.220 | seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters

01:14:54.740 | of the Persian Gulf and teach people

01:14:57.500 | all the skills of agriculture and of architecture

01:15:01.540 | and of astronomy.

01:15:02.780 | It's found all around the world

01:15:04.580 | that there was a relatively small number of people

01:15:06.820 | who took refuge in Giza,

01:15:08.500 | who benefited from the survival skills

01:15:11.500 | of the hunter-foragers who lived at Giza at that time

01:15:13.940 | and who also passed on their knowledge

01:15:15.980 | to those hunter-foragers.

01:15:17.580 | But it was not knowledge that was ready

01:15:20.060 | to be put into shape at that time.

01:15:22.420 | And that knowledge was then preserved

01:15:24.340 | and kept and handled within very secretive groups

01:15:29.100 | that passed it down over thousands of years.

01:15:31.980 | And finally, it bursts into full form

01:15:35.140 | in the fourth dynasty in ancient Egypt.

01:15:38.020 | And you know, the notion that knowledge

01:15:40.500 | might be transferred over thousands of years

01:15:44.580 | shouldn't be absurd.

01:15:47.620 | We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel,

01:15:50.580 | it goes back to the time of Abraham,

01:15:52.380 | which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC.

01:15:56.500 | And knowledge has been preserved from that time

01:15:58.740 | right up to the present day.

01:15:59.980 | So if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years,

01:16:03.020 | you can probably preserve it for eight.

01:16:05.420 | - Now, of course, the error bars on this are quite large,

01:16:07.780 | but if an advanced Ice Age civilization existed,

01:16:11.140 | where do you think it was?

01:16:13.140 | Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed?

01:16:16.460 | And how big do you think it might have been?

01:16:19.780 | - Well, this is where I'm often accused

01:16:21.660 | of presenting a God of the Gaps argument,

01:16:23.580 | that I think there was a lost civilization

01:16:25.140 | because there's lots of the Earth

01:16:26.420 | that archaeologists have never looked at.

01:16:28.580 | Of course, I'm not thinking that.

01:16:30.820 | These are very special gaps that I'm interested in.

01:16:33.580 | And I'm interested in them because of all the curiosities

01:16:36.340 | and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before.

01:16:38.380 | It's not just because there are gaps

01:16:40.100 | in the archaeological record.

01:16:42.340 | It's because those gaps involve places

01:16:45.780 | that were very interesting places to live

01:16:47.540 | during the Ice Age.

01:16:48.980 | And they specifically include the Sahara Desert,

01:16:52.540 | which was not a desert during the Ice Age

01:16:55.220 | and went through this warm, wet period

01:16:58.100 | when it was very, very fertile.

01:16:59.940 | Certainly, some archaeology has been done in the Sahara,

01:17:03.780 | but it's fractional, it's tiny.

01:17:06.340 | And I think if we want to get into the origins,

01:17:08.420 | true origins of ancient Egyptian civilization,

01:17:10.700 | of the peoples of ancient Egypt,

01:17:12.060 | we need to be looking in the Sahara for that.

01:17:15.700 | And the Amazon rainforest is another example of this.

01:17:20.700 | I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers.

01:17:25.580 | The Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest

01:17:29.220 | is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six.

01:17:33.900 | And then you have the continental shelves

01:17:38.020 | that were submerged by sea level rise

01:17:39.900 | at the end of the Ice Age.

01:17:40.820 | Now, it's well established that sea level rose by 400 feet,

01:17:44.780 | but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight.

01:17:47.380 | It came in dribs and drabs.

01:17:50.020 | There were periods of very rapid,

01:17:52.460 | quite significant sea level rise.

01:17:54.660 | And there were periods when the sea level

01:17:56.380 | was rising much more slowly.

01:17:58.660 | So that 400 foot sea level rise is spread out

01:18:01.660 | over a period of about 10,000 years.

01:18:03.500 | But there are episodes within it,

01:18:04.940 | like Meltwater Pulse 1B, like Meltwater Pulse 1A,

01:18:09.700 | when the flooding was really immense.

01:18:12.900 | - How big do you think it might've been?

01:18:14.780 | And do you think it was spread across the globe?

01:18:18.300 | So if there were expert navigators,

01:18:20.620 | do you think they spread across the globe?

01:18:23.220 | - Well, the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is

01:18:25.620 | I don't know where this civilization started

01:18:29.540 | or where it was based.

01:18:30.580 | All I'm seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles

01:18:33.940 | that intrigue me and which suggest to me

01:18:36.700 | that something is missing from our past.

01:18:39.340 | And I'm not inclined to look for that missing something

01:18:42.500 | in, for example, Northern Europe,

01:18:45.100 | because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live

01:18:47.900 | during the Ice Age.

01:18:48.820 | I mean, nobody smart would build a civilization

01:18:52.580 | in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago.

01:18:54.900 | It was a hideous, frozen wasteland.

01:18:58.100 | The places to look are places that were hospitable

01:19:00.620 | and welcoming to human beings during the Ice Age.

01:19:03.100 | And that, of course, includes the coastlines

01:19:05.140 | that are now underwater.

01:19:06.860 | Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert.

01:19:08.940 | And of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well.

01:19:11.580 | All of these places, I think, are candidates

01:19:14.460 | for, quote, unquote, my lost civilization.

01:19:18.580 | And because I think, largely from those ancient maps,

01:19:22.460 | that it was a navigating, seafaring civilization,

01:19:25.820 | I suspect that it wasn't only in one place.

01:19:28.860 | It was probably in a number of places.

01:19:31.060 | And then I can only speculate.

01:19:33.420 | Maybe there was a cultural value

01:19:38.220 | where it was felt that it was not appropriate

01:19:40.940 | to interfere with the lives of hunter-foragers at that time.

01:19:45.940 | Maybe it was felt that they should keep

01:19:48.660 | their distance from them.

01:19:50.100 | Just as even today, there is a feeling

01:19:52.700 | that we shouldn't be interfering too much

01:19:54.820 | with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest.

01:19:58.460 | Although, interestingly, some of those tribes

01:20:02.420 | are now using cell phones.

01:20:04.140 | That possibility may have been there in the past.

01:20:08.620 | And only when we come to a global cataclysm

01:20:11.820 | does it become essential to have outreach

01:20:13.900 | and actually to take refuge

01:20:15.660 | amongst those hunter-forager populations.

01:20:17.580 | That is the hypothesis that I'm putting forward.

01:20:20.020 | I'm not claiming that it's a fact.

01:20:21.820 | But for me, it helps to explain the evidence.

01:20:24.420 | - So that speaks to one of the challenges

01:20:26.260 | that archeologists provide to this idea,

01:20:29.220 | is that there is a lot of evidence of humans in the Ice Age,

01:20:32.940 | and they appear to be all hunter-gatherers.

01:20:36.380 | But like you said, only a small percent

01:20:40.820 | of areas where humans have lived

01:20:43.300 | have been studied by archeologists.

01:20:46.340 | - That's right.

01:20:47.180 | Very tiny percent.

01:20:48.020 | Even a tiny percent of every archeological site

01:20:50.660 | has been studied by archeologists, too.

01:20:52.060 | Typically, one to five percent

01:20:53.940 | of any archeological site is excavated.

01:20:55.940 | - I mean, that's why, go back a tip,

01:20:58.260 | it fills my mind with imagination,

01:21:00.540 | especially seeing it as a time capsule.

01:21:02.500 | It's almost certain that there's places on Earth

01:21:07.420 | we haven't discovered, that once we do,

01:21:10.820 | even if it's after the Ice Age,

01:21:12.340 | will change our view of human history.

01:21:15.540 | Do you think there's going to be a place,

01:21:17.220 | like, what will be your dream thing to discover,

01:21:20.740 | like Gobekli Tepe, that says a definitive, like,

01:21:25.620 | perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history?

01:21:29.060 | - Some kind of archive.

01:21:30.420 | Some kind of Hall of Records.

01:21:32.460 | There's both mystical associations

01:21:35.500 | with the Hall of Records at Giza,

01:21:37.100 | from people like the Edgar Cayce Organization.

01:21:40.780 | There's also ancient Egyptian traditions,

01:21:43.140 | which suggest that something was concealed

01:21:47.260 | beneath the Sphinx.

01:21:48.340 | This is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt,

01:21:51.980 | it's quite present in ancient Egypt.

01:21:54.740 | So far, as far as I know,

01:21:56.140 | nobody has dug down beneath the Sphinx.

01:21:59.260 | And of course, there's very good reasons for that.

01:22:00.820 | You don't want to damage the place too much,

01:22:03.740 | but let's call it the Hall of Records.

01:22:06.660 | I'd love to find that.

01:22:09.060 | But I think in a way, that's what Gobekli Tepe is.

01:22:13.220 | Gobekli Tepe is a Hall of Records.

01:22:15.180 | You know, it's interesting that just as I've tried

01:22:17.980 | to outline, I hope reasonably clearly,

01:22:21.060 | that the three great pyramids of Giza

01:22:22.980 | match Orion's belt in 10,500 BC,

01:22:25.460 | just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC,

01:22:28.780 | 12,500 years ago or so.

01:22:32.620 | Pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe

01:22:36.300 | contains what a number of researchers,

01:22:38.460 | myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram.

01:22:41.420 | Martin Swetman of Edinburgh University

01:22:43.380 | has brought forward the best work in this field,

01:22:46.180 | but it was initially started

01:22:47.260 | by a gentleman called Paul Burley,

01:22:49.700 | who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43

01:22:52.940 | is a scorpion, very much like we represent

01:22:57.300 | the constellation of Scorpio today,

01:22:59.660 | and that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings,

01:23:03.780 | which is in a posture very similar to the constellation

01:23:06.220 | that we call Sagittarius,

01:23:08.580 | and on that outstretched wing is a circular object.

01:23:13.540 | And the suggestion is that it's marking the time

01:23:15.940 | when the sun was at the center of the Dark Rift

01:23:18.100 | in the Milky Way at the summer solstice

01:23:22.460 | 12,500 years ago.

01:23:23.980 | That's what it's marking.

01:23:26.420 | And it's interesting that the same date

01:23:30.380 | can be deduced from Pillar 43.

01:23:31.860 | Of course, it's controversial.

01:23:32.900 | Martin Swetman's ideas are by no means accepted

01:23:35.740 | by archeology,

01:23:37.260 | but he's done very, very thorough,

01:23:38.900 | detailed statistical work on this,

01:23:40.540 | and I'm personally convinced.

01:23:42.140 | So we have a time capsule at Gobekli Tepe,

01:23:45.660 | which is memorializing a date

01:23:47.700 | that is at least 1,200 years before Gobekli Tepe was built,

01:23:52.180 | if that dating of 11,600 years ago

01:23:55.260 | proves to be absolutely the oldest date,

01:23:57.620 | as it is at present.

01:23:59.540 | The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago,

01:24:04.020 | the beginning of the Younger Dryness,

01:24:05.500 | the beginning of the impact event.

01:24:09.580 | And then Giza does the same thing,

01:24:11.260 | but in much larger scale.

01:24:12.980 | It uses massive megalithic architecture,

01:24:17.820 | which is very difficult to destroy,

01:24:19.780 | and a profound knowledge of astronomy

01:24:21.780 | to encode a date in a language that any culture,

01:24:26.100 | which is sufficiently literate in astronomy,

01:24:29.220 | will be able to decode.

01:24:30.660 | We don't have to have a script that we can't read,

01:24:33.460 | like we do with the Indus Valley civilization

01:24:35.700 | or with the Easter Island script.

01:24:37.180 | We don't have to have a script that can't be interpreted.

01:24:39.180 | If you use astronomical language,

01:24:42.020 | then any astronomical literate civilization

01:24:45.660 | will be able to give you a date.

