Graham Hancock
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, independently and by coincidence. And by coincidence, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, China, they all pop up at pretty much the same time. So that is the mainstream view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Oh, definitely, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you're seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of years before evolution. Sumer emerges. But what's happening now, really, I spent much of the 90s and the late 1980s investigating this issue of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But by 2002, when I published a book called Underworld, which was the most massive and most heavy book that I've ever written because I was writing very defensively at the time,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Um, by the time I finished that book, my wife, Santa, and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world, looking for structures underwater, often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they'd seen underwater. By the time that book was finished, I, I thought, actually, I've done this story. I've walked the walk. I really don't have much more to say about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I, I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind recently retitled visionary and that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in in the evolution of human human culture and i didn't think that i would go back to the lost civilization issue But Gobekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The more and more discoveries there, the 11,600-year date from Enclosure D, which has the two largest megalithic pillars. And I reached a point where I realized I have to get back in. I have to get back in the water. And I have to investigate this again. And Gobekli Tepe was a game changer. But I think it's a game changer for everything. Because Gobekli Tepe... the extraordinary nature of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
We're looking at a major megalithic site which is at least five and a half thousand years older than, say, Gigantia in Malta, which was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And this led, of course, to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of having the world's oldest megalithic site and from archaeologists. And this, in turn, has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region and what they're finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus is what Turkish archaeologists are now calling the Taz-Tepeler civilization. They're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
very definite identifying characteristics semi-subterranean circular structures the use of t-shaped megalithic pillars sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at gobekli tepe it's clear that gobekli tepe now was not the beginning of this process it was actually in a way the end of this process it was the summation of everything that that stone hills civilization had had achieved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But what is becoming clear is that this is a period before the foundation of Gobekli Tepe. As far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Gobekli Tepe. But of course, there's a lot of Gobekli Tepe still underground. So we can't say for sure that that's the oldest, but it's the oldest so far excavated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
What we're seeing is that in that whole region around there, something was in motion, and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And this is where these two dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I'll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago. So Gobekli Tepe's construction date, if it is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
11,600 years ago, if they don't find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas. But the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form at Gobekli Tepe. And After the construction of Gobekli Tepe, in fact, even during the construction of Gobekli Tepe, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The people who created Gobekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning. But by the time Gobekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and then topped off with a hill, Which is why Gobekli Tepe is called what it is. Gobekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill or the hill of the naval.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
For a long time, Gobekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, Gobekli Tepe is, first of all, the oldest fossil. fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn't mean the older ones won't be found, but it is the oldest so far found. The part of the site that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site, we do know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
My first visit to Gobekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt, who died a year later, was very generous to me and showed me around the site for over a period of three days. And he He explained to me that they've already used ground-penetrating radar on the site, and they know that there's much more Gobekli Tepe still underground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So anything is possible in terms of the dating of Gobekli Tepe. But what we have at the moment... is a series of almost circular but not quite circular enclosures which are walled with relatively small stones and then inside them you have pairs of megalithic pillars and the archetypal part of that site
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
is enclosure D, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct. They're substantial, hefty pieces of stone. It isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20-foot tall or 20-ton megalith, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. There's nothing magical or really weird about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Human beings can do that. And always have. Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It's within 200 meters of the main enclosure. So that's not a mystery. But the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture, this massive structure, massive megalithic pillars appear. And the pillars, one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And there is good work that's been done which suggests that enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star Sirius. And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there. Now you asked how Gobekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey of that pot-bellied hill in the 1960s by some American archaeologists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And they were looking, absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic area. And they had found some Paleolithic flints, Upper Paleolithic flints around there, so it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed, sticking out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut stone, bits of very large and very finely cut stone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archaeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age. And they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine remains. And they abandoned the site and never looked at it further.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And it wasn't until the German Archaeological Institute got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius, had real insight into this and started to dig at Gobekli Tepe that they realized what they'd found, that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And they'd found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that's where agriculture at any rate in Europe and Western Asia begins. It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was created by hunter-gatherers, yeah. There was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Gobekli Tepe. But by the time Gobekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down and buried, agriculture was all around it. And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Is it around that similar time? It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago, to about 8,400 BC. So around 1,200 years, it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site. And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture growing. I'm going to use the word being introduced. There'd been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And to me, that's another of the mysteries about Gobekli Tepe. And then with the new work that's being done, we realized that it's part of a much wider phenomenon, which spreads across an enormous distance. And the puzzling thing is that after Gobekli Tepe, there almost seems to be a decline. Things fall down again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia. But agriculture has taken a firm route by then. Actually, one other thing, I'll just say this in passing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
When I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archaeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, and that Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers. who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so annoying to archaeologists as it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
This is the out of Africa theory. I think it's more than a theory. It's really strongly evidenced. Why? Because we're part of the great ape family and it's an African family. There's no doubt that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and... The astonishingly distant travels that they undertook. Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the next hill. And I think that goes very deep into human character. And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of humanity. people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archaeological record, which await to be discovered. And, of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archaeology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archaeology is not on its own enough to suggest that we're missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000-year gap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world. And They're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another and that are also distant from one another in time. They don't necessarily occur at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And this is where I think that archaeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story. So there are particular issues. For example, the notion of the afterlife destiny of the soul, what happens to us when we die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do think about, what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America through Mexico through into North America, but it's also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we're looking at is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is this sequence of numbers that are
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
result of the precession of the equinoxes. At least I think that's the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend. Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you're based, back in the 60s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And Hertha von Deschend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. And they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill. And Hamlet's Mill... differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I'll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Santillana and van der Schind are pointing out that knowledge of procession is much much older than that thousands of years older than that and and they do actually trace it I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly to some almost unbelievable ancestor Civilization reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this this mystery in the first place Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Now the procession of the equinoxes to give it its full name is is results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet of course is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So if you imagine the extended north pole of the Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star, precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth. Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended north pole of the Earth points at empty space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac, that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The we're seeing what's in direct line with the Sun in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the Sun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So at different times of the year, the Sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today we live in the age of Pisces, and it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where I differ from archaeology. I think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the spring equinox. The question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox? Right now, it's Pisces. In another 150 years or so, it'll be Aquarius. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians, it was Aries, going back to the time of Ramesses or before. Before that, it was Taurus, and so on and so forth. It's backwards through the zodiac until 12,500 years ago, you come to the age of Leo, when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the spring equinox. Now, this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The whole cycle, and it is a cycle, it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years. Put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years. That may be a convention. Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more, but you're talking fractions. It's in that area, 25,920 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger. It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it's difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You've got to pass it on. And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santidhyana and Vandeshan call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of procession, and selected the key numbers of procession, of which the most important number, the governing number, is the number 72. But we also have numbers related to the number 72.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
