#854 - Graham Hancock - The Hidden Secrets Of America’s Ancient Apocalypse
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Graham Hancock. He's a journalist and an author known for his work on ancient civilizations. The Americas hold a profound secret. While human history is often traced back to other parts of the globe, Graham believes that evidence points to the Americas being inhabited far earlier than previously believed. So what is the true history of the Americas and how does it reshape our understanding of human civilization?

Expect to learn how Graham thinks that the first inhabitants of the Americas got there, what is so fascinating about the Amazon, why Graham has done ayahuasca more than 70 times, everything he's discovered about the Mayans, ancient Egyptians, Easter Island and other ancient societies, his reflections on his debate with Flint Dibble, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Graham Hancock. Graham Hancock

Yesterday was the anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. How fitting. I guess it is, but of course he didn't discover it. In fact, the Americas may have been discovered as early as 130,000 years ago, which makes 1492 A.D.,

pale insignificance. Of course, this is a matter that's disputed by archaeologists. Nevertheless, there's a highly professional team from the San Diego Natural History Museum who've excavated what is called the Cerruti Mastodon site just south of San Diego.

And I've been there into the museum and talked to the leading expert, Tom Demare. And what they found was mastodon bones that had been crushed systematically and in an organized way using some kind of stone tool to extract the marrow. And the only interpretation they're able to put upon this is that this was human beings. Whether it was other kinds of human species like Denisovans,

perhaps even Neanderthals, or whether it was anatomically modern humans. All of us were around 130,000 years ago, but it's human behavior that we're looking at, the systematic killing of an animal and then the fracturing of its bones to extract the marrow. Now, of course, this is

regarded as some kind of terrible heresy by archaeologists who've been wedded to the idea of a very recent settlement of the Americas for a very, very, very long time. But gradually, reluctantly, kicking and screaming, spitting nails as they go along, archaeologists have begun to accept that the peopling of the Americas happened a lot earlier than they had thought. And presently, the kind of date that is being

considered, accepted in fact, by the majority of archaeologists. This is around 23,000, 24,000 years ago. That's White Sands, New Mexico, and the human footprints there, which we feature in episode one of season two of Ancient Apocalypse. But there's a recognition that it could be older than that, could be 30,000 years old. And then there's sites in South America

which may be even older, 36,000, 40,000, 50,000 years old. So the whole issue is very much up for grabs. But the one guy who was really late to the party was Columbus. Is the Americas often overlooked?

When it comes to the history of human civilization? Yes, because there's been this prejudice that the Americas could have had nothing to do with the origins of civilization because human beings supposedly weren't in America until – it was called the Clovis first model. It was held until really about 10 years ago that no humans had been in the Americas before 13,000 years ago.

So you can see that the Cerruti Mastodon site multiplies that by 10 to 130,000 years ago. But there's gradually been an acceptance of an earlier settlement than that. And they're still fighting over the Cerruti Mastodon site, whether to accept that or not. There's been a back and forth of papers in Nature, a reasonably respectful discussion going on between archaeologists who disagree over this. But yes, that model of a very late settlement of the Americas, I mean,

The view is that anatomically modern humans came into Europe about 60,000 years ago, maybe 50,000 years ago. We have anatomically modern humans in Australia between 50 and 60,000 years ago as well. And of course, anatomically modern humans were in Africa going back 300,000 years, the earliest known

anatomically modern human remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and they date to 310,000 years ago and they're identical to pretty much identical to modern humans today and we can assume that their brains were pretty much identical as well. It may be that earlier examples of anatomically modern humans will be found this is why

One of my pet sayings is stuff just keeps on getting older because it's not that long ago when the view was, I mean, back in the 90s, when the view was that there were no anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago. And then new discoveries kept pushing that back. And then it switched to about 110,000 years ago.

with a discovery in Ethiopia and now more than 300,000 years ago. So who knows how far that timeline will go back. But the general view has been we will not look for the origins of civilization in the Americas because they were recently settled. And these new discoveries have to change that picture. Archaeology is very slow to change its paradigms, but this is one that is going to need to be changed. And the result is that the Americas have not been seriously studied

for the specific issue of the origins of civilization, that thing that we call civilization. What was or is the established history? What was the story that's been told by archaeologists up to now about how the Americas was settled, when, what mode, etc.? Right. Well, the story that stuck for a very long time, like 30 or more years, was the notion that a people who archaeologists call the Clovis culture...

entered North America across the Bering land bridge. We call it the Bering Straits today, but during the Ice Age and 13,400 years ago was during the Ice Age, sea level was much lower and it was possible to cross by land from Siberia into Alaska and thus to enter the Americas without making a sea voyage. And part of the prejudice that archaeologists did have against our ancestors is they didn't think they were capable of making sea voyages.

And therefore, this seemed like the most likely way that they came into the Americas. And that stuck for a very long time. And that was called the

the Clovis first hypothesis. And it became the subject, if I can just complete, it became the subject of a bitter battle amongst archaeologists because there was a group of archaeologists, very powerful, very influential, very widely published who clung on to this Clovis first doctrine that there was no culture here before the Clovis culture for a very long time. And anybody who brought new evidence to the table suggesting an older human presence in the Americas were running the risk of having their careers destroyed.

And this happened in the case of several individuals. We're running the risk of being humiliated, of having funding withdrawn from their research, and so on and so forth. So that doctrine, the Clovis First Doctrine, stuck until...

the evidence became utterly overwhelming. For example, Tom Dillehay finally managed to demonstrate, even to the most skeptical of his colleagues, that Monteverde in South America had dated at least 14,000 years ago, well before Clovis and maybe 15 and more thousand years ago. And Jacques-Anck Mars, this classic example, brilliant man, excavated bluefish caves in the Yukon back in the 1970s,

and found evidence that humans had been there 24,000 years ago. And he received the full machine gun fire of the entire archaeological profession, and they literally destroyed his career. But back in 2017, he was finally proved to be right. He was absolutely 100% right. Humans were in the Yukon. Is he still around? He is still around, but very, very old now and retired and broken by what happened to him.

It's interesting you talk about coming over the Bering Land Bridge into the northest of North America and then trickling down from there. But if you were to suggest that that happens around about 13,000 years ago, let's say that the markings that were found in South America that you just mentioned were found at

Shortly after that, that is a long way to travel. If you're starting at the top and coming down, you would presume that the disbursement would be more centered at the top as opposed to at the bottom. Yes, you would. And archaeologists are beginning now to open up to the idea that our ancestors were seafarers.

I mean, they have to be open to that idea because even at the peak of the ice age when sea level was at its lowest, it was not possible to get to Australia without a sea voyage. You just couldn't do it. And particularly when you're settling a new land, you can't just go by accident with two or three people. You have to go with a substantial group.

who bring the means of survival with them at that point. Otherwise, they'll become extinct very, very rapidly. And Australia was systematically settled about 50,000, maybe as much as 60,000 years ago. And undoubtedly, boat journeys were involved. And the same goes for Cyprus.

Of course, Cyprus is an island today, but it was an island during the Ice Age too. It's surrounded by colossal deeps at that end of the Mediterranean, and it was never connected to the land. And yet Cyprus was settled around 14,000 years ago, and the evidence is it was a highly organized project.

which involved sophisticated shipping and large numbers of people carrying animals with them who settled in Cyprus. So there shouldn't be an argument that our ancestors could use ships. And it's beginning to happen now. Now that Clovis I has finally died the death it long ago deserved, archaeologists are beginning to accept that

that maybe human beings did use ships to come to the Americas. They don't like the idea of them doing something like crossing the whole Pacific Ocean directly. They prefer the idea that they kind of island hopped from Siberia down the coast of Alaska and thence into North America and finally into South America. But this raises one highly significant problem, which is first of all that the South American sites by and large are older than the North American sites.

And secondly, and again we feature this in season two of Ancient Apocalypse, there's intriguing DNA evidence which connects the peoples of Melanesia, New Guinea, and Australian Aborigines, and certain peoples who are indigenous in Taiwan as well, which connects them directly with three tribes

in the Amazon rainforest, in the west of the Amazon rainforest. And that particular genetic signal is not found anywhere in North America at all. And it should be if they got there by a land route coming through North America. It's only found in South America. And the most parsimonious way to explain it, even leading geneticists admit this, although they know that it's not an idea that archaeologists are going to accept, the easiest way to explain it is that there was a direct crossing of the

Pacific Ocean by sea. And since those remains that have been found are already very old, more than 10,000 years old, we're looking at a sea crossing that could have happened thousands of years before that. It's just an accident of discovery that complete skeletal remains were found that are 10,000 years old, which have this DNA signal, which is still present in the modern populations.

big ocean on either side of the Americas. Big ocean on either side. If you're going to sail it, it's not. I mean, Cyprus, it's deep, whatever, in the Mediterranean, but it's not a Pacific or an Atlantic crossing. No, in the case of Cyprus and Australia, at the peak of the Ice Age, a large part of the Indonesian archipelago was all joined into a landmass called Sunda. And that went down as far as Timor. And it's

It was still necessary to have a crossing of open ocean of about 90 kilometers to get to New Guinea, which was then joined to Australia. It was a paleo-continent called Sahul. It was about 90 kilometers. And in the case of Cyprus, it was about 50 or 60 kilometers. But the notion of human beings...

actually crossing the Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean, crossing thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean more than 10,000 years ago is still a very tough one for archaeologists to accept. But at the same time, they can't deny the genetic evidence and they must look for some explanation. And there's been all kinds of hysterical wriggles to try to explain that anomaly. I still think the simplest explanation is the best. You think Pacific, not Atlantic crossing?

Well, this was definitely a Pacific crossing because the connection is between peoples who live on the east side of the Asian landmass down into Australia and peoples on the west side of the South American landmass. That's just for the genetic component, though. There's other people that were there. There's more evidence that's there. How did those people get there earlier than...

Well, that's an unanswered question. That's a completely unanswered question. There are a number of sites, all of which are strongly disputed in South America, which are much, much older. How did they get there? We don't know. What has to...

be seriously questioned is the notion that the entry was only through North America and that they kind of... And only 13,000 years ago. Or even 23,000 years ago. And that they had to find their way through North America down to South America. And the reason that South America is not being considered as the possible first place of human habitation in the Americas is precisely because of that prejudice that, of course, our ancestors couldn't have sailed the entire Pacific Ocean.

What's interesting about the Amazon? Everything is interesting about the Amazon. I love the Amazon. It's a god, or I would prefer to say a goddess. The Amazon is a force. It's an amazing and extraordinary thing. It's very tough. The heat and the humidity are intense. The

insects, the snakes, the creatures that will eat you up, the piranhas in the river. It sounds pretty inhospitable as a place that you're going to settle. At the same time, it's a garden.