01:24:48.300 | The Hoover Dam has a star map built into it,

01:24:52.020 | and that star map is part of an exhibition

01:24:56.140 | that was put there at the founding of the Hoover Dam.

01:24:59.180 | And what it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam

01:25:04.180 | at the moment of its completion.

01:25:06.100 | And Oscar Hansen, the artist who created that piece,

01:25:10.100 | said so specifically that this would be so

01:25:12.220 | that any future culture would be able to know

01:25:15.140 | the time of the dam's construction.

01:25:17.140 | So you can use astronomy and architecture

01:25:19.380 | to memorialize a particular date.

01:25:22.660 | - Quick pause, bathroom break?

01:25:23.980 | - Sounds good.

01:25:25.580 | - So to me, the story that we've been talking about,

01:25:29.500 | it is both exciting

01:25:32.940 | if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct

01:25:36.860 | and the one you're constructing is correct.

01:25:39.140 | Both are super interesting

01:25:40.260 | because the mainstream archeology perspective

01:25:43.340 | means that there is something about the human mind

01:25:46.540 | from which the pyramids, these ideas spring naturally.

01:25:51.420 | You place humans anywhere, you place them on Mars,

01:25:53.980 | it's gonna come out that way.

01:25:55.820 | So that's an interesting story of human psychology

01:25:58.180 | that then becomes even more interesting

01:26:00.740 | when you evolve out of Africa with Homo sapiens,

01:26:04.860 | how they think about the world.

01:26:05.900 | That's super interesting.

01:26:07.340 | And then if there's an ancient civilization,

01:26:09.940 | advanced civilization that explains

01:26:12.180 | why there's so many similar types of ideas that spread,

01:26:16.860 | that means that there's so much undiscovered still

01:26:20.700 | about the sort of the spring

01:26:22.700 | of these ideas of civilization that come.

01:26:24.700 | So to me, they're both fascinating.

01:26:26.260 | So I don't know why there's so much sort of infighting,

01:26:29.340 | but I think it's partly territorial.

01:26:31.580 | I think that, I don't, I can't speak of all archeologists,

01:26:36.580 | but some archeologists feel very territorial

01:26:41.060 | about their profession and they do not feel happy

01:26:44.740 | about outsiders entering their realm,

01:26:50.100 | especially if those outsiders have a large platform.

01:26:53.380 | And that's, I've found that the attacks on me

01:26:58.300 | by archeologists have increased step-by-step

01:27:02.460 | with the increase of my exposure.

01:27:04.380 | I wasn't very interesting to them

01:27:07.020 | when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992

01:27:10.660 | with a book called "The Sign and the Seal."

01:27:13.180 | But when "Fingerprints of the Gods" was published in 1995

01:27:17.060 | and became a global bestseller,

01:27:19.580 | then I started to attract their attention

01:27:22.060 | and appear to have been regarded as a threat to them.

01:27:26.700 | And that is the case today.

01:27:28.580 | That is why "Ancient Apocalypse" season one

01:27:32.140 | was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix.

01:27:35.780 | It's why the Society for American Archeology

01:27:38.340 | wrote an open letter to Netflix,

01:27:40.900 | asking Netflix to reclassify the series as science fiction.

01:27:44.340 | It's why they accused the series

01:27:47.380 | of anti-Semitism, misogyny, white supremacism,

01:27:52.380 | and a whole, I don't know, a whole bunch of other things

01:27:55.980 | that have nothing to do with anything

01:27:57.860 | that's in the series.

01:27:59.780 | It was like, we must shut this down.

01:28:03.780 | This is so dangerous to us.

01:28:05.500 | Certainly not a danger,

01:28:06.540 | there are many more dangerous things in the world

01:28:09.060 | than a television series going on right now.

01:28:13.300 | But maybe it was seen as a danger to archeology,

01:28:16.660 | that this non-archeologist was in archeological terrain

01:28:20.420 | and being viewed and seen by large,

01:28:23.780 | and read by large numbers of people.

01:28:25.860 | Maybe that was part of the problem.

01:28:27.740 | And human nature being what it is,

01:28:30.660 | I noticed that two of my principal critics,

01:28:34.340 | John Hoopes from the University of Kansas

01:28:37.100 | and Flint Dibble, who's now teaching

01:28:38.620 | at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the UK,

01:28:42.660 | are both people who like to have media exposure.

01:28:46.220 | And John Hoopes had just recently started

01:28:49.060 | his YouTube channel.

01:28:50.100 | Flint Dibble has had one for quite a while.

01:28:52.780 | Pretty small number of followers.

01:28:55.540 | I think that they feel that they should be the ones

01:28:59.100 | who are getting the global attention,

01:29:00.740 | and that it's not right that I am.

01:29:03.220 | And that the best way to stop that is to stop me,

01:29:08.060 | to shut me down, to get me canceled.

01:29:10.740 | And basically requiring Netflix to relabel my series

01:29:15.660 | from a documentary to a science fiction,

01:29:18.940 | which is what they actually had the temerity

01:29:21.420 | to suggest to Netflix.

01:29:22.900 | If that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them,

01:29:26.940 | that would have effectively been the cancellation

01:29:29.140 | of my documentary series.

01:29:30.340 | It would no longer have been ranked under documentary.

01:29:32.940 | So it was a deliberate attempt to shut me down.

01:29:36.140 | And I see that going on again and again,

01:29:38.740 | and it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary.

01:29:41.220 | I've become very defensive towards archeology.

01:29:43.660 | I hit back after 30 years of these attacks on my work.

01:29:48.660 | I'm tired of it.

01:29:51.100 | And I do defend myself.

01:29:53.860 | And sometimes I'm perhaps over vigorous in that defense.

01:29:56.340 | Maybe I was a little bit too strong

01:29:58.300 | in my critique of archeology in the first season

01:30:01.180 | of "Ancient Apocalypse."

01:30:02.180 | Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder.

01:30:04.460 | And I've tried to reflect that in the second season,

01:30:07.460 | and to bring also many more indigenous voices

01:30:12.540 | into the second season,

01:30:13.580 | as well as the voices of many more archeologists.

01:30:16.900 | - Yeah, in general,

01:30:17.740 | I got a chance to get a glimpse of the archeology community.

01:30:21.500 | And in archeology, in science in general,

01:30:26.500 | I don't have much patience for this kind of arrogance

01:30:30.940 | or snark or dismissal of general human curiosity

01:30:35.940 | that I think your work inspires in people.

01:30:39.300 | So that's why people like Ed Barnhart,

01:30:42.380 | who I recently had a conversation with,

01:30:44.340 | he radiates sort of kindness and curiosity as well.

01:30:48.620 | And it's like that kind of approach to ideas,

01:30:51.500 | especially about human history, it inspires people,

01:30:55.100 | inspires millions of people to ask questions.

01:30:57.700 | I mean, that's why you had Keanu Reeves on the new season.

01:31:01.540 | He's basically coming to the show

01:31:03.100 | from that same perspective of curiosity.

01:31:05.180 | - Keanu is genuinely curious about the past

01:31:08.020 | and very, very interested in it.

01:31:10.140 | And he's bringing to it questions

01:31:12.100 | that everybody brings to the past.

01:31:13.500 | He's speaking for every man in the series.

01:31:17.380 | - So given that, can you maybe steel man the case

01:31:21.660 | that archeologists make about this period

01:31:26.160 | that we've been talking about?

01:31:27.660 | Can you make the case that that is indeed what happened,

01:31:32.100 | is it was hunter-gatherers for a long time,

01:31:34.740 | and then there was a cataclysm,

01:31:37.260 | a very difficult period in human history

01:31:39.140 | with the Younger Dryas,

01:31:40.460 | and that changed the environment

01:31:43.820 | and then led to the springing up of civilizations

01:31:47.180 | at different places on Earth.

01:31:48.880 | Can you sort of make the case for that?

01:31:50.700 | - Oh, no, I completely understand

01:31:51.940 | why that is the position of archeology,

01:31:54.380 | because that's what they've found.

01:31:56.220 | Archeology is very much wishing to define itself

01:31:59.340 | as a science, and it uses the techniques

01:32:03.780 | of weighing and measuring and counting

01:32:05.360 | are very key to what archeology does.

01:32:09.020 | And in what they've found

01:32:10.900 | and what they've studied around the world,

01:32:14.260 | they don't see any traces of a lost civilization.

01:32:17.460 | And the idea that,

01:32:19.220 | besides, we live in a very politically correct world today,

01:32:24.940 | and the idea that some kind of lost civilization

01:32:29.940 | brought knowledge to other cultures around the world

01:32:32.340 | is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way.

01:32:36.100 | It triggers that aspect as well.

01:32:39.100 | But basically, I think majority of archeologists

01:32:42.260 | are in complete good faith on this.

01:32:43.860 | I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me.

01:32:47.940 | I think that what we're hearing from most archeologists,

01:32:52.140 | some much more vicious than others,

01:32:54.080 | but what we're hearing from most archeologists

01:32:56.480 | is this is what we found,

01:32:58.020 | and we don't see evidence for a lost civilization in it.

01:33:01.860 | And to that, I must reply, please look at the myths.

01:33:06.860 | Please consider the implications of the Younger Dryas.

01:33:11.060 | Please look at the ancient astronomy.

01:33:12.820 | Please look at those ancient maps

01:33:14.280 | and don't just dismiss them and sneer at them.

01:33:16.980 | And for God's sake, please look more deeply

01:33:20.020 | at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable

01:33:23.140 | and attractive during the Ice Age,

01:33:25.140 | and that have hardly been studied by archeology at all,

01:33:28.460 | before you tell us that your theory is the only one

01:33:31.460 | that can possibly be correct.

01:33:33.700 | In fact, it's a very arrogant and silly position

01:33:36.380 | of archeology, because archeological theories

01:33:38.860 | are always being overthrown.

01:33:40.540 | It can take years, it can take decades.

01:33:42.520 | It took decades in the case of the Clovis First hypothesis

01:33:46.300 | for the settlement of the Americas.

01:33:48.540 | But sooner or later, a bad idea will be kicked out

01:33:53.060 | by a preponderance of evidence

01:33:54.660 | that that idea does not explain.

01:33:57.500 | - If we can just look back at your debate

01:33:59.900 | with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan experience,

01:34:03.860 | what are some takeaways from that?

01:34:05.860 | What have you learned?

01:34:07.500 | Maybe what are some things you like about Flint?

01:34:10.980 | You said that he's one of your big critics,

01:34:13.420 | but what do you like about his ideas

01:34:14.980 | and what were you maybe bothered by?

01:34:17.820 | - First of all, just very recently,

01:34:19.500 | and it can be found on my YouTube channel

01:34:21.580 | and it's signaled on my website,

01:34:23.540 | I have made a video, runs about an hour,

01:34:27.300 | which looks at a series of statements

01:34:29.380 | that Flint made during the debate,

01:34:31.460 | which I was not prepared to answer.

01:34:34.360 | And it turns out that some of those statements

01:34:39.460 | are not correct.

01:34:40.740 | The notion, for example,

01:34:43.620 | that there were 3 million shipwrecks

01:34:47.780 | that have been mapped, Flint actually uses the word mapped,

01:34:51.540 | 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped

01:34:53.580 | at one point in the debate.

01:34:54.700 | And I've put that clip into the video

01:34:56.820 | that I've brought out.

01:34:58.340 | That is not a fact, that is an estimate, a UNESCO estimate.

01:35:02.020 | And actually in the small print

01:35:04.780 | on one of the slides that he has on the screen,

01:35:06.780 | you can see the word estimate,

01:35:08.180 | but he never expresses that word out loud.

01:35:12.220 | So those who are listening to the podcast

01:35:13.860 | rather than watching it

01:35:14.700 | wouldn't even have a chance to see that.