72 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by 2 is 54. These numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who were involved in killing the god Osiris in ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432,000 in the Rig Vesa. 432,000 is a multiple of 72.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And at Angkor in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Thom. And on that bridge, you have figures on both sides, sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vazuki. And what they're doing is they're churning the milky ocean. It's the same metaphor of churning and turning that's defined in the story of Hamlet's Mill, of Amloddy's Mill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108. 108 is 72 plus 36. It's a precessional number, according to the work that Santillana and Van Deschen did. And the fascination with this number system and its discovery all around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
is one of the puzzles that intrigue me and suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very widely around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's no light pollution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright, and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was an overwhelming presence, and that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it's hard to miss... when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun, over the course of the solar year, is month by month rising against the background of different constellations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then there's a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards, and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac. I think it would have been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek constellation,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
convention, but that the constellations were there, I think was very clear, and that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky, which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah. Let's not underestimate oral traditions. Oral traditions, that's something we've lost in our culture today. One of the things that happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory. Actually, there's a nice story from ancient Egypt about the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Look at this gift, he says to a mythical pharaoh of that time. Look at the gift that I am giving humanity. Writing, this is a wonderful thing. It'll enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose. And the pharaoh in this story replies to him, no, you have not given us a wonderful gift. You have destroyed the art of memory. We will forget everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context. And actually, that's a very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time. One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history, is human beings love stories. We love great stories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And So carefully done that actually it doesn't matter whether the storyteller knows that they're passing on that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it's repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I take them very seriously. And the other... There's many reasons, but... I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm. within human memory. I mean, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I mean, the best known one, of course, is the K-Pg event, as it's now called, that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million or 66 million years ago. But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I think it's an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm of which one of, but not the only, distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater. The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archaeological explanation is, look,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
People suffer local floods all the time. I mean, as we're talking, there's flooding in Florida. But I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood. They know it's local. But that's the argument largely of archaeology dealing with the flood myths, that some local population experienced a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
a nasty local flooding event, and they decided to say that it affected the whole world. I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the Ice Age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yes. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short... is not a lunatic fringe theory, as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It's the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archaeology and including oceanography as well. And they are collectively puzzled
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the earth. You can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see it's about the width of a human hand. And there's a drawer there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time. And that drawer has revealed the sides of the drawer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And you can see the cross section. And in the cross section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the earth. And it contains evidence of wildfires. There's a lot of soot in it. There are also nanodiamonds in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that's been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade. There are carbon microspherules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact. I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Lewis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, Initially, their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater. And for a long time, they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But when they finally did produce that deeply buried Csikszentmihalyi crater, that's when People started to say, yeah, they have to be right. But they weren't relying on the crater. They were relying on the impact proxies. And they're the same impact proxies that we find in what's called the Younger Dryas boundary layer all around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So it's the fact that at the moment when the Earth tips into a radical climate shift, it's been warming up. for at least 2,000 years before 12,800 years ago. People at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief. You know, we've been living through this really cold time, but it's getting better. Things are getting better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12,860 years ago, There's a massive global plunge in global temperatures, and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age. And it's almost literally overnight. It's very, very, very rapid. Normally, in an epoch when the Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. And then equally dramatically and equally suddenly, the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea called Meltwater Pulse 1b, round about 11,600 years ago. So this is a period which is very tightly defined. It's a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's when the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas, and it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part, And the main theory that's been put forward up to now, and I don't dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream, basically, which is part of the central heating system of our planet. So no wonder it became cold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But what's not really been addressed before is why that happened. Why? gulf stream was cut why a sudden pulse of melt water went into the world ocean and and it was so much of it and it was so cold that actually stopped the gulf stream in its tracks that's where the younger dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem now
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The hypothesis, of course, is broader than that. Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. They have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact event or events was what we now call the torrid meteor stream, which the Earth still passes through twice a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's now about 30 million kilometers wide. It takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit. It passed through it in June and it passes through it at the end of October.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The suggestion is that the Taurid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago, came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the Sun and went into orbit around the Sun, an orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, The likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments, because these are chunks of rock held together by ice. And as they warm up, they split and disintegrate and break into pieces. As it passed through that, its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the torrid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America as far east as Syria. And that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would have caused craters, although there certainly were some. We're talking about airbursts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter, and it's coming in very fast into the Earth's atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the Earth. It's going to blow up in the sky. And the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on the 30th of June, 1908. The Tunguska event was nobody disputes. It was definitely an airburst of a cometary fragment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the date is interesting because the 30th of June is the height of the beta Taurids. It's one of the two times when the Earth is going through the Taurid meteor stream. Well, luckily, that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited, but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the Taurid meteor stream and about the risk of... cosmic impact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So the suggestion is that it wasn't one impact, it wasn't two impacts, it wasn't three impacts, it was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet, coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap, largely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Some of them may also have hit the Northern European ice cap, resulting in that sudden, otherwise unexplained, flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
um and and uh caused the cooling that then that then took place but this was a disaster for life all over the planet and and it's interesting that one of the sites where they find the younger dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz the carbon microspherules the nano diamonds the trinitite and so on and so forth
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
All of those impact proxies are found at Abu Huraira. That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago, and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And it's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening, by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Abu Huraira. This is a theory, the Younger Dryas Impact. It's a hypothesis, actually. It's not even a theory. A theory is, I think, considered a higher level than a hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's why it's the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. And of course, it has many opponents, and there are many who disagree with it. And there have been a series of... peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. One, I think, was in 2011. It was called a requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And there's one just been published a few months ago or a year ago, you know, called a complete refutation of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title. So it's a hypothesis that has its opponents. And even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Robert Shock from Boston University, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall. He doesn't go for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. fully accepts that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place, but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying. It's the Younger Dryas that's central to what I'm saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger. Something caused it. I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we're looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation. But I don't mind other explanations. It's good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet. And that word advanced civilization... This is another word that is easily misunderstood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I've tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved something certain things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world and are a category of ancient maps called portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople. The portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they're extremely accurate maps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas. For example, on these Portolano-style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they based their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes. Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison's chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea. So you could have the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time, and then you could work out your longitude.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is, these portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the Ice Age. They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula. And the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that was the case during the Ice Age. That was the Sunda shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by archaeology, which says, oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it. So they put a fictional landmass there. I don't think that makes sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age. But that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following that exploration instinct, that they knew how to navigate. They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before. They knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Those maps... were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and recopied. We don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it's likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I suggest it's likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, and that's where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yes, that's about as far as I would take it. And when I say that it, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I'm referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I'm not saying that they were building steam engines. I don't see any evidence for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