In which humans can flourish and which humans did flourish. So what's interesting about the Amazon first and foremost? This is one of those areas of the world that is massively under researched by archaeology and I don't say that that's An act of irresponsibility on the part of archaeology That's because it's incredibly expensive to go and research in the Amazon and when you are of the opinion that you're not going to find much there and

then undertaking that research has never seemed worthwhile. But new information keeps on coming in, which is changing that. I mean, statistically, we're looking about five to six million square kilometers that are still under dense canopy rainforest. And again, this is an issue that we've gone into in season two of Ancient Apocalypse, because

I think everybody knows that the Amazon is under attack at the moment, that large parts of the Amazon are being cut down and turned into soya bean farms and cattle ranches. And the soya beans are primarily to feed the cattle. As a result of these clearances, strange things have begun to emerge into plain sight. And these include gigantic...

perfectly geometrical earthworks. Now,

If we talk about the earthworks in the UK, I mean, everybody's heard of Stonehenge or Avebury. A henge actually is an earthwork. It's the ditch that surrounds the stone circle. It's not particularly prominent in the case of Stonehenge, but it's massively prominent in the case of Avebury, a big deep ditch with an embankment on either side. These earthworks in the Amazon, they don't have the standing stones in the middle of them because there is no stone in that

part of the Amazon. But they do have these huge earthworks which can take very intriguing geometrical forms. For example, a perfect square with a perfect circle inside it, but on a scale of hundreds of meters. Rectangles,

square enclosures with sort of scallops cut out of one corner of them. The whole thing, lots and lots of circles. Many of these structures appear to be aligned to the cardinal directions. What's the cardinal direction? North, south, east and west. And it's very important to be clear on that. North, south, east and west on a compass are not the same as true north, south, east and west.

there's an error of 10 or 11 degrees, which is a magnetic reading. True north is defined by astronomy. And which one does this follow? This follows true north, yeah. True north, south, east, and west, the true cardinal directions. So anyway, as a result of the clearances, we've started to see these puzzling earthworks appearing, and that has led a team who we cooperated with in ancient apocalypse. The lead archaeologist is Marty Parsonen,

from the University of Helsinki and his partner in the project is Alseio Ranzi who's a very distinguished geographer from Brazil. And it was actually Alseio who was the first to spot these geoglyphs, that's what he called them, because it struck him that there was a similarity to the Nazca lines. These are things that are so big that you can only really see what they are when you're up in the air. And he was on a flight over and suddenly saw this and he thought, "What the hell is that?"

And that led him to begin to investigate and find there wasn't just one. There were dozens of them that had already been produced by the clearances. And now what Arceo and Marti are doing is a detailed lidar study in the areas touching on those parts that have already been cleared. They're going deeper into the jungle. And while we were there, they found half a dozen new structures.

under the canopy rainforest you see lidar will allow you to see through the rainforest canopy and to see relief features underneath it without destroying anything and then you can go in very very low tech you can just go in not destroy anything and begin to investigate what the lidar has picked up and what the lidar has picked up is these just extraordinary geometrical structures extending into the jungle as far as the range of the drone on that day and and um

Both Marty and Alseo are of the opinion that there are thousands of these things still waiting to be discovered. And indigenous people, I spent time with an elder of the Aparina people for whom these geoglyphs are sacred. They say that there are thousands of them throughout the jungle and they still venerate them and value them today and that they are places that shamans use to work healing medicine on the people. How old are they? The ones that have been...

up till now go back about 2,000 to 3,000 years. And that's based on dating of organic material found in the earthworks. It's a rough guess. However, what they've found that those precise areas on which the earthworks now stand, once you go down, once you excavate down deeper than

about two or three meters, you find that they have been intensely used by human beings. And there's an enormous amount of charcoal and carbon down there. And those dates, so what they're saying is that these sites actually appear to have been selected and appear to have been sacred to people for at least 10,000 years.

And we see the latest incarnation of them in the earthworks that have survived to this day. So there's a big project now going on in the Amazon to open it up and to find out. I don't mean to open it up by destroying the rainforest. I mean to use LIDAR to find out what's going on there. And other results of this have included absolute confirmation that there were huge cities in the Amazon, that the Amazon did have a population before the Spanish conquest,

tens of millions. This was a completely different place from the place that we imagine this kind of pristine rainforest inhabited by a few tribes of hunter-foragers now. There were large-scale permanent settlements in the Amazon and they were joined by perfectly straight roadways that ran in some cases for hundreds of kilometers.

We are seeing the traces literally of a lost civilization in the Amazon and the work is just beginning to get to grips with the dates on these. And this is just tiny bits of the Amazon that have been looked at thus far. So I'm of the opinion that the Amazon has a great deal more to tell us. And I've done my best to bring the case for that to the viewers in Ancient Apocalypse. And besides, what a privilege to spend time in the Amazon.

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My first visit to the Amazon was in 2003. I was working on a book that I published in 2005 called Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. It's recently been retitled as Visionary. It's still out there, but I was interested in the notion

for which credit must be given to the late great Terence McKenna, that sampling psychedelics played a key role in the evolution of human consciousness. And that we can see the evidence for the use of psychedelics. And here I want to pay tribute to the work of Professor David Lewis Williams of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. We can see evidence for the use of psychedelics in cave art all around the world.

and in rock art all around the world and we can see that evidence in the Amazon very very strongly and furthermore shamans in the Amazon who are drinking ayahuasca drinking the powerful visionary brew ayahuasca after their visionary experiences if they have painting skills and quite a number of them do they paint their visions and those paintings of those visions

are astonishingly similar to the paintings that you see on ancient rock faces such as in Colombia in the Amazon going back more than 12,000 years and paintings that you see even in Europe in caves like Lascaux where the same geometric patterns and the same strange beings that are part mixture, part animal, part human appear. It's as though the visionary realm is being manifested in art.

And I wanted to investigate that. And I had not experienced ayahuasca before, but I didn't feel I could write about it authentically without drinking ayahuasca. So I went to the Amazon, first of all, in 2003 to drink ayahuasca with an indigenous shaman whose name is Francisco Montes Shuna.

And I had my first 11 sessions with- 11 sessions? Yeah. First 11? First 11, yeah. I've subsequently had about another 70. But the first 11 were for research purposes. The other 70 is because ayahuasca has helped me to get to grips with issues in my life that I didn't even know I needed to get to grips with. But it's helped me to do that. So I still feel, I think they're right in the Amazon to refer to ayahuasca as a teacher.

And I have learned many useful and important lessons to it. So the last time I had an ayahuasca session was actually while we were filming in Peru, in the Peruvian Amazon for season two of Ancient Apocalypse. And it was... You just peeled off from a day of shooting to go and... Yeah, and it was the same shaman, Francisco Montesuna, who I'd drunk with 20 years before. So it was fascinating to be back there and to be in the midst of that

and surrounded by that wildness. Of course, you can drink ayahuasca pretty well anywhere in the world today, but it's better to do so

in the hands of a shaman who really knows what he or she is doing. I'm not saying that there can't be Western shamans, there can and there are some, but they need to sit down at the feet of shamans in the Amazon and learn techniques from them because people can get into a very bad place on an ayahuasca trip and that needs to be handled. Shamans see it as keeping dark forces at bay. That's what their role is primarily in this.

So it was very, very interesting to have another session there. And I was joined by my good friend, Luis Eduardo Luna, who's a Colombian anthropologist who is now based in Brazil. He's one of the world experts on ayahuasca. And we had some very interesting discussions about the mysteries of this brew. And the mysteries of the ayahuasca brew also touch upon the question of civilization in the Amazon. How so? Well, because ayahuasca is a very complicated thing to make.

It is a mixture of two ingredients. The best known form, which is actually called ayahuasca,

And that's not even an Amazonian word. That's a Quechua word. It's an Inca word. The Incas were also using ayahuasca and they named it. And that name, there are many local names for it, but the Inca name stuck and everybody calls it ayahuasca now, which means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead. The vine itself has almost no visionary properties. If you were to drink a tea made of the

brewing up smashed up portions of the vine and you could drink gallons of it and you wouldn't have any visions whatsoever. The other ingredient is a leaf from a bush and that bush is botanically Sicotria viridis. In the Amazon they call it chacruna and those leaves contain substantial qualities, quantities of chacruna

arguably the world's most powerful psychedelic, which is dimethyltryptamine, DMT, the type of DMT that's called NNDMT. And this way it gets complicated because DMT is not normally accessible orally to the brain. In other words, you could eat munch

several kilos of those leaves or cook them up in a tea and drink them, it wouldn't have any effect on you. And this is because of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase that we have in our gut. It destroys DMT on contact.

That's why people who want to have the straight DMT experience today have to smoke it or vape it, smoke it in a pipe or vape it and then it gets right through the blood-brain barrier and into the brain but through the gut you can't absorb it orally. So how do you conquer that problem? What you need in scientific terms is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. You need something that will shut down that enzyme in the gut.

And that's precisely what the ayahuasca vine provides. It provides monoamine oxidase inhibitor that shuts down the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT in the leaves that are part of the brew to be active. And then instead of having the usual 10 or 12 minute or even less trip to the other side of reality, which is what happens with smoked or vape DMT, you have a four-hour journey to the other side of reality. And it's much simpler.

slower paced and you have time to get to grips with what is happening and to investigate the visions that you're experiencing and the teachings that you're receiving. Sometimes you receive nothing. Sometimes all you do is just vomit and have diarrhea. I mean, that is one of the physical consequences of ayahuasca.

I can say as a result, I've been working with ayahuasca for more than 20 years now. I can say that as a result of long-term exposure to ayahuasca, the vomiting and diarrhea side of it have got less and less as time has gone on. But the visionary experiences continue to be extremely powerful. However, sometimes you don't get anything. And they call it a nada experience.

in Peru where you have a nothing. But the view of shamans in Peru is that nothing is the really most important one, that you're downloading stuff subconsciously that you're not getting consciously. It's really, they celebrate these nadas. They're good things to have. What's the implication of having the similar cave paintings from potential psychedelic cave paintings in Peru?

the Amazon in Europe, elsewhere in the world. What are you sort of, the story you're drawing from that? The implication is that psychedelics were involved in every case, different psychedelics, but they were involved in every case. Just to finish on the case of ayahuasca, the other form of ayahuasca is called yaje, which is spelled Y-A-J-E with an accent over the E, yaje. And a lot of people think that that is ayahuasca, and indeed it does include the ayahuasca vine.

that that is the common element to these two versions of the brew. However, the dimethyltryptamine element is provided actually from another vine, from the leaves that grow off that vine. And

They contribute not only NN DMT, but also 5-MeO DMT. Both of them are in the brew with the monoamine. Have you tried this? Yes, I have. Okay. Can you compare the two? I would say it's significantly more powerful than ayahuasca on its own and really intense, overwhelming visions and the sense of contact with an intelligence. And I know that skeptical people

Nuts and bolts scientists will say of course you're not having contact with any intelligence. It's just it's just your fantasies It's just just a hallucination But I suggest they go and have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca first and see if that is still their view there's something very mysterious about it, and this is a result of literally Amazonian technology

Go figure how they choose out of more than 100,000 different species of plants and trees. They find the bush with the leaves that contain DMT and they find the vine which contains the monoamine oxidase inhibitor and they put them together. What do you suggest? To do that by trial and error is no easy task. It's no easy task, but also given enough time and not much else to do. It could be done. It could be done. And when I observe shamans in the Amazon today, what I...

notice is that they are constantly sampling plants.