01:35:16.140 | And I sitting there in the studio

01:35:17.860 | didn't see that word estimate either.

01:35:19.580 | And I didn't know that.

01:35:20.540 | I thought, my God, Flint has a point here.

01:35:23.580 | If there'd been 3 million shipwrecks found and mapped,

01:35:27.140 | if that's the case, the absence of any shipwreck

01:35:30.580 | from a lost civilization of the ice age is a problem.

01:35:34.140 | But then I discovered that it isn't 3 million shipwrecks

01:35:36.820 | that have been mapped.

01:35:37.900 | It's much, much less than that.

01:35:39.420 | And maybe it's 250,000, still a large number,

01:35:43.420 | but most of them from the last thousand years.

01:35:46.220 | And unfortunately what Flint didn't go into,

01:35:49.900 | and perhaps he should have shared with the audience,

01:35:51.700 | and again, I go into this in the video,

01:35:53.940 | is that there is indisputable evidence

01:35:57.140 | that human beings were seafarers

01:35:59.500 | as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago.

01:36:02.100 | The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short,

01:36:05.780 | 90 kilometers, 100 kilometer ocean voyage,

01:36:07.940 | but nevertheless it was an ocean voyage.

01:36:09.900 | And it must have involved a large enough people,

01:36:12.260 | a large enough number of people

01:36:14.500 | to create a permanent population that wouldn't go extinct.

01:36:17.780 | The settlement of Cyprus is the same thing.

01:36:19.740 | It was always an island, even during the ice age.

01:36:22.740 | And no ships have survived

01:36:25.140 | that speak to the settlement of Australia,

01:36:27.420 | and no ships have survived

01:36:28.780 | that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either.

01:36:30.460 | But that doesn't mean that that thing didn't happen.

01:36:32.700 | - I should just like linger on this,

01:36:34.020 | because for me it was, the shipwrecks thing was convincing.

01:36:37.340 | And then looking back, first of all, watching your video,

01:36:39.420 | but also just realizing the peopling of Australia part,

01:36:43.260 | that's mind-boggling to me, 50,000 years ago.

01:36:48.020 | Just imagine being the person standing on the shore,

01:36:51.440 | looking out into the ocean,

01:36:53.300 | standing on the shore of a harsh environment,

01:36:55.340 | looking out to the ocean of a harsh environment,

01:36:57.980 | and deciding that, you know what,

01:36:59.680 | I'm going to go towards near certain death.

01:37:02.420 | - I don't know what's on the other side of that water.

01:37:05.740 | You can't see 90 kilometers.

01:37:06.580 | - And humans did it.

01:37:07.760 | - Yeah, and again, it's that urge to explore.

01:37:11.580 | And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers

01:37:15.300 | who made the journey there and back.

01:37:17.080 | They ventured into the water.

01:37:18.780 | They definitely had boats.

01:37:20.740 | And lo and behold, after a two or three day voyage,

01:37:23.920 | they ended up on a coastline.

01:37:26.500 | You're an individual.

01:37:27.820 | You've got my relatively straightforward island hopping

01:37:30.700 | with where each island is within sight of each other

01:37:33.300 | as far as Timor.

01:37:34.660 | And when you get to Timor,

01:37:36.260 | suddenly you can't island hop anymore.

01:37:38.060 | There's an expansive ocean that you can't see across.

01:37:41.100 | But that urge to explore that curiosity

01:37:43.900 | that is central to the human condition

01:37:48.820 | would undoubtedly have led some adventurous individuals

01:37:51.680 | to want to find out more

01:37:52.760 | and even be willing to risk their lives.

01:37:54.860 | And that first reconnoitering

01:37:57.040 | of what lay beyond that strait

01:37:59.280 | would have undoubtedly been undertaken

01:38:00.920 | by very few individuals.

01:38:03.440 | Not enough to create a permanent population in Australia.

01:38:06.880 | But when they came back with the good news

01:38:09.040 | that there's a whole land there,

01:38:11.200 | that's the land that geographers call Sahul.

01:38:16.200 | Which in just as Sunda was the ice age,

01:38:21.260 | Indonesian and Malaysian peninsula

01:38:23.340 | all joined together into one landmass.

01:38:25.420 | So Sahul was New Guinea joined to Australia.

01:38:29.200 | So they would have made landfall in New Guinea.

01:38:31.920 | And then they think,

01:38:33.500 | well, here is this vast, open, incredible land.

01:38:36.300 | We need to bring more people here.

01:38:39.380 | And that would have involved larger craft.

01:38:43.760 | You need to bring people with resources

01:38:47.400 | and you need to bring enough of them,

01:38:49.800 | both men and women in order to produce a population

01:38:52.560 | that will not rapidly become extinct.

01:38:54.480 | And it's the same in Cyprus.

01:38:56.320 | There the detailed work that's been done

01:38:58.960 | suggests very strongly

01:39:01.040 | that we're looking at planned migrations

01:39:03.320 | of groups of people in excess of a thousand at a time,

01:39:08.760 | bringing animals with them.

01:39:10.680 | And this certainly would have involved multiple boats

01:39:13.440 | and boats of a significant size.

01:39:15.600 | - And there's no archeological evidence of those boats.

01:39:18.720 | - None whatsoever.

01:39:19.560 | The oldest boat that's ever been found in the world

01:39:21.460 | is the Dokos shipwreck off Greece,

01:39:23.140 | which is around 5,000 years old, if I recall correctly.

01:39:26.760 | - So everything that makes a boat is lost to time.

01:39:30.480 | - Yes, boats can be preserved under certain circumstances.

01:39:33.600 | There's a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea,

01:39:35.560 | almost two miles deep.

01:39:36.820 | I didn't know the Black Sea was that deep,

01:39:38.860 | but there's a wreck and there's no oxygen down there

01:39:41.660 | that is more than 2,000 years old

01:39:44.340 | and it is still in pretty much perfect condition.

01:39:47.460 | But in other conditions,

01:39:48.880 | the structure of the ship evaporates.

01:39:52.780 | Sometimes what you're left with is the cargo of the ship.

01:39:54.980 | And you could say there was a ship that sank here,

01:39:57.240 | but the ship itself has gone.

01:40:00.660 | The fact is we know that our ancestors were seafarers

01:40:04.060 | as much as 50,000 years ago

01:40:05.980 | and no ship has survived to testify to that,

01:40:08.300 | yet we accept that they were.

01:40:10.460 | - Do you think one day we'll find a ship

01:40:12.700 | that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old?

01:40:17.360 | - It's not impossible.

01:40:19.380 | I think it's quite unlikely,

01:40:21.420 | given the very thin survival of ships,

01:40:23.940 | the further back you go in time,

01:40:26.260 | with the oldest, as I say, being about 6,000 years old now.

01:40:29.980 | And then the other thing to take into account

01:40:32.540 | is the Younger Dryas event itself

01:40:35.420 | and the cataclysmic circumstances of that event

01:40:38.340 | and the roiling of the seas

01:40:42.540 | that would have taken place then.

01:40:44.100 | How much would have survived in a boat accident

01:40:47.880 | at that time would have survived

01:40:49.580 | for thousands of years afterwards, I'm not sure.

01:40:51.980 | But I don't give up hope, it's possible.

01:40:55.120 | - So, okay, so that's back to the three million shipwrecks.

01:40:59.020 | - Yeah.

01:40:59.860 | - So what's your takeaway from that debate?

01:41:01.500 | - Well, my takeaway from that debate

01:41:03.140 | is that I should have been better prepared

01:41:06.980 | and I should have been less angry.

01:41:08.700 | I have to say that Flint had really disturbed me

01:41:15.220 | with these constant snide, not quite exact references

01:41:21.060 | to racism and white supremacism in my work.

01:41:24.780 | I detest such things.

01:41:28.220 | And to have those labels stuck on me,

01:41:30.620 | he's always avoided taking direct responsibility,

01:41:33.540 | pretty much always avoided.

01:41:34.700 | There's one example that I include in the video I've made

01:41:38.460 | where he really hasn't successfully avoided it.

01:41:41.060 | But in most cases, he's trying to say

01:41:42.820 | that I rely on sources that were racist,

01:41:45.860 | but that he's not saying that I myself am a racist.

01:41:48.880 | But the end result of those statements

01:41:51.900 | is that people all around the world came to the conclusion

01:41:55.260 | that Graham Hancock is a racist and a white supremacist.

01:41:58.260 | And that really got under my skin and it really upset me.

01:42:01.140 | And I felt angry about it.

01:42:03.020 | And I felt that I was there

01:42:05.220 | to defend "Ancient Apocalypse" season one.

01:42:08.060 | Whereas in fact, what I was there to do

01:42:09.700 | was to listen to a series of lectures

01:42:11.900 | where an archeologist tells me what archeologists have found

01:42:14.900 | and that somehow I'm to deduce

01:42:16.740 | that from what they have found,

01:42:18.540 | they're not gonna find anything else,

01:42:20.980 | at least not anything to do with the lost civilization.

01:42:23.620 | - Listen, I feel you.

01:42:24.660 | I've seen the intensity of the attacks

01:42:26.420 | and the whole racism label.

01:42:28.220 | Is the one that can get under your skin.

01:42:30.940 | And it's a toolbox has been prevalent over the past,

01:42:34.220 | let's say decade, maybe a little bit more

01:42:37.220 | as a method of cancellation.

01:42:39.060 | When a person has the opposite of racist very often,

01:42:43.580 | it's kind of hilarious to watch,

01:42:45.180 | but it can get under your skin.

01:42:46.980 | Especially when you have certain dynamics

01:42:49.580 | that happen on the internet,

01:42:50.880 | where it seeps into a Wikipedia page

01:42:53.580 | and then other people read that Wikipedia page

01:42:56.340 | and you get to hear it from like friends.

01:42:58.900 | Oh, I didn't know you're at whatever.

01:43:00.900 | And you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are

01:43:04.420 | is actually has a lot of power,

01:43:06.220 | not by people that know you well,

01:43:09.220 | but by people that just kind of are learning about you

01:43:11.380 | for the first time.

01:43:12.260 | - Definitely.

01:43:13.100 | - And they can really start to annoy you

01:43:15.180 | and get onto your skin when people are kind of

01:43:18.420 | indirectly injecting, they're writing articles about you.

01:43:22.280 | They can then be cited by Wikipedia.

01:43:24.640 | It can really bother a person

01:43:26.200 | who is actually trying to do good science

01:43:28.360 | or just trying to inspire people with different ideas.

01:43:30.420 | - I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented.

01:43:33.460 | And I felt that I, as a human being,

01:43:35.180 | was being insulted and wronged

01:43:39.260 | in ways that are deeply hurtful.

01:43:42.500 | My wife and I have six children between us

01:43:45.860 | and we have nine grandchildren.

01:43:47.820 | And of those nine grandchildren, seven are of mixed race.

01:43:51.500 | And this is my family.

01:43:54.180 | And these are kids who are gonna grow up

01:43:55.680 | and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia

01:43:58.920 | that grandpa was some kind of racist.

01:44:02.240 | This is a personal issue for me.

01:44:03.860 | And I'm afraid I carried that personal anger

01:44:06.120 | into the debate and it made me less effective

01:44:10.120 | than I should have been.

01:44:11.040 | But ultimately I do want to pay tribute to Flint.

01:44:13.160 | He is an excellent debater.

01:44:15.000 | He's got a very sharp mind.

01:44:16.880 | He's a very clever man and he's very fast on his feet.

01:44:20.640 | And I recognize that.

01:44:22.100 | I was definitely up against a superior debater

01:44:25.980 | in that debate.

01:44:26.820 | I'm not sure that I have those debating skills

01:44:29.160 | and I certainly didn't have them on that particular day.

01:44:32.480 | I also admire about Flint something else,

01:44:35.240 | which is that he was willing to be there.