building tricks and skills of how to well definitely and this again is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza plateau in Egypt with the three great pyramids and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubix, who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
John West picked that up, and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt, and he was… hugely versed in ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right. Maybe there was some kind of flooding here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that's when he brought Robert Schock, second person I'd like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Schock to Giza. And Schock was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the ire of Egyptologists, and say, well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least 1,000 years of heavy rainfall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And as Shock's calculations have continued, as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery, he's continuously pushed that back. And he's now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12,500 years ago, during the Younger Dryas. for the creation of the Great Sphinx. Of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
was a completely different place during the Ice Age. There were rivers in it. There were lakes in it. It was fertile. It was possibly densely populated. And there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Boval. Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He's got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And it does take a genius sometime to make these connections, because nobody noticed it before, that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt. And skeptics will say, well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want, but Orion actually isn't any old constellation. Orion was the god Osiris in the sky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu, and they recognize it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. What's being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It's not just a random constellation. And then, when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today, and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago, it's not precisely related to how Orion's Belt looked at that time. There's a bit of a twist. They're not quite right. But as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
and back and back, and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago, in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly. They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground. And that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx an equinoctial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this for themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx, and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. But the question is, what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12,500 years ago, it was the constellation of Leo. And actually, the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely. And that it, over the thousands of years, it became damaged. It became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
By the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, the head of the lion, original lion head, would have been a complete mess. And we suggest that it was then re-carved into a pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre, but there's no real strong resemblance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But it's definitely wearing the nemesis headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. And we think that that's the result of a re-carving of what was originally not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument. It wouldn't make sense if you create an equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre, 4,500 years ago, and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I mean, it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high, and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, you would be better... You'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the Sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies, and putting on the ground, as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau It's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But the fact that the principal monuments of the Giza Plateau, the three great pyramids and the Great Sphinx, all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, to me is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually, if you look at computer software at the sky at that time, you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the River Nile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen as the site for this very special place. So the point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground which memorializes a very ancient date does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago. From the ancient Egyptian point of view, you're there 4,500 years ago, and there's a time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
8,000 years before that, which is very, very, very important to you, you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we're looking at, except for one thing, and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx. And we're pretty sure that the Sphinx at least does date back to 12,500 years ago. And with it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
the megalithic temples, the so-called Vali Temple, which stands just just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx Temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The Sphinx Temple has largely been destroyed, but the Vali Temple, attributed to Khafre, on no good grounds whatsoever, is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each. And yet, it has been... remodeled, refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there. So I think Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They were closely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramids as we see them today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older, and that when we look at the Three Great Pyramids, we're looking at a renovation and a restoration and an enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually, the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, and there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today, but the... the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing, is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? And the timeline... that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid, is the pyramid of the Pharaoh Djoser, the step pyramid at Saqqara, about a hundred years or so before the Giza pyramids were built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then we have this explosion in the Fourth Dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to a single pharaoh, Sneferu, who built, supposedly, the pyramid at Maidum and the two pyramids at Dashur, the Bent and the Red Pyramids. And then within that same hundred year span, we have the Giza pyramids being built. This is according to the Orthodox chronology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then suddenly, once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt. And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place, whereas the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti About which there is some controversy. Basic statistics, it's a six million ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's aligned almost perfectly to true north, south, east and west within three sixtieths of a single degree. Sixtieths because degrees are divided into degrees. And it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing. Plus it's very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You know, in the 9th century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place. But there was an Arab caliph, Caliph al-Mamun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the North Face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was. But he figured, if there's an entrance to this thing, it's going to be in the North Face somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So he put together a team of workers and they went in with sledgehammers and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. And they cut their way into the Great Pyramid for a distance of maybe 100 feet. And then the hammering that they did
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
dislodge something they heard a little bit further away something big falling and they realized there was a cavity there and they started heading in that direction and then they joined the internal passageway of the system of the great pyramid the descending and the ascending corridors that go up when you go up the ascending corridor every
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
One of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor, and it's above the so-called Queen's Chamber, you go up the Grand Gallery, you're eventually going to come to what is known as the King's Chamber, in which there is a sarcophagus. And that sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus already in place. Above the king's chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the king's chamber of the weight of the monument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down, where more weight was involved, you have the queen's chamber and there are no such relieving chambers above that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vise, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place, allegedly found, well, he claims he found the graffiti, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang naming the pharaoh Khufu. And it's true, I've been in that chamber and there is the cartouche of Khufu there, quite recognizable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But the dispute around it is, is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the old kingdom or whether Howard Weiss actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jaf papirai, where on the Red Sea, a diary, the diary of an individual called Merer was found. And he talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid. And it's clear that what he's talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He's not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
He's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You've got to go down a 26-degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you're going to walk a distance of about, not walk, you're going to eight walk. You're almost going to have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because they're only three feet, five inches high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. The theory of Egyptology... is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But after cutting out that 300-foot-long, 26-degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there, and they built
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
what's now known as the queen's chamber as his burial chamber but then they decided that wouldn't do either so they then built the king's chamber and that's where the pharaoh is supposed to have been buried those arab raiders under khalif mamun didn't find anything in the great pyramid at all so your idea is that uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Mm-hmm. That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when the gods walked the earth. This is when seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt, and that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There are king lists, by the ancient Egyptians themselves, there are king lists that go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt. Considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists, but nevertheless, it's interesting that there's that reference to remote time. Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The followers of Horus are one of those, specifically tasked. with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods. The souls of Pe and Neken are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Younger Dryas cataclysm