They're constantly sampling admixtures of plants. Francisco, on this latest journey that I had, was dropping little bits of different flowers into the plant as well. God knows what that's going to do. Yeah. Well, all I can say is that I did have an extraordinary night. And it was very, very interesting. And, you know, nobody in their right mind is going to drink ayahuasca for kids.

It's not some kind of light-hearted heart. I would say it's definitely not recreational, especially with the physical effects that it has. But it's also a powerful emotional journey, which will reveal to you things that you may have suppressed from yourself. And the point I often make on this is it's very easy to be harsh and cruel sometimes.

with words to another human being, especially when you're pretty good at words, which I am. And I've often, that's my only skill, actually. I have no other skills. I can't even, you know, put a screwdriver into a screw thread without it breaking off. But I have words. And I've realized that I've said things in moments of anger that were very harsh and very cruel and really hurt other people. And ayahuasca has shown me that side of myself. It's interesting on that point, I

I often think about how people that are physically strong, there's a meme, there is a culture around physically strong people protect physically weaker people. Or at the very least, a big hulking MMA fighter doesn't try and fight a grandstand.

granddad for instance because there's an imbalance but we don't have the same sense because outwardly it's not as obvious we don't have the same sense for somebody lexically who is linguistically very capable no and you can use ben shapiro talked to me about this about how he's a professional debater very quick with his words so on and so forth and he can use that to win when arguing with his wife yeah but he says do you want to be right or do you want to be loved yeah

And, uh, exactly. He has to temper. It's like being the real strong guy up against the granddad. Absolutely. I would say the most important lessons I've had from, from my ayahuasca journeys has, has been that I do have a problem with anger and I need to deal with it. And I have been dealing with it. It's, it's one thing to get the revelation is another thing to actually integrate it into your life. I mean, that's where the hard work begins, but I, and, but I'm, I'm working on this and I hope that I'm,

kinder and more nurturing person than i was i want to get it i want to talk about that because i'm particularly fascinated about the psychology of somebody that had to deal with such consistent criticism for a long period of time disposition for anger but then also evidently this sort of transcendent desire to include and transcend as ken wilber would say

But it's partly to do with being 74 years old. You know, we're all mortal. And the thing is, when we're in our 30s and 40s, we don't really take that into account. But believe me, when you get to my age, the clock is ticking. And you know that whatever happens, it's not going to be that long before your time is up.

And I'm completely resigned and accepting to the notion of death and it can come at any time. But when it comes, I would like to be able to look back on my life and say that it was a worthwhile life and that I did more good than I did harm at the very least. Anger is a young man's game in that regard. Yeah. Yeah.

What's this rumor meme that I've heard about the Amazon being a man-made jungle? Oh, it is. It is a man-made jungle. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that when you analyze the millions of trees in the Amazon and you find that they boil down to about 16,000 different species, that species like the Brazil nut tree, which are...

incredibly helpful to human beings which are food producing trees are hyper dominant in the Amazon and they shouldn't be if it were just the result of natural selection in the Amazon. It's clear that human beings have been involved in turning the Amazon to their purpose and making it an environment that is useful to them, that can feed them, that can nurture them and for that reason just as the

Clearly, a brilliant kind of shamanic science went into the creation of ayahuasca. An equally brilliant kind of shamanic science went into the creation of curare, which involves 11 different plants. You know what curare is. Curare is a nerve poison, which is used to tip arrows. If you're hunting a monkey...

and that monkey is 100 foot up a tree and you want it for dinner. What you don't want to do is

for it to, as you shoot an arrow into it, its natural instinct will be to wrap its tail around the tree. And suddenly the monkey that you want for dinner is hanging by its tail a hundred feet above you in the tree. You don't want that. So you want something that paralyzes its muscles. And that's what curare is. That's why, you know, curare was later used in anesthesia as well. They shoot the monkey with a curare-tipped arrow.

Its muscles go limp and it falls from the tree and dinner is ready. But to create curare, you need 11 different ingredients all put together. And if you don't have even one of them, it won't work anymore. So that's a scientific project, again, from a people who have lived in their environment for thousands, I believe tens of thousands of years and are so familiar with it and so comfortable with it, they know what to do with it. But I would add to that one other Amazonian science.

which again we go into in the in in season two which is which is called terra preta which is

patches of astonishingly fertile soil that are found dotted throughout the Amazon and which are still sought out by modern settlers today because the rest of the rainforest isn't particularly fertile. That's why it's also such a tragic waste to cut the rainforest down. It's doing much better things for the world by being left as a rainforest than it is being turned into a cattle ranch. But terra preta

has allowed bits of the Amazon to be incredibly fertile. And that also is an Amazonian invention. People in the Amazon are still making terra preta today, but the oldest examples so far found go back more than 8,000 years. And it's almost a miracle soil. It regenerates its own fertility. It's full of bacteria. It's full of biochar. It's been deliberately created by human beings. They put a lot of refuse in it as well. And it just...

works and multiplies and it keeps on rejuvenating its own fertility. So patches that are 8,000 years old are still fertile today. The thing that I keep coming back to is I understand that there is the technology or the trial and error that's happened in order to make the Amazon very useful to humans in a way that other areas on the planet wouldn't have been. Also understand that you can curate the jungle biologically

Brazil nut trees becoming more prevalent, et cetera. It's still to me thinking about what were sort of anthropologically modern humans built for, persistence hunting, open plains,

It just seems so inhospitable. I wonder why would you decide to, I don't know what America was like. Well, that's where you have to ask yourself, what was the Amazon that we're now looking at? What was it like during the Ice Age? What was it like 12, 13, 14,000 years ago? And what it was like was more like the savannas.

of East Africa than it looks today. It became a rainforest later, after human beings were in it. And I suspect human beings were, of course climate change was involved as well, but I suspect that human beings were involved in the creation of the Amazon right from the beginning. Transforming a savanna

extending over millions of square kilometers into a giant rainforest. The rainforest itself is probably not much older than 14,000 years. Because how would you have been able to make thousands and thousands of circles inside of squares if every two feet there's another tree? Exactly, exactly. That's right. Certainly, at the very least, you'd have to clear the area that you wanted to build your earthwork in. So it's

It's just one of those great unexamined areas where the human story has not been followed through enough. And when we do follow it through, we find intriguing hints of great sophistication in the past and of finding a way of life. We shouldn't imagine that everything that we would call a quote-unquote advanced civilization has to look like us, you know, with iPhones and cars and rocket ships and things like that. It doesn't have to look like that. It's a

lots of other ways to be being advanced. And I would say an advanced civilization actually should not be defined by its possessions, by its material wealth. It should be defined by its spiritual wealth and its ability to live in harmony with the environment in which it is surrounded. And our civilization, despite all its tech achievements, is not living in harmony with the environment at all.

whereas Amazonian civilization for thousands of years was and still is. I get what you mean there. I'm hesitant sometimes of sort of laying at the feet of modern humans this disregard for the world around us. I think it would be difficult if you were to give people of 13,000, 14,000 years ago the...

convenience and the opportunity and the availability of all of the things that everybody has in the modern world i'm not i'm not convinced by the idea that humans are being callous in their usage of most things in the modern world oh no i don't think so either had they have had the opportunity to it would have been difficult in the past to have not become fat because of the beautiful cheesecake and all of the the no i don't think i don't think individual humans are being callous at all um

we operate at the scale of a hive mind, a very large scale organism. That's what humanity is in, in the world. And, and, and, um, the plain fact is we, we, we aren't looking after the world well enough. Uh, this is our, this is our home. We're very detached from it. And,

And yes, they're very detached from it. And there's no sense of spiritual value in it. This is one of the problems with modern science in its desperate desire to separate itself off from superstition. It's become totally focused on weighing and measuring and counting, on a so-called rational approach to reality, whereas reality itself is not really very rational. And I think that this is what's missing in our society today.

is the spiritual element, a sense of connection to this beautiful garden of a planet that the universe has gifted us with and a connection to the wider universe. And that's why things happen in the way they do. But it can change. I don't think any of the mainstream religions in the world today are helpful in this respect. I realize that some people do get profound spiritual experiences within the mainstream religions. But I think

What's happening today is people are beginning to seek spiritual directions in other ways. And perhaps that's one of the reasons why

ayahuasca has become so well known and so popular in the West because it does seem to open a doorway to other dimensions and other realms. It's probably a more reliable route to a transcendent experience than going to the Vatican, for instance. I would say so, yeah. The Vatican is pretty awesome. And also the key difference is that

It's direct experience. It's what you're experiencing. And what you're experiencing is not this world. It's undeniable in that. Whatever it is, it's not this. You're experiencing, if our brains are concocting it all in some sort of elaborate novel, then it's astonishing in itself. That itself is a mystery. But many of us who've worked with ayahuasca and DMT can't rid ourselves of this sense that we're,

getting brief temporary access to some other level of reality. And fortunately, a number of scientists are now looking into this in a serious organized experimental way. And that is being done at Imperial College in London.

And it's being done at the University of California in San Diego. Where's that place that's found the way to do IV DMT? That's Imperial College. Yeah. So they can keep you at the state that you would have smoked. Yeah. But perpetual. Yeah. The peak state that you would be in five minutes after you've had the third puff on the pipe.

The peak state that you would be in there, they can keep you there for an hour or longer. Which presumably feels like three and a half million years. Well, I've tried to volunteer for this, but they won't let me because I have epilepsy.

But one of the projects that's taking place in America may allow me to volunteer. I don't believe it would have any... You're a brave man in that regard. I don't believe it would have any negative interaction with my epilepsy because I've quite a lot of experience of DMT and I've had no problems.

