Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449
- The big question for
me in that timeline is, why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until
after 12,000 years ago, really, after 10,000 years ago to start seeing the
beginnings of civilization? - The following is a
conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author, who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last Ice Age, and that it was destroyed
in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the
Netflix documentary series, "Ancient Apocalypse", the second season of which
has just been released, and it's focused on the
distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed
with the archeologist, Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archeologist, scholar I love talking to on the podcast. Extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and
respectful in disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people, both on the inside and the
outside of the mainstream, in the various disciplines involved. This is a Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Graham Hancock. Let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history, that there was an advanced
Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps
ceded what people now call the sixth cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India,
China, Andes, and Mesoamerica. So let's talk about
this idea that you have. Can you, at the highest
possible level, describe it? - It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of
puzzlement and incompleteness in the story that we are
taught about our past, which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less a straightforward
evolutionary progress. We start out as hunter foragers, then we become agriculturalists. The hunter forger phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, this is where it is
also important to mention that anatomically modern humans, and were not the only humans. We had Neanderthals from, I
don't know, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. They were certainly human because anatomically modern
humans interbred with them, and we carry Neanderthal genes. There were the Denisovans maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently
as 30,000 years ago. And again, interbreeding took place. They're obviously a human species. So, you know, we've got
this background of humans who didn't look quite like us. And then we have
anatomically modern humans. And I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, and date to about 310,000 years ago. So the question is, what were our ancestors doing after that? And I think we can
include the Neanderthals and that Denisovans in
that general picture. And why did it take so long? This is one of the puzzles, one of the questions that bother me. Why did it take so long when we have creatures who are
physically identical to us, we cannot actually weigh
and measure their brains. But from the work that's
been done on the crania, it looks like they had
the same brains that we do with the same wiring. So if we've been around for
300,000 plus years at least, and if ultimately in our
future was the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn't it happen sooner? Why did it take so long? Why was it such a long time? Even the story of
anatomically modern humans has kept on changing. I remember a time when it was said that there hadn't been
anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago. And then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia,
and then 310,000 years ago. There's a lot of missing
pieces in the puzzle there. But the big question
for me in that timeline is why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until
after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago, to start seeing the beginnings, what are selected as the
beginnings of civilization in places like Turkey, for example. And then there's a relatively slow process of adopting agriculture. And by 6,000 years ago,
we see Ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization. And we're then in the predynastic period in Ancient Egypt as well, 6,000 years ago, beginning to see definite
signs of what will become the dynastic civilization of
Egypt about 5,000 years ago. And interestingly round
about the same time, you have the Indus Valley Civilization popping up out of nowhere. And by the way, the
Indus Valley Civilization was a lost civilization until the 1920s when railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins. I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, and these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally-planned cities. Clearly they're the work of an already sophisticated civilization. One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley Civilization is that we find a steatite
seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture. And that seal is 5,000 years old, and the yoga posture is Mulabandhasana, which involves a real
contortion of the ankles and twisting the feet back. It's an advanced yoga posture. So there it is, 5,000 years ago, and that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga
take to get to that place when it was already so
advanced 5,000 years ago? What's the background to this? China, the Yellow River Civilization, again, it's around about the same period, five to 6,000 years ago. You get these first signs
of something happening. So it's very odd that
all around the world, we have this sudden
upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a
natural evolutionary process that would lead to a civilization. And yet certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these different civilizations. I just find that whole idea very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look
at this radical break that takes place in not
just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas event. It was an extinction level event. That's when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct. It's after that event
that we start seeing this, what are taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps
towards civilization. We come out of the upper
Paleolithic, as it's defined, the end of the old Stone
Age and into the Neolithic. And that's when the wheels
are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But what happened before that, and why did that suddenly happen then? And I can't help feeling, and I felt this for a very long while, that there are major
missing pieces in our story. It's often said that I'm
claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost
civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis
that I am putting forward to answer some of the
questions that I have about prehistory. And I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities, because the Younger Dryas event was a massive global
cataclysm, whatever caused it. And it's strange that just after it, we start seeing these first signs. - So the current understanding
in mainstream archeology is that after the Younger Dryas is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe, with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently. - Yeah, independently, and by coincidence. And by coincidence,
those big civilizations that we all remember as
the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus
Valley Civilization, China, they all pop up at the
pretty much the same time. That is the mainstream view. - And they don't just pop up, they kind of build up gradually. First, there's some settlements. - Oh, definitely, yes. - And then there's different
dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture, and that is also non-obvious, but it's just, there's
first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where
the people are living. Then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff. - It seems like an entirely
reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you're
seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of
years before Sumer emerges. But what's happening now, really, I spent much of
the '90s and the late 1980s investigating this issue
of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it. But by 2002, when I published
a book called "Underworld", which was the most massive
and most heavy book that I've ever written, because I was writing very
defensively at the time. By the time I finished that
book, my wife, Santha, and I spent seven years scuba
diving all around the world, looking for structures underwater, often led by local
fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they'd seen underwater. By the time that book
was finished, I thought, actually, I've done this story. I've walked the walk. I really don't have much
more to say about it. And I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called, "Supernatural: Meetings
"with the Ancient Teachers "of Mankind", recently
retitled "Visionary". And that was about the role of, fundamentally about the
role of psychedelics in the evolution of human culture. And I didn't think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue, but Göbekli Tepe in Turkey
kept on forcing itself upon me. The more and more discoveries there, the 11,600 year date from Enclosure D, which is the two largest
megalithic pillars. And I reached a point where I realized, I have to get back in the water, and I have to investigate this again. And Göbekli Tepe was a game changer. But I think it's a game
changer for everything, because Göbekli Tepe, the
extraordinary nature of it, we are looking at a major megalithic site, which is at least five
and a half thousand years older than say, Ggantija in Malta, which is, was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic
site in the world. And this led, of course, to a huge amount of
interest and attention, both from the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of having the world's
oldest megalithic site, and from archeologists. And this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region. And what they're finding
throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe, and
going down into Syria, and further down into the
Jordan Valley as far as Jericho, and even across a bit of the
Mediterranean into Cyprus, is what Turkish
archeologists are now calling the Taş Tepeler Civilization. They're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills Civilization, with very definite
identifying characteristics, semi-subterranean, circular structures, the use of T-shaped megalithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as
big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It's clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually in a way,
the end of this process. It was the summation of everything that Stone Hills
Civilization had achieved. But what is becoming clear
is that this is a period between before the
foundation of Göbekli Tepe, as far as we know, that
date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Göbekli Tepe. But of course, there's
a lot of Göbekli Tepe still underground. So we can't say for sure
that that's the oldest, but it's the oldest so far excavated. What we're seeing is that in
that whole region around there, there was something was in motion, and it began to go into motion round about the beginning
of the Younger Dryas. And this is where these two
dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I'll
round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago. So Göbekli Tepe's construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don't find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas. But the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we are already seeing the
stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full
form at Göbekli Tepe. And after the construction
of Göbekli Tepe, in fact, even during the
construction of Göbekli Tepe, we see agriculture
beginning to be adopted. The people who created Göbekli
Tepe were all hunter foragers at the beginning, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely
deliberately finished, closed off, closed down,
deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and then topped off with a hill, which is why Göbekli Tepe
is called what it is. Göbekli Tepe means Potbellied Hill, or the Hill of the Navel. For a long time, Göbekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that
looked a bit like a potbelly. - Can you say how it was discovered? I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it
is and how it was discovered. - Well, Göbekli Tepe is first of all, the oldest fully elaborated
megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn't mean that
older ones won't be found, but it is the oldest so far found. The part of the site
that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage
of the whole site. We do know, my first visit
to Göbekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the
late Dr. Klaus Schmidt, who died a year later, was very generous to me and
showed me around the site for over a period of three days. And he explained to me that they've already used
ground penetrating radar on the site, and they know that there's
much more Göbekli Tepe still underground. So anything is possible in terms of the dating of Göbekli Tepe. But what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular, but not quite circular enclosures, which are walled with
relatively small stones. And then inside them you have
pairs of megalithic pillars. And the archetypal part of
that site is Enclosure D, which contains the two
largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall. and reckoned to weigh somewhere
in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct. They're substantial,
hefty pieces of stone. It isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20 foot
tall or 20 ton megalith, nor is it an extraordinary
feat to move it. There's nothing magical or
really weird about that. Human beings can do that and always have. Besides the quarry for the
megaliths is right there. It's within 200 meters
of the main enclosure. So that's not a mystery. But the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture, this massive, massive
megalithic pillars appear. And the pillars, one of the
things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment. And there is good work that's been done, which suggests that Enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star, Sirius. And the rising points of the star, Sirius, appear to be mapped by
the other enclosures, which are all oriented in
slightly different directions. It was the work entirely
of hunter foragers, but by the time Göbekli
Tepe was completed, agriculture was being introduced, and was taking place there. Now you asked how Göbekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey
of that Potbellied Hill in the 1960s by some
American archeologists, and they were looking, absolutely looking for Stone Age material, material from the paleolithic. And they had found some
paleolithic flints, upper paleolithic flints around there. So it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed sticking
out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut stone, bits of very large and
very finely cut stone. And looking at that, the
workmanship was so good that those archeologists were confident that it had nothing to
do with the Stone Age. And they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine remains, and they abandoned the site
and never looked at it further. And it wasn't until the
German Archeological Institute got involved and, but
particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius,
had real insight into this, and started to dig at Göbekli Tepe, that they realized what they'd found, that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world. And they'd found it at a
place where agriculture, according to the established
historical timeline, that's where agriculture, at any rate, in Europe and Western Asia begins, it begins in Anatolia in Turkey, and then it gradually
disseminates westward from there. - And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter gatherers. - It was created by
hunter gatherers, yeah. There was no agriculture 11,600
years ago in Göbekli Tepe. But by the time Göbekli
Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down and buried,
agriculture was all around it. And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants. - Do we have an understanding
when it was turned into a, if I could say a time capsule, so protected by forming a mound around it? - [Graham] Yes. - Is it around that similar time? - It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years
ago, to about 8,400 BC. So around 1200 years it was there. And it continued to be
elaborated as a site. And while it was being
elaborated as a site, we see agriculture, I'm gonna
use the word being introduced. It had, there'd been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there. And to me, that's another of the mysteries about Göbekli Tepe. And then with the new
work that's being done, we realized that it's part
of a much wider phenomenon, which spreads across an enormous distance. And the puzzling thing is
that after Göbekli Tepe, there almost seems to be a decline. Things fall down again. And then we enter this long,
slow process of the neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments until we come to Ancient
Sumer and Mesopotamia. But agriculture has taken
a firm route by then. Actually, one other thing,
I'll just say this in passing. When I talk about a lost civilization, introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archeology is fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western
Europe from Turkey, and that the Western Europeans
didn't invent agriculture. It was absolutely introduced
by Anatolian farmers who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so annoying
to archeologists as it is. And perhaps we should also state, if we look at the entirety
of history of hominids, humans or hominids have been explorers. I didn't even know this when
I was preparing for this. - [Graham] Yeah. - [Lex] Looking at homoerectus. - [Graham] Yeah. - [Lex] 1.9 million years ago. - Absolutely.