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that they are referred to in the Edfu building texts as seven sages, because that repeats again and again. It's also in Mesopotamia, it's seven sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
of architecture and of astronomy it's found it's found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in giza who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter foragers who lived at giza at that time and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter foragers but it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time and that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years, and finally it bursts into full form in the fourth dynasty in ancient Egypt. And, you know, the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn't be We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for eight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, this is where I'm often accused of presenting a God of the gaps argument, that I think there was a lost civilization because there's lots of the earth that archaeologists have never looked at. Of course, I'm not thinking that. These are very special gaps that I'm interested in. And I'm interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's not just because there are gaps in the archaeological record. It's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Ice Age. And they specifically include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the Ice Age and went through this warm, wet period when it was very, very fertile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Certainly some archaeology has been done in the Sahara, but it's fractional. It's tiny. And I think if we want to get into the origins, true origins of ancient Egyptian civilization, of the peoples of ancient Egypt, we need to be looking in the Sahara for that. And the Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six. And then you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. It's well established that sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight. It came in dribs and drabs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more rapidly. much more slowly. So that 400-foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years. But there are episodes within it, like Meltwater Pulse 1b, like Meltwater Pulse 1a, when the flooding was really immense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based. All I'm seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. And I'm not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the Ice Age. I mean, nobody smart would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous, frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the Ice Age. And that, of course, includes the coastlines. that are now underwater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Of course it includes the Sahara Desert, and of course it includes the Amazon Rainforest as well. All of these places I think are candidates for quote-unquote my lost civilization. And because I think largely from those ancient maps that it was a navigating, seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn't only in one place. It was probably in a number of places. And then I can only speculate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Maybe there was a cultural value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter-foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep their distance from them. Just as even today, there is a feeling that we shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Although, interestingly, some of those tribes are now using cell phones. That possibility may have been there in the past. And only when we come to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have outreach and actually to take refuge. amongst those hunter-forager populations. That is the hypothesis that I'm putting forward. I'm not claiming that it's a fact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But for me, it helps to explain the evidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's right. Very tiny percent. And even a tiny percent of every archaeological site has been studied by archaeologists, too. Typically, one to five percent of any archaeological site is excavated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Some kind of archive, some kind of hall of records. There's both mystical associations with the hall of records at Giza from people like the Edgar Cayce organization, There's also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt. It's quite present in ancient Egypt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So far, as far as I know, nobody has dug down beneath the Sphinx. And, of course, there's very good reasons for that. You don't want to damage the place too much. But let's call it the Hall of Records. I'd love to find that. But I think in a way, that's what Gobekli Tepe is. Gobekli Tepe is a hall of records.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You know, it's interesting that just as I've tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the three great pyramids of Giza match Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC, 12,500 BC. years ago or so. Pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Martin Swetman of Edinburgh University has brought forward the best work in this field, but it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Burley, who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings, which is in a posture very similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius. And on that outstretched wing is a circular object. And the suggestion is that it's marking the time when the sun was at the center of the dark rift in the Milky Way at the summer solstice 12,500 years ago. That's what it's marking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And it's interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar 40. Of course, it's controversial. Martin Swetman's ideas are by no means accepted by archaeology. But he's done very, very thorough, detailed statistical work on this, and I'm personally convinced. So we have a time capsule at Gobekli Tepe, which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before Gobekli Tepe was built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date as it is at present. The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the impact event. And then Giza does the same thing, but in much larger scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It uses massive megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture, which is sufficiently literate in astronomy, will be able to decode. We don't have to have a script that we can't read. like we do with the Indus Valley civilization or with the Easter Island script.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
We don't have to have a script that can't be interpreted. If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date. The Hoover Dam has a star map built into it. And that star map is part of an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the Hoover Dam. And what it does is it freezes the sky
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion. And Oscar Hansen, the artist who created that piece, said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture would be able to know the time of the dam's construction. So you can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think that, I think that, um, I can't speak of all archaeologists, but some archaeologists feel very territorial about their profession, and they do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders have a large platform. And that's I found that the attacks on me by archaeologists have increased step by step with the increase of my exposure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I wasn't very interesting to them when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called The Sign and the Seal. But When Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995 and became a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention and appear to have been regarded as a threat to them. And that is the case today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That is why Ancient Apocalypse Season 1 was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix. It's why the Society for American Archaeology wrote an open letter to Netflix asking Netflix to reclassify the series as science fiction. It's why they accused the series of anti-Semitism, misogyny, white supremacism, and a whole, I don't know, a whole bunch of other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's nothing to do with anything that's in the series. It was... It was like, we must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us. Certainly not a danger. There are many more dangerous things in the world than a television series going on right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But maybe it was seen as a danger to archaeology, that this non-archaeologist was in archaeological terrain and being viewed and seen and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem. And human nature being what it is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas and Flint Dibble, who's now teaching at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the UK, are both people who like to have media exposure. And John Hoopes had just recently started his YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for decades. for quite a while, a pretty small number of followers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think that they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention and that it's not right that I am and that the best way to stop that is to stop me, to shut me down, to get me cancelled, and basically requiring Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest to Netflix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would have effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series. It would no longer have been ranked under documentary. So it was a deliberate attempt to to shut me down. And I see that going on again and again. And it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary. I've become very defensive towards archaeology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I hit back after 30 years of these attacks on my work. I'm tired of it. And I do defend myself. And sometimes I'm perhaps over-vigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archaeology in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse. Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I've tried to reflect that in the second season and to bring also many more indigenous voices into the second season, as well as the voices of many more archaeologists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Keanu is genuinely curious about the past and very, very interested in it. And he's bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the past. He's speaking for every man in the series.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
No, I completely understand why that is the position of archaeology, because that's what they've found. Archaeology is very much wishing to define itself as a science, and it uses the techniques of weighing and measuring and counting are very key to what archaeology does. And in what they've found and what they've studied around the world, they don't see any traces of a lost civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the idea that... Besides, we live in a very politically correct world today, and the idea that some kind of lost civilization brought knowledge to other cultures around the world is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way. it triggers that aspect as well. But basically, I think majority of archaeologists are in complete good faith on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me. I think that what we're hearing from most archaeologists, some much more vicious than others, but what we're hearing from most archaeologists is this is what we found and we don't see evidence for a lost civilization in it. And to that, I... must reply, please look at the myths. Please consider the implications of the Younger Dryas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Please look at the ancient astronomy. Please look at those ancient maps and don't just dismiss them and sneer at them. And for God's sake, please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable and attractive during the Ice Age and that have hardly been studied by archaeology at all before you tell us that your theory is the only one that can possibly be correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
In fact, it's a very arrogant and silly position of archaeology because archaeological theories are always being overthrown. It can take years. It can take decades. It took decades in the case of the Clovis First hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. But sooner or later, a bad idea will be kicked out by a preponderance of evidence that that idea does not explain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
First of all, just very recently, and it can be found on my YouTube channel and it's signaled on my website, I have made a video, runs about an hour, which looks at a series of statements that Flint made during the debate, which I was not prepared to answer. And it turns out that some of those statements are not correct. The notion, for example, that there were three million shipwrecks,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
uh that have been mapped flint actually uses the word mapped three million shipwrecks that have been mapped at one point in the debate and i've i've put that clip into the video that i brought out that is not a fact that is an estimate a unesco estimate um and and actually in the small print on one of the slides that he has on the screen you can see the word estimate but he never