On the contrary, I find it helpful. But I would like to try that extended thing because... Have you done the pipe? Oh, yeah. I've smoked DMT and I've vaped DMT. Both are... And drank it through the... And then drunk it through the ayahuasca brew. The nice thing about going straight to the DMT is you don't have the negative physical consequences. And that, you know, you can be in the middle of an extraordinary vision where revelations are just palpable

piling in on you and suddenly your stomach says no get me get me get me out of here immediately you know and that often involves in the jungle squatting behind it behind a tree and confronting whatever creatures are living in that tree

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Well, this is another extraordinary civilization of the ancient world, which I think has much more ancient origins than are given to it. We have to trace the origins of Mayan civilization back through the people who were called the Olmecs. And then we have to look at the incredible sophistication

and complication of Mayan mathematics and Mayan astronomy and the enormous numbers that they used and how they were recording dates on Steli that go back 30 million years into the past. Where are they? On a modern map, where do you point to where the Mayans were? The Yucatan Peninsula primarily, but then going on into Guatemala as well. That's the Mayan area. And

for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, we filmed specifically in Palenque, which is down at the bottom of the Yucatan. The nearest large town is Villa Hermosa.

Palenque is a magnificent Mayan site dating back to the 8th or 9th century AD. And it's got a series of pyramids built around a beautiful plaza with what appears to be an astronomical observation tower in the middle of a structure that is probably wrongly referred to as the palace.

And I was able to discuss the site at length with an archaeologist. Not all archaeologists hate me. Quite a number of archaeologists are interested in what I do and are willing to work with me. Don't necessarily agree with me, but

but are willing at least to have a civil conversation with me. And I was so lucky to have Ed Barnhart as a guest when we were in Palenque. He seems cool. I watched him on Lex's show. He's a brilliant guy and he's fun and he's just so enjoyable to be around. And just a mine of information about the Mayan calendar and about Mayan astronomy and about Mayan mathematics. So you can read Mayan? He can, yes. He can read the Mayan glyphs and he did a bit of

of that for us. He's just really good at it. But also, you know, interpreting what Mayan culture was all about. And one of the things we touched on was the fact that there's a very specific idea about what happens to the soul after death.

And that idea is found all around the world. It's found very powerfully in the Americas, South America, Mexico, Central America, and North America. But it's also found in Egypt, and it's found in Mesopotamia, and it's found in ancient India. And the idea is that

upon death, the soul makes a leap to the heavens and where it specifically leaps to is the Milky Way. And this is referred to in many cultures as the path of souls. And it's

the deceased individual then, or the soul of the deceased individual then makes a journey along the path of souls. And there will be confronted with all the errors and mistakes and also all the good that that person has done. It's like a judgment day. It's like a judgment scene. And that judgment is represented by my

by monstrous beings and locked gates that you have to be able to confront. And this idea is just found all around the world. And it's one of the reasons, one of the reasons that I find very persuasive to the notion that we've lost an episode of the human story. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think we're looking at the remnant

of a very ancient spiritual system which was passed down in many different parts of the globe and subsequently reinterpreted and developed by the people it was part of. You're saying that because it sounds like there's echoes of that in some modern religions that you don't think they've independently arisen separately, you think that it's a single lineage? I think it's a single lineage, yeah. I think when we come to specific ideas like that, plus the

availability and the focus upon and the sacred nature of specific numbers in many different cultures around the world. Well, there's a phenomenon which has been very important in my work over the last 30 years called the precession of the equinoxes.

And it's not a phenomenon that everybody knows about, so I'll try to explain it. It's actually an observable effect, but it's hardly observable within a human lifetime. The best way to observe it, if you could extend your life by a few hundred years and just stay, just be at the same spot every spring equinox when the sun rises perfectly due east, be there before dawn, a good hour before dawn,

A constellation of the zodiac is going to be lying on the horizon in the place where the sun rises. And that constellation was seen by ancient cultures as housing the sun on the equinox. And it defined the character of an age. But

If you could be there for several hundred years, you would notice that it's gradually shifting along the horizon and eventually another constellation will slip into place behind the Sun on that same key day. And what's happening there from an astronomical perspective? Well, what's happening is the Earth is our viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And not only is it rotating on its own axis as we know, but it's also wobbling.

And that wobble, one of the most noticeable effects over long periods of time is it changes the pole star. So because what is the pole star except the star that the extended north pole of the Earth points most directly at? And at the moment it's Polaris, but it's been Tuban, it's been Draco, it's been many other stars in the... Tuban is in the constellation of Draco in the past. What's the cycle? How long does it take for you to get back? 25,920 years.

I'm glad that you know it.

25,920 years and the process unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years. So that is... It's going to be tough to track in the space of a 72-year lifetime. It is. It is. So you need long-term observation, you need record-keeping, and you need the information being passed on from generation to generation. But sooner or later, you're going to notice. If you're an avid watcher of the heavens, if these things matter to you as they did to ancient cultures, you're going to notice that this is shifting along the horizon.

Whether you're going to figure out exactly why that observable is happening, that's another matter which I can't give you a definite answer on. But that the observable was observed going back a very long way into the past is clear. And I can't touch on this subject without paying tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Deschend. Giorgio was the professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1960s.

at a time when I think people were more open-minded than they are today. And Hertha was a professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. And they published this astonishing, groundbreaking book called Hamlet's Mill.

And Hamlet's Mill is about the ancient recognition of precession. They completely, these are leading academic figures, they completely dismiss the notion that the Greeks discovered precession just 2,000 or 2,300 years ago. They're confident that it goes back thousands of years before that and they trace it back to what they call some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization.

The fact that this is found all around the world in many, many different cultures. Classic example, the bridge over the moat leading to Angkor Thom in the Angkor complex has 54 statues on either side. And each of those is pulling on the body of a serpent. And if you add 54 to 54, you get 108 statues.

108 is 72 plus 36, half of 72. 72 is the heartbeat of the processional cycle. And then there's processional imagery. What they're doing by pulling on that serpent is they're churning the milky ocean. There's also reliefs in Angkor Wat which show the same scene, but on Angkor Thom it's actually in three dimensions. They're churning the milky ocean and

As a result, they're producing the amrita, the elixir of immortality. But that churning motion, that's why the book is called Hamlet's Mill, Amlody's Mill. That same idea of something whirling and turning and changing is locked symbolically into this number system all around the world. What are some of the other numbers? You mentioned 108. They're all multiples of 72 or 80.

additions to 72 which are related to the number 72, like 72 plus 36 being 108 is a processional number. It's a very widely respected number found in sacred traditions all around the world.

43,200 is another processional number. That's 72 times 600. And that is a number that's found everywhere. There are 432,000 syllables in the Rig Veda. It's the same number again and again, based on the same system of ideas that keeps on coming up. What were the numbers that the Mayans were obsessed by?

The Mayans were very much involved in the equinoxes and in precessional numbers, but they were also going far beyond that. They were plumbing the depths of time. I can't think of any other ancient culture which had a focus on periods that were millions of years. Five million years. It's a really quite remarkable thing. And they could tell you what the phase of the moon was on a particular day.

five or ten million years ago. Why do you think they were so preoccupied with deep history, long numbers, numerology? Not numerology. Well, numerology is a fair word for it in the sense that numbers are thought to have a sacred or a magical quality. Why do you think that the Mayans, what is it that's... Well, I've always seen this as a... And again, of course, I'm going to be criticized by archaeologists for this as though I'm taking something away from the Mayans.

But I see the Mayan calendar and the mathematics associated with it as an out-of-place artifact. I see it as something which is the need for it

is hard to explain within the general circumstances of Mayan culture to have that precise mathematical calculation and this ability to think back millions of years into the past and into the future. It's hard to see the need for it. It feels like something that would have been needed in a much bigger culture, a much bigger civilization, which we're able to put huge numbers of specialists to work. I do regard it as an inheritance. I think the Maya inherited this.

this system from an earlier lost civilization. That's my view. And then they did their own work on it and developed it. And it's a very extraordinary thing. If that was the case, if the Mayans inherited it, it was passed down somehow from a previous more advanced civilization, why would they have needed it? Well, I think that

Look at our so-called civilization today. I mean, we have no problem with big numbers. They're quite useful to us. We have no problem with complex, sophisticated mathematics. We are quite capable of peering back millions of years in the past. I mean, our present creation story is that the Earth formed 4,500 million years ago, 4.5 billion years ago.

Well, the evidence seems to suggest that it did. But that can also be viewed as a creation myth in a way, a scientific creation myth. The Big Bang, that's another. It's a theory. It's a speculation. But did it happen? Was it that way? There's evidence suggesting that it was. But the point I'm making is that creation myths, foundation myths, myths about the nature of the universe are not limited to science.

hunter-forager peoples in the ancient world. They're also found in the scientific world today. How much do you think of this focus on astronomy and numbers is from a functional perspective, something logistically, operationally useful? And how much do you think is symbolic and

and sort of sacred? I don't think it's primarily functional. Most archaeologists will tell you that. They say, of course, the ancients wanted to know when spring began, when... How to navigate. Yeah, but not only that. For planting crops, you know, for agriculture, you want to know the season to plant, the season to reap. So you want to be aware of the spring equinox. You want to know the longest day of the year, the shortest day of the year, the solstices, etc.

These are useful in an agricultural calendar. And that's the argument that's given by archaeologists.

In my opinion, any self-respecting farmer anywhere in the world is really well aware of when he should plant or she should plant and when they should sow. They don't need devices that tell them when the equinox is there. There is such a device in a really magical one at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan.

And this is on the pyramid of Kukulkan, which is another name for Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. This pyramid at Chichen Itza, its northern stairway, the bottom of the stairway, in fact, the bottom of all its stairways, is on each side, there's the head of an enormous serpent. But the balustrade up the side of the stairway is just completely plain. But on the spring equinox...

Towards sunset, between about 5 o'clock in the evening and 5.45 in the evening, this magical effect occurs, and the shadows of the corner of the pyramid are cast on the balustrade of that stairway, and they create the shadow form of a serpent, of an undulating serpent, which joins with that serpent head. That only happens on the equinox, and not at any other time. So they pinpointed it precisely. They

oriented their pyramid precisely so that one part could cast a shadow on another on that special day. I think that's going over the top if your interest is only agriculture. I think that's paying homage to remembering

giving credit to this memory of the feathered serpent, of Kukulkan, of Quetzalcoatl. I'm going to say, so let's just linger on that for a second, because, you know, I've heard you on Joe's show talking about this for a long time. And I always think about

That's magical. It sounds to me like it's so cool. That's so beautiful. It's evidently something sacred. It's taken this sort of lovely blend of art and astronomy and archaeology and architecture and all of this together. But can you just think for a second about what the psychology of those humans was like? What's their relationship to this thing? As above?

So below. It's as simple as that. There was an ancient system in the old world developed out of ancient Egypt called the Hermetic tradition. The god, the Greek figure Hermes is a Greek version of the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth.