- Almost right away they spread out through the whole world. - [Graham] Yeah. - And we, homo sapiens, evolved from them. And we should also mention,
since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand, there's still debates about the dynamics of all
that was going on there, like we mentioned in Africa,
that it's the, you know, I think the current understanding, we didn't come from one
particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations. - This is the out of Africa theory. I think it's more than a theory, it's really strongly evidenced. Why, because we are part
of the Great Ape family, and it's an African family. - [Lex] Yeah. - There's no doubt that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa. But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early
migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely homo erectus, and the astonishingly distant
travels that they undertook. Yes, I think there is an urge
to explore in all of humanity. I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the next hill. And I think that goes very
deep into human character. And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures
of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world. And then settling in
different parts of the world, I think a lot of anatomically
modern human evolution took place outside Africa as
well, not not only in Africa. - So I guess the general
puzzlement that you're filled with is given that these
creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of
thousands of years for them to develop complicated
society settlements? - That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind
a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold
of in the archeological record, which await to be discovered. And of course, there are
huge parts of the world that have not been studied
at all by archeology. But the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all
by archeology is not on its own enough to suggest that
we're missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to
that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap. It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography. There's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world. And they're found amongst cultures that are geographically
distant from one another, and that are also distant
from one another in time. They don't necessarily
occur at the same time. And this is where I think
that archeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can
manifest again and again throughout the human story, so that there are particular issues, for example, the notion of the afterlife, destiny of the soul. What happens to us when we die? And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do
think about what happens. I used to feel immortal
when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I
definitely know that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to
have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to
the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey
along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life
that that person has lived will determine their destiny
in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America through Mexico, through into North America. But it's also found in Ancient
Egypt, in Ancient India, in Ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don't feel that
that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed
down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world. And then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is this sequence of numbers that are a result of the
precession of the equinoxes. At least I think that's the
best theory to explain them. Here, I think it's
important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de
Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Giorgio de Santillana was
Professor of History of Science actually at MIT, where you
are based, back in the '60s. And Hertha von Dechend was Professor of the History of Science at Frankfurt University. And they wrote an
immense book in the 1960s called "Hamlet's Mill". And "Hamlet's Mill" differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the
phenomenon of precession. And I'll explain what
precession is in a moment. Generally, it's held
that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession. And the dating on that
is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so. Santillana and von
Dechend are pointing out that knowledge of procession
is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that. And they do actually trace it. I think I'm quoting them
pretty much correctly, to some almost unbelievable
ancestor civilization. Reading that book was one
of the several reasons that I got into this
mystery in the first place. Okay, now, the procession
of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, is results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet, of course,
is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles
an hour at the equator. But what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis. And that it, so if you imagine the extended North Pole of the
Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing
at the star, Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not
always been the pole star, precisely because of this
wobble on the axis of the Earth. Other stars have occupied
the pole position, and sometimes the extended
North Pole of the Earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred
to as the path of the sun. The Earth is orbiting the sun, and we are seeing what's behind it, what's in direct line
with the sun in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So at different times of the year, the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today, we live in the age of Pisces, and it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians
used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where
I differ from archeology. I think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much
earlier than we suppose. Anyway, to get to the point,
the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the Spring Equinox. This was, the question was, what constellation is
rising behind the sun? What constellation is
housing the sun at dawn on the Spring Equinox? Right now, it's Pisces. In another 150 years or
so, it'll be Aquarius. We do live in the dawning
of the age of Aquarius. Back in the time of the
late Ancient Egyptians, it was Aries, going back to
the time of Ramses or before. Before that it was Taurus,
and so on and so forth. It's backwards through the
zodiac until 12,500 years ago, you come to the age of Leo, when the constellation
of Leo houses the sun on the Spring Equinox. Now this process unfolds
very, very, very, very slowly. The whole cycle, and it is a cycle. It repeats itself roughly
every 26,000 years. Put a more exact figure
on it, 25,920 years. That may be a convention. Some scholars would would say
it was a bit less than that, a bit more, but you're talking fractions. It's in that area, 25,920 years. And to observe it, you really need more
than one human lifetime, because it unfolds very, very slowly, at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the
horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime, in a period of 72 years is
about the width of your finger. It's not impossible to
notice in a lifetime, but it's difficult. You've gotta pass it on. And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santillana
and von Dechend call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire
process of procession, and selected the key
numbers of procession, of which the most important number, the governing number is the number 72. But we also have numbers
related to the number 72. 72 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by two is 54. These numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who were involved in
killing the God of Cyrus in Ancient Egypt and nailing
him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432,000 in the Rigveda. 432,000 is a multiple of 72. And at Angkor in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Thom. And on that bridge you
have figures on both sides, sculpted figures, which are
holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vasuki. And what they're doing is
they're churning the milky ocean. It's the same metaphor
of churning and turning that's defined in the
story of "Hamlet's Mill", of Amlodi's mill. There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108. 108 to 72 plus 36. It's a precessional number, according to the work that
Santillana and von Dechend did. And the fascination
with this number system and its discovery all around the world is one of the puzzles that intrigued me, and suggest to me that we are
looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down, and probably was passed down from a specific single
common source at one time, but then was spread out very,
very widely around the world. - So one of the defining ways that you approach the
study of human history that I think contrast
with mainstream archeology is do you take this sort
of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the
stars very seriously. - I do, as I believe the ancients did. - I think it's important
to sort of consider what humans would've
thought about back then. Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on
YouTube and whatever. But back then, especially
before sort of electricity, the stars is like, yeah, the
sexiest thing to talk about. - There's no light pollution. - There's no light pollution, so there's-- - Humanity of the heavens. - Every single night, you're spending looking up at the stars. And you can imagine there's
a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very
good at studying the stars. - [Graham] Yeah. - And sort of the scientists of the day. And I'm sure there's going to
be these geniuses that emerge. - [Graham] Yeah. - They're able to do two things. One, tell stories about
the gods of whatever, based on the stars. And then also as we'll
probably talk about, use the stars practically
for navigation, for example. - Oh yeah, definitely. - And so like, it makes
sense that the stars had a primal importance
for the ideas of the times, for the status, for
religious explorations. - It was an ever present reality. - [Lex] Yes. - And it was bright and it was brilliant. And it was full of lights. It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it. It was an overwhelming presence. And that's one of the reasons
why I'm really confident that the constellations
that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it's hard to miss when
you pay attention to the sky, that the sun over the
course of the solar year, is month by month rising
against the background of different constellations. And then there's a much longer process, the process of procession, which takes that journey backwards. And where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac, I think it would've been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have
identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian
or Greek convention. But that the constellations were there, I think was very clear, and that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky, which were not on the path of the sun that people paid attention to. - Well, but detecting the
procession of the Equinox is hard because especially they don't
have any writing systems. They don't have any mathematical systems. So everything is told through words. - Yeah. Well, and they have, let's not underestimate oral traditions. The oral traditions, that's something we've
lost in our culture today. One of the things that
happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory. Actually, there's a nice
story from Ancient Egypt about the God, Thoth, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing. "Look at this gift", he says to mythical Pharaoh of that time, "look at the gift that I am
giving humanity, writing. "This is a wonderful thing. "It'll enable you to preserve so much "that you would otherwise lose." And the Pharaoh in this
story replies to him, "No, you have not given
us a wonderful gift. "You have destroyed the art of memory. "We will forget everything. "Words will roam free around the world, "not accompanied by any wise advice "to set them into context." And actually, that's a
very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time. One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history is
human beings love stories. we love great stories, and one way to preserve
information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And so carefully done that actually, it doesn't matter whether
the storyteller knows that they're passing on
that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it's repeated faithfully, the information contained
within it will be passed on. And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge. - So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously. - I take them very seriously,
and the other many reasons. But I can't help being deeply
impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition
of a global cataclysm within human memory. I mean, we know that,
we know scientifically that there have been many,
many cataclysms in the past, going back millions of years. I mean, the best known one,
of course is the KPG event as it's now called, that
made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million, or 66 million years ago. But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption
about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad. But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really
ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at
the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved
the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water. And I think it's an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition
of a global cataclysm, of which one of, but not the only distinguishing
characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and
the submergence of lands that had previously been
above water, underwater. The fact that this story is
found all around the world suggests to me that the
archeological explanation is, look, people suffer local
floods all the time. I mean, as we're talking,
there's flooding in Florida, but I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood. They know it's local. But that's the argument
largely of archeology dealing with the flood myths, or that some local population experienced a nasty local flooding event. And they decided to say that
it affected the whole world. I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know
there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas when flooding did occur, and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the Ice Age. - So there is the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis that provides an
explanation of what happened during this period. - Yeah. - That result in such
rapid environmental change. So can you explain this hypothesis? - Yes. The Younger Dryas Impact
Hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory as its opponents often
attempt to write it off. It's the work of more
than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archeology and
including oceanography as well. And they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas. And by the fact that it is
accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the earth. You can see it most
clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see it's about
the width of a human hand, and there's a draw there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time. And that draw has revealed
the sides of the draw, and you can see the cross section. And in the cross section
is this distinct dark layer that runs through the earth, and it contains evidence of wildfires. There's a lot of soot in it. There are also nanodiamonds in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that's
been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees Centigrade. There are carbon microspherials. All of these are proxies for
some kind of cosmic impact. I talked a moment ago about the
extinction of the dinosaurs. Luis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially, their discovery
was based entirely on impact proxies, just
as the Younger Dryas. There was no crater. And for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater. But when they finally did produce that deeply buried Chicxulub crater, that's when people started to say, yeah, they have to be right. But they weren't relying on the crater, they were relying on the impact proxies. And they're the same impact proxies that we find in what's called the Younger Dryas boundary
layer all around the world. So it's the fact that at the moment when the Earth tips into
a radical climate shift, it's been warming up
for at least 2000 years before 12,800 years ago. People at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief. You know, we've been living
through this really cold time, but it's getting better. Things are getting better. And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12,860 years ago, there's a massive global
plunge in global temperatures. And the world suddenly
gets as cold as it was at the peak of the Ice Age. And it's almost literally overnight. It's very, very, very rapid. Normally in an epoch, when the
Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise. But there is a sea level
rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning
of the Younger Dryas. And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. And then equally dramatically
and equally suddenly, the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up. And you have a recognized
pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of a the galciers collapse into the sea, called Meltwater Pulse 1B,
round about 11,600 years ago. So this is a period which
is very tightly defined. It's a period when we know
that human populations were grievously disturbed. That's when the so-called
Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the
record during the Younger Dryas. And it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well. - Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? Like what explains this
huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature? - The abrupt cessation of the global meridional
overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream
is the best known part. The main theory that's
been put forward up to now, and I don't dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the
Gulf Stream, basically, which is part of the central
heating system of our planet. So no wonder it became cold. But what's not really
been addressed before is why that happened, why
the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater
went into the world ocean. And it was so much of
it, and it was so cold, that actually stopped the
Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that's where the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis offers a very elegant and
very satisfactory solution to the problem. Now the hypothesis, of
course, is broader than that. Amongst the scientists working
on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an
astrophysicist, an astronomer. They have assembled a
great deal of evidence, which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas
impact event or events was what we now call the
Taurid Meteor Stream, which the Earth still
passes through twice a year. It's now about 30 million kilometers wide. Takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit. It passes through it in June, and it passes through it
at the end of October. The suggestion is that
the Taurid Meteor Stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system
round about 20,000 years ago, came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the sun and went into orbit around the sun, an orbit that crossed
the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, the likelihood of a
collision with the Earth was extremely small. But as it started to
do what all comets do, which was to break up
into multiple fragments, 'cause these are chunks of
rock held together by ice. And as they warm up, they
split and disintegrate and break into pieces. As it passed through that, its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider. And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through
a particularly dense part of the Taurid Meteor Stream, and was hit by multiple
impacts all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America, as far east as Syria. And that we are by and large not talking about impacts
that would've caused craters, although there certainly were some, we are talking about airbursts. When an object is 100 or
150 meters in diameter and it's coming in very fast
into the Earth's atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the Earth. It's gonna blow up in the sky. And the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on
the 30th of June, 1908. The Tunguska event was nobody disputes, it was definitely an airburst
of a cometary fragment. And the date is interesting, because the 30th of June is
the height of the Beta Taurid. It's one of the two times when the Earth is going through
the Taurid Meteor Stream. Well, luckily that part of
Siberia wasn't inhabited, but 2000 square miles of
forest were destroyed. If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of
the Taurid Meteor Stream and about the risk of cosmic impact. So the suggestion is that
it wasn't one impact, it wasn't two impacts,
it wasn't three impacts. It was hundreds of airbursts
all around the planet, coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientists working on this think hit the North
American ice cap largely. Some of them may also have hit
the Northern European ice cap resulting in that sudden, otherwise unexplained, flooded meltwater that went into the world ocean, and caused the cooling
that then took place. But this was a disaster for
life all over the planet. And it's interesting that one of the sites where they find the Younger Dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming
evidence of an airburst, and where they find
all the shocked quartz, the carbon microspherials,
the nanodiamonds, the trinitite, and so on and so forth, all of those impact proxies
are found at Abu Hureyra. That was a settlement within
150 miles of Göbekli Tepe. And it was hit 12,800 years
ago, and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was
reinhabited by human beings within probably five years. But it was completely
obliterated at that time. And it's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Abu Hureyra. Now this is a theory,
the Younger Dryas impact, it's a hypothesis actually. It's not even a theory. A theory is, I think,
considered a higher level than a hypothesis. That's why it's the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis. And of course it has many opponents, and there are many who disagree with it. And there have been a series
of peer-reviewed papers that have been published, supposedly debunking the
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. One I think was in 2011. It was called "A Requiem for the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis". And there's one just been
published a few months ago, or a year ago, you know, called, "A Complete Refutation "of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis", something like that, some lengthy title. So it's a hypothesis
that has its opponents, and even within those of us who are looking at the
alternative side of history, there are different points of view. Robert Schoch from Boston University, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall. He doesn't go for the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis. He think, he fully accepts
that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm and that
the extinctions took place, but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst. So there, what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively
explains all the evidence. - How important is the impact hypothesis, to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations? So is it possible to
have another explanation for environmental factors that could have erased most
of an advanced civilization during this period? - In a sense, it's not
the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying, it's the Younger Dryas that's
central to what I'm saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger, something caused it. I think the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the notion that we're
looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there, and we still pass through it twice a year is the best explanation. But I don't mind other explanations. It's good that there
are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery
that's been solved yet. And that word, advanced civilization, this is another word that
is easily misunderstood. And I've tried to make
clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a
civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us. We should expect it to be
completely different from us, but that it would've
achieved certain things. So amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precession numbers that are found all around the world, and are a category of ancient
maps called Portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade
that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople. The Portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they're extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps
of the Mediterranean alone. But some of them show much wider areas. For example, on these
Portolanos style maps, you do find a depiction of
Antarctica again and again. And another thing that
these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they base their maps on multiple older source
maps, which have not survived. These maps are intriguing, because they have very
accurate relative longitudes. Our civilization did not
crack the longitude problem until the mid 18th century
with Harrison's chronometer, which was able to keep
accurate time at sea. So you could have the time in London, and you could have the local time at sea at the same time on, and then you could work
out your longitude. There might be other ways of
working out longitude as well. But there it is. The fact is these Portolanos have extremely accurate
relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them
show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the Ice Age. They show a much extended
Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula. And the series of islands
that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together
into one landmass. And that was the case during the Ice Age. That was the Sunda Shelf. And the presence of Antarctica
on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me, and is not satisfactorily explained in my view, by archeology, which says, oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world
needed something underneath it to balance it. So they put a fictional landmass there. I don't think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last Ice Age, but that doesn't mean that
they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following
that exploration instinct, that they knew how to navigate. They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before. They knew how to navigate, and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world
and they mapped the world. Those maps were made a
very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in
the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were
being copied and recopied. We don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria
except that it was destroyed. I suggest it's likely, this was during the period
of the Roman Empire. I suggest it's likely
that some of those maps were taken out of the library
and taken to Constantinople. And that's where they were
liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again, and started to be copied and recopied. - So from this perspective, when we talk about advanced
Ice Age civilization, it could have been a relatively
small group of people with a technology of their
scholars of the stars and their expert seafaring navigators. - Yes, that's about as
far as I would take it. And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I'm referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. - [Lex] Yeah. - I'm not saying that they
were building steam engines. I don't see any evidence for that. - And perhaps some building
tricks and skills of how to-- - Well, definitely, and this again, is where you
come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in Egypt
with the Three Great Pyramids, and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't
pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and
the Great Sphinx itself. This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue. - Well can you actually
describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them? - Well, first of all, the astronomy. And here I must pay
tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony
West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if
the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that
idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubicz,
who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on
the body of the Sphinx. John West picked that up, and he was a great amateur
Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt, and he was hugely versed in Ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange
scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the
trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe
Schwaller was right. Maybe there was sign of
some sort of flooding here. And that's when he brought Robert Schoch, second person, I'd like to recognize. Geologists at Boston University. He brought Schoch to Giza, and Schoch was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk
the ire of Egyptologists and say, well, it looks to me
like the Sphinx was exposed to at least a thousand
years of heavy rainfall. And as Schoch's
calculations have continued, as he's continued to be
immersed in this mystery, he's continuously pushed that back. And he's now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12 and
a half thousand years ago during the Younger Dryas for the creation of the Great Sphinx. And then, of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara was a
completely different place during the Ice Age. There were rivers in it,
there were lakes in it, it was fertile. It was possibly densely populated. And there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion
damage on the Sphinx. The next person who needs to
be mentioned in this context is Robert Bauval. Robert and I have co-authored
a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He's got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert
became very demoralized by the attacks of
Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius, and it does take a genius sometime to make these connections, 'cause nobody noticed it before that the Three Pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's Belt. And skeptics will say, well,
you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want. But Orion actually isn't
any old constellation. Orion was the God of Cyrus in the sky. He was the Ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation, Sahu. And they recognize it
as the celestial image of the God of Cyrus. So what's being copied on the
ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It's not just a random constellation. And then when we take
procession into account, you find something else
very intriguing happening. First of all, you find that the exact orientation of
the pyramids as it is today, and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have
been built 4,500 years ago, it's not precisely related
to how Orion's Belt looked at that time. There's a bit of a twist
is they're not quite right. But as you process the stars backwards, as you go back and back and back, and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12 and a half thousand years
ago, in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly
they locked perfectly. They match perfectly with the
three pyramids on the ground. And the same moment that the Great Sphinx, an Equinoctial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the Spring Equinox. Anybody can contest
this through themselves. Just go to Giza on the 21st of
March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx, and you will see the sun
rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. But the question is, what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12 and a half thousand years ago, it was the constellation of Leo, and actually the constellation of Leo has a very sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was
originally a lion entirely. And that it, over the thousands
of years, it became damaged. It became eroded,
particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out. By the time you come to the fourth dynasty when the Great Pyramids
are supposedly built, by the time you come
to the fourth dynasty, the head of the lion, original lion head would've
been a complete mess. And we suggest that it was then recarved into a Pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it
was the Pharaoh Khafre, but there's no real strong resemblance. But it's definitely
wearing the Nemes headdress of an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh. And we think that that's
a result of a re-carving of what was originally
not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument. It wouldn't make sense if you
create an Equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre 4,500 years ago, and the Sphinx is an Equinoctial marker. I mean, it's 270 feet
long and 70 feet high, and it's looking directly at
the rising sun on the Equinox. If you create it then,
you would be better, you'd be more likely to create
it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring Equinox. So why is it a lion? And again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies, and putting on the ground
as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau, it's a fact, of course that Egyptologists completely dispute. But the fact that the principle monuments of the Giza Plateau, the
Three Great Pyramids, and the Great Sphinx
all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, to me, is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually, if you
look at computer software at the sky at that time, you'll see that the Milky
Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on
the ground by the River Nile. I suggest that may be one
of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen as the site
for this very special place. So the point I want to make is that an astronomical
design on the ground, which memorializes a very ancient date, does not have to have been
done 12,500 years ago. If from the Ancient
Egyptian point of view, you're there 4,500 years ago. And there's a time
8,000 years before that, which is very, very,
very important to you. You could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date
on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we're looking at, except for one thing. And that's the erosion
patterns on the Sphinx. And we are pretty sure
that the Sphinx at least does date back to 12 and
half thousand years ago. And with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx Temple, which stands directly
in front of the Sphinx. The Sphinx Temple has
largely been destroyed. But the Valley Temple attributed to Khafre on no good grounds whatsoever, is a huge megalithic construction, with blocks of limestone that weigh up to a hundred tons each. And yet it has been remodeled,
refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks. And those core limestone
blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe much older
megalithic blocks there. So I think Giza is a
very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce
the dynastic Ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids. They were closely involved
in the construction of the Great Pyramids
as we see them today. But what I do suggest is that
there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older, and that when we look at
the three Great Pyramids, we are looking at a
renovation and a restoration, and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually the Great Pyramid is
built around a natural hill, and that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound
to the Ancient Egyptians. - So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the Pyramids, and the Pyramids were
built by the Egyptian to celebrate further
an already holy place. - Yeah. And there were platforms in