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness in the story that we are taught about our past. which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less straightforward evolutionary progress. We start out as hunter-foragers, Then we become agriculturalists. The hunter-forager phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
expresses that word out loud, so those who are listening to the podcast rather than watching it wouldn't even have a chance to see that. And I, sitting there in the studio, didn't see that word estimate either. And I didn't know that. I thought, my God, Flint has a point here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If there have been three million shipwrecks found and mapped, if that's the case, the absence of any shipwreck from a lost civilization of the Ice Age is a problem. But then I discovered that it isn't 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It's much, much less than that. And maybe it's 250,000, still a large number, but most of them from the last thousand years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And unfortunately, what Flint didn't go into, and perhaps he should have shared with the audience, and again, I go into this in the video, is that there is... indisputable evidence that human beings were seafarers as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, 100 kilometer ocean voyage but nevertheless it was an ocean voyage and it must have involved a large enough people, a large enough number of people to create a permanent population that wouldn't go extinct. The settlement of Cyprus is the same thing. It was always an island even during the Ice Age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either. But that doesn't mean that that thing didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I don't know what's on the other side of that water. You can't see 90 kilometers. Humans did it. Yeah. And again, it's that urge to explore. And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made the journey there and back. They ventured into the water. They definitely had boats. And lo and behold, after a two or three day voyage, they ended up on a coastline. You're an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You've got my relatively straightforward island hopping where each island is within sight of each other as far as Timor. And when you get to Timor, suddenly you can't island hop anymore. There's an expansive ocean that you can't see across. But that urge to explore, that curiosity that is central to the human condition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
would undoubtedly have led some adventurous individuals to want to find out more and even be willing to risk their lives. And that first reconnoitering of what lay beyond that strait would have undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals, not enough to create a permanent population in Australia. But when they came back with the good news that there's a whole land there,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's the land that geographers call Sahul, which just as Sunda was the Ice Age, Indonesian and Malaysian peninsula all joined together into one landmass. So Sahul was New Guinea joined to Australia. So they would have made landfall in New Guinea. And then they think, well, here is this vast, open, incredible land. We need to bring more people here. And that would have involved larger craft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You need to bring people with resources and you need to bring enough of them. both men and women, in order to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct. And it's the same in Cyprus. There, the detailed work that's been done suggests very strongly that we're looking at planned migrations of groups of people in excess of a thousand at a time, bringing animals with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And this certainly would have involved multiple boats and boats of a significant size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
None whatsoever. The oldest boat that's ever been found in the world is the Dokos shipwreck off Greece, which is around 5,000 years old, if I recall correctly. So everything that makes a boat is lost to time. Yes, boats can be preserved under certain circumstances. There's a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea, almost two miles deep. I didn't know the Black Sea was that deep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And there's no oxygen down there. That is more than 2,000 years old and is still in pretty much perfect condition. But in other conditions... the structure of the ship evaporates. Sometimes what you're left with is the cargo of the ship, and you could say there was a ship that sank here, but the ship itself has gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The fact is we know that our ancestors were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago, and no ship has survived to testify to that, yet we accept that they were.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's not impossible. I think it's quite unlikely, given the very thin survival of ships the further back you go in time, with the oldest, as I say, being about 6,000 years old now. And then the other thing to take into account is the Younger Dryas event itself and the cataclysmic circumstances of that event. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
the roiling of the seas that would have taken place then how much would have survived in a, in a, in a boat accident at that time would have survived for thousands of years afterwards. I, I, I'm not sure, but I, I don't give up hope it's possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, my takeaway from that debate is that I should have been better prepared and I should have been less angry. I have to say that Flint had really disturbed me with these constant snide, not quite exact references to racism and white supremacism in my work. I detest such things. And to have those labels stuck on me. He's always avoided taking direct responsibility, pretty much always avoided.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I mean, this is where it's also important to mention that anatomically modern humans were not the only humans. We had Neanderthals from, I don't know, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. They were certainly human because anatomically modern humans interbred with them and we carry Neanderthal genes. There were the Denisovans, maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's one example that I include in the video I've made where he really hasn't successfully avoided it. But in most cases, he's trying to say that I rely on sources that were racist. but that he's not saying that I myself am a racist. But the end result of those statements is that people all around the world came to the conclusion that Graham Hancock is a racist and a white supremacist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that really got under my skin, and it really upset me, and I felt angry about it, and I felt that I was there to defend Ancient Apocalypse season one, whereas in fact what I was there to do was to listen to a series of lectures where an archaeologist tells me what archaeologists have found,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
and that somehow I'm to deduce that from what they have found, they're not going to find anything else, at least not anything to do with the lost civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented. And I felt that I, as a human being, was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful. My wife and I have six children between us, and we have nine grandchildren. And of those nine grandchildren, seven are of mixed race. And this is my family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And these are kids who are going to grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that grandpa was some kind of racist. You know, this is a personal issue for me. And I'm afraid I carried that personal anger into the debate. And it made me less effective than I should have been. But ultimately, I do want to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He's got a very sharp mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
He's a very clever man. And he's very fast on his feet. And I recognize that. I was definitely up against a superior debater in that debate. I'm not sure that I have those debating skills, and I certainly didn't have them on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else, which is that he was willing to be there. Most archaeologists don't want to talk to me at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudo-archaeologist or a purveyor of pseudo-archaeological theories. They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there, but they actually don't want to sit down and confront me. At least Flint was willing to do that. And I'm grateful to him for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I think in that sense, it is an important encounter between people with, let's say, an alternative view of history and those with the very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us. And he's also a very determined character. He doesn't give up. So all of those things about him I admire and respect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And again, interbreeding took place. They're obviously a human species. So, you know, we've got this background of humans who didn't look quite like us. And then we have anatomically modern humans. And I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Gebeler Hood in Morocco. and date to about 310,000 years ago. So the question is, what were our ancestors doing after that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But I think he fought dirty during the debate, and I've said exactly why in this video that I now have up on YouTube.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's pretty interesting. It's very interesting. It's a very important discipline. And I've said many times before publicly, I couldn't do any of my work without the work that archaeologists do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don't study what archaeologists study, but nevertheless, the data that archaeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do. But when I look at the Great Sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the pharaoh Khafre,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription that describes it to Khafre. And in fact, the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of Khufu. I am not looking at what Egyptologists study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Khafre connection. At Gobekli Tepe, I'm not really looking what archaeologists look at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I'm looking at the alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track precession of the star Sirius over a period of time. Archaeologists aren't interested in any of that. So I value and respect archaeology. I think it's an incredible tool for investigating our past. But I wish archaeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it and a slightly opener perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's as though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as quote-unquote dangerous, because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public and think the general public are just going to accept that much later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Actually, by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today. And behaving in a snobbish, arrogant way, we archaeologists are the only people who are really qualified to speak about the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship. And I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was very much the case with archaeologist Marty Parsonin from the University of Helsinki and with geographer Alcea Ranzi, Brazilian geographer, very, very senior figure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
um who i worked with in in the amazon for season two of ancient apocalypse looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the amazon jungle and which more and more are now being found with lidar indeed we found some of them ourselves with lidar while we were there yeah that was an incredible part of the show that i got a chance to preview it's like there's all this earthworks yeah the traces of things built on the ground that probably you can only really
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