01:44:37.680 | Most archaeologists don't want to talk to me at all.

01:44:39.660 | They want to insult me from the sidelines.

01:44:42.200 | They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me

01:44:45.200 | a pseudo-archaeologist or a purveyor

01:44:47.600 | of pseudo-archaeological theories.

01:44:49.520 | They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there,

01:44:52.340 | but they actually don't want to sit down and confront me.

01:44:54.580 | At least Flint was willing to do that.

01:44:56.660 | And I'm grateful to him for that.

01:44:57.900 | And I think in that sense, it is an important encounter

01:45:01.280 | between people with, let's say,

01:45:03.180 | an alternative view of history

01:45:04.460 | and those with the very much mainstream view of history

01:45:06.620 | that archaeology gives us.

01:45:08.420 | And he's also a very determined character.

01:45:11.020 | He doesn't give up.

01:45:12.540 | So all of those things about him I admire and respect.

01:45:18.440 | But I think he fought dirty during the debate.

01:45:22.340 | And I've said exactly why in this video

01:45:25.180 | that I now have up on YouTube.

01:45:26.860 | - To say a positive thing that I enjoyed,

01:45:29.100 | I think towards the end,

01:45:30.740 | and him speaking about agriculture was pretty interesting.

01:45:33.700 | So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting,

01:45:37.540 | like where you can get some insights

01:45:42.260 | through the fog of time about what people were doing,

01:45:45.980 | how they were living.

01:45:47.080 | That's pretty interesting.

01:45:47.920 | - It's very interesting.

01:45:48.900 | It's a very important discipline.

01:45:50.180 | And I've said many times before publicly,

01:45:53.220 | I couldn't do any of my work

01:45:54.560 | without the work that archaeologists do.

01:45:56.900 | I emphasize very strongly in this video

01:45:59.460 | that I don't study what archaeologists study.

01:46:03.360 | But nevertheless, the data that archaeologists

01:46:06.660 | have generated over the last century or so

01:46:08.820 | has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do.

01:46:12.260 | But when I look at the Great Sphinx

01:46:14.260 | and the studies of archaeology saying

01:46:15.980 | that this is the work of the pharaoh Khafre,

01:46:18.060 | despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription

01:46:21.420 | that ascribes it to Khafre,

01:46:23.020 | and in fact the presence of other inscriptions

01:46:25.060 | that say that it was already there in the time of Khufu,

01:46:28.540 | I am not looking at what Egyptologists study.

01:46:30.700 | They just dismiss all of that

01:46:31.940 | and lock into the Khafre connection.

01:46:35.220 | At Gobekli Tepe, I'm not really looking

01:46:38.280 | at what archaeologists look at.

01:46:39.620 | I'm looking at the alignments of the megaliths

01:46:41.660 | and how they seem to track procession of the star Sirius

01:46:44.460 | over a period of time.

01:46:45.900 | Archaeologists aren't interested in any of that.

01:46:48.700 | So I value and respect archaeology.

01:46:50.940 | I think it's an incredible tool for investigating our past.

01:46:55.240 | But I wish archaeologists would bring

01:46:57.500 | a slightly gentler frame of mind to it

01:47:00.060 | and a slightly opener perspective.

01:47:02.260 | And also that archaeologists would be willing

01:47:05.500 | to trust the general public to make up their own minds.

01:47:08.980 | It's as though certain archaeologists

01:47:11.340 | are afraid of the public being presented

01:47:13.620 | with an alternative point of view,

01:47:15.220 | which they regard as quote unquote dangerous,

01:47:18.500 | because they somehow underestimate the intelligence

01:47:21.240 | of the general public

01:47:22.080 | and think the general public are just going to accept that.

01:47:24.940 | Actually, by condemning those alternative point of view,

01:47:27.940 | archaeologists make it much more likely

01:47:29.940 | that the general public will accept

01:47:31.620 | those alternative point of view,

01:47:32.780 | because there is a great distrust of experts

01:47:34.860 | in our society today.

01:47:36.380 | And behaving in a snobbish, arrogant way,

01:47:39.200 | we archaeologists are the only people

01:47:41.460 | who are really qualified to speak about the past.

01:47:44.020 | And anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous.

01:47:46.940 | That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term.

01:47:51.380 | There could be a much more positive

01:47:52.780 | and a much more cooperative relationship.

01:47:54.420 | And I can see that relationship

01:47:56.140 | with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart.

01:47:59.180 | It was very much the case with archaeologist Marty Passanen

01:48:04.180 | from the University of Helsinki

01:48:05.820 | and with geographer Alceu Ranzi,

01:48:08.740 | Brazilian geographer, very, very senior figure,

01:48:11.980 | who I worked with in the Amazon

01:48:14.380 | for season two of "Ancient Apocalypse,"

01:48:16.300 | looking at these astonishing earthworks

01:48:18.060 | that have emerged from the Amazon jungle

01:48:19.740 | and which more and more are now being found with LIDAR.

01:48:22.780 | Indeed, we found some of them ourselves with LIDAR

01:48:25.060 | while we were there.

01:48:26.140 | - Yeah, that was an incredible part of the show

01:48:28.580 | that I got a chance to preview.

01:48:30.080 | It's like, there's all this earthworks.

01:48:33.300 | Yeah, the traces of things built on the ground

01:48:37.660 | that probably you can only really appreciate

01:48:42.660 | when you look from up above.

01:48:44.120 | - That's right.

01:48:44.960 | - So the idea that they built stuff

01:48:46.240 | that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above

01:48:48.880 | means they had a very kind of deep relationship

01:48:52.820 | with the sky.

01:48:55.180 | - With the sky.

01:48:56.020 | - Yeah.

01:48:56.860 | - And a very good knowledge of geometry as well,

01:48:58.600 | because these are geometrical structures.

01:49:00.460 | And some of them even seem to incorporate

01:49:03.160 | geometrical games, almost like squaring the circle.

01:49:07.200 | It's not quite that, but you have a lovely square earthwork

01:49:10.560 | with a lovely circle earthwork right in the middle of it.

01:49:14.600 | Whatever else they were, they were geometers.

01:49:16.520 | They were not just builders of fantastically huge earthworks

01:49:21.220 | that nobody expected in the Amazon,

01:49:23.660 | not just builders of cities

01:49:25.280 | that we now know existed in the Amazon,

01:49:27.520 | but that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well.

01:49:31.020 | - Everything we're talking about is so full of mystery.

01:49:34.040 | It's just fascinating, especially the farther back we go.

01:49:36.620 | - That's what I love about the past

01:49:38.520 | is the mystery that's there.

01:49:39.680 | And that's another thing that I regret

01:49:41.300 | about some archeologists is that their mission seems to be

01:49:44.780 | to drain all mystery out of the past,

01:49:48.320 | to suck it dry like some kind of vampire,

01:49:51.480 | sucking the blood out of the past

01:49:53.040 | and to reduce it to a series of numbers

01:49:55.400 | that appear to be scientific.

01:49:59.720 | I think that's most unfortunate.

01:50:01.880 | The past is deeply mysterious.

01:50:03.760 | The whole story of life on earth is deeply mysterious.

01:50:07.140 | I mean, we were talking about the timeline of human beings,

01:50:10.580 | but if you go back to the formation of the earth itself,

01:50:14.820 | if I've got the figures right,

01:50:17.060 | it's about four and a half billion years ago

01:50:19.700 | that the earth supposedly formed.

01:50:21.740 | It was then incredibly hot and inhospitable to life

01:50:26.460 | for the next several hundred million years.

01:50:29.620 | But it was actually Francis Crick

01:50:31.960 | who pointed out something odd

01:50:34.680 | that within a hundred million years

01:50:37.200 | of the earth being cool enough to support life,

01:50:40.840 | there's bacterial life all over the planet.

01:50:44.400 | And Crick wrote a book called "Life Itself"

01:50:47.080 | that was published in 1981.

01:50:49.160 | And he suggested that life had been brought here

01:50:52.640 | by a process of panspermia.

01:50:55.380 | Now that's an idea that's around in circulation

01:50:58.160 | that comets may carry bacteria

01:51:00.360 | which can seed life on planets.

01:51:02.180 | But Crick actually in "Life Itself"

01:51:03.840 | was talking about directed panspermia.

01:51:06.320 | He envisaged, this is Crick, not me.

01:51:09.560 | He envisaged an alien civilization

01:51:12.640 | far away across the galaxy, which faced extinction.

01:51:16.760 | Perhaps a supernova was gonna go off in the neighborhood.

01:51:22.720 | They were highly advanced.

01:51:24.200 | Their first thought might've been,

01:51:26.400 | let's get ourselves off the planet

01:51:27.760 | and go and populate some other planet.

01:51:29.280 | But the distances of interstellar space were so great.

01:51:32.160 | So their second thought was, let's preserve our DNA.

01:51:35.920 | Let's put bacteria, genetically engineered bacteria

01:51:40.920 | into cryogenic chambers

01:51:43.480 | and fire them off into the universe in all directions.

01:51:45.880 | And bottom line of Crick's theory in "Life Itself"

01:51:48.440 | is one of those cryogenic containers

01:51:51.040 | containing bacterial life from another solar system

01:51:54.600 | crashed into the early earth.

01:51:56.040 | That's why life began so suddenly here on earth.

01:51:58.800 | - If we as a human civilization continue,

01:52:01.440 | I think that is a one way to create backups of us

01:52:06.440 | elsewhere in the universe,

01:52:08.760 | given the space is to do a life gun and shoot it everywhere.

01:52:12.880 | And then it just plants.

01:52:14.680 | And you kind of hope that whatever is the magic

01:52:17.160 | that makes up human consciousness,

01:52:20.160 | and if that magic is already there in the initial DNA

01:52:24.800 | of the bacteria.

01:52:26.800 | - The potential for that magic is there.

01:52:29.240 | - The potential is there.

01:52:30.280 | - And evolutionary forces will work upon it

01:52:33.160 | in different ways in different environments.

01:52:36.200 | But the potential is there.

01:52:37.440 | Yes, it's something that we would do.

01:52:39.280 | If we were facing a complete extinction of life

01:52:42.400 | on planet earth, a major global effort would be made

01:52:46.680 | to preserve it somehow.

01:52:48.720 | And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers

01:52:52.480 | into the universe and hoping that some of them

01:52:54.200 | would land somewhere hospitable.

01:52:56.120 | - And as you were mentioning,

01:52:57.520 | there's just so many interesting mysteries

01:52:59.480 | along the way here.

01:53:00.680 | For example, I mean, it's like three billion years,

01:53:05.680 | it was single cell organisms.

01:53:07.760 | So it seems like life is pretty good

01:53:10.840 | for single cell organisms,

01:53:12.460 | that there's no need for multicellularity,

01:53:14.840 | that like for animals, for any of this kind of stuff.

01:53:16.920 | So why is that?

01:53:19.340 | It seems like you could adapt much better

01:53:21.440 | if you're a more complicated organism.

01:53:23.200 | It took a really long time to take that leap.

01:53:25.360 | Is it because it's really hard to do?

01:53:27.680 | And what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap?

01:53:32.680 | And the same, I mean, for us to be selfish

01:53:36.080 | and self-obsessed, for us humans,

01:53:38.160 | like what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens

01:53:42.400 | from the other hominids?

01:53:44.600 | And why did Homo sapiens win out

01:53:46.720 | against the androthals and the other competitors?

01:53:49.340 | Why are they not around anymore?

01:53:52.000 | So those are all fascinating mysteries.

01:53:55.360 | And it feels like the more we propose

01:53:59.760 | sort of radical ideas about our past

01:54:01.880 | and take it seriously and explore,

01:54:04.720 | the more we'll be able to sort of figure out that puzzle

01:54:07.680 | that leads all the way back to Homo sapiens

01:54:10.360 | and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on earth.