place where the pyramids stand, not the pyramids as we see them today, but the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time. - So what's the case? What's the evidence that
the Egyptologists use to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the
Pyramids and the Sphinx? - Well, the Three Great Pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that
I have with the whole thing is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? And the timeline that
we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid is the
pyramid of the Pharaoh Djoser. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara
about a hundred years or so before the Giza Pyramids are built. And then we have this
explosion in the fourth dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed
to single Pharaoh Sneferu, who built supposedly the Pyramid at Meidum and the two pyramids at Dahshur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid. And then within that
same a hundred year span, we have the Giza Pyramids being built. This is according to
the Orthodox chronology. And then suddenly, once the
Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a
massive slump in Ancient Egypt. And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize
them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they're
extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery,
repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place. Whereas the Giza Pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy. Basic statistics, it's a
6 million ton structure. It's each side is about 750 feet long. - Yeah. - It's aligned almost perfectly
to true north, east and west within three 60ths of a single degree, 60ths because degrees
are divided into 60s. And it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive
size of the thing. Plus it's very complicated
internal passageways that are involved in it. You know, in the ninth century, the Great Pyramids still had
its facing stones in place. But there was an Arab, Caliph Mamun, who had already realized
that other pyramids did have their entrances
in the north face. Nobody knew where the entrance
to the Great Pyramid was, but he figured, if there's
an entrance to this thing, it's gonna be in the north face somewhere. So he put together a team of workers, and they went in with sledgehammers and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. And they cut their way
into the Great Pyramid for a distance of maybe a hundred feet. And then the hammering that
they did, dislodged something, they heard a little bit further
away, something big falling. And they realized there
was a cavity there. And they started heading
in that direction. And then they joined
the internal passageway of the Great Pyramid, the descending and the
ascending corridors that go up. When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal
passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in, slopes
at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting
because the angle of slope of the exterior of the
Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were
at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid. If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of a
so-called ascending corridor, and it's above the
so-called Queen's Chamber. You go up the Grand Gallery, you're eventually going
to come to what is known as the King's Chamber in
which there is a sarcophagus. And that sarcophagus
is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passage way. It's almost as though the
so-called King's Chamber was built around the
sarcophagus already in place. Above the King's Chamber
are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure
on the King's Chamber of the weight of the monument. But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down where more weight was involved, you have the Queen's Chamber, and there are no such
relieving chambers above that. In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and
vandal called Howard Vyse, who dynamite his way into those
chambers in the first place, allegedly found, well, he
claims he found the graffiti, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang, naming the Pharaoh Khufu. And it's true, I've been in that chamber, and there is the cartouche of Khufu there, quite recognizable. But the dispute around it is whether that is a
genuine piece of graffiti dating from the Old Kingdom, or whether Howard Vyse
actually put it there himself, because he was in desperate
need of money at the time. I'm not sure what the
answer to that question is. Another reason why, but
it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel
confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu. Another is what is called
the Wadi el-Jarf Papyri, where on the Red Sea, the diary of an individual
Khan Merer was found. And he talks about bringing
highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid. And it's clear that
what he's talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He's not talking about the
body of the Great Pyramid. He's talking about the facing
stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason
why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu
was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid, and in a big way. But I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure. And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is a 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You got to go down a 26
degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet. It's a hundred feet vertically, but the slope means you're
gonna walk at a distance, not walk, you're gonna ape walk, you are almost gonna have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to
go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep
bumping your head on them, 'cause they're only three
feet, five inches high. You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into
the subterranean chamber. The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to
be the burial place of Khufu. But after cutting out that 300 foot long, 26 degree sloping passage, lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean
chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there. And they built what's now known as the Queen's Chamber
as his burial chamber. But then they decided
that wouldn't do either, so they then built the King's Chamber, and that's where the Pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Caliph Mamun didn't find anything in
the Great Pyramid at all. - So your idea is that the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the
Pyramid were much earlier. And why that's important,
is it in that case, it would be evidence of
some transfer of technology. - Yes. - From a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, most of that civilization was
either destroyed or damaged, and they desperately
scattered across the globe. - Seeking refuge. - Seeking refuge and
telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars. Their knowledge about the stars. - [Graham] Yeah. - And their knowledge about building, and knowledge about navigation. - That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that
the Ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch
that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time,
it means the first time. This is when the Gods walk the Earth. This is when Seven Sages
brought wisdom to Ancient Egypt. And that is seen as the origin of Ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists in by the
Ancient Egyptians themselves. There are king lists that go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30,000 years into
the past in Ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely
mythical by Egyptologists. But nevertheless, it's interesting that there's that
reference to remote time. Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be
described as secret societies. The followers of Horace are one of those specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first
time into later periods. The Souls of Peiennecken are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of
the Younger Dryas cataclysm who settled in Giza, may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that they're referred to in the Edfu Building text as Seven Sages, 'cause that repeats again and again. It's also in Mesopotamia, it's
Seven Sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the
waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the
skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy. It's found all around the world that there was a relatively
small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter foragers who lived at Giza at that time, and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter foragers. But it was not knowledge that
was ready to be put into shape at that time. And that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within
very secretive groups that passed it down
over thousands of years. And finally it bursts into full form in the fourth dynasty in Ancient Egypt. And you know, the notion that
knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years
shouldn't be observed. We know, for example, in
the case of Ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much,
I think around 2000 BC, and knowledge has been
preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can preserve
knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for eight. - Now, of course the air
bars on this are quite large, but if an advanced Ice
Age civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might
find it one day if it existed? And how big do you think
it might have been? - Well, this is where I'm often accused of presenting a God of the gaps argument. And I think there was a lost civilization because there's lots of the Earth that archeologists have never looked at. Of course, I'm not thinking that. These are very special gaps
that I'm interested in, and I'm interested in them
because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I've
expressed to you before. It's not just because there are gaps in the archeological record, it's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Ice Age. And they specifically
include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the Ice Age, and went through this warm wet period when it was very, very fertile. Certainly some archeology
has been done in the Sahara, but it's fractional, it's tiny. And I think if we want
to get into the origins, the true origins, Ancient
Egyptian civilization of the peoples of Ancient Egypt, we need to be looking
in the Sahara for that. And the Amazon Rainforest
is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about
9 million square kilometers. The Amazon that's left under
dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square
kilometers, maybe closer to six. And then you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. Now it's well established that
sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight. It came in dribs and drabs. There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise. And there were periods when
the sea level was rising much more slowly. So that 400 foot sea
level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years. But there are episodes within it, like Meltwater Pulse 1B,
like Meltwater Pulse 1A when the flooding was really immense. - How big do you think it might have been, and do you think it was
spread across the globe? So if there were expert navigators, do you think they spread across the globe? - Well, the reason that
I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where
this civilization started or where it was based. All I'm seeing are clues
and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me, and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. And I'm not inclined to look
for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe, because Northern Europe
was not a very nice place to live during the Ice Age. I mean, nobody smart
would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous, frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were
hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the Ice Age. And that of course includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert, and of course it includes the
Amazon Rainforest as well. All of these places, I
think, are candidates, for quote unquote, my lost civilization. And because I think largely
from those ancient maps that it was a navigating
seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn't
only in one place, it was probably in a number of places. And then I can only speculate. Maybe there was a cultural
value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter
foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep
their distance from them, just as even today, there is a feeling that we
shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes
in the Amazon Rainforest. Although interestingly,
some of those tribes are now using cell phones. - Yeah. - That possibility may have
been there in the past. And only when we come
to a global cataclysm, does it become essential to have outreach and actually to take refuge amongst those hunter forager populations. That is the hypothesis that
I'm putting it forward. I'm not claiming that it's a fact, but for me, it helps to
explain the evidence. - So that speaks to one of the challenges that archeologists provide to this idea is that there is a lot of evidence. - [Graham] Yeah. - Of humans in the Ice Age, and they appear to be
all hunter gatherers. But like you said, only
a small percent of areas where humans have lived have
been studied by archeologists. - That's right. Very tiny percent. And even a tiny percent of
every archeological site has been studied by archeologists too. Typically one to 5% of any
archeological site is excavated. - I mean, that's why go back to the type it fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing as the time capsule. You know, it's almost certain that there is places on
Earth we haven't discovered, that once we do, even if
it's after the Ice Age, will change our view of human history. - [Graham] Yeah. - Do you think there's
going to be a place, like what would be your
dream thing to discover, like Göbekli Tepe, that says a definitive like perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history. - Some kind of archive, some
kind of hall of records. There's both mystical associations with the Hall of Records at Giza, from people like the
Edgar Cayce organization. There's also Ancient Egyptian traditions, which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that
is alien to Ancient Egypt, it's quite present in Ancient Egypt. So far as far as I know, nobody has dug down beneath the Sphinx. And of course there's very
good reasons for that. You don't wanna damage the place too much. But let's call it the Hall of Records, I'd love to find that. But I think in a way,
that's what Göbekli Tepe is. Göbekli Tepe is a hall of records. You know, it's interesting that just as I've tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the Three Great Pyramids of Giza match Orion's Belt in 10,500 BC, just as the Sphinx
matches Leo in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago or so, Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Göbekli Tepe contains what a number of
researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram. Martin Sweatman of Edinburgh
University has brought forward the best work in this field. But it was initially
started by a gentleman called Paul Burley, who noticed that one of
the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today. And that above it is a vulture
with outstretched wings, which is in a posture very
similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius. And on that outstretched
wing is a circular object. And the suggestion is
that it's marking the time when the sun was at the
center of the dark rift in the Milky Way at the Summer Solstice, 12 and a half thousand years ago. That's what it's marking. And it's interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar 40. Of course it's controversial. Martin Sweatman ideas are by no means accepted by archeology. But he's done very, very thorough detail statistical work on this,
and I'm personally convinced. So we have a time capsule at Göbekli Tepe, which is memorializing a date
that is at least 1,200 years before Göbekli Tepe was built, if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the
oldest date as it is at present. The date memorialized on
Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the impact event. And then Giza does the same
thing, but in much larger scale. It draws our, it uses massive
megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture which is
sufficiently literate in astronomy will be able to decode. We don't have to have a
script that we can't read, like we do with the
Indus Valley Civilization or with the Easter Island script. We don't have to have a script
that can't be interpreted. If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical
literate civilization will be able to give you a date. Hoover Dam has a star map built into it. And that star map is part of an exhibition that was put there at the
founding of the Hoover Dam. And what it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the
moment of its completion. And Oskar Hansen, the artist
who created that piece, said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture
would be able to know the time of the dam's construction. So you can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date. - Quick pause, bathroom break? - [Graham] Sounds good. - So to me, the story that
we've been talking about, it is both exciting if the mainstream archeology
narrative is correct, and the one you're
constructing is correct, both are super interesting because the mainstream
archeology perspective means that there's something
about the human mind from which the pyramids,
these ideas spring naturally, you place humans anywhere,
you place 'em on Mars, it's gonna come out that way. So that's an interesting
story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve out
Africa with homo sapiens, how they think about the world. That's super interesting. - [Graham] Yeah. - And then if there's
an ancient civilization, advanced civilization that explains why there's so many similar
types of ideas that spread, that means that there's
so much undiscovered. - [Graham] Yeah. - Still.