the sky with the sky yeah and and and a very good knowledge of geometry as well because these are geometrical structures and some of them even even seem to incorporate geometrical games almost of the kind like squaring the circle uh it's not quite that but you have a lovely square earthwork with a lovely circle earthwork right in the middle of it Whatever else they were, they were geometers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They were not just builders of fantastically huge earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon, not just builders of cities that we now know existed in the Amazon, but that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's what I love about the past is the mystery that's there. And that's another thing that I regret about some archaeologists is that their mission seems to be to drain all mystery out of the past. to suck it dry like some kind of vampire, sucking the blood out of the past and to reduce it to a series of numbers that appear to be scientific. I think that's most unfortunate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The past is deeply mysterious. The whole story of life on Earth is deeply mysterious. I mean, we were talking about the timeline of human beings, but if you go back to the formation of the Earth itself, If I've got the figures right, it's about four and a half billion years ago that the Earth supposedly formed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I think we can include the Neanderthals and the Denisovans in that general picture. And why did it take so long? This is one of the puzzles, one of the questions that bother me. Why did it take so long when we have creatures who are physically identical to us?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It was then incredibly hot and inhospitable to life for the next several hundred million years. But it was actually Francis Crick who pointed out something odd, that within 100 million years of the Earth being cool enough to support life, there's bacterial life all over the planet. And Crick wrote a book called Life Itself that was published in 1981.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And he suggested that life had been brought here by a process of panspermia. Now, that's an idea that's around in circulation, that comets may carry bacteria which can seed life on planets. But Crick actually in life itself was talking about directed panspermia. He envisaged... This is Crick, not me. He envisaged an alien civilization far away across the galaxy which faced...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in the neighborhood. They were highly advanced. Their first thought might have been, let's get ourselves off the planet and go and populate some other planet. But the distances of interstellar space were so great. So their second thought was, let's preserve our DNA. Let's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Put bacteria, genetically engineered bacteria into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions. And bottom line of Crick's theory in life itself is one of those cryogenic containers containing bacterial life from another solar system crashed into the early Earth. And that's why life began so suddenly here on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The potential for that magic is there. The potential is there. And evolutionary forces will work upon it in different ways in different environments. But the potential is there. Yes, it's something that we would do. If we were facing a complete extinction of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be made to preserve it somehow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
We cannot actually weigh and measure their brains, but from the work that's been done on the crania, it looks like they had the same brains that we do with the same wiring. So if we've been around for 300,000 plus years at least... And if ultimately in our future was the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn't it happen sooner? Why did it take so long?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, yeah. I think that Homo sapiens is the tail end of a very long, deep series of mysteries that goes back right to the beginning of life on this planet and probably long before, actually. Because this planet is part of the universe and God knows what else is out there in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, it's interesting. There's no doubt that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for at least 10,000 years, probably more than that. And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals, that we killed them off. But at the same time, we were into breeding with the Neanderthals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They are still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There's another theory that I've read about. There is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals, that there was ritual cannibalism took place amongst Neanderthals, and particularly the eating of human brains. And this can cause kuru. which can kill off whole populations. That's another suggestion of whether Neanderthals died out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's lots of possibilities that have been put forward. Maybe we just out-competed them. Maybe anatomically modern humans had some brain connections that they didn't have, even though the Neanderthal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings. As the old saying goes, size isn't everything. Maybe we just had a more compact, more efficient brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the rise of Homo sapiens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The fact that Homo erectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say that's what I think I'm doing. I'm exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way, making my own path and defining my own route.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Why was it such a long time? Even the story of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing. I remember a time when it was said that there hadn't been anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago. And then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia and then 310,000 years ago. There's a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think that shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science. When I spend time with shamans in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They're always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms, for example, of the ayahuasca brew to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way. The invention of curare is a remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down to shamans in the Amazon. They are the scientists of the hunter-forager state of society. And they were the ancient leaders of human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So I think all civilization arises out of shamanism. And shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor where experimentation is undertaken and exploration and investigation of the environment around us. And what I'm suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did and used that study of the skies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
develop navigational techniques and and were able to sail and explore the earth but that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shamans are still using in the amazon to this day and and i do see them as as scientists in a very proper use of the word but do you think something like ayahuasca was a part of that process
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yes, ayahuasca is the result of shamanistic investigation of what's available in the Amazon. Of course, ayahuasca is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today, and some people see it as a miracle cure for all kinds of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is. Perhaps it can be in certain ways. Ayahuasca itself is not an Amazonian word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It comes from the Quechua language, and it means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead. But the ayahuasca vine is only one of two principal ingredients in the ayahuasca brew. And the other ingredient are leaves that contain dimethyltryptamine. And there are two sources of that. One is a bush called Cicotria viridis. That's its botanical name. They call it chacruna in the Amazon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And its leaves are rich in dimethyltryptamine, DMT, which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic known to science. And the other source comes from another vine, Diplopteris cabrerana, which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT. So the ayahuasca vine on its own is not going to give you a visionary journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the leaves that contain DMT on their own, whether they come from diplopteris or whether they come from chacruna, are not going to give you a visionary journey. And the reason they're not going to give you the visionary journey is because of the enzyme monoamine oxidase in the gut that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally. Basically, DMT is not accessible orally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
unless you combine it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about science in the Amazon, because there's so many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands different species of plants and trees in the Amazon, and they've gone around and they found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary visionary experiences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
to arrive at that. Exactly, exactly. To realize that this is something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So ayahuasca is the form that is made with the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of the chacruna plant. But yagé,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's made from the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of another vine, Diploploris cabrerana, which contain not only NNDMT, which is the DMT that everybody's pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5-MeO DMT. And the Yahé experience, which I have also had, in my view, is more intense and more powerful, almost to the point of being overwhelming, than the ayahuasca experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But the big question for me in that timeline is why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why do we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago, to start seeing the beginnings, what are selected as the beginnings of civilization in places like Turkey, for example. And then there's a relatively slow process of adopting agriculture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But the result of this sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost retched just smelling it in the cup, but then unleashes these
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
extraordinary experiences and it isn't just pretty visuals it's the sense of encounters with sentient others that there are sentient beings that somehow we're surrounded by a realm of sentience that is not normally accessible to us and that what the ayahuasca brew and certain other psychedelics like like some psilocybin mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
LSD can do it, but ayahuasca is the master in this, of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm, other world. And of course, the hardline rational scientists will say that's just all fantasies of your brain. But I don't think we fully understand or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I remain open to two possibilities, that consciousness is generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
we locked into the physical realm we need our everyday alert problem-solving state of consciousness and that's the state of consciousness that western civilization values and and and and highly encourages but these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Crick's role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix, that he finally got it under the influence of LSD. There's the classic example of Kerry Mullis and the polymerase chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So the notion that the alert problem-solving state of consciousness is the only valuable state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state. But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that we encounter, and not everybody encounters them, and you're certainly not going to encounter them on every ayahuasca trip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There are ayahuasca journeys where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips where actually you don't see visions as amongst the most valuable. And they say you are learning stuff that you're not remembering, but you're learning it anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
These sentient others that are encountered, what are they? Are they just figments of our brain on drugs? Or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality, which is inhabited by consciousness, which is in a non-physical form? And I'm equally open to that idea. I think that may be what is going on here with ayahuasca.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But the other thing is that there is a presence within the ayahuasca brew, and she is present both in ayahuasca and in Yahé. And that's one of the reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the ayahuasca vine, not the leaves. It's as though the vine has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And by 6,000 years ago, we see ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization. And we're then in the pre-dynastic period in ancient Egypt as well, 6,000 years ago, beginning to see definite signs of what will become the dynastic civilization of Egypt about 5,000 years ago. And interestingly, round about the same time, you have the Indus Valley civilization popping up out of nowhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or Yahé, you drink it enough times. I've had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca. you definitely start to feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine and which most people in the West interpreted as feminine, and they call her Mother Ayahuasca.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit of Ayahuasca as male, but in all cases, that spirit is seen as a teacher. fundamentally what ayahuasca is. It's a teacher and it teaches moral lessons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that's fascinating that a mixture of two plants should cause us to reflect on our own behavior and how it may have hurt and damaged and affected others and fill us with a powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future. The more baggage you carry in your life, the more
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