01:54:13.520 | - Yeah, I think that Homo sapiens is the tail end

01:54:16.840 | of a very long, deep series of mysteries

01:54:19.920 | that goes back right to the beginning of life

01:54:22.420 | on this planet and probably long before, actually,

01:54:25.920 | because this planet is part of the universe

01:54:27.640 | and God knows what else is out there in the universe.

01:54:31.080 | - Why do you think Homo sapiens evolved?

01:54:35.280 | Like what was the magic thing?

01:54:37.840 | So there's a bunch of theories about fire

01:54:40.560 | leading to meat, to cooking, which can fuel the brain.

01:54:43.920 | That's one.

01:54:44.800 | The other is like social interaction.

01:54:46.720 | We're able to use our imagination to construct ideas

01:54:50.000 | and share those ideas and tell great stories.

01:54:52.280 | And that is somehow an evolutionary advantage.

01:54:55.080 | Do you have any like favorite conception of--

01:54:57.520 | - Well, it's interesting.

01:54:59.920 | There's no doubt that anatomically modern humans

01:55:02.600 | and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe

01:55:05.680 | for at least 10,000 years, probably more than that.

01:55:08.840 | And yet one of the popular views

01:55:11.120 | is that anatomically modern humans

01:55:13.160 | wiped out the Neanderthals, that we killed them off.

01:55:17.280 | But at the same time,

01:55:18.640 | we were into breeding with the Neanderthals.

01:55:20.440 | In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone.

01:55:22.920 | They are still within us today.

01:55:25.240 | We are part Neanderthal.

01:55:28.400 | There's another theory that I've read about.

01:55:30.960 | There is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals,

01:55:34.080 | that there was ritual cannibalism took place

01:55:36.560 | amongst Neanderthals,

01:55:37.480 | and particularly the eating of human brains.

01:55:40.840 | And this can cause Kuru,

01:55:44.520 | which can kill off whole populations.

01:55:46.840 | That's another suggestion

01:55:48.000 | of why the Neanderthals died out.

01:55:50.160 | There's lots of possibilities that have been put forward.

01:55:53.120 | Maybe we just out-competed them.

01:55:55.240 | Maybe anatomically modern humans

01:55:58.440 | had some brain connections that they didn't have,

01:56:00.440 | even though the Neanderthal brain was bigger

01:56:03.040 | than the brain of anatomically modern human beings.

01:56:05.280 | As the old saying goes, size isn't everything.

01:56:08.720 | Maybe we just had a more compact, more efficient brain.

01:56:12.160 | The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals and Denisovans

01:56:17.160 | did not survive the rise of Homo sapiens.

01:56:21.280 | - For our discussion, though,

01:56:22.360 | what is interesting is all the hominids

01:56:24.040 | seem to be explorers.

01:56:25.960 | - Yes.

01:56:26.800 | - They spread.

01:56:27.640 | I mean, I didn't know this.

01:56:28.840 | - The fact that Homo erectus was all over the planet

01:56:31.280 | more than a million years ago is testament to that.

01:56:35.480 | And I do think that exploration urge

01:56:37.840 | is fundamental to humanity.

01:56:40.080 | And I would like to say that's what I think I'm doing.

01:56:44.000 | I'm exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way,

01:56:49.000 | making my own path and defining my own route.

01:56:53.000 | - That's the leap from non-human to human.

01:56:57.220 | One of the things you've discussed is your idea

01:57:02.600 | of what was the leap to human civilization.

01:57:05.840 | What is the driver?

01:57:06.840 | What is the inspiration for humans to form civilizations?

01:57:10.400 | And for you, that's shamanism.

01:57:12.320 | - Definitely.

01:57:13.160 | - Can you explain what that means?

01:57:14.000 | - I think that shamanism is the origin

01:57:17.120 | of everything of value in humanity.

01:57:22.120 | I think it was the earliest form of science.

01:57:26.040 | When I spend time with shamans in the Amazon,

01:57:30.960 | I observe people who are constantly experimenting

01:57:34.160 | with plants in a very scientific way.

01:57:37.220 | They're always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that

01:57:40.280 | in different forms, for example, of the ayahuasca brew

01:57:42.880 | to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way.

01:57:47.880 | The invention of curare is a remarkable scientific feat,

01:57:51.960 | which is entirely down to shamans in the Amazon.

01:57:55.880 | They are the scientists of the hunter-forager

01:57:59.680 | state of society.

01:58:03.120 | And they were the ancient leaders of human civilization.

01:58:08.120 | So I think all civilization arises out of shamanism.

01:58:13.480 | And shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor

01:58:16.600 | where experimentation is undertaken and exploration

01:58:19.320 | and investigation of the environment around us.

01:58:22.040 | And what I'm suggesting is that one group,

01:58:25.880 | perhaps more than one group,

01:58:28.000 | went a bit further than other groups did

01:58:30.520 | and used that study of the skies

01:58:33.440 | and developed navigational techniques

01:58:36.880 | and were able to sail and explore the Earth.

01:58:40.560 | But that ultimately, what lies behind it

01:58:43.120 | is the same curiosity and investigative skill

01:58:47.120 | that shamans are still using in the Amazon to this day.

01:58:51.280 | And I do see them as scientists

01:58:54.480 | in a very proper use of the word.

01:58:56.880 | - But do you think something like ayahuasca

01:58:58.840 | was a part of that process?

01:59:00.760 | - Yes, ayahuasca is the result of shamanistic investigation

01:59:05.760 | of what's available in the Amazon.

01:59:08.720 | Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad

01:59:12.200 | in Western industrialized societies today.

01:59:14.880 | And some people see it as a miracle cure

01:59:17.720 | for all kinds of ailments and problems.

01:59:19.680 | And perhaps it is, perhaps it can be in certain ways.

01:59:24.240 | Ayahuasca itself is not an Amazonian word.

01:59:26.880 | It comes from the Quechua language

01:59:28.480 | and it means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead.

01:59:32.880 | But the ayahuasca vine is only one

01:59:35.800 | of two principal ingredients in the ayahuasca brew.

01:59:39.440 | And the other ingredient are leaves

01:59:41.480 | that contain dimethyltryptamine.

01:59:44.240 | And there are two sources of that.

01:59:46.220 | One is a bush called Cicotria viridis,

01:59:49.120 | that's its botanical name.

01:59:50.360 | They call it chacruna in the Amazon.

01:59:52.800 | And its leaves are rich in dimethyltryptamine DMT,

01:59:56.040 | which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic

01:59:59.360 | known to science.

02:00:00.640 | And the other source comes from another vine,

02:00:05.800 | Diplopteris cabrerana,

02:00:08.280 | which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT.

02:00:12.480 | So the ayahuasca vine on its own

02:00:14.880 | is not going to give you a visionary journey.

02:00:17.960 | And the leaves that contain DMT on their own,

02:00:20.960 | whether they come from Diplopteris

02:00:22.640 | or whether they come from chacruna

02:00:24.560 | are not gonna give you a visionary journey.

02:00:26.680 | And the reason they're not gonna give you

02:00:27.960 | the visionary journey

02:00:29.000 | is because of the enzyme monoamine oxidase in the gut

02:00:33.080 | that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally.

02:00:36.120 | Basically DMT is not accessible orally

02:00:39.120 | unless you combine it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

02:00:44.080 | And that's what I mean when I'm talking about science

02:00:46.000 | in the Amazon.

02:00:46.840 | 'Cause there's so many tens of thousands,

02:00:48.120 | hundreds of thousands different species

02:00:50.280 | of plants and trees in the Amazon.

02:00:51.720 | And they've gone around and they found

02:00:53.840 | just two or three of them that put together

02:00:56.600 | can produce these extraordinary visionary experiences.

02:00:59.040 | - Just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten.

02:01:01.680 | - Yeah.

02:01:02.520 | - It consumed and smoked

02:01:03.560 | or all kinds of combinations to arrive at that.

02:01:07.280 | - Exactly, exactly.

02:01:08.400 | To realize that this is something very special.

02:01:11.640 | And then to use the principles there

02:01:14.280 | to find another form of it.

02:01:16.460 | So ayahuasca is the form that is made

02:01:19.040 | with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the shakuna plant.

02:01:23.060 | But yaje is made from the ayahuasca vine

02:01:26.960 | and the leaves of another vine, Diplopteris cabrerana,

02:01:31.100 | which contain not only NN-DMT,

02:01:33.580 | which is the DMT that everybody's

02:01:35.720 | pretty much familiar with these days,

02:01:37.240 | but also 5-MeO-DMT and the yaje experience,

02:01:41.760 | which I have also had in my view is more intense

02:01:47.640 | and more powerful almost to the point of being overwhelming

02:01:51.540 | than the ayahuasca experience.

02:01:53.920 | But what the result of this sophisticated chemistry

02:01:58.240 | that we find taking place here is a brew

02:02:03.240 | which is hideous to drink.

02:02:05.780 | The taste, I find it quite repulsive.

02:02:09.580 | I almost retch just smelling it in the cup.

02:02:15.400 | But then unleashes these extraordinary experiences.

02:02:20.120 | And it isn't just pretty visuals.

02:02:22.440 | It's the sense of encounters with sentient others,

02:02:27.440 | that there are sentient beings,

02:02:30.000 | that somehow we're surrounded by a realm of sentience

02:02:33.280 | that is not normally accessible to us.

02:02:35.880 | And that what the ayahuasca brew

02:02:37.680 | and certain other psychedelics,

02:02:38.980 | like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose

02:02:42.400 | can do it as well, LSD can do it.

02:02:44.440 | But ayahuasca is the master in this of lowering the veil

02:02:49.440 | to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm,

02:02:53.400 | other world.

02:02:54.360 | And of course the hardline rational scientists

02:02:56.920 | will say that's just all fantasies of your brain.

02:03:00.540 | But I don't think we fully understand

02:03:03.680 | or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is.

02:03:07.840 | And I remain open to two possibilities,

02:03:10.560 | that consciousness is generated by the brain,

02:03:13.520 | is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars.

02:03:17.360 | But I also am open to the possibility

02:03:19.760 | that the brain is a receiver of consciousness,

02:03:22.200 | just as a television set

02:03:23.480 | is the receiver of television signals.

02:03:26.240 | And that if that is the case,

02:03:31.040 | then we locked into the physical realm,

02:03:35.120 | we need our everyday alert problem-solving

02:03:37.760 | state of consciousness.

02:03:38.720 | And that's the state of consciousness

02:03:40.420 | that Western civilization values and highly encourages.

02:03:45.420 | But these other states of consciousness

02:03:50.260 | that allow us to access alternative realities

02:03:54.360 | are possibly more important.

02:03:57.640 | It may be apocryphal,

02:03:59.140 | but it was reported after Francis Crick's role

02:04:03.900 | and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix,

02:04:07.260 | that he finally got it under the influence of LSD.

02:04:10.740 | There's the classic example of Carey Mullis

02:04:13.100 | and the polymerase chain reaction.

02:04:15.180 | He said he got that under the influence of LSD.

02:04:18.420 | So the notion that the alert problem-solving

02:04:20.620 | state of consciousness

02:04:21.580 | is the only valuable state of consciousness

02:04:23.660 | is disproved by valuable experiences

02:04:27.380 | that people have had in a visionary state.

02:04:30.180 | But the question that remains unresolved

02:04:33.100 | is those entities that we encounter

02:04:36.580 | in the, and not everybody encounters them,

02:04:38.500 | and you're certainly not going to encounter them

02:04:40.060 | on every Ayahuasca trip.

02:04:41.360 | There are Ayahuasca journeys where nothing seems to happen.

02:04:44.640 | I suspect something does happen,

02:04:48.060 | but it happens at a subconscious level.