- Yeah. - About the sort of the
spring of these ideas of civilization that come. So to me, they're both fascinating. So I don't know why there's so
much sort of infighting, but. - I think it's partly territorial. I think that, I don't, I can't
speak of all archeologists, but some archeologists
feel very territorial about their profession, and they do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders
have a large platform. And that's, I found that the
attacks on me by archeologists have increased step by step with the increase of my exposure. I wasn't very interesting to them when I just had one
minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called "The
Sign and the Seal". But when "Fingerprints of the
Gods" was published in 1995 and became a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention, and appear to have been
regarded as a threat to them. And that is the case today. That is why "Ancient Apocalypse" Season 1 was defined as the most
dangerous show on Netflix. It's why the Society
for American Archeology wrote an open letter to Netflix asking Netflix to reclassify
the series as science fiction. It's why they accused the series of antisemitism, misogyny,
white supremacism, and a whole, I don't know, a whole bunch of other things like that. It has nothing to do with
anything that's in the series. It was like, we must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us. Is it certainly not a danger, there are many more
dangerous things in the world than a television series
going on right now. But maybe it was seen as
a danger to archeology that this non-archeologist
was in archeological terrain and being viewed and seen by large, and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem. And human nature being what it is, I noticed that two of
my principal critics, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas, and Flint Dibble, who's now teaching at the
University of Cardiff in Wales, in the UK, are both people who
like to have media exposure. And John Hoopes had just recently
started a YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had
one for quite a while, pretty small number of followers. I think that they feel that
they should be the ones who are getting the global attention, and that it's not right that I am. And that the best way to
stop that is to stop me, to shut me down, to get me canceled, and basically requiring
Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they
actually had the temerity to suggest to Netflix. That would, if that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would've effectively
been the cancellation of my documentary series. It would no longer have been
ranked under documentary. So it was a deliberate
attempt to shut me down, and I see that going on again and again. And it's so unfortunate
and so unnecessary. I've become very defensive
towards archeology. I hit back. After 30 years of these attacks
on my work, I'm tired of it. And I do defend myself, and sometimes I perhaps
overvigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archeology in the first season of
"Ancient Apocalypse". Maybe I should have been a
bit gentler and a bit kinder. And I've tried to reflect
that in the second season, and to bring also many
more indigenous voices into the second season, as well as the voices of
many more archeologists. - Yeah, in general, I got
a chance to get a glimpse of the archeology community, and in archeology, in science in general, I don't have much patience
for this kind of arrogance or snark or dismissal of
general human curiosity. - [Graham] Yeah. - That I think your
work inspires in people. And so that's why people like Ed Barnhart, who I recently had a
conversation with, you know, he radiates sort of kindness
and curiosity as well. And it's like that kind
of approach to ideas, especially about human
history, it inspires people. - Exactly. - [Lex] Inspires millions
of people to ask questions. - Exactly. - I mean, that's why you had
Keanu Reeves on the new season, and he's basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity. - Keanu is genuinely
curious about the past, and very, very interested in it. and he's bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the past. He's speaking for every man in the series. - So given that, can you
maybe steelman the case that archeologists make about this period that we've been talking about? Can make the case that that
is indeed what happened, is it was hunter
gatherers for a long time, and then there was a cataclysm, a very difficult period
in the human history with the Younger Dryas, and that changed the environment,
and then led to this, the springing up of civilizations at different places on Earth. Can you sort of make the case for that? - Oh no, I completely understand why that is the position of archeology, because that's what they've found. Archeology is very much wishing to define itself as a science. And it uses the techniques of weighing, and measuring, and counting are very key to what archeology does. And in what they've found and what they've studied around the world, they don't see any traces
of a lost civilization. And the idea that besides the, we live in a very politically
correct world today. And the idea that some
kind of lost civilization brought knowledge to other
cultures around the world is seen as almost racist
or colonialist in some way. It triggers that aspect as well. But basically, I think
majority of archeologists are in complete good faith on this. I don't think that anybody's
really seeking to frame me. I think that what we are
hearing from most archeologists, some much more vicious than others, but what we're hearing
from most archeologists is this is what we found and we don't see evidence for
a lost civilization in it. And to that, I must reply,
please look at the myths. Please consider the implications
of the Younger Dryas. Please look at the ancient astronomy. Please look at those ancient maps, and don't just dismiss
them and sneer at them. And for God's sake,
please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely
habitable and attractive during the Ice Age, and that have hardly been
studied by archeology at all before you tell us that your theory is the only one that
can possibly be correct. In fact, it's a very arrogant and silly position of archeology, because archeological theories
are always being overthrown. It can take years, it can take decades. It took decades in the case
of the Clovis first hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. But sooner or later, a bad
idea will be kicked out by a preponderance of evidence that that idea does not explain. - If we can just look back at
your debate with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan Experience, what
are some takeaways from that? What have you learned, maybe what are some things
you like about Flint? You said that he's one
of your big critics, but what do you like about his ideas and what were you maybe bothered by? - First of all, just very recently, and it can be found on my YouTube channel, and it signaled on my website, I have made a video runs about an hour, which looks at a series of
statements that Flint made during the debate, which I
was not prepared to answer. And it turns out that
some of those statements are not correct. The notion, for example, that there were 3 million
shipwrecks that have been mapped. Flint actually uses the word "mapped", 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped at one point in the debate. And I've put that clip into
the video that I brought out. That is not a fact, that is an estimate, a UNESCO estimate. And actually in the small
print on one of the slides that he has on the screen,
you can see the word estimate, but he never expresses that word out loud. So those who are listening to the podcast rather than watching it wouldn't even have a chance to see that. And I, sitting there in the studio, didn't see that word estimate either. And I didn't know that. I thought, my God, Flint has a point here. If there've been 3 million
shipwrecks found and mapped, if that's the case, the absence of any shipwreck
from a lost civilization of the Ice Age is a problem. But then I discover that it
isn't 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It's much, much less than that. And maybe it's 250,000,
still a large number, but most of them from
the last thousand years. And unfortunately what
Flint didn't go into, and perhaps he should have
shared with the audience, and again, I go into this in the video, is that there is indisputable evidence that human beings were seafarers as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago. The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, a hundred kilometer ocean voyage. But nevertheless, it was an ocean voyage. And it must have involved
a large enough people, a large enough number of people to create a permanent population
that wouldn't go extinct. The settlement of Cyprus
is the same thing. It was always an island
even during the Ice Age. And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia, and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement
of Cypress either. But that doesn't mean that
that thing didn't happen. - I should just like linger on this, because for me it was the
shipwrecks thing was convincing. And then looking back, first
of all, watching your video, but also just realizing the
peopling of Australia part, that's mind bothering to me. 50,000 years ago. - [Graham] Yeah. - Just imagine being the
person standing on the shore, looking out into the ocean, standing on the shore
of a harsh environment, looking out to the ocean of
even a harsh environment, and deciding that, you know, what I'm going to go
towards near certain death, and explore. - You don't know what's on
the other side of that water. You can't see 90 kilometers. - And humans did it.