And in the Hermetica texts attributed to Hermes, there is this phrase, as above, so below. And what that phrase is saying is that it is our burden and our responsibility to replicate upon the earth the perfection and beauty and magnificence of the heavens. That if we fall out of harmony with the heavens, if we disconnect from the heavens, we fall to pieces. And we must...

constantly maintain and reinforce and honor and respect our connection to the wider universe. That's what as above, so below is about. That's why I and, and the brilliant genius discoverer of the Orion correlation theory, Robert Boval, um, are, uh, reject completely the, uh,

skeptical attitude of Egyptologists. What Robert Boval discovered was that the three great pyramids on the ground at Giza replicate the three stars of the belt of the constellation of Orion in the sky, but that they don't do so precisely

precisely in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built, the perfect match is in 10,500. Because of wobble? Because of the precessional wobble, exactly. That's right. They're building precession. They're using precession, they're using the language of astronomy

and massive architecture to memorialize a particular date. Does that mean that the whole Giza complex was built 12,500 years ago? No. But it does mean that it's memorializing a date that's 12,500. Just like any Western cathedral may be memorializing events that took place in the time of Abraham. It doesn't mean that they were built in the time of Abraham. I do think the Great Sphinx does date back 12,500 years. I think we're looking at a complex that's been developed

and increasingly refined over a very, very long period of time. Why that site in Egypt? Well, there are multiple sites around the world that are referred to as navels of the earth, and Giza is one of them. I would suggest that it was the ancient prime meridian

just as the prime meridian in our time for just reasons of the British Empire passes through Greenwich, I think in ancient times it passed through Giza. Now, other benefits of the Giza Plateau, it is situated at 30 degrees north latitude, give or take a tiny fraction, and 30 degrees north latitude is one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole.

So it's not a random location. And furthermore, if you go into the broad expanse of Giza in its place on the earth as a whole, you find that it's dead center of the largest area of exposed land on earth. So it's interesting for that respect. And then you build upon it an enormous pyramid.

weighing six million tons with precise orientation to true astronomical north, true astronomical south, true astronomical east, and true astronomical west. That is saying whatever this thing is, it is speaking to the earth. The earth's

It's focus. It is locked in to the cardinal directions of our planet. And then we find, and again, of course, my opponents in archaeology scoff at this, they accept that it's the case. Even Flint Dibble, who I debated with on the Joe Rogan experience in April 2024, even he accepted this, but he mocked it and thought that it was just a coincidence. But it is a fact.

But if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by, guess what, 43,200, it's one of those precessional numbers. It's not a random number. If it was, you know, 64,000, 1 to 64,000, I wouldn't think much of it, but it's 1 to 43,200. If you take the height of the Great Pyramid, the original height, it's lost about 30 feet from its top. If you take the height and multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth.

And if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth. So here we have a monument that is speaking to the Earth, that is locked into the Earth's astronomical cardinal directions, and then models the Earth on a scale defined by a motion of the Earth itself.

That is as above, so below. And that is what I think governs these arrangements all around the world. A wish and a desire to lock humanity into the cosmos and to make us realize that we're part of something much larger than ourselves. Staying hydrated can be boring, but it doesn't need to be. The problem is that most hydration beverages are filled with sugar and loads of ingredients that you can't pronounce, which is why I'm such a massive fan

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modern wisdom i was in uh south florida about a month ago uh recording some episodes and there was this spectacular lightning storm going on pitch black at night we were driving back from dinner or whatever uh south florida obviously recently had some pretty intense weather but being british we it's just gray you know what i'm used to i'm used to fierce gray yeah uh a very mild sort of damp uh climate and uh just driving back it's one of those

storms where the moon is full and is rising and these lightning storms and it's off over on the coast, on the ocean. And I remember thinking, imagine that you were a prehistoric human tribe, individual, whatever, looking out

it, you would be so certain that the gods were mad at you, that you had done something. You're like, I knew I shouldn't have touched myself last night when I went to bed. I knew that I shouldn't have told that lie. I knew that I shouldn't have stolen that fig, whatever it is that you, you know, maybe something awful is going to happen, whatever it might be. Um, and you begin to personify and you create the stories and narratives. Cause that's the way that, you know, without stats and books, that's the way that you pass down information. I just remember thinking like,

the all of your relationship as a human prehistoric human to everything is done through that kind of a story that that is a god or goddess having a war it looked like a battle it looked like you know two gods off in the distance throwing throwing lightning at each other and then most recently with the hurricanes that have come through florida yeah that's i think about one in a thousand year event in terms of the uh rainfall and some of the speed of the winds so it's

rare but not unheard of and maybe 10 times since perhaps the Americas were settled something like that would have happened yeah can you imagine what a tribe that saw that occur would think yeah but but but supposing they saw something even much bigger than that supposing they saw something that uh

affected the whole world, their whole world, however far they could go. It was devastated. It was destroyed. They themselves might have been destroyed by it. Can you imagine how that would be recorded? And could that be why we have 200 people

Myths of a global flood that destroyed a prehistoric civilization found all around the world. A global cataclysm. These myths mix up a number of different effects. They mix up bolts of fire from the sky. They mix up volcanoes suddenly erupting. They include earthquakes and they include flood, global flood, a flood that floods everything that is capable of submerging lands.

And this is why I'm very interested in the epoch called the Younger Dryas, which unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. It's why we call our series Ancient Apocalypse. It's going to say, what's the apocalypse bit? Well, the apocalypse bit is that the Younger Dryas, that's a name given by climatologists to an episode of really weird climate that took place at the end of the last ice age.

They call it the Younger Dryas after a species of alpine flower that flourishes in extremely cold weather. What happened, to cut a long story short, is that

Down to about 12,800 years ago, give or take a century, because you can't be that precise with these definitions. The Earth was definitely emerging from the Ice Age. It was getting warm and things were looking good. It felt like that 100,000 years of frozen world was coming to an end.

And then suddenly it flipped completely. And you have sudden sea level rise. You have a plunge in global temperature so that suddenly almost overnight,

It is as cold as it was as the absolute peak of the last ice age. This happens suddenly and it happens right around the world. Worse, of course, in northern and deep southern latitudes and much less vicious in its effects in tropical and equatorial zones, but a massive, massive event. This is the time, precisely that window, when all the big megafauna of the ice age go extinct. The saber-toothed tigers disappear.

mastodons mammoths when we were at white sands by the way it was just amazing to see these mammoth footprints still in the sand there they're big they're very big these things have got a huge stride have you been following the work of ben lammett colossal have you seen this no i haven't okay so they are bringing back woolly mammoths uh i've seen that yes i have so ben was on the show i may be talking about actually being involved with the project a little bit um just to tangent off before you tell us more about younger drives

You know one of the reasons that they're looking at bringing them back? That they think that by putting them in the higher latitudes, these animals will be able to compact down the snow and reflect back more sun. Interesting. So they'll be able to use an extinct species to help combat modern global warming. Okay.

That's a very fancy idea. It's amazing. They're farmers. They're farm animals in a way that they will eat seeds from here and poop them over there, which will help to spread things around. So the other two, I asked him, what else are you working on? So he's got this. The way they're doing it, it's the Asian elephant. So they've taken all of these frozen samples of genetic material. They're then using AI to splice in the gaps. So there will be, at some point, there will be an Asian elephant that

that gives birth to a woolly mammoth when they're ready because it's the closest genetic relative that they can get but the other one and this is so cool i i i really love this idea from ben

He said that, I was like, what else do you want to bring back? Like, you know, saber-toothed tiger, that's pretty cool. And he said, dodo bird. I'm like, I mean, it's a meme. Why would you bring back the useless... Precisely, why would you do that? And he said, well, it was because it was... The reason that it was dead was because of environmental destruction. So he's using...

the all of the effort being very public about the effort that they have to go to in order to bring this bird back to say See how much we had to do see the labor that we had to jump through In order to be able to bring back this thing that we could have just avoided destroying its habitat in the first place So it's like a PR bird so it may end up being actually way more useful than you ever thought but kind of

only as a public relations tool. But I thought that was really cool. It is very cool. Colossal's awesome. People should go and check them out. It would be nice to see how it all ends up. It's a real thing. It's going to happen, isn't it? It's happening. I mean, the Asian elephant thing, they're ready to pull the pin on it. I think it'll happen within the next few years. Fascinating. It's awesome. So Younger Dryas. Yeah. So the Younger Dryas, within...

almost a living memory of the human species. You know, we know that there have been huge cataclysms on the Earth before. The best known example is the Chicxulub crater in deeply buried off the Gulf of Mexico, the so-called KT. Dinosaur killer. Dinosaur was extinct, 65 or

66 million years ago. There'd been a number of events like that caused by cosmic impacts from by objects from... I'm sure that you've looked at this as well, but the... I really loved learning about the fact that that asteroid had it have hit in a slightly different area of the Earth. It wasn't to do with even the impact. It was to do with the toxic dust that was kicked up from some particular type of rock that's very deep down underneath that. And you're talking about

seconds later that the entire future of the earth, maybe 10 seconds later. Because these things are traveling at tens of thousands of miles an hour. And we're spinning pretty quick as well. And it would have been completely, it was about as bad of a place for the dinosaurs, pretty good for us, that it could have hit. And I always think about that when I think about contingency and convergence and thin chance. Interesting, interesting. Maybe the dinosaurs annoyed the universe.

Perhaps they weren't tracking their procession sufficiently well. They didn't know their wobble. Anyway, sorry, Young and Dryas, I keep distracting you. It's not a distraction. It's relevant. The point is that there have been a number of extinction-level events on our planet.

And what is not being properly taken into account is that although it was very recent in geological terms, just 12,800 years ago, the Younger Dryas was also an extinction level event. And it led to the extinction, as I said, of all the great megafauna of the Ice Age. And it ushered in the Holocene, the modern age that we live in today. The team who are working on what is called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

deserve to be taken seriously. Their opponents in science try to paint them as some sort of lunatic fringe. But actually we're dealing with a number, more than 60 highly credentialed scientists who are just following the evidence where it leads them. And what the evidence leads them to, and I've given all the data on this in my books, particularly in Magicians of the Gods that was published in 2015, what the evidence leads to is the conclusion that

That the earth 12,800 years ago passed through the debris stream of a disintegrating comet all comets disintegrate sooner or later and For those who would wish to see an example of this it's Jupiter in it It's the it's the Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting hitting Jupiter and breaking up into 21 fragments before it did so and

Comets break up into multiple fragments. Every single meteor shower that we see, and we pass through dozens of them every year, every single one of those is the debris stream of a disintegrated comet. That's what they all are. Every single shooting star is a bit of a comet that we're looking at. A little golf ball, sometimes bigger.