02:04:49.780 | I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips

02:04:52.560 | where actually you don't see visions

02:04:54.280 | as amongst the most valuable.

02:04:56.020 | And they say you are learning stuff

02:04:57.500 | that you're not remembering,

02:04:58.700 | but you're learning it anyway.

02:05:00.900 | These sentient others that are encountered,

02:05:04.780 | what are they?

02:05:06.580 | Are they just figments of our brain on drugs?

02:05:09.560 | Or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality

02:05:13.220 | which is inhabited by consciousness

02:05:15.380 | which is in a non-physical form?

02:05:18.540 | And I'm equally open to that idea.

02:05:21.500 | I think that may be what is going on here with Ayahuasca.

02:05:25.420 | But the other thing is that there is a presence

02:05:30.420 | within the Ayahuasca brew,

02:05:32.540 | and she is present both in Ayahuasca and in Yahé.

02:05:37.540 | And that's one of the reasons why the shamans say

02:05:40.020 | that actually the master of the process

02:05:42.100 | is the Ayahuasca vine, not the leaves.

02:05:44.660 | It's as though the vine has harnessed the leaves

02:05:47.020 | to gain access to human consciousness.

02:05:49.300 | And there, if you have sufficient exposure

02:05:52.700 | to Ayahuasca or Yahé, you drink it enough times,

02:05:55.820 | I've had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with Ayahuasca,

02:06:01.100 | you definitely start to feel an intelligent presence

02:06:04.740 | with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine

02:06:09.220 | and which most people in the West interpreted as feminine

02:06:12.340 | and they call her Mother Ayahuasca.

02:06:14.340 | There are some tribes in the Amazon

02:06:15.720 | who interpret the spirit of Ayahuasca as male,

02:06:18.820 | but in all cases, that spirit is seen as a teacher.

02:06:22.740 | That's fundamentally what Ayahuasca is.

02:06:25.700 | It's a teacher, and it teaches moral lessons.

02:06:28.820 | And that's fascinating,

02:06:30.360 | that a mixture of two plants

02:06:32.060 | should cause us to reflect on our own behavior

02:06:34.740 | and how it may have hurt and damaged and affected others

02:06:37.780 | and fill us with a powerful wish

02:06:40.440 | not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future.

02:06:43.580 | The more baggage you carry in your life,

02:06:47.500 | the harder the beating the Ayahuasca is going to give you

02:06:50.840 | until it forces you to confront

02:06:53.300 | and take responsibility for your own behavior.

02:06:56.420 | And that is an extraordinary thing

02:06:59.380 | to come from a plant brew in that way.

02:07:02.700 | And I think in, yes, I think Ayahuasca is the most powerful

02:07:07.700 | of all the plant medicines

02:07:10.180 | for accessing these mysterious realms,

02:07:12.640 | but there's no doubt you can access them.

02:07:14.820 | They're all tryptamines.

02:07:16.060 | They're all related to one another in one way.

02:07:18.220 | You can access them through LSD,

02:07:20.060 | and you certainly can access them

02:07:21.420 | through psilocybe mushrooms as well in large enough dose.

02:07:24.840 | - Both possibilities, as you describe, are interesting.

02:07:27.500 | And to me, they're kind of akin to each other.

02:07:30.380 | I wonder what the limit of the brain's capacity

02:07:36.740 | is to create imaginary worlds

02:07:38.600 | and treat them seriously and make them real

02:07:42.020 | and in those worlds explore

02:07:45.760 | and have real sort of moral, deep brainstorming sessions

02:07:50.040 | with those entities.

02:07:53.540 | So it's almost like the power of the human mind

02:07:57.260 | to imagine taken to its limit.

02:08:01.180 | - It is.

02:08:02.500 | And the curious thing is that the same iconography,

02:08:06.880 | people paint their visions after Ayahuasca sessions.

02:08:10.060 | People were painting in Europe,

02:08:12.700 | in the cave of Lascaux, for example,

02:08:14.940 | and of course they had access to psilocybe mushrooms

02:08:18.100 | in prehistoric Europe.

02:08:20.340 | There's a remarkable commonality

02:08:23.460 | in the imagery that is painted.

02:08:25.620 | I like to give credit where credit is due

02:08:28.740 | and there are two names that need to be mentioned here.

02:08:31.100 | One is the late, great Terence McKenna

02:08:33.380 | and his book, "Food of the Gods,"

02:08:35.140 | where he proposed the idea very strongly

02:08:38.140 | that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics

02:08:41.120 | that made us fully human.

02:08:42.700 | That's what switched on the modern human mind.

02:08:46.980 | And very much the same idea began to be explored

02:08:49.220 | a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis Williams

02:08:51.980 | at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

02:08:54.700 | Fabulous book called "The Mind in the Cave,"

02:08:57.740 | where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities

02:09:01.660 | in cave art and rock art all around the world

02:09:04.780 | can only be properly explained

02:09:07.300 | by people in deeply altered states of consciousness

02:09:11.540 | attempting to remember when they return

02:09:14.140 | to a normal everyday state of consciousness,

02:09:16.540 | attempting to remember their visions

02:09:18.500 | and document them on permanent media

02:09:21.180 | like the wall of a cave.

02:09:22.740 | So typically you get a lot of geometric patterns

02:09:25.660 | but you also got entities

02:09:27.300 | and those entities often are therianthropes,

02:09:30.420 | part animal, part human in form.

02:09:34.060 | Might have the head of a wolf

02:09:35.660 | and the body of a human being,

02:09:37.900 | might have the head of a bird

02:09:39.460 | and the body of a human being and so on and so forth

02:09:42.180 | and that they communicate with us in the visionary state.

02:09:45.740 | Interestingly, although this sounds like woo-woo

02:09:48.980 | and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of

02:09:52.420 | at risk of their careers,

02:09:53.900 | there is very serious work now being done

02:09:56.180 | at Imperial College in London

02:09:58.140 | and at the University of California at San Diego

02:10:02.220 | where volunteers are being given extended DMT.

02:10:06.420 | There's a new technology, DMT-X,

02:10:10.140 | where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip

02:10:14.580 | and it's possible to keep the individual

02:10:17.260 | in the peak DMT state,

02:10:19.500 | which normally when you smoke or vape DMT,

02:10:21.620 | you're looking if you're lucky at 10 minutes

02:10:24.220 | or if you're unlucky, if it's a bad journey

02:10:27.540 | because those 10 minutes can seem like forever.

02:10:30.740 | But with DMT-X,

02:10:33.300 | with the drip feeding of DMT into the bloodstream,

02:10:36.140 | these volunteers actually could be kept

02:10:37.860 | in the peak state for hours.

02:10:40.220 | And unlike LSD, where you rapidly build up tolerance,

02:10:43.620 | nobody ever builds up tolerance to DMT,

02:10:45.700 | it always hits you with the same power.

02:10:47.380 | Even if you took it yesterday and the day before

02:10:49.500 | and you're taking it tomorrow as well,

02:10:51.220 | it's still gonna have that same power,

02:10:52.860 | there's no tolerance there.

02:10:53.900 | So that's how they can use that lack of tolerance

02:10:57.100 | to keep volunteers in this state.

02:10:59.820 | And then when they debrief those volunteers,

02:11:01.820 | they're also putting them in MRI scanners

02:11:03.820 | and looking at what's happening in the brain.

02:11:05.700 | But when they debrief them,

02:11:07.180 | they're all talking about encounters with sentient others.

02:11:10.820 | There's even a group now called sentient others

02:11:13.260 | where people are exchanging,

02:11:14.300 | volunteers are now exchanging their experiences.

02:11:17.180 | They weren't allowed to do so

02:11:18.900 | at the beginning of the experiment,

02:11:19.980 | but now that most of them have left it,

02:11:22.020 | they're exchanging their experiences.

02:11:23.460 | And it's all about encounters with insentient others

02:11:26.300 | who wish to teach them moral lessons.

02:11:28.820 | Now, to me, that's wild.

02:11:30.980 | What is going on here?

02:11:32.740 | How do we account for this?

02:11:36.460 | Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations

02:11:38.820 | and brightly colored visuals,

02:11:40.620 | but the moral lessons that come with it,

02:11:42.500 | those are very odd.

02:11:43.780 | - Yeah, and would you say that the reason

02:11:46.660 | that could give birth to a civilization,

02:11:48.780 | is it because such visions can help create myths

02:11:53.780 | and especially like religious myths

02:11:57.060 | that would be a cohesive thing

02:11:59.340 | for a large group of people to get around?

02:12:02.380 | - Yeah, and can help us to be better members

02:12:04.300 | of our own community.

02:12:05.140 | - Right, with the moral lessons.

02:12:06.260 | - Yeah, more contributing members of our community,

02:12:09.660 | more caring, more nurturing members of our community.

02:12:11.980 | That's got to be good for any community.

02:12:14.740 | I've said this a dozen times,

02:12:16.820 | but I'll say it again.

02:12:18.940 | If I had the power to do so,

02:12:22.020 | I would make it a law, an absolute law,

02:12:26.460 | that anybody running for a powerful political position,

02:12:29.860 | particularly if that position is president

02:12:32.020 | or head of state in any kind of way,

02:12:34.180 | that that person has to undergo the Ayahuasca ordeal first.

02:12:37.820 | They have to have 10 or 12 sessions of Ayahuasca

02:12:41.460 | as a condition for applying for the job.

02:12:46.340 | I suspect that most who had had those experiences

02:12:50.180 | wouldn't want to apply for the job anymore.

02:12:53.420 | They would want to live a different kind of life.

02:12:55.420 | And those who did want to carry on

02:12:57.540 | being a leader of a nation would be very different people

02:13:00.340 | from the people who are leading the nations of the earth

02:13:03.460 | into chaos and destruction today.

02:13:07.140 | - Yeah, they would be doing it for the right reasons.

02:13:08.740 | I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump

02:13:10.860 | and actually brought up this same idea

02:13:13.980 | that it would be a much better world

02:13:15.660 | if most of Congress and most politicians

02:13:17.940 | would take some form of psychedelics at the very least.

02:13:20.420 | - I have no doubt that it would be a better world.

02:13:22.740 | I mean, this raises an interesting point,

02:13:24.620 | which is the role of government

02:13:27.020 | in controlling our consciousness.

02:13:29.240 | And in my opinion, the so-called war on drugs

02:13:34.940 | is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights

02:13:38.380 | that have been undertaken in the past 60 years.

02:13:42.260 | It should be a Republican issue.

02:13:43.700 | If I understand the Republican Party correctly,

02:13:46.140 | the Republican Party believes in individual freedom

02:13:49.180 | for adults as much as possible,

02:13:51.420 | and particularly the freedom to make choices

02:13:54.180 | over their own bodies.

02:13:55.900 | But in the case of even cannabis,

02:13:59.060 | I know that's one of the great things

02:14:00.980 | that's happening in America.

02:14:02.420 | It's happening state by state

02:14:04.660 | where cannabis is being legalized

02:14:07.020 | and that draconian hand of government

02:14:08.700 | is being taken off the back of people

02:14:10.740 | who are consuming a medicine

02:14:12.900 | that is far less harmful than alcohol,

02:14:15.420 | which is glorified in our society.

02:14:18.540 | We cannot say that we are free

02:14:22.300 | if we allow a government to dictate to us

02:14:24.980 | what experiences we may or may not have

02:14:27.540 | in our inner consciousness while doing no harm to others.

02:14:31.100 | And the point there is we already have a whole raft of laws

02:14:35.180 | that deal with us when we do harm to others.

02:14:37.740 | Do we really need laws that tell us

02:14:40.020 | what we may or may not experience

02:14:42.220 | in the inner sanctum of our own consciousness?

02:14:44.140 | I think it's a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty.