- Yeah. - I love it so much. - Again, it's that urge to explore. - [Lex] Yeah. - And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made
the journey there and back. They ventured into the water. They definitely had boats. And lo and behold, after
a two or three day voyage, they ended up on a coastline. You're an individual. You've got by relatively
straightforward island hopping with where each island is within sight of each
other as far as Timor. And when you get to Timor, suddenly you can't island hop anymore. There's an expansive ocean
that you can't see across. But that urge to explore, that curiosity that is
central to the human condition would undoubtedly have led
some adventurous individuals to want to find out more, and even be willing to risk their lives. And that first reconnoitering
of what lay beyond that strait would've undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals, not enough to create a permanent
population in Australia. But when they came back with the good news that there's a whole land there, that's the land that was in it, that geographers call Sahul, which in just as Sunda was the Ice Age, Indonesian and Malaysian
Peninsula all joined together into one landmass, so Sahul was New Guinea
joined to Australia, so they would've made
landfall in New Guinea. And then they think, well, here is this vast
open, incredible land. We need to bring more people here. And that would've involved larger craft. You need to bring people with resources, and you need to bring enough of them, both men and women, in order
to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct. And it's the same in Cyprus. There, the detailed work that's been done suggests very strongly that we are looking at planned migrations of groups of people in excess
of a thousand at a time, bringing animals with them. And this certainly would've
involved multiple boats, and boats of a significant size. - And there's no archeological
evidence of those boats. - None whatsoever. The oldest boat that's ever
been found in the world is the Dokos Shipwreck off Greece, which is around 5,000 years
old, if I recall correctly. - [Lex] So everything that's
makes a boat is lost to time. - Yes. Boats can be preserved
under certain circumstances. There's a wreck at the
bottom of the Black Sea, almost two miles deep. I didn't know the Black Sea was that deep. But there's a wreck and
there's no oxygen down there, that is more than 2000 years old and is still in pretty
much perfect condition. But in other conditions, the structure of the ship evaporates. Sometimes what you're left
with is the cargo of the ship. And you could say there
was a ship that sank here, but the ship itself has gone. The fact is, we know that
our ancestors were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago, and no ship has survived
to testify to that, yet we accept that they were. - Do you think one day we'll find a ship that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old? - It's not impossible. I think it's quite unlikely given the very thin survival of ships, the further back you go in
time, with the oldest, as I say, being about 6,000 years old now. And then the other thing
to take into account is the Younger Dryas event itself and the cataclysmic
circumstances of that event, and the roiling of the seas
that would've taken place then, how much would've survived in
a boat accident at that time would've survived for
thousands of years afterwards, I'm not sure, but I don't
give up hope it's possible. - So, okay, so that's back
to the 3 million shipwrecks. - [Graham] Yeah. - So what's your takeaway
from that debate? - Well, my takeaway from that debate is that I should have
been better prepared, and I should have been less angry. I have to say that Flint
had really disturbed me with this constant snide, not quite exact references to
racism and white supremacism in my work. I detest such things. And to have those labels stuck on me, he's always avoided taking
direct responsibility, pretty much always avoided. There's one example that I
include in the video I've made where he really hasn't
successfully avoided it, but in most cases he's trying to say that I rely on sources that were racist, but that he's not saying
that I myself am a racist. But the end result of those statements is that people all around the
world came to the conclusion that Graham Hancock is a
racist and a white supremacist. And that really got under my
skin and it really upset me. And I felt angry about it, and I felt that I was there to defend "Ancient Apocalypse" Season 1. Whereas in fact, what I was there to do was to listen to a series of lectures where an archeologist tells me what archeologists have found, and that somehow I'm to deduce that from what they have found, they're not gonna find anything else, at least not anything to do
with the lost civilization. - Listen, I feel you, I've seen
the intensity of the attacks and the whole racism label is the one that can get under your skin. And it's a toolbox that's been prevalent over
the past, let's say decade, maybe a little bit more as
a method of cancellation, when a person has, is
the opposite of racist, very often, it's kind
of hilarious to watch, but it can get under your skin, especially when you have certain dynamics that happen on the internet where it seeps into a Wikipedia page, and then other people
read that Wikipedia page, and you get to hear it from like friends, oh, I didn't know you're at whatever. And you realize that Wikipedia
description of who you are is actually has a lot of power, not by people that know you well, but by people that just kind
of are learning about you for the first time. - [Graham] Definitely. - And they can really start to annoy you and get onto your skin when people are kind of
indirectly injecting, they're writing articles about you that can then be cited by Wikipedia. It can really bother a person who is actually trying to do good science and or just trying to inspire
people with different ideas. - I felt that my work was being
deliberately misrepresented, and I felt that I, as a
human being, were being, was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful. My wife and I have six
children between us, and we have nine grandchildren, and of those nine grandchildren,
seven are of mixed race. And this is my family, and these are kids who are gonna
grow up and read Wikipedia, and learn from reading Wikipedia that grandpa was some kind of racist. You know, this is a personal issue for me, and I'm afraid I carried that
personal anger into the debate and it made me less effective
than I should have been. But ultimately I do want
to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He's got a very sharp mind. He's a very clever man and
he's very fast on his feet. And I recognize that I was definitely up against a superior
debater in that debate. I'm not sure that I have
those debating skills, and I certainly didn't have
them on on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else, which is that he was willing to be there. Most archeologists don't
wanna talk to me at all. They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on
calling me a pseudoarcheologist or a purveyor of
pseudoarcheological theories. They want to make sure that
the hints of racism are there, but they actually don't want
to sit down and confront me. At least Flint was willing to do that, and I'm grateful to him for that. And I think in that sense, it is an important encounter
between people with, let's say an alternative view of history and those with the very much
mainstream view of history that archeology gives us. And he's also a very determined character. He doesn't give up. So all of those things about
him, I admire and respect, but I think he fought
dirty during the debate. And I've said exactly why in this video that I now have up on YouTube. - To say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end, and him speaking about agriculture
was pretty interesting. - [Graham] Yeah. - So the techniques of archeology
are pretty interesting. Like where you can get some insights through the fog of time about
like what people were doing, how they were living. That's pretty interesting. - It's very interesting. It's a very important discipline. And I've said many times before, publicly, I couldn't do any of my work without the work that archeologists do. I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don't study what
archeologists study, but nevertheless, the data that
archeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable
to me in the work that I do. But when I look at the great Sphinx and the studies of archeology saying that this is the work
of the Pharaoh Khafre, despite the absence of any
single contemporary inscription that describes it to Khafre, and in fact the presence
of other inscriptions that say that it was already
there in the time of Khufu, I am not looking at what
Egyptologists study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Khafre connection. At Göbekli Tepe, I'm not really looking at
what archeologists look at. I'm looking at the
alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track procession of the star, Sirius,
over a period of time. Archeologists aren't
interested in any of that. So I value and respect archeology. I think it's an incredible tool
for investigating our past, but I wish archeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it, and a slightly opener perspective. And also that archeologists
would be willing to trust the general public
to make up their own minds. It's as though certain archeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as
quote unquote dangerous because they somehow
underestimate the intelligence of the general public, and think the general public are just going to accept that much. Actually by condemning those
alternative point of view, archeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view, because there is a great
distrust of experts in our society today. And behaving in a snobbish, arrogant way, we, archeologists are the only people who are really qualified
to speak about the past, and anybody else who speaks
about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful
to archeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship. And I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed
Barnhart was very much the case, with archeologist, Martti Parssinen, from the University of Helsinki, and with geographer, Alceu
Ranzi, Brazilian geographer, very, very senior figure who
I worked with in the Amazon for Season 2 of "Ancient Apocalypse", looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the Amazon jungle, and which more and more are
now being found with LiDAR. Indeed we found some of
them ourselves with LiDAR while we were there. - Yeah, that was an
incredible part of the show that I got a chance to preview, that it's like there's
all this earthworks, yeah, the traces of
things built on the ground that probably you can
only really appreciate when you look from up above. - [Graham] That's right. - So the idea that they built stuff that you can only appreciate
when viewed from up above means they had a very
kind of deep relationship with the sky. - With the sky. - [Lex] Yeah. - And a very good knowledge
of geometry as well, because these are geometrical structures. And some of them even seem to
incorporate geometrical games, almost of the kind like
squaring the circle. It's not quite that, but you
have a lovely square earthwork with a lovely circle earthwork
right in the middle of it. Whatever else they were,
they were geometers. They were not just builders of
fantastically huge earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon, not just builders of cities that we now know existed in the Amazon, but that they were astronomers
and mathematicians as well. - Everything we're talking
about is so full of mystery. It's just fascinating, especially
the farther back we go. - That's what I love about the past is the mystery that's there. And that's another thing that I regret about some archeologists is that their mission seems to be to drain all mystery out of the past, to suck it dry, like some kind of vampire sucking the blood out of the past, and to reduce it to a series of numbers that appear to be scientific. I think that's most unfortunate. The past is deeply mysterious. The whole story of life on
Earth is deeply mysterious. I mean, we were talking about
the timeline of human beings, but you know, if you go
back to the formation of the Earth itself, if I've got the figures right, it's about four and a
half billion years ago that the Earth supposedly formed. It was then incredibly hot
and inhospitable to life for the next several
hundred million years. But it was actually Francis Crick who pointed out something odd, that within a hundred million years of the Earth being cool
enough to support life, there's bacterial life
all over the planet. And Crick wrote a book
called "Life Itself", that was published in 1981, and he suggested that
life had been brought here by a process of panspermia. Now that's an idea that's
around in circulation, that comets may carry bacteria, which concede life on planets. But Crick actually in "Life Itself" was talking about directed panspermia. He envisaged, this is Crick, not me, he envisaged an alien civilization far away across the galaxy,
which faced extinction. Perhaps a supernova was gonna
go off in the neighborhood. They were highly advanced. Their first thought might have been, let's get ourselves off the planet, and go and populate some other planet. But the distances of
interstellar space were so great. So their second thought
was, let's preserve our DNA, let's put bacteria, genetically engineered bacteria
into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the
universe in all directions. And bottom line of Crick's
theory in "Life Itself" is one of those cryogenic containers containing bacterial life
from another solar system crashed into the early Earth, and that's why life began
so suddenly here on Earth. - If we as a human civilization continue, I think that is a one way
to create backups of us elsewhere in the universe, given the space is to do a life
gun and shoot it everywhere. - [Graham] Yeah. - And it just plants. - [Graham] Yes, yes. - And you kind of hope
that whatever is the magic that makes up human consciousness. And if that magic is already
there in the initial DNA of the bacteria. - The potential for that magic is there. - The potential is there. - And evolutionary forces will work upon it and in different ways, in different environments, but that the potential is there, yes. It's something that we would do. If we were facing a complete extinction
of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be
made to preserve it somehow. And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable. - And as you were mentioning, there's just so many interesting mysteries along the way here, for example, I mean, it's like, I think like 3 billion years
it was single cell organisms. - [Graham] Yeah. - So it seems like life is pretty good, single cell organisms, that there's no need for multicellularity, that like for animals, for
any of this kind of stuff. So why is that? It seems like you could adapt much better if you are a more complicated organism. It took a really long
time to take that leap. Is it because it's really hard to do? And what was the forcing
function to do that kind of leap? And the same, I mean, for us to be
selfish and self-obsessed, for us humans, like what was the magic
leap to homo sapiens from the other hominids, and why did homo sapiens
win out against Neanderthals and the other competitors? Why are they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries, and it feels like the more we
propose sort of radical ideas about our past, take
it serious and explore, the more we'll be able to
sort of figure out that puzzle that leads all the way
back to homo sapiens, and maybe all the way back to
the origin of life on Earth. - Yeah, yeah. I think that homo sapiens is the tail end of a very long, deep series of mysteries that goes back right to the
beginning of life on this planet and probably long before actually, 'cause this planet is
part of the universe, and God knows what else is
out there in the universe. - Why do you think homo sapiens evolved? Why, like what was the magic thing? So there's a bunch of theories about fire, leading to meat, to cooking,
which can fuel the brain, that's one. The other is like social interaction. We're able to use our
imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas
and tell great stories, and that is somehow an
evolutionary advantage. Do you have any like
favorite conception of? - Well, it's interesting. There's no doubt that
anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for at least 10,000 years,
probably more than that. And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals,
that we killed them off. But at the same time