Yeah, sometimes those bits are really large. Sometimes they can be kilometers in diameter. And what is called the torrid meteor stream, because it appears to emanate in our time from the constellation of Taurus. Of course, it's not coming from the constellation of Taurus. It's a visual effect. That bit of the sky that the constellation of Taurus is in. The torrid meteor stream is full of large and dangerous objects.

And it's also full of smaller objects. When I say smaller, they might be 100 or 200 meters in diameter instead of two or three kilometers in diameter. The view of the comet research group who are behind the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth entered a swarm of cometary debris. That swarm did include some large objects.

And they reckon that's why the North American ice cap went into a sudden meltdown 12,800 years ago, unleashing floods on an enormous scale and raising sea levels very oddly at a time when global temperatures were sinking. Normally you get sea level rise when global temperatures are rising, but they plunged during the Younger Dryas and yet you have

sea level rise. They think that some large objects hit the North American ice cap and some hit the Northern European. Multiple, not single large impact. No, no. But they do think that there were some large objects that hit the ice caps. But they think primarily what it was, was airbursts of objects that were about 100 to 200 meters in diameter. Airbursts like the Tunguska event in

1908, June the 30th, 1908. Nobody disputes that that was a bit of a comet. It almost certainly was a comet that fell out of the Taurid meteor stream because that is the peak of what's called the Beta Taurids in precisely 30th of June. And it didn't leave any crater because it blew up in the sky.

The Earth's atmosphere destroyed it in the sky, but that air burst flattened the rough calculation is 2,000 square miles of Siberian forest.

And when investigators went into the area a few years later, they just found the whole forest flattened over an enormous area by this airburst. It was a cataclysmic airburst. Now, if you take that, fortunately, it was an uninhabited area of Siberia. But if you take that over population areas and you multiply it by 100, it's not just one airburst, it's 100 airbursts. And as you say, the Earth is spinning pretty fast. It's rotating at 1,000 miles an hour at the equator. So you can see how

the trajectory of these bits coming in would actually spatter the Earth across a huge range of the Earth's circumference.

And the evidence for the Younger Dryas impact is that these airbursts were taking place from as far west as the west coast of North America and as far east as Syria, as far south as Antarctica and southern Chile, as far north as Belgium. So this was a very large event and the fact that no massive craters have been found yet

is partly explained by the sense that the larger objects hit the North American ice cap and partly explained by the fact that air bursts don't leave craters, but they do decimate communities like Abu Huraira in Syria, which is

is within 150 miles of the extraordinary site of Gobekli Tepe and which was wiped out 12,800 years ago. Abu Huraira was. It was completely flattened by something. You mean by flattened? I mean that everybody there was killed and that the whole place was destroyed. It was rapidly reoccupied. Within two or three years it was reoccupied and repopulated but something really bad happened there and the traces on the ground, the iridium

the nano diamonds, the shocked quartz, the melt glass like trinitite, all of these things speak to precisely what the comet research group thinks went happened, that this was an airburst of an object of roughly Tunguska size that happened to happen over an ancient settlement.

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If you throw a couple of hundred 200-meter-sized airburst comets at the Earth, what happens? Is it lots of water, lots of fire, lots of what? Well, what happens, first of all, and this is a key part of why did the temperature fall?

And the answer to that is that's why the view is that some large objects hit the North American ice cap and the European ice cap. See, the North American ice cap at that time was more than a mile deep.

Where did that go from and to? Well, you can start right up in northern Canada and you can come down into Montana and you still have ice cap. And it's a mile deep at that time. So even a kilometer wide object hitting that is not going to leave a crater under the ground. The crater is going to be in the ice.

And then meltwater is going to be released from the ice into the world ocean. It's going to flood off the land and into the ocean, both the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean. And that's what appears to have been what brought the climate down is a huge flood of icy meltwater pouring into the world ocean and stopping the Gulf Stream in its tracks.

If we were to stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks today, global warming would not be a problem any longer. We'd be in global cooling very, very, very rapidly. And that appears to be what happened. And that, up till now, is the explanation that is given for the sudden plunge in climates at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. The explanation is that there was a flood of meltwater, icy meltwater into the world ocean.

cut what's called the global meridional overturning circulation of which the Gulf Stream is a part, and led to this sudden cooling. But they don't ask themselves, why did that icy water get into the world ocean in the first place? And that is what the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis explains. What's the alternative hypothesis for how the Gulf Stream got switched off?

Well, there is no real hypothesis for it. It's just said there is a hypothesis. I just don't think it's a very good one. They say that what happened was that glacial lakes formed in North America, Glacial Lake Missoula and Glacial Lake Agassiz.

And these lakes were bounded by ice dams and that from time to time, the pressure of water on the dam would break it and the water in the lake would flood out. And they tried to account for this with sort of

80 flooding events over a period of a couple of thousand years or more. Whereas what the evidence on the ground speaks to one major flooding event. And that sudden drop in climate is very definitely keyed in to the date of around 12,800 years ago. Talk to me about Easter Island. What a place. I love Easter Island. It's so beautiful and mysterious and remote. 2,000 miles from the coast of Peru.

2,000 miles from Tahiti, literally in the middle of nowhere. There sits Easter Island. And we know that it has been inhabited by human beings. But the general view of archaeology is not for very long. The general view sees Easter Island as being settled perhaps as recently as 1,000 years ago.

Maybe you could go back to 700 AD, 1,300, 1,400 years ago. There's some dispute about this. But the notion that Easter Island might have been settled earlier than that is not widely accepted. And so the settlement of Easter Island is seen as something that happened towards the end of what is referred to as the Polynesian expansion period.

And let us recognize the incredible achievements of the Polydesians, who were the world's ultimate seafarers. I mean, they explored the whole Pacific Ocean and they found Easter Island.

that tiny tiny dot in the middle of nowhere and there's no doubt that the indigenous inhabitants of easter island today are descended from polynesians they are they are polynesian people no doubt about that whatsoever um but the question is is there a prehistory to easter island that is being missed and i feel very strongly there is um and there are signs already that that um

possibility of a much older prehistory to Easter Island is beginning to be explored. One of our indigenous guests on the show happens to be an archaeologist from Easter Island and her name is Sonia Hoa and

And she and her team have found remnants of what are called banana phytoliths, these tiny little bits, microscopic bits of banana, in an excavation that they did in a place called the Raraukau Crater. And they're dateable. And they date back not to the Ice Age, but they date back 3,000 years, which is at least twice as old as human beings were ever supposed to have been on Easter Island. And why I say human beings is because you can't transfer bananas from place to place any other way than human beings bringing them there.

those bananas could not have been blown by the wind. No. They are a result of human activity. So the presence of that, it's quite a dynamite finding. It doesn't take Easter Island back to the Ice Age, but it does suggest that there's a lot more that we need to find in Easter Island. And I'm just

intrigued by the traditions of the Easter Islanders, by the fact that they have a memory of a flooded homeland which was destroyed in a global cataclysm. That homeland was called Hever.

and it was somewhere in the Pacific, and it was flooded in an enormous flood, and some of the survivors found their way to Easter Island. That's how the story is told, but during the period of the Polynesian expansion, there was no flooded island of large size in the Pacific Ocean. Sea levels had already stopped rising by that point. You have to go back to the end of the Ice Age to get that kind of sea level rise that would actually submerge a whole island-sized landmass. And these memories are very clear, still preserved,

by the Easter Islanders. And they don't put a date on it, but it doesn't fit in with the conventional archaeological notion of how or when Easter Island was first settled. There's this suggestion that there's a mysterious lost history in Easter Island. And I'm of the view, and I present evidence for this in the series, that the...

Iconic objects for which Easter Island is best known, the Moai, these huge sculptured figures, are definitely not from the last seven or eight hundred years. They're much, much older than that. Is there a way to date them? Well, largely because of the sedimentation that covers many of them up. They're

Covered it was first realized when Thor hard I'll did an excavation there back in the 1980s What you see when you go up onto Rana Raraku? There's a number of craters on Easter Island Rano cow was where they found the banana fighter list Rana Raraku was one of the main quarries out of which the Moai were cut And what you see when you go up there today Is basically head and shoulders sticking out of the ground? but if you excavate those

those huge statues, you find they really are huge and that they go down, and Thor Hardell did this, they go down 30 feet under the ground. And they weren't deliberately buried there. They were covered by sedimentation. And so it becomes a calculation of how

How long? How much sediment per year? Would you get 30 feet of sedimentation in a tiny island like Easter Island with no other landmass within 2,000 miles to contribute to the windblown dust and so on and so forth? It all has to come from Easter Island itself. So that's a suggestion that they may be much older. And again...

Professor Robert Schock at Boston University who's done the absolute breakthrough courageous work on the Great Sphinx and arguing that the Great Sphinx of Giza shows geological evidence of being more than 12,000 years old. Schock is also of the view that the Moai of Easter Island are vastly older than we've been told by archaeologists and he bases that largely on the sedimentation. Why did they make all of those statues? Well, um...

The explanation that we were given by an elder on Easter Island, Leo Paccarati, is that...

is that they contain magic, they contain mana, they contain a force, they contain a power which can affect crops and which can make all right between humanity and the universe. And that they remember them today as images of ancestors who were of particular importance

Oh, there's different sized ears and stuff that didn't... Yeah, there's the long ears and the short ears. That's true. The two original races. Long ears and the short ears. The long ears and the short ears, yeah. Um...

There's a notion that they're imbued with the power of powerful deceased individuals and that they act as protectors for Easter Island. And there's one particular array in particular of Moai where you have seven of the Moai in a row. And that is thought to memorialize the seven wise men who fled to Easter Island from the destruction by flood of the land of Hever. That seems like a big leap.

Why are they the seven men? Why is there seven? Why did they... Well, that's a big leap all around the world because there were seven sages that brought civilization to Mesopotamia as well, according to their myths and traditions. There were seven sages who brought civilization to Egypt in Zep Tepi the first time, according to the Edfu texts. This notion of seven survivors of a cataclysm is pretty widespread.

What about the similarities with other statues around the world? Yeah, I've been quite struck by that. And I think I was lucky enough to know Thor Heyerdahl. He was an incredible, brilliant, open-minded guy. And I think if Thor had had the... He passed away in 2002. But I think if he'd had the opportunity to see Gobekli Tepe and to see the...

upright T-shaped megaliths there and to see the fact that they have carved into them arms and hands and that the hands cross across the belly like this, it's exactly the same posture as the Easter Island statues except in the case of Gobekli Tepe particularly in enclosure D where the largest megaliths are, we know that they're close to 12,000 years old. They're 11,600 years old at least.