02:14:48.300 | And we would have much less drug problems

02:14:51.900 | if these drugs were all legalized

02:14:55.620 | and made available to people without shaming them,

02:14:59.020 | without punishing them in any way,

02:15:01.940 | but just part of normal social life.

02:15:03.860 | And then you could be sure

02:15:04.980 | that you were getting good product

02:15:06.660 | rather than really shitty product,

02:15:08.460 | which has been cut with all sorts of other things.

02:15:10.380 | Ultimately, the way forward is for adults

02:15:13.780 | to take responsibility for their own behavior

02:15:16.920 | and for society to allow that to happen

02:15:19.780 | and not to have big government taking responsibility

02:15:22.300 | for decisions that should be in the hands of individuals.

02:15:24.860 | - And for me also, it's exciting,

02:15:26.180 | some of these substances like psilocybin

02:15:29.420 | are being integrated into scientific studies at large scales.

02:15:32.860 | It's really interesting.

02:15:33.700 | - We've seen a revolution

02:15:34.660 | in the way science looks at psychedelics

02:15:36.780 | in the last 20, 25 years.

02:15:38.960 | They were in that highly demonized category.

02:15:43.100 | But again, it's one of those paradigms

02:15:45.260 | which gets overwhelmed by new evidence.

02:15:47.060 | And it began to be realized

02:15:48.900 | that psilocybin and other psychedelics

02:15:52.480 | are very helpful in a range of conditions

02:15:55.320 | from which people suffer.

02:15:57.100 | Post-traumatic stress disorder,

02:15:59.740 | the fear of death when you're suffering

02:16:02.260 | from terminal cancer can be overwhelming.

02:16:05.060 | And it's been found that psilocybin can remove that.

02:16:10.060 | Deep depressions can be evaporated

02:16:14.020 | with one single massive psilocybin journey.

02:16:17.220 | They just go away.

02:16:18.100 | There's really good science on this.

02:16:19.780 | And they are being integrated

02:16:21.060 | into conventional medicine more and more.

02:16:22.640 | We'll see it happening.

02:16:23.480 | I'm not sure if it'll happen as much as,

02:16:25.500 | as fast as I would like to see it happen in my lifetime,

02:16:27.780 | but it is gonna happen.

02:16:29.340 | - Yeah, actually, just recently found out

02:16:31.540 | that you had a TED talk, "War on Consciousness,"

02:16:36.540 | that was taken down.

02:16:38.780 | And that was just part of just the general resistance.

02:16:41.820 | 'Cause it was a pretty, it wasn't a radical,

02:16:44.620 | it wasn't really a radical talk.

02:16:45.460 | - No, I was talking about ayahuasca,

02:16:47.300 | and I was talking about the view that I hold very strongly,

02:16:50.380 | that as long as we do no harm to others,

02:16:52.880 | sovereign adults should be allowed to make decisions

02:16:55.060 | about their own bodies and not face a jail sentence

02:16:57.380 | or shaming as the result.

02:16:59.380 | But this, so it was a TEDx talk, not a TED talk,

02:17:02.580 | organized by a local TED group.

02:17:04.900 | They call them TEDx talks.

02:17:07.220 | And I gave this talk about the war on consciousness.

02:17:12.220 | And it was immediately pulled down from TED's main channel

02:17:16.540 | with all kinds of bizarre reasons being given.

02:17:19.820 | But unfortunately it was too late

02:17:21.220 | because a number of people had already downloaded the talk

02:17:23.620 | and then uploaded it onto other YouTube channels.

02:17:26.220 | And actually their banning of it made it go viral

02:17:29.340 | in a way that would not have happened otherwise.

02:17:31.860 | But again, it's a sign that points of view

02:17:34.220 | that are not acceptable to those in positions of power

02:17:37.700 | are simply dismissed and shut down,

02:17:40.460 | or at least attempts are made to do so.

02:17:43.500 | - In general, just along that line of thinking,

02:17:45.740 | I'm pretty sure that what we understand

02:17:47.940 | about consciousness today will seem silly

02:17:50.420 | to humans 100 years from now.

02:17:53.420 | - You bet it will.

02:17:54.860 | Especially if we harness psychedelics

02:17:57.560 | to investigate consciousness.

02:17:59.420 | And that is what is happening at Imperial College right now

02:18:04.420 | is the investigation of the experience.

02:18:07.940 | They're not looking, there are other trials

02:18:10.140 | that are looking for the therapeutic potential of DNT,

02:18:12.380 | but in this case, they're looking entirely

02:18:14.740 | at the experiences that people have

02:18:16.380 | and why they're so similar from people

02:18:18.340 | from different age groups and different genders

02:18:21.060 | and different parts of the world

02:18:22.140 | are all having the same experiences.

02:18:23.860 | - And for me, from an engineer perspective,

02:18:26.280 | it's interesting if it's possible

02:18:28.420 | to engineer consciousness in artificial beings.

02:18:31.260 | - Yeah.

02:18:32.100 | - It's another way to approach the question

02:18:34.860 | of how special is human consciousness?

02:18:37.540 | - Yeah.

02:18:38.380 | - From where does it arise?

02:18:42.180 | Is it something that permeates all of life?

02:18:44.740 | And then in that case, what is the thing

02:18:47.060 | that makes life special?

02:18:48.140 | Like, what is life?

02:18:49.160 | What is these living organisms that we have here

02:18:52.100 | and that evolved to create humans?

02:18:54.460 | What is truly special about humans?

02:18:57.100 | And it's both scary and exciting

02:18:59.440 | to consider the possibility

02:19:00.520 | that we can create something like this.

02:19:02.200 | - Yeah, but why not?

02:19:03.680 | We're a vehicle for consciousness, in my view.

02:19:07.000 | I think consciousness is present in all life on Earth.

02:19:10.320 | I don't think it's limited to human beings.

02:19:12.680 | We have the equipment to manifest

02:19:14.780 | and express that consciousness

02:19:16.160 | in the way that a dog, for example, doesn't have

02:19:18.620 | or a snail doesn't have or a pigeon doesn't have.

02:19:21.600 | But when I look at two pigeons sitting on my garden fence

02:19:25.380 | and rubbing up close to each other

02:19:27.780 | and enjoying each other's company

02:19:29.180 | and taking off together and hanging out together,

02:19:31.660 | I think they're conscious beings.

02:19:34.020 | And I think consciousness is everywhere.

02:19:37.340 | I think it's the basis of everything.

02:19:38.940 | And I suspect that fundamentally,

02:19:41.660 | consciousness is non-physical

02:19:44.100 | and that it can manifest in physical forms

02:19:46.980 | where it can then have experiences

02:19:48.660 | that would not be available in the non-physical state.

02:19:51.400 | That's a guess.

02:19:52.620 | - That'd be a fascinating,

02:19:54.060 | because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms

02:19:56.620 | to manifest the consciousness.

02:19:57.860 | - And see if consciousness enters,

02:19:59.740 | if they become consciousness.

02:20:01.020 | Isn't there some suggestion that artificial intelligence

02:20:03.300 | is already becoming conscious?

02:20:04.860 | - That makes humans really uncomfortable.

02:20:07.420 | Because we are at the top of the food chain,

02:20:09.460 | we consider ourselves truly special,

02:20:11.220 | and to consider that there's other things

02:20:13.100 | that could be special is scary.

02:20:16.340 | - Well, look how other people make us uncomfortable, too.

02:20:19.500 | I mean, look at the state of the world today.

02:20:22.280 | All the conflicts that are raging,

02:20:25.580 | that's because we're afraid.

02:20:27.520 | When I say we, I'm speaking nation by nation.

02:20:30.000 | We are afraid of other people.

02:20:31.960 | We fear that they're going to hurt us

02:20:33.800 | or damage us in some way.

02:20:34.960 | And so we seek to stop that.

02:20:36.560 | It's the root of many, many conflicts, this fear.

02:20:39.720 | And so fear of AI may not be such a good idea.

02:20:42.840 | After all, it might be very interesting

02:20:44.400 | to go down that route and see where it comes.

02:20:46.000 | Certainly, in terms of exploring consciousness,

02:20:48.520 | it is very interesting.

02:20:50.240 | - Yeah, fear is a useful thing,

02:20:53.320 | but it can also be destructive.

02:20:54.880 | - Well, it can be destructive,

02:20:56.320 | and it can shut you down completely.

02:20:58.520 | - If you look into the future,

02:21:00.320 | maybe the next hundred years,

02:21:01.640 | what do you hope are the interesting discoveries

02:21:03.720 | in archeology that we'll find?

02:21:06.520 | - Well, I'd really like to know

02:21:07.820 | how the Great Pyramid was built.

02:21:09.820 | And we now have, with new tech, with scanning technology,

02:21:14.480 | it's now become apparent that there are many major voids

02:21:17.780 | within the Great Pyramid.

02:21:19.520 | Right above the Grand Gallery,

02:21:20.840 | there's what looks like a second Grand Gallery

02:21:23.420 | that has been identified with remote scanning.

02:21:26.400 | And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up

02:21:31.560 | already, are being found as a result of this.

02:21:33.880 | So it may be that the Great Pyramid

02:21:37.280 | will ultimately give up its secrets.

02:21:39.640 | I often think that the Great Pyramid

02:21:41.040 | is partly designed to do that.

02:21:43.560 | It's designed to invite its own initiates.

02:21:47.440 | Some people aren't interested in the Great Pyramid at all,

02:21:50.800 | but some people are fascinated by it,

02:21:52.760 | and they're drawn towards it.

02:21:53.760 | And when they're drawn towards it,

02:21:54.920 | it immediately starts raising questions in their minds,

02:21:57.760 | and they seek answers to their questions.

02:21:59.340 | So it's like saying, "Here I stand.

02:22:02.400 | "Investigate me, find out about me, figure out what I am.

02:22:06.520 | "Why have I got these two shafts

02:22:08.900 | "cut into the side of the so-called Queen's Chamber?

02:22:11.800 | "Why do they slope up

02:22:13.340 | "through the body of the Great Pyramid?

02:22:14.680 | "Why do they not exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid?

02:22:17.580 | "Why, when we send a robot up those shafts,

02:22:20.040 | "do we find them after about 160 feet

02:22:22.260 | "blocked by a door with metal handles?

02:22:25.240 | "Why, when we drill through that door

02:22:26.940 | "to see what's beyond it, three or four feet away,

02:22:29.820 | "we see another door?"

02:22:31.840 | It's very frustrating, but it's saying to us,

02:22:35.700 | "Keep on exploring.

02:22:36.920 | "If you're persistent enough,

02:22:38.960 | "we'll eventually give you the answer."

02:22:40.600 | So I'm hoping that that answer will come

02:22:43.280 | as to how this most mysterious of monuments

02:22:45.680 | was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it.

02:22:49.680 | Certainly, I'm sure it was never a tomb or a tomb only.

02:22:54.680 | The later pyramids might have been.

02:22:58.560 | Actually, no pharaonic burial

02:23:00.120 | has been discovered in any pyramid,

02:23:01.840 | but nevertheless, it's pretty clear

02:23:04.680 | that the later pyramids,

02:23:05.700 | with the pyramid texts written on the walls,

02:23:08.100 | like the Pyramid of Unas,

02:23:09.360 | Fifth Dynasty Pyramid at Saqqara, were tombs.

02:23:13.680 | But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length

02:23:16.620 | to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth,

02:23:20.520 | to orient it perfectly to true north,

02:23:22.700 | to make it six million tons, this is not a tomb.

02:23:26.120 | This is something else.

02:23:27.040 | This is a curiosity device.

02:23:28.520 | This is something that is asking us to understand it,

02:23:31.240 | and I hope we will understand it,

02:23:33.040 | and I hope Egyptologists will be willing

02:23:36.520 | to set aside that prejudice

02:23:38.020 | that they're only looking at a tomb

02:23:39.800 | and consider other possibilities.