we were inter-breeding with the Neanderthals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone. They're still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There's another theory
that I've read about, well, there is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals, that there was ritual cannibalism took place amongst Neanderthals, and particularly the
eating of human brains. And this can cause Kuru, which can kill off whole populations. That's what another suggestion of why the Neanderthals died out. There's lots of possibilities
that have been put forward. Maybe we just outcompeted them, you know? Maybe anatomically modern humans
had some brain connections that they didn't have, even
though the Neanderthal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings. As the old saying goes,
size isn't everything. Maybe we just had a more
compact, more efficient brain. The fact of the matter is that
Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the rise of homo sapiens. - For our discussion though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers. - [Graham] Yes. - They spread. I mean, I didn't know this. - The fact that homo erectus
was all over the planet more than a million years
ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say
that's what I think I'm doing. I'm exercising my urge to
explore the past in my own way, making my own path and
defining my own route. - That's the leap from non-human to human. One of the things you've discussed is your idea of what was the
leap to human civilization. What is the driver, what is
the inspiration for humans to form civilizations? And for you, that's shamanism. - [Graham] Definitely. - Can you explain what that means? - I think that shamanism
is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the
earliest form of science. When I spend time with
shamans in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly
experimenting with plants in a very scientific way. They're always trying a pinch
of this and a pinch of that in different forms, for
example, of the ayahuasca brew, to see if it enhances it or
makes it different in any way. The invention of curare is a
remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down
to shamans in the Amazon. They are the scientists
of the hunter forger state of society. And they were the ancient
leaders of human civilization. So I think all civilization
arises out of shamanism. And shamanism is a naturally
scientific endeavor where experimentation is undertaken, an exploration and investigation of the environment around us. And what I'm suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did, and used that study of the skies and developed navigational techniques and were able to sail
and explore the Earth. But that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity
and investigative skill that shamans are still using
in the Amazon to this day. And I do see them as scientists in a very proper use of the word. - But do you think
something like ayahuasca was a part of that process? - Yes, ayahuasca is the result
of shamanistic investigation of what's available in the Amazon. Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today. And some people see it as a miracle cure for all kind of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is, perhaps
it can be in certain ways. Ayahuasca itself is not an Amazonian word. It comes from the Quechua language, and it means the vine of
souls, or the vine of the dead. But the ayahuasca vine is only one of two principal ingredients in the ayahuasca brew. And the other ingredients are leaves that contain
dimethyl tryptamine. And there are two sources of that. One is a bush called Psychotria viridis, that's its botanical name. They call it Chacruna in the Amazon. And its leaves are rich in
dimethyl tryptamine, DMT, which is arguably the
most powerful psychedelic known to science. And the other source
comes from another vine, Diplopterys cabrerana, which the leaves of that
vine also contained DMT. So the ayahuasca vine on its own is not going to give
you a visionary journey. And the leaves that
contain DMT on their own, whether they come from Diplopterys or whether they come from chacruna, are not gonna give you
a visionary journey. And the reason they're not gonna give you the visionary journey is
because of the enzyme, monoamine oxidase in the gut, that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally. Basically, DMT is not accessible orally, unless you combine it with a
monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And that's what I mean when
I'm talking about science in the Amazon, 'cause there's
so many tens of thousands, hundreds thousands different species of plants and trees in the Amazon. And they've gone around, and they found just two or
three of them that put together, can produce these extraordinary
visionary experiences. - Just imagine the number of
plants they had to have eaten. - Yeah. - Consumed and smoked or
all kinds of combinations to arrive at that. - Exactly, exactly. To realize that this is
something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So ayahuasca is the form that is made with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the chacruna plant. But yahe is made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another
vine, Diplopterys cabrerana, which contain not only N,N-DMT, which is the DMT that
everybody's pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO-DMT. And the yahe experience,
which I have also had, in my view, is more
intense and more powerful, almost to the point of being overwhelming than the ayahuasca experience. But what the result of this
sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew, which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just
smelling it in the cup, but then unleashes these
extraordinary experiences. And it isn't just pretty visuals, it's the sense of encounters
with sentient others, that there are sentient beings that somehow we are surrounded
by a realm of sentients that is not normally accessible to us. And that what the ayahuasca brew, and certain other psychedelics, like some psilocybin mushrooms
in a high enough dose can do it as well. LSD can do it. But ayahuasca is the master in this of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing
other realm, other world. And of course the hard
line rational scientists will say that's just all
fantasies of your brain. But I don't think we fully understand or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is. And I remain open to two possibilities, that consciousness is
generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the
way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a
receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then we locked into the physical realm, we need our everyday alert problem solving
state of consciousness. And that's the state of consciousness that western civilization
values and highly encourages. But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access
alternative realities are possibly more important. It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick's
role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix, that he finally got it
under the influence of LSD. There's the classic example of Kary Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under
the influence of LSD. So the notion that the
alert problem solving state of consciousness is the only valuable
state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state. But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that
we encounter in the, and not everybody encounters them, and you're certainly not
going to encounter them on every ayahuasca trip. There are ayahuasca journeys
where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the
Amazon regard those trips where actually you don't see visions as amongst the most valuable. And they say you are learning stuff that you're not remembering,
but you're learning it anyway. These sentient others that are
encountered, what are they? You know, are they just
figments of our brain on drugs, or are we actually gaining
access to a parallel reality where, which is inhabited
by consciousness, which is in a non-physical form? And I'm equally open to that idea. I think that may be what is
going on here with ayahuasca. But the other thing is
that there is a presence within the ayahuasca brew, and she is both present, both
in ayahuasca and in yahe. And that's one of the
reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the ayahuasca vine, not the leaves. It's as though the vine
has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness. And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or yahe, you
drink it enough times, I've had maybe 75 or 80
journeys with ayahuasca. You definitely start to
feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality,
which I interpret as feminine, and which most people in the
west interpret it as feminine, and they call her Mother Ayahuasca. There are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit
of ayahuasca as male, but in all cases, that
spirit is seen as a teacher. That's fundamentally what ayahuasca is. It's a teacher and it
teaches moral lessons. And that's fascinating that
a mixture of two plants should cause us to reflect
on our own behavior and how it may have hurt and
damaged and affected others, and fill us with a
powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior
again in the future. The more baggage you carry in your life, the heart of the beating that
ayahuasca is going to give you until it forces you to confront
and take responsibility for your own behavior. And that is an extraordinary thing to come from a plant brew in that way. And I think in, yes, I think
ayahuasca is the most powerful of all the plant medicines for accessing these mysterious realms. But there's no doubt you can access them. They're all tryptamines, they're all related to
one another in one way. You can access 'em through LSD, and you certainly can access them through psilocybe mushrooms
as well in large enough dose. - Both possibilities, as you
describe, are interesting. And to me, they're kind
of akin to each other, is I wonder what the limit
of the brain's capacity is to create imaginary worlds
and treat them seriously and make them real. And in those worlds, explore, and have real sort of moral
deep brainstorming sessions with those entities. So it's almost like the power
of the human mind to imagine, taken to its limit. - It is. And the curious thing is
that the same iconography, people paint their visions
after ayahuasca sessions. People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lascaux, for example. And of course they had
access to psilocybe mushrooms in prehistoric Europe. There's a remarkable
commonality in the imagery that is painted. I like to give credit where credit is due. And there are two names that
need to be mentioned here. One is the late great Terence McKenna and his book, "Food of the Gods", where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral
encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human. That's what switched on
the modern human mind. And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis-Williams at the University of
Witwatersrand in South Africa, fabulous book called
"The Mind in the Cave", where he's again arguing that
these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock
art all around the world can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered
states of consciousness, attempting to remember when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave. So typically you get a
lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities. And those entities often
are the therianthropes, part animal part human in form. Might have the head of a wolf
and the body of a human being, might have the head of a bird
and the body of a human being, and so on and so forth, and that they communicate with
us in the visionary state. Interestingly, although
this sounds like woo woo, and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of at
risk of their careers. There is very serious work now being done at Imperial College in London and at the University of
California at San Diego where volunteers are
being given extended DMT. There's a new technology, DMTx, where the DMT is fed directly
into the bloodstream by drip. And it's possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT state, which normally when you smoke or vape DMT, you're looking, if you're
lucky, at 10 minutes, or if you're unlucky,
if it's a bad journey, because those 10 minutes
can seem like forever. But with DMTx, with
the drip feeding of DMT into the bloodstream, these volunteers actually could be kept in the peak state for hours. And unlike LSD where you
rapidly build up tolerance, nobody ever builds up tolerance to DMT. It always hits you with the same power, even if you took it
yesterday and the day before, and you're taking it tomorrow as well, it's still gonna have that same power. There's no tolerance there. So that's how they can
use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state. And then when they
debrief those volunteers, they're also putting them in MRI scanners and looking at what's
happening in the brain. But when they debrief them, they're all talking about
encounters with sentient others. There's even a group now
called Sentient Others, where people are exchanging, volunteers are now
exchanging their experiences. They didn't do so, they
weren't allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment, but now that most of them have left it, they're exchanging their experiences, and it's all about encounters
within sentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons. Now, to me, that's wild. What is going on here? What, how do we account for this? Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals, but the moral lessons that come with it, those are very hard. - Yeah, and would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization, is it because such visions
can help create myths, and especially like religious myths, that would be a cohesive thing for a large group of people to get around. - Yeah, and can help
us to be better members of our own community, - Right, with moral lessons. - Yeah, more contributing
members of our community, more caring, more nurturing
members of our community. That's got to be good for any community. I've said this a dozen
times, but I'll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would make it a law, an
absolute law that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position
is president or head of state in any kind of way, that
that person has to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first. They have to have 10 or
12 sessions of ayahuasca as a condition for applying for the job. I suspect that most who
had had those experiences wouldn't want to apply
for the job anymore. They would want to live
a different kind of life. And those who did want to carry on being a leader of a nation would be very different people from the people who are leading
the nations of the Earth into chaos and destruction today. - Yeah, they'll be doing
it for the right reasons. I mentioned to you, I recently
interviewed Donald Trump, and I actually brought up this same idea that it would be a much better
world if most of Congress and most of politicians would take some form of psychedelic,
at the very least. - Yeah, I have no doubt that
it would be a bad world. I mean, this raises an interesting point, which is the role of government in controlling our consciousness. And in my opinion, the
so-called war on drugs is one of the fundamental
abuses of human rights that have been undertaken
in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue. If I understand the
Republican Party correctly, the Republican Party believes in individual freedom for
adults as much as possible, and particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies. But in the case of even cannabis, I know there's one of the great things that's happening in America. It's happening state by state where cannabis is being legalized on that draconian hand of government has being taken off the back of people who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol, which is glorified in our society. We cannot say that we are free
if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in
our inner consciousness while doing no harm to others. And the point there is we
already have a whole raft of laws that deal with us when
we do harm to others. Do we really need laws that tell us what we may or may not experience in the inner sanctum of
our own consciousness? I think it's a fundamental
violation of adult sovereignty. And we would have much less drug problems if these drugs were all legalized and made available to
people without shaming them, without punishing them in any way, but just part of normal social life. And then you could be sure that you were getting good product rather than really shitty product, which has been cut with