And that precise dating cannot be put on the Easter Island statues, at least not yet, partly because nobody has looked. But there are extraordinary similarities. I don't know what you do, carbon dating? Can you do that with this type of volcanic rock? Well, you can't carbon date any kind of rock. There's a thing called luminescence dating, where if a rocky object has been exposed

Kept away from the light if you can be sure that it's not seen light for thousands and thousands of years then you can you can say when it was last exposed to the light if no way yeah you can you can this there's some kind of radiation comes off it and allows you to say when it was last exposed to light doesn't necessarily tell you what it was made.

but it tells you when it was last exposed. Like when it was brought into the cave or whatever it might be. That's wild. It's a great technology. And then the other one is carbon dating, but carbon dating only works on organic materials. Unless something's got lodged in it and the likelihood of that not being degraded over time. That's by and large how most dating is done by archaeologists. When archaeologists are confronted by a megalithic site, they will look for...

Bits of datable material. Bits of organic. Please give us something organic. Yeah, which ideally should be trapped underneath a megalith. In order to say... The gold standard. This was here before the thing was here. Yeah, or to come to the conclusion that the megalith and that object have something in common in terms of their age. That's the closest you... It's a bit of something that's trapped underneath. Yes, it's an assumption rather than necessarily an exact dating. But it does give you a guideline and it's pretty good.

Talking about the Americas, I notice we haven't touched at all. I just want to say one thing about Malta, which was in season one. Okay. It's in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse. And it concerns this because there's been very tiny amount of carbon dating on Malta. Hardly any. You know that Malta is a massive, extraordinary, megalithic culture with gigantic megalithic temples. Right.

And until the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, the temple called Gigantia on the island of Gozo, which is one of the two Maltese islands, was thought to be the oldest megalithic site in the world. And it was thought to be about 6,000 years old, maybe.

Maybe a little bit under. And this is based on largely what they call contextual dating, not on carbon dating. But they like to say there is some carbon dating that proves that Gigantia is close to 6,000 years old because carbon dating was done two or three years ago in a project called Phragsus.

But when you look at actually what they carbon dated, they didn't carbon date anything under the temple, which is a protected site. They carbon dated something that was underneath a former temple.

toilet block 40 meters away from the temple and therefore the conclusion that that dates the temple even even if it were under a megalith you have to take it carefully as to how and when it got there but if it's 40 meters away from the temple i'm sorry it's no use for dating the temple itself i think it's possible that the maltese temples may be in some cases as old as gobekli tepe

They have comparisons in common. And this dating problem is at the heart of the matter because there's been very little reliable dating on Malta. Getting back over to America. Yeah. Why haven't you talked about Northern America yet? We've been talking about Brazil. We've been talking about buying culture. Two reasons. Because we have filmed in North America. We had an extraordinary period of filming in Chaco Canyon. Chaco Canyon is...

the most incredible, they call it the Anasazi people, the old ones, the ancestral people of the Pueblo people of that part of America today. Chaco Canyon is a massive,

beautifully astronomically aligned complex of buildings and semi-subterranean circular structures, which again are astonishingly similar to the structures at Gobekli Tepe and which even have that T-shaped motif that is very common in Gobekli Tepe. But the thing about Chaco Canyon, the biggest great house there has got more than 400 rooms in it.

And many of those rooms are completely sealed off. And archaeologists have found there's no evidence that any large population ever lived there. This place was clearly built for some sort of sacred purpose. And there is evidence that people made pilgrimages to Chaco Canyon, that that's how they got there.

And the place was used as a site of pilgrimage. And as above, so below. It's locked into the summer solstice, sunset and sunrise, the winter solstice, sunset and sunrise, different buildings, the equinoxes. They're all tied up. There are alignments that extend over distances of tens of kilometers to other structures which are perfectly in line with a solsticial alignment. This was the work of an amazing astronomical culture.

And no, I'm not claiming that that astronomical culture was 12,000 years old. But what I'm suggesting is that

that it expresses may be much older than the structures themselves. So we filmed at Chaco Canyon and we filmed at White Sands in New Mexico where an indigenous expert, Kim Charlie, who was actually one of the people who found the footprints in the first place, was my principal informant and it was wonderful to see the emotion that she felt about the connection of her people with these 23,000 year old footprints.

Would we have filmed elsewhere in America? Yes. But unfortunately, archaeologists prevented us from doing so. Tell me more about that.

Well, just as they denied us access to film at Serpent Mound in Ohio in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse, we'd made an episode about Serpent Mound anyway. We were able to do some filming from neighboring land. But we were specifically denied access in a written document that I have put online, which said that the reason that they were denying us access was because I was presenting the series.

And basically, they don't agree with my ideas. Therefore, the best way to censor me is not to allow me to go to Serpent Mound at all, or at least to make it as difficult as possible for me to tell a story about Serpent Mound, a story that would have honored Serpent Mound and does honor Serpent Mound. Anybody who looks at that episode in season one of Ancient Apocalypse will realize that. Where are we heretical? We're suggesting that the Serpent Mound's alignment to the summer solstice sunset is

is just slightly off. And the reason that it's slightly off isn't precession, it's another motion of the Earth, which is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The Earth has a tilt on its axis, and that tilt shifts around 23.5 degrees, and that affects the rising position of the Sun on the solstices and the setting position. And what it's targeted at is the setting position of the Sun, not today, not a thousand years ago, but

11,500 years ago. Anyway, we stopped filming there and that repeated in season two. We wanted to film at Cahokia, an amazing, massive pyramid site. We wanted to film... Where's that? It's in Illinois. We wanted to...

let me double check that. I'm forgetting which state it's in. I do believe it's Illinois. We wanted to film it. I've been to Cahokia. It is an incredible place, but we were not allowed to film there. Filming permission was denied again because I'm the presenter of the series. I wanted to film at Monks Mound in Alabama, Moundville in Alabama. We sought permission to film there. Same reason it was denied. So if other manufacturers,

majestic, wonderful mound sites in North America don't show up in our series, it's because archaeology didn't want us to film there. But the

SAA asked Netflix to recategorize your last series, so I imagine they must be thrilled that you've released another one. Well, the SAA made a desperate, frantic, hysterical effort to have me canceled. That's basically what it was about. They tried to, I think it's an abuse of power, they tried to use their power as a body representing 5,000 archaeologists.

to mount a smear campaign against Ancient Apocalypse, to say all sorts of things about it that were simply untrue, to present that in an open letter to Netflix, and to ask that Netflix reframe the series as science fiction instead of documentary. And of course, what a clever way to get someone cancelled. I mean, who's going to watch it if it's science fiction? You know, rightly and properly, it is a documentary series, and it is

full of expert opinion from many, many different people. It's not a work of fiction. It's not some kind of novel. This is a documentary. But they wanted it to be called science fiction because they knew that that way the viewership would be reduced. And Netflix, fortunately, ignored them. There's no real tension or stakes if it's just a whimsical story. The only reason that it actually...

people and is compelling. One of the reasons that it is more so is that this is being proposed as a potential real world story, not as something that's just been fabricated. Absolutely. And to the annoyance of archaeology, I think actually there are a number of archaeologists in the SAA who

One called John Hoopes, who's a professor at the University of Kansas, was actually directly involved in the writing of that SAA open letter. And another, of course, is Flint Dibble, who I debated with on the Joe. I think they have media aspirations themselves. When I look at the reaction of a lot of these individuals, what I see fundamentally is jealousy and envy. They see that I'm getting exposure in front of a mass public, and they think it should be theirs, right?

So, in fact, I'll say something about John Hoopes and Flint Dibble in this context, which is that if individuals who define themselves as archaeologists find themselves spending more and more of their lives just attacking the work of other people, well, what archaeology are they doing? What have they contributed to human knowledge? When I look at Flint Dibble and I look at John Hoopes, the answer I come to is virtually zero.

They've contributed nothing to human knowledge. They're not going to make a mark on history. Nothing in the work that they've done is going to have any effect or any significance a generation or two from now. But they can make themselves significant by attacking the ideas of other people, especially if they frame those ideas as assaults upon archaeology. What's your reflection on the debate that you had with Flint? Well, I've finally got round to...

that debate. I've been very busy, as you can imagine, with making season two of Ancient Apocalypse, which went on, finalization of that series went on long after the debate in April, and I've not had time, but I did finally sit down to fact check Flint Dibble, and I've just

I just put that video online quite recently as we're talking, just a couple of days ago. And what I've done is I've just compared the statements that Flint makes in the debate with the facts. I'm hardly injecting my own words into it at all. It's just important, I think, for people to understand

The tactics that were used in that debate, I do think that Flint is a better debater than me, and I say that in the video. I do think he was better prepared than me. But some of the tactics that he used, I'm not going to define them here. I would prefer that people look at the video. So the video can be found on my YouTube channel, and I'm going to follow that up ultimately with the only talk that I'm going to give in North America next year

Because next year is looking to be very busy. But I'm going to give a talk on the 19th and 20th of April in Sedona. Two days of talks. I'm going to present a whole series of arguments called The Fight for the Past. And the link for that is up on the events page of my website.

And I hope people will join me there. And I hope people who are critical of my ideas will join me there because I want to open up to audience discussion in this. But I think my feeling was I felt quite beaten down after the debate. I felt that I'd done badly.

I felt that I'd let my side down, my side being the alternative approach to archaeology. But as time has gone by and as I've looked at the tactics that Flint used in that debate and as more and more people have become aware of those tactics, I've realized that in a way it was a good thing that I wasn't the outright winner of that debate because what it did was it showed to a wide general public the true face of archaeology, which is

the skull behind the smile of archaeology, which is an archaeology that seeks to crush and destroy other people, to ridicule and diminish their life's work, to insult them, to humiliate them. That's what comes across in the debate that I had with Flint Dibble. And unfortunately, his kind of archaeologist is most vocal in the issue of a

attacking alternative views of the past. I think it's very good that the public got to see an archaeologist doing that over a period of several hours in a debate. And I'm actually quite glad that I didn't do better than I did. But I'm also glad now that I've had time to put the record straight with this video. How has it been personally to spend such a long time being criticized so heavily from so many people?

Yeah, it goes back a fairly long way. My first book about a historical mystery was called The Sign and the Seal, A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. It's based on my years of experience in Ethiopia and looks at Ethiopia's claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant. I'd written many books before that, but they were entirely on current affairs issues.

The Sign and the Seal was the first book I wrote about a historical mystery. None of my books about current affairs issues received much criticism. The Sign and the Seal didn't either. It was quite welcomed as an interesting story. Good Lord, could the Ark of the Covenant actually be in Ethiopia? What is the Ark of the Covenant? As the Ethiopians claim. Well, you've obviously not seen Raiders of the Lost Ark then. No.

It's the Indiana Jones movie. It's the object that's described in the book of Exodus, carried on carrying poles, made of gold, wooden gold with the tablets of the Ten Commandments supposedly inside it. I won't go into the long details of why it might be in Ethiopia. But my point is that that book only got to number six in the bestseller list.