of the beating that ayahuasca is going to give you until it forces you to confront and take responsibility for your own behavior. And that is an extraordinary thing to come from a plant brew in that way. And I think in, yes, I think ayahuasca is the most powerful of all the plant medicines for accessing these mysterious realms, but there's no doubt you can access them. They're all tryptamines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They're all related to one another in one way, You can access them through LSD, and you certainly can access them through psilocybe mushrooms as well in large enough dose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It is. And the curious thing is that the same iconography, people paint their visions after ayahuasca sessions. People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lascaux, for example, and of course they had access to psilocybe mushrooms in prehistoric Europe. there's a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is painted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I like to give credit where credit is due, and there are two names that need to be mentioned here. One is the late, great Terence McKenna and his book, Food of the Gods, where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human. That's what switched on the modern human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Fabulous book called The Mind in the Cave, where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock art all around the world
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered states of consciousness attempting to remember when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave. So typically you get a lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And those entities often are Therianthropes, part Therianthropes. part human in form, might have the head of a wolf and the body of a human being, might have the head of a bird and the body of a human being, and so on and so forth, and that they communicate with us in the visionary state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Interestingly, although this sounds like woo-woo, and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of at risk of their careers, there is very serious work now being done at Imperial College in London and at the University of California at San Diego, where volunteers are being given extended DMT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's a new technology, DMT-X, where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip, and it's possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT state, which normally when you smoke or vape DMT, you're looking, if you're lucky, at 10 minutes. Or if you're unlucky, if it's a bad journey, because those 10 minutes can seem like forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization. until the 1920s when railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins. I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. And these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally planned cities. Clearly, they're the work of an already sophisticated civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But with DMTX, with the drip feeding of DMT into the bloodstream, these volunteers actually could be kept in the peak state for hours. And unlike LSD, where you rapidly build up tolerance, nobody ever builds up tolerance to DMT. It always hits you with the same power, even if you took it yesterday and the day before and you're taking it tomorrow as well. it's still going to have that same power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's no tolerance there. So that's how they can use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state. And then when they debrief those volunteers, they're also putting them in MRI scanners and looking at what's happening in the brain. But when they debrief them, they're all talking. about encounters with sentient others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's even a group now called sentient others where people are exchanging, volunteers are now exchanging their experiences. They didn't do, they weren't allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment, but now that most of them have left it, they're exchanging their experiences. And it's all about encounters with sentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons. Now, to me, that's wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
What is going on here? How do we account for this? Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals, but the moral lessons that come with it, those are very odd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, and can help us to be better members of our own community. Right, with moral lessons. Yeah, more contributing members of our community, more caring, more nurturing members of our community. That's got to be good for any community. I've said this a dozen times, but I'll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
make it a law, an absolute law, that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position is president or head of state in any kind of way, that that person has to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first. They have to have 10 or 12 sessions of ayahuasca as a condition for applying for the job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I suspect that most who had had those experiences wouldn't want to apply for the job anymore. They would want to live a different kind of life. And those who did want to carry on being a leader of a nation would be very different people from the people who are leading the nations of the earth into chaos and destruction today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I have no doubt that it would be a better world. I mean, this raises an interesting point, which is the role of government in controlling our consciousness. And in my opinion, the so-called war on drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If I understand the Republican Party correctly, the Republican Party believes in individual freedom for adults as much as possible, and particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies. But In the case of even cannabis, I know that's one of the great things that's happening in America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's happening state by state where cannabis is being legalized and that draconian hand of government is being taken off the back of people who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol, which is glorified in our society. We cannot say that we are free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
if we allow a government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness while doing no harm to others. And the point there is we already have a whole raft of laws that deal with us when we do harm to others. Do we really need laws that tell us what we may or may not experience in the inner sanctum of our own consciousness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley civilization is that we find a steatite seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture. And that seal is 5,000 years old. And the yoga posture is Moolabandhasana, which involves a real contortion of the ankles and twisting the feet back. It's an advanced yoga posture. So there it is 5,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think it's a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty. And we would have much less drug problems And these drugs were all legalized and made available to people without shaming them, without punishing them in any way, but just part of normal social life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then you could be sure that you were getting good product rather than really shitty product, which has been cut with all sorts of other things. The way forward is for adults to take responsibility for their own behavior and for society to allow that to happen and not to have big government taking responsibility for decisions that should be in the hands of individuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
We've seen a revolution in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20, 25 years. They were in that highly demonized category. But again, it's one of those paradigms which gets overwhelmed by new evidence. And it began to be realized that psilocybin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people suffer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Post-traumatic stress disorder, the fear of death when you're suffering from terminal cancer can be overwhelming. And it's been found that psilocybin can remove that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive psilocybin journey they just go away there's really good science on this and and they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more we'll see it happening i'm not sure if it'll happen as much as as fast as i would like to see it happen in my lifetime but it is going to happen
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I was talking about ayahuasca and I was talking about the view that I hold very strongly that as long as we do no harm to others, sovereign adults should be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies and not face a jail sentence or shaming as a result. So it was a TEDx talk, not a TED talk, organized by a local TED group. They call them TEDx talks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I gave this talk about the war on consciousness. And it was immediately pulled down from Ted's main channel with all kinds of bizarre reasons being given. But unfortunately, it was too late because a number of people had already downloaded the talk and then uploaded it onto other YouTube channels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And actually, their banning of it made it go viral in a way that would not have happened otherwise. But again, it's a sign that that points of view that are not acceptable to those in positions of power are simply dismissed and shut down, or at least attempts are made to do so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
uh to humans from 100 years from now you bet it will especially if we harness psychedelics to investigate consciousness and and you know that is that is what is happening at uh at imperial college right now is is the investigation of the experience they're not looking there are other trials that are looking for the therapeutic potential of dmt but in this case
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
they're looking entirely at the experiences that people have and why they're so similar from people from different age groups and different genders and different parts of the world are all having the same experiences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga take to get to that place when it was already so advanced 5,000 years ago? What's the background to this? China, the Yellow River civilization. Again, it's around about the same period, 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, you get these first signs of something happening. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, but why not? We're a vehicle for consciousness, in my view. I think consciousness is present in all life on Earth. I don't think it's limited to human beings. We have the equipment to manifest and express that consciousness in the way that a dog, for example, doesn't have, or a snail doesn't have, or a pigeon doesn't have. But when I look at two pigeons sitting on my garden fence and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
rubbing up close to each other and enjoying each other's company and taking off together and hanging out together. I think they're conscious beings. And I think consciousness is everywhere. I think it's the basis of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And I suspect that fundamentally consciousness is non-physical and that it can manifest in physical forms where it can then have experiences that would not be available in the non-physical state. That's a guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And see if consciousness enters, if they become consciousness. Isn't there some suggestion that artificial intelligence is already becoming conscious?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, look how other people make us uncomfortable, too. I mean, look at the state of the world today. All the conflicts that are raging. That's because we're afraid. When I say we, I'm speaking nation by nation. We are afraid of other people. We fear that they're going to hurt us or damage us in some way, and so we seek to stop that. It's the root of many, many conflicts, this fear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And so fear of AI may not be such a good idea, after all. It might be very interesting to go down that route and see where it comes. Certainly, in terms of exploring consciousness, it is very interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, it can be destructive, and it can shut you down completely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, I'd really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built. And we now have, with new tech, with scanning technology, it's now become apparent that there are many major voids within the Great Pyramid. Right above the Grand Gallery, there's what looks like a second Grand Gallery that has been identified with remote scanning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's very odd that all around the world we have this sudden upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a natural evolutionary process that would lead to a civilization. And yet, certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these different civilizations. I just find that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up already, are being found as a result of this. So it may be that the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its secrets. I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It's designed to invite its own initiates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Some people aren't interested in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it and they're drawn towards it. And when they're drawn towards it, it immediately starts raising questions in their minds and they seek answers to their questions. So it's like saying, here I stand. investigate me, find out about me, figure out what I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Why have I got these two shafts cut into the side of the so-called Queen's Chamber? Why do they slope up through the body of the Great Pyramid? Why do they not exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid? Why, when we send a robot up those shafts, do we find them after about 160 feet blocked by a door with metal handles?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Why, when we drill through that door to see what's beyond it, three or four feet away, we see another door? It's like very frustrating, but it's saying to us, keep on exploring. If you're persistent enough, we'll eventually give you the answer. So I'm hoping that that answer will come as to how this most mysterious of monuments was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Certainly, I'm sure it was never a tomb or a tomb only. later pyramids might have been. Actually, no pharaonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid, but nevertheless, it's pretty clear that the later pyramids, with the pyramid texts written on the walls, like the Pyramid of Unas, Fifth Dynasty Pyramid at Saqqara, were tombs. But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