02:23:41.300 | And as new tech is revealing

02:23:42.800 | these previously unknown inner spaces

02:23:45.160 | within the Great Pyramid,

02:23:46.160 | I think that's gonna become more and more likely.

02:23:48.240 | - So not just the how it was built, but the why.

02:23:50.960 | - But the why.

02:23:52.160 | - And to you, it seems obvious

02:23:54.840 | that there would be a cosmic motivation.

02:23:57.380 | - Yeah, very, very much so, as above, so below,

02:24:00.280 | which is an idea in the Hermetica.

02:24:04.820 | The god Hermes, for the Greeks,

02:24:07.600 | was the Greek version of Thoth,

02:24:09.720 | the wisdom god of ancient Egypt,

02:24:11.200 | and that's where that saying comes from.

02:24:12.520 | It comes from the Hermetica,

02:24:14.160 | but it's expressing an ancient Egyptian idea

02:24:16.760 | to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.

02:24:19.600 | - So you think there's something interesting

02:24:21.080 | to be discovered about the how it was built?

02:24:23.400 | You mean beyond the ideas of using ramps and wet sand?

02:24:27.720 | - Yeah, ramps won't do it.

02:24:29.120 | Ramps won't do it, nor will wet sand.

02:24:31.600 | It's true that the ancient Egyptians

02:24:33.440 | did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand.

02:24:38.200 | There are even reliefs that show the process

02:24:41.400 | where an individual is standing

02:24:42.640 | on the front of the sledge pouring water

02:24:44.880 | down to lubricate the sand underneath,

02:24:47.680 | and that's a perfectly respectable way

02:24:50.760 | to move a 200-ton block of stone across sand,

02:24:55.360 | flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it,

02:24:58.000 | but that is not gonna help you get

02:25:00.760 | dozens of 70-ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air

02:25:05.760 | to form the roof of the king's chamber

02:25:08.160 | and the floor of the chamber above it

02:25:09.680 | and the roof of that chamber

02:25:10.520 | and the floor of the chamber above that

02:25:12.200 | and so on and so forth.

02:25:13.760 | Wet sand never got those objects up there.

02:25:16.360 | Somehow they were lifted up there.

02:25:18.280 | Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution,

02:25:21.480 | but where are the remains of those ramps?

02:25:24.320 | If you're going to carry blocks weighing

02:25:27.520 | up to two or three tons

02:25:28.840 | right to the top of the Great Pyramid

02:25:30.560 | to complete your work,

02:25:32.400 | you're gonna need a ramp

02:25:33.800 | that's going to extend out into the desert

02:25:36.000 | for more than a mile at a 10-degree slope,

02:25:38.560 | and it's calculated that a 10-degree slope

02:25:40.480 | is about the maximum slope

02:25:41.800 | that human labor can haul objects up a ramp,

02:25:45.800 | and that ramp can't just be compacted sand,

02:25:50.280 | since heavy objects are being hauled up.

02:25:52.160 | It's gonna have to be made of very solid material,

02:25:54.360 | almost as solid as the pyramid itself.

02:25:56.520 | Where is it?

02:25:57.360 | We don't see any trace of those so-called ramps

02:26:00.240 | that are supposed to have been involved

02:26:01.440 | in the construction of the pyramid.

02:26:03.120 | I think we don't know.

02:26:04.240 | I think we have no idea it's built.

02:26:05.720 | That's why there's so many different theories.

02:26:07.800 | We haven't got the answer yet,

02:26:09.440 | but the how of it is one of the big mysteries

02:26:11.920 | from our past.

02:26:12.840 | - I love the Great Pyramids as a kind of puzzle

02:26:15.760 | that was created by the ancient peoples

02:26:18.960 | to be solved by later peoples.

02:26:21.040 | I mean, this is, I don't know if you're aware

02:26:22.880 | of the 10,000-year clock.

02:26:25.160 | - I'm not, no.

02:26:26.200 | - That was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis

02:26:30.240 | in Sierra Diablo Mountains in Texas.

02:26:32.480 | So they're building a clock that ticks once a year

02:26:35.520 | for 10,000 years.

02:26:36.640 | - Oh, wow.

02:26:37.480 | - So it's talking about,

02:26:39.240 | and it's supposed to sort of run.

02:26:41.000 | You know, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs.

02:26:43.960 | And it's an example of modern humans thinking like,

02:26:47.560 | okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond,

02:26:53.520 | if something goes wrong or the future humans

02:26:57.200 | that are way different come back

02:26:59.480 | and they analyze what happened here,

02:27:02.200 | how can we create monuments that they can then analyze?

02:27:06.600 | And in that way, be curious about, in their curiosity,

02:27:11.280 | discover some deep truths about this current time.

02:27:13.760 | It's an interesting kind of notion of like,

02:27:15.920 | what can we build now that would last?

02:27:18.520 | And the answer is that the majority

02:27:20.040 | of what we build now wouldn't last.

02:27:21.760 | - Wouldn't.

02:27:22.600 | - It would be gone within a few thousand years.

02:27:26.280 | But what would last is massive megalithic structures

02:27:30.400 | like the Great Pyramid, that would last.

02:27:33.600 | And it could be used to send a message to the future.

02:27:37.600 | I think Gobekli Tepe serves a similar function.

02:27:41.240 | I mean, there it was, it was buried 10,400 years ago.

02:27:46.240 | And then for the next 10,000 years, nobody touched it.

02:27:50.000 | Nobody knew it was there.

02:27:51.360 | It took the genius of Klaus Schmidt,

02:27:54.280 | the original excavator, to realize what he'd found

02:27:59.280 | and what it was.

02:28:01.040 | But the great thing about the sealing of Gobekli Tepe,

02:28:03.480 | the deliberate burial of Gobekli Tepe,

02:28:05.800 | is it means that no later culture trod over it

02:28:08.240 | and imposed their organic materials on it

02:28:10.800 | and messed up the dating sequences and so on and so forth,

02:28:13.520 | or vandalized it or used it as a quarry.

02:28:15.800 | It's all there intact.

02:28:17.720 | - So you mentioned that the pyramids

02:28:20.560 | and some of the other amazing things that humans have built

02:28:23.560 | was the result of us humans struggling with our mortality.

02:28:28.600 | - That's the ultimate goal.

02:28:31.680 | That seems to me what's at the heart

02:28:33.320 | of many pyramids around the world,

02:28:36.000 | is that they're connected in one way or another

02:28:38.320 | to the notion of death

02:28:40.360 | and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife.

02:28:43.640 | And this is, of course, the fundamental mystery

02:28:45.960 | that all human beings face.

02:28:47.200 | We may wish to ignore it.

02:28:50.440 | We may wish to pretend that it's not gonna happen,

02:28:53.080 | but we are, of course, all mortal.

02:28:55.960 | Every one of us, all eight billion

02:28:57.760 | or however many of us that are on the planet right now,

02:29:00.600 | we're all gonna face death sooner or later.

02:29:03.520 | And the question is, what happens?

02:29:06.320 | And there are a few cultures

02:29:08.560 | that really intensely, deeply studied that mystery.

02:29:12.600 | We are not one of them.

02:29:13.840 | The general view of science, I think,

02:29:16.440 | is that we're accidents of evolution.

02:29:19.960 | When we die, the light blinks out.

02:29:21.720 | There's no more of us, there's no such thing as a soul,

02:29:23.880 | but that's not a proven point.

02:29:25.520 | There's no experiment that proves that's the case.

02:29:27.400 | We know we die, but we don't know

02:29:29.360 | whether there's such a thing as a soul or not.

02:29:32.560 | - Yeah, that's the great mystery.

02:29:33.960 | - It's a great mystery that we all share.

02:29:36.040 | And those cultures that have investigated it,

02:29:38.440 | and ancient Egypt is the best example,

02:29:42.080 | have investigated it thoroughly

02:29:43.760 | and map out the journey that we make after death.

02:29:46.560 | But that notion of a journey after death

02:29:48.880 | and of hazards and challenges along the way,

02:29:51.200 | and ultimately of a judgment,

02:29:53.240 | that notion is found right around the world,

02:29:55.360 | and it even manifests into the three monotheistic face

02:29:59.320 | that are still present in the world today.

02:30:01.240 | - Well, you're one such human,

02:30:03.000 | and you said you contemplate your own death.

02:30:07.880 | - Yeah.

02:30:08.720 | - Are you afraid of it?

02:30:09.560 | - No, I'm not afraid of death at all.

02:30:12.280 | I'm curious about death.

02:30:14.240 | I think it could be very interesting.

02:30:16.880 | I think it's the beginning of the next great adventure.

02:30:20.000 | So I don't fear it.

02:30:22.040 | And I would like to live as long as my body

02:30:26.120 | is healthy enough to make living worthwhile,

02:30:29.520 | but I don't fear death.

02:30:30.480 | What I do fear is pain.

02:30:33.520 | I do fear the humiliation that old age

02:30:36.320 | and the collapse of the faculties can bring.

02:30:38.960 | I do fear the cancers that can strike us down

02:30:41.920 | and riddle us with pain and agony.

02:30:44.240 | That I fear very, very much indeed.

02:30:46.920 | But death is gonna come to all of us.

02:30:49.600 | I accept it, it's gonna come to me.

02:30:51.960 | And I'm not gonna say I'm looking forward to it,

02:30:54.680 | but when it happens, I'm going to approach it,

02:30:57.400 | I hope, with a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure,

02:31:01.560 | that there's something beyond this life.

02:31:04.120 | It isn't heaven, it isn't hell, but there's something.

02:31:07.880 | The soul goes on.

02:31:09.240 | I think reincarnation is a very plausible idea.

02:31:13.240 | Again, modern science would reject that.

02:31:15.880 | But there's the excellent work of Ian Stevenson,

02:31:17.880 | Children Who Remember Past Lives,

02:31:20.560 | who found that children up to the age of seven

02:31:23.120 | often have memories of past lives.

02:31:25.680 | And in cultures where memories of past lives are discouraged,

02:31:29.840 | they tend not to express that much.

02:31:31.600 | But in cultures where memories of past lives are encouraged,

02:31:34.400 | like India, they do express it.

02:31:36.320 | And he found several subjects,

02:31:37.960 | children under the age of seven in India,

02:31:40.000 | who were able to remember specific details of a past life.

02:31:42.840 | And he was able to go to the place

02:31:44.640 | where that past life unfolded and validate those details.

02:31:48.840 | So if consciousness is the basis of everything,

02:31:51.880 | if it's the essence of everything,

02:31:53.360 | and consciousness benefits in some way

02:31:55.640 | from being incarnated in physical form,

02:31:58.240 | then reincarnation makes a lot of sense.

02:32:00.120 | All the investment that the universe has put

02:32:01.840 | into creating this home for life

02:32:05.000 | may have a much bigger purpose than just accident.

02:32:08.760 | - What a beautiful mystery this whole thing is.

02:32:12.240 | - Yeah, we are immersed in mystery.

02:32:13.600 | We live in the midst of mystery.

02:32:14.960 | We're surrounded by mystery.

02:32:16.120 | And if we pretend otherwise, we're deluding ourselves.

02:32:19.800 | - And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world

02:32:22.360 | to explore that mystery.

02:32:23.720 | Thank you for talking today.

02:32:24.920 | - Thank you, Lex.

02:32:25.760 | It's been a pleasure.

02:32:27.440 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:32:29.000 | with Graham Hancock.

02:32:30.400 | To support this podcast,

02:32:31.640 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:32:34.640 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:32:36.560 | from Charles Darwin.

02:32:38.400 | It is not the strongest of the species that survives,

02:32:41.880 | nor the most intelligent.

02:32:44.480 | It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

02:32:48.320 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:32:52.720 | (upbeat music)

02:32:55.320 | (upbeat music)

02:32:57.920 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449

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