And that seemed to be just a little bit below the horizon where archaeologists needed to attack it. But the next book, Fingerprints of the Gods, got to number one on the bestseller list, not only in the UK, but also in six other countries, including Italy and Japan. It became a worldwide phenomenon. And that attracted the eye of Sauron from archaeologists who, even then in 1995, were very annoyed that the public were listening to me. And that's when I started to be directly targeted

and attacked by archaeologists and by non-archaeologists who support the archaeological mainstream position. And those attacks grew increasingly furious and unpleasant during the 1990s.

And I naturally began to feel quite annoyed about them myself. And I began to feel that I needed to defend myself against these kind of things. I couldn't just let it happen. So I can say that really I've been locked in a kind of argument with archaeology.

since the mid-1990s. And from time to time, they've got a big TV program to attack me, like BBC Horizon did a big so-called expose on my work in around the year 2000. There were some serious errors in the Horizon presentation, and it's the first time ever that BBC Horizon has been forced to re-edit and re-issue a program. But those errors were there because the archaeologists behind it

wanted me and my colleagues like Robert Boval destroyed, stopped, stopped in our tracks. Don't let these people speak because goodness knows they might mislead the public. And this is a problem that I have with this attitude within archaeology, which is an attitude fundamentally of disrespect towards the intelligence of the general public.

I think sovereign adults should have the right to make up their own minds. They should have the right to explore alternative points of view. Those who are presenting alternative points of view should not be stopped from filming at sites where those alternative points of view can express. It should be an open market in ideas, and the general public is quite intelligent enough to make up its own mind about which idea it supports and which it doesn't. I strongly reject the...

tendency within a small faction of archaeologists who nevertheless present themselves as speaking for the rest and who the rest circle the wagons around whenever necessary. I strongly resent their notion that they somehow need to tell the public what to think. Has it been frustrating for you as somebody who wants to focus on work, the, you say,

not perverse incentives, but the temptation to play defense for yourself, given that lots of accusations are coming at you, which then means that if you don't respond, the vacuum of response sometimes sucks in speculation or seems like complicity or a lie through omission or whatever it might be. So this...

Do you ever sort of feel wistful for how much of your life has been spent this back and forth? I've heard you have this conversation a number of times with Joe. I've heard you do it directly to Flint. It's evident that this has been something that's got under your skin for a long time, and it's been poke, poke, poke, poke, poke continuously.

I think about how much time of both archaeologists doing the debunking and then I think what's now technically referred to as 'de-dunking', which is the reverse of the debunking. Yeah, debunking the mainstream. That's Dan Richards, his channel is called 'De-Dunking'. He's done some great work. I'd like to give a shout out to another YouTube channel run by a guy called Independent Scholar. That's his handle.

He's done some excellent... It's a very small channel right now, but it deserves to be bigger. I like that, the dunking word. But my point being that so much time of both...

established mainstream archaeology yourself. And then from what I can tell, even parts of your psychology, maybe this anger predisposition has played into it a little bit, has been captured by criticism. Criticism captured in many ways. It's made me defensive. Just take a look at a book that I published in 2002 called Underworld. It's about a thousand pages long. It's got 2000 footnotes. I wrote that book defensively.

That book describes the seven years of scuba diving that I and my wife, Santha, did to look at structures that were submerged by rising sea level at the end of the last ice age. But I made it a very heavy read because I was trying to bulletproof it against the attacks that I knew were going to happen.

And as a result, it's a much heavier read than most of my books. I don't feel I need to write so defensively now, but I do feel that I need to document and provide the source for every single statement that I make. Yeah.

so that I can't be accused of misrepresenting information. I'm aware that I'm surrounded by a group of hostile people who want to find any error or mistake in my work and magnify it into some kind of conspiracy that Hancock is involved in. Look, when the SAA wrote that open letter to Netflix, it took me a month to research and document my rebuttal to the SAA's open letter. And that rebuttal

Part of it I actually read out during this video I've told you about, but it's on my website. It's in my blog. A detailed rebuttal to the points that I make. So that was a month of my life that I could have been doing something much more constructive with, that I was spent immersed in each and every one of their criticisms to show that those criticisms are not based on anything solid. Yes, it's most unfortunate.

Why can't archaeology be a bit kinder and a bit more generous? Why is it necessary for people who define themselves as scientists? I don't think archaeologists are scientists. I think they're like the lady who protests too much. I think that's a Shakespearean line. They desperately want to be scientists. But why should they have this power? Why should they have this ability to

to just use their authority to try to shut people down. I saw an interesting video about pseudo-archaeology and how it's a dangerous gateway, basically accusing you of being the beginning of a radicalization pipeline because questioning the status quo and established theories in archaeology gets you very quickly into Rothschild and blizzard people things soon enough. Well, I think...

I was amused by my first season of Ancient Apocalypse being called the most dangerous show on Netflix in newspapers and by archaeologists. And I've never seen why that should be the case. And my rebuttal to the SAA's open letter makes that clear. But...

Just how did we get on to that point? I'm getting tired. No, I was saying that what's it been like psychologically dealing with all of the criticism and then there was this pseudo archaeology pipeline into danger. Oh, yes. The idea that thinking for oneself about the past might dangerously lead to thinking once for oneself about other things, too. This is often being connected to the climate change issue.

People said, my goodness, if people believe Hancock that we're wrong about the past, then they'll believe experts are wrong about climate change as well.

And that's one of the reasons why it's seen as dangerous. But behind that is a notion that the public should not be provided with information that can enable them to make choices between different points of view. And I think that's the heart of a democracy. It's the heart of a democratic system that we should have an open forum for alternative points of view. And rather than despising the public and think that they need to be told what to think by so-called experts,

who are archaeologists, we should trust the public to make up their own mind on information and we should provide that information to them. And I don't think that's dangerous. I think what's dangerous is shutting that down. Can we talk a little bit about Stonehenge? Because there was some recent revelations that came out about the distance that the central rocks had traveled. Well, one from Scotland. Yeah. I mean, that's for the people who aren't in the UK. UK is not as big as America, all right? But that's a good distance. You're looking at hundreds of miles.

With a pretty big rock. With a pretty hefty multi-ton rock. And that's 4,000 years old? 4,000 or more years old. There's parts of Stonehenge that are much older. There was a woodhenge at Stonehenge, which may go back as much as 10,000 years into the past. This is a site that was developed over a long period of time. We're looking at the latest incarnation of it at around 4,000 years.

years ago. Another mystery is that the blue stones, the smaller stones at Stonehenge also don't come from the Marlborough Downs where Stonehenge stands. They come from Wales. They were brought a distance of more than 100 miles. And in fact, you can see an almost, almost a template of Stonehenge in the Presily Mountains in Wales, where these stones were cut out of and brought to, you could actually put them back into the gaps that have been left for them. So

The ancients were doing something on a very large scale across hundreds of miles to create that site. And of course, we have no documents that have survived from that period, so we don't know why. But what we do know is that Stonehenge, like Serpent Mound, like the Great Sphinx, is oriented

at a key moment in the solar year. In the case of Stonehenge, it's sunrise on the summer solstice. In the case of Serpent Mound, it's sunset on the summer solstice. But you can see the connection that as above so below that we're seeing in the Americas, we're also seeing in ancient Britain. And I'm not saying that that's because it came from ancient Britain to ancient America or from ancient America.

to ancient Britain. I'm saying that the best explanation for that is that both received a legacy from an older and lost civilization. Up next, would you ever consider doing any work in Antarctica? I don't see the point. I don't see the point. I'd love to go to Antarctica and see that magnificence, but what work could I usefully do? I'd have to have a billionaire backer and lots of amazing kit.

you know, to start investigating under the ice properly in Antarctica. Where would you like to go next then if it's not Antarctica? I intend to spend the next year refocusing on ancient Egypt.

I've been out of ancient Egypt for quite a while, but I've recently mended my fences and established a new friendship with Zahi Hawass, who is the leading Egyptian Egyptologist. And I hope to work with Zahi rather than...

We've buried our old conflict, and there was a conflict between us. We've decided that is not fruitful for either of us. He has his point of view, I respect it. And it's based on his lifetime exposure to the mysteries of ancient Egypt. And he comes at it from a mainstream archaeological point of view.

I've been exposed to ancient Egypt for 30 years and I'm coming at it from an alternative point of view and how interesting to work together to, it's the first time I might have a really constructive long-term working relationship with a archaeologist. So, and it's odd because Zahi and I were once at Dagestan but

But, you know, we both we're both getting old and we both feel that there's no point in having bitterness in life. So I want to get back to ancient Egypt and I want to spend a lot more time there. I think Egypt is the heart of the mystery. That's where ultimately all the stories will come out. I originally had this plan that obviously you're not aware of because I never told you. Yeah.

But we may be able to make it work, I guess, with your newfound Egyptian contact and your next focus. I wanted to do a podcast...

at sunrise in front of the pyramids of Giza with you at some point. I imagine that getting the license from the Egyptian government may be difficult. I imagine that all of the technical problems, all the rest of it. But if and when you're ready to do that, I've got the team that can put it together. So I think we could make it happen. I think we could make it happen. But I would say what you want is sunrise by the Sphinx or between the Sphinx and

and the second pyramid behind the sun. - I'm happy to negotiate. - Looking precisely in the direction of the gaze of the Sphinx and watch the sun come over the horizon

directly in the island of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is oriented perfectly to the sunrise at dawn on the spring equinox. I will allow you to contribute to the location, but maybe we can make that work. Graham Hancock, ladies and gentlemen, Graham, I really appreciate you. I appreciate your bravery to be able to go and do this stuff. The new series, which I got early access to, which is pretty sweet on Netflix, is really awesome. I actually prefer the second series to the first one. I think that the pacing is awesome. It's engaging. Where should people go and what can they expect over the next however long?

Well, the series goes public on Netflix. It's released on Netflix on the 16th of October, Wednesday, the 16th of October. So anybody anywhere in the world who has Netflix will be able to watch Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 from the 16th of October 2024 onwards. And that's one of the great things about Netflix is that when you put...

a year and a half of effort into making something on this scale, it doesn't just disappear with one showing. It stays there for a long period of time. So people can view it even a year or two years or three years after it was first released.

And to keep up to date with everything else that you're doing? My website is the primary focus, grahamhancock.com. And of course, I have a substantial Facebook page. I have a personal page, but I would look up author Graham Hancock. It's my author page that is my main Facebook page. And I have a Twitter account as well. Maybe we can put them under the description when you release this. Thank you. Graham, I appreciate you. Thank you. Good to be with you.

Offense. Get away. Yeah. Offense.