all sorts of other things. Ultimately, the way forward is for adults to take responsibility
for their own behavior, and for society to allow that to happen and not to have big government
taking responsibility for decisions that should be
in the hands of individuals. - And for me also, it's exciting, some of these substances like psilocybin are being integrated to scientific
studies at large scales. It's really interesting. - We've seen a revolution in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20, 25 years. They were in that highly
demonized category. But again, it's one of those paradigms which gets overwhelmed by new evidence. And it began to be
realized that psilocybin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people suffer
post-traumatic stress disorder, the fear of death when you are suffering
from terminal cancer can be overwhelming. And it's been found that
psilocybin can remove that. Deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive
psilocybin journey. They just go away. There's really good science on this, and they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more. We'll see it happening, I'm not sure if it'll happen as fast as I would like to see
it happen in my lifetime, but it is gonna happen. - Yeah, actually just recently found out that you had a TED Talk,
war on consciousness. - [Graham] Yes. - That was taken down. - [Graham] Yeah. - And that was just part of
just the general resistance, because it was a pretty, it wasn't radical, wasn't really erratic. - I was talking about ayahuasca, and I was talking about the
view that I hold very strongly, that as long as we do no harm to others, sovereign adults should be
allowed to make decisions about their own bodies, and not face a jail sentence
or shaming as the result. But this, so it was a
TEDx Talk, not a TED Talk, organized by a local TED group. They call them TEDx Talks. And I gave this talk about
the war on consciousness, and it was immediately pulled
down from TED's main channel with all kinds of bizarre
reasons being given. But unfortunately it was too late because a number of people had
already downloaded the talk and then uploaded it onto
other YouTube channels. And actually their banning
of it made it go viral in a way that would not
have happened otherwise. But again, it's a sign that points of view that are not acceptable to
those in positions of power are simply dismissed and shut down, or at least attempts are made to do so. - In general, just along
that line of thinking, I'm pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today
will seem silly to humans from a hundred years from now. - You bet it will, especially
if we harness psychedelics to investigate consciousness. And you know, that is what is happening at Imperial College right now is the investigation of the experience. They're not looking,
there are other trials that are looking for the
therapeutic potential of DMT, but in this case, they're looking entirely at the experiences that people have and why they're so similar from people from different age
groups and different genders and different parts of the world are all having the same experiences. - And for me, from an
engineering perspective, it's interesting if it's possible to engineer consciousness
in artificial beings. - [Graham] Yeah. - it's another way to
approach the question of how special is human consciousness? - [Graham] Yeah. - How, from where does it arise? Is it something that
permeates all of life? And then in that case, what is the thing that makes life special? Like what is life? What is these living
organisms that we have here and that evolve to create humans, and what is truly special about humans and is both scary and exciting
to consider the possibility that we can create something like this. - [Graham] Yeah, but why not? We are a vehicle for
consciousness, in my view. I think consciousness is
present in all life on earth. I don't think it's
limited to human beings. We have the equipment to manifest and express that consciousness in the way that a dog,
for example, doesn't have, or a snail doesn't have,
or a pigeon doesn't have. But when I look at two pigeons
sitting on my garden fence and rubbing up close to each other, and enjoying each other's company, and taking off together
and hanging out together, I think they're conscious beings. And I think consciousness is everywhere. I think it's the basis of everything. And I suspect that fundamentally, consciousness is non-physical, and that it can manifest in physical forms where it can then have experiences that would not be available
in the non-physical state. That's a guess. - That'd be a fascinating, because then you can construct
all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness. - And see if consciousness
enters, if they become conscious. Isn't there some suggestion that artificial intelligence
is already becoming conscious? - That makes humans really uncomfortable. - [Graham] Yeah. - Because we are at the
top of the food chain, we consider ourselves truly special. And to consider that there's other things that could be special is scary. - Well, look how other people
make us uncomfortable too. I mean, look at the
state of the world today, all the conflicts that are raging. That's because we're afraid. When I say we, I'm
speaking nation by nation, that we are afraid of other people. We fear that they're going to hurt us or damage us in some way, and so we seek to stop that. It's the root of many,
many conflicts, this fear. And so fear of AI may not be
such a good idea after all. It might be very interesting
to go down that route and see where it comes. Certainly in terms of
exploring consciousness, it is very interesting. - Yeah, fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive. - Well, it could be destructive and it can shut you down completely. - If you look into the future, maybe in the next a hundred years, what do you hope are the interesting
discoveries in archeology that we'll find? - Well, I'd really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built. And we now have with new tech,
with scanning technology, it's now become apparent that there are many major
voids within the Great Pyramid. Right above the Grand Gallery, there's a, what looks like
a second Grand Gallery that has been identified
with remote scanning and new chambers. One of them has even been opened up, already being found as a result of this. So it may be that the seat that the Great Pyramid will
ultimately give up its secrets. I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It's designed to invite its own initiates. Some people aren't interested
in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it and they're drawn towards it. And when they're drawn towards it, it immediately starts raising
questions in their minds and they seek answers to their questions. So it's like saying, here
I stand, investigate me, find out about me, figure out what I am. Why have I got these two shafts cut into the side of the
so-called Queen's Chamber? Why do they slope up through
the body of the Great Pyramid? Why do they not exit on the
outside of the Great Pyramid? Why when we send a robot up those shafts, do we find them after about 160 feet blocked by a door with metal handles? Why when we drill through that
door to see what's beyond it, three or four feet away,
we see another door. It's like very frustrating, but it's saying to us, keep on exploring. If you're persistent enough, we'll eventually give you the answer. So I'm hoping that that answer will come as to how this most
mysterious of monuments was actually built and the
inspiration that lay behind it. Certainly, I'm sure it was
never a tomb or a tomb only. The later pyramids might have been, actually no pharaonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid. But nevertheless, it's pretty
clear that the later pyramids with the pyramid text
written on the walls, like the Pyramid of Unas, fifth dynasty, Pyramid at Saqqara, were tombs. But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the Earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it 6 million tons. This is not a tomb,
this is something else. This is a curiosity device. This is something that is
asking us to understand it. And I hope we will understand it. And I hope Egyptologists will be willing to set
aside that prejudice, that they're only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities. And as new tech is revealing these previously unknown inner spaces within the Great Pyramid, I think that's gonna become
more and more likely. - So not just the how it
was built, but the why. - [Graham] But the why. - And to you, it seems obvious that there would be a cosmic motivation. - Yeah, very, very much so. As above, so below. You know, which is an
idea in the Hermetica, the God, Hermes, for the Greeks, was the Greek version of Thoth, the wisdom God of Ancient Egypt. And that's where that saying comes from. It comes from the Hermetica, but it's expressing an
Ancient Egyptian idea to mirror the perfection
of the heavens on Earth. - So you think there's
something interesting to be discovered about how it was built? You mean beyond the sort of the ideas of the using ramps and wet sand? - Yeah, ramps won't do it. Ramps won't do it, nor will wet sand. It's true that the Ancient
Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand. There are even reliefs
that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the
sled pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath. And that's a perfectly respectable way to move a 200 ton block of
stone across sand, flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not gonna help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks,
300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King's Chamber and the floor of the chamber above it, and the roof of that chamber, and the floor of the chamber above that and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there. Now, yeah, ramps are
proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps? If you're going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the Great Pyramid to complete your work, you're gonna need a ramp
that's going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10 degree slope. And it's calculated that a 10 degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can
haul objects up a ramp, and that ramp can't just be compacted sand since heavy objects are being hauled up. It's gonna have to be made
of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don't see any trace
of those so-called ramps that are supposed to have been involved in the construction of the pyramid. I think we don't know. I think we have no idea it's built, that's why there's so
many different theories. We haven't got the answer yet, but the how of it is one of the
big mysteries from our past. - I love the Great Pyramids
as a kind of puzzle that was created by the
ancient peoples to be solved. - [Graham] Yeah. - By later peoples. I mean, this is, I don't
know if you're aware of the 10,000 year clock that-- - [Graham] I'm not, no. - That was built by Jeff
Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas. So they're building a clock
that ticks once a year for 10,000 years. - [Graham] Oh, wow. - So it's talking about, and
it's supposed to sort of run, you know, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs. And it's an example of
modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong, or the future humans that
are way different, come back, and they analyze what happened here, how can we create monuments
that they could then analyze? - [Graham] Yeah. - And in that way, be curious
about, in their curiosity, discover some deep truths
about this current time. It's an interesting
kind of notion of like, what can we build now? - That would last. And the answer is that the
majority of what we build now wouldn't last. - It wouldn't. - It would be gone within
a few thousand years. But what would last is
massive megalithic structures, like the Great Pyramid, that would last. And it could be used to send
a message to the future. I think Göbekli Tepe
serves a similar function. I mean, there it was,
buried 10,400 years ago, and then for the next 10,000
years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there. It took the genius of Klaus
Schmidt, the original excavator, to realize what he'd found and what it. But the great thing about
the ceiling of Göbekli Tepe, the deliberate burial of Göbekli Tepe, is it means that no later
culture trod over it and imposed their organic materials on it, and messed up the dating
sequences and so on and so forth, or vandalized it or used it as a quarry. It's all there intact. - So you mentioned that the pyramids and some of the other amazing
things that humans have built was the result of us humans
struggling with our mortality. - That's the ultimate goal. That seems to me what's at the heart of many pyramids around the world is that they're connected
in one way or another to the notion of death and to the notion of the
exploration of the afterlife. And this is of course,
the fundamental mystery that all human beings face. We may wish to ignore it,
we may wish to pretend that it's not gonna happen, but we are of course, all
mortal, every one of us, all 8 billion or however many of us that
are on the planet right now, we're all gonna face
death sooner or later. And the question is what happens? And there are a few cultures
that really intensely, deeply studied that mystery. We are not one of them. The general view of science, I think, is that we're accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There's no more of us. There's no such thing as the soul. But that's not a proven point. There's no experiment that
proves that's the case. We know we die, but we don't know whether there's such a
thing as a soul or not. - Yeah, it's the great mystery. - It's a great mystery that we all share, and those cultures that
have investigated it, and Ancient Egypt is the best example, have investigated it thoroughly and map out the journey
that we make after death. But that notion of a journey after death and have hazards and
challenges along the way, and ultimately of a judgment, that notion is found
right around the world, and it even manifests into the three monotheistic face that are still present in the world today. - Well, you're one such human, and you said you
contemplate your own death. - [Graham] Yeah. - Are you afraid of it? - No, I'm not afraid of death at all. I'm curious about death. I think it could be very interesting. I think it's the beginning
of the next great adventure. So I don't fear it. And I would like to live as long as my body is healthy enough to make living worthwhile. But I don't fear death. What I do fear is pain. I do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the
faculties can bring. I do fear the cancers
that can strike us down and riddle us with pain and agony. That I fear very, very much indeed. But death is gonna come to all of us. I accept it it's gonna come to me. And I'm not gonna say I'm
looking forward to it, but when it happens, I'm
gonna approach it I hope, with a sense of curiosity
and a sense of adventure. That there's something beyond this life. It isn't heaven, it isn't
hell, but there's something. The soul goes on. I think reincarnation is
a very plausible idea. Again, modern science would reject that. But there's the excellent
work of Ian Stevenson, children who remember past lives, who found that children
up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives. And in cultures where
memories of past lives are discouraged, they tend
not to express that much. But in cultures where memories
of past lives are encouraged, like India, they do express it. And he found several subjects, children under the age of seven in India who were able to remember
specific details of a past life. And he was able to go to the place where that past life unfolded
and validate those details. So if consciousness is
the basis of everything, if it's the essence of everything, and consciousness benefits in some way from being incarnated in physical form, then reincarnation makes a lot of sense. All the investment that the universe has put into creating this home for life may have a much bigger
purpose than just accident. - What a beautiful mystery
this whole thing is. - Yeah, we are immersed in mystery. We live in the midst of mystery. We're surrounded by mystery. And if we pretend otherwise,
we're deluding ourselves. - And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world
to explore that mystery. Thank you for talking today. - Thank you, Lex. It's been a pleasure. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Graham Hancock. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. It is not the strongest of
the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the
most adaptable to change. Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.