to make it a scale model of the Earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it six million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device. This is something that is asking us to understand it. And I hope we will understand it. And I hope Egyptologists will understand
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
be willing to set aside that prejudice that they're only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities. And as new tech is revealing these previously unknown inner spaces within the Great Pyramid, I think that's going to become more and more likely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, very, very much so. As above, so below. Which is an idea in the Hermetica. The god Hermes for the Greeks was the Greek version of Thoth, the wisdom god of ancient Egypt. And that's where that saying comes from. It comes from the Hermetica. But it's expressing an ancient Egyptian idea to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, ramps won't do it. Ramps won't do it, nor will wet sand. It's true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand. There are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the sledge pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that's a perfectly respectable way to move a 200-ton block of stone across sand, flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not going to help you get results.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
dozens of 70 ton granite blocks, 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King's chamber and the floor of the chamber above it and the roof of that chamber and the floor of the chamber above that and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there. Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If you're going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the Great Pyramid to complete your work, you're going to need a ramp that's going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10-degree slope. And it's calculated that a 10-degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And that ramp can't just be compacted sand since heavy objects are being hauled up. It's going to have to be made of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don't see any trace of those so-called ramps that are supposed to have been involved in the construction of the pyramid. I think we don't know. I think we have no idea it's built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That whole idea, very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas event. It was an extinction-level event. That's when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's why there's so many different theories. We haven't got the answer yet. But the how of it is one of the big mysteries from our past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
But what would last is massive megalithic structures like the Great Pyramid. That would last. And it could be used to send a message to the future. I think Gobekli Tepe serves a similar function. I mean, there it was. It was buried 10,400 years ago. And then for the next 10,000 years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It took the genius of Klaus Schmidt, the original excavator, to realize what he'd found and what it was. But the great thing about the sealing of Gobekli Tepe, the deliberate burial of Gobekli Tepe,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
is it means that no later culture trod over it and imposed their organic materials on it and messed up the dating sequences and so on and so forth or vandalized it or used it as a quarry it's all there intact so you mentioned that the pyramids and some of the other amazing things that humans have built has was the results of us humans struggling with our mortality
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
that's the that's the ultimate the ultimate goal that seems to me what's at the heart of many pyramids around the world is that they're connected in one way or another to the notion of death uh and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife and and this is of course the fundamental mystery that all human beings face we may we may wish to ignore it we may wish to pretend that it's not going to happen but we are of course all mortal um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Every one of us, all 8 billion or however many of us that are on the planet right now, we're all going to face death sooner or later. And the question is, what happens? And there are a few cultures that really intensely, deeply studied that mystery. We are not one of them. The general view of science, I think, is that we're accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's no more of us. There's no such thing as the soul. But that's not a proven point. There's no experiment that proves that's the case. We know we die, but we don't know whether there's such a thing as a soul or not. Yeah, it's a great mystery. It's a great mystery that we all share.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And those cultures that have investigated it, and ancient Egypt is the best example, have investigated it thoroughly and map out the journey that we make after death. But that notion of a journey after death and of hazards and challenges along the way, and ultimately of a judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That notion is found right around the world, and it even manifests into the three monotheistic faiths that are still present in the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I'm not afraid of death at all. I'm curious about death. I think it could be very interesting. I think it's the beginning of the next great adventure. So I don't fear it. And I would like to live as long as my body is healthy enough to make living worthwhile. But I don't fear death. What I do fear is pain. I do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the faculties can bring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's after that, it's after that event that we start seeing this, what are taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization. We come out of the upper Paleolithic as it's defined, the end of the old Stone Age, and into the Neolithic. And that's... when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But what happened before that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I do fear the cancers that can strike us down and riddle us with pain and agony. That I fear very, very much indeed. But death... It's going to come to all of us. I accept it. It's going to come to me. And I'm not going to say I'm looking forward to it, but when it happens, I'm going to approach it, I hope, with a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That there's something beyond this life. It isn't heaven. It isn't hell. But There's something. The soul goes on. I think reincarnation is a very plausible idea. Again, modern science would reject that. But there's the excellent work of Ian Stevenson, Children Who Remember Past Lives, who found that children up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives. And in cultures...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
where memories of past lives are discouraged, they tend not to express that much. But in cultures where memories of past lives are encouraged, like India, they do express it. And he found several subjects, children under the age of seven in India, who were able to remember specific details of a past life, and he was able to go to the place where that past life unfolded and validate those details.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So if consciousness is the basis of everything, if it's the essence of everything, and consciousness benefits in some way from being incarnated in physical form, then reincarnation makes a lot of sense. All the investment that the universe has put into creating this home for life may have a much bigger purpose than just accident. What a beautiful mystery this whole thing is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, we are immersed in mystery. We live in the midst of mystery. We're surrounded by mystery. And if we pretend otherwise, we're deluding ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And why did that suddenly happen then? And I can't help feeling, and I've felt this for a very long while, that there are major missing pieces in our story. It's often said that I'm claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I am putting forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory. And I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the Younger Dryas event was a massive global cataclysm, whatever caused it. And it's strange that just after it, we start seeing these first signs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This thing existed on this planet. Human beings interacted with it. It's a very compelling evidence for an earlier settlement of the Americas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Almost certainly. And the way the evidence is looking... It's most likely that South America was settled first before North America was settled. And that raises all kinds of questions. And we've gone into this in season two of Ancient Apocalypse primarily to do with the DNA evidence of a direct connection between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
and the peoples of certain tribes in South America. And that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America, but also to do with archaeological sites like Monteverde. I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillehay the last time we were on when Flint was here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And Tom Dillehay, who found Monteverde, who excavated Monteverde in South America and realized that it was plus 14,000 years old and therefore a lot older than than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America. When he put that idea forward, he was eviscerated by his colleagues in archaeology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It took them a decade to come around to accepting that actually he was right. And there are many other sites in South America going back 30 plus thousand years. They're all controversial because they conflict with an existing model. But I think instead of clinging on to existing models, I think that's one of the problems with archaeology is this territoriality, this kind of control of the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think instead of doing that, it would be nicer if archaeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to new and different ideas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I've come to the point, and I'm going to say something, some strong words here. Get crazy. Get crazy, Grandmaster. I've come to the point where I believe that some archaeologists, not all of them, most actually this problem is with a small number of archaeologists, but they're extremely vocal. I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power. Archaeologists have a power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They are the official spokespeople for the past. And they use that power to slap down any point of view that doesn't agree with theirs. So I think that there's an abuse of power there. And at the same time, there's not a realization that that's happening because the mindset that drives it is the feeling that members of the general public are unable to decide things for themselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This is the arrogance of archaeology that they feel that they have to tell people what to think about the past and they underestimate the intelligence of the public and the ability of the public to discern, to make choices between different possibilities about the past. They think that So archaeologists seem to think that only one possibility of the past must be considered by the general public.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Like the island of Cyprus. The nearest Turkish coast is about 60 kilometers from there. It's always been surrounded by huge deeps. It's always been an island, even at the peak of the sea level, lowest sea level during the Ice Age. Cyprus was always an island. And yet, there's evidence now that it was settled 14,000 years ago, certainly 14,000 to 12,500 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And that's their possibility. And it reminds me a lot of the heresy hunters back in the 16th century. You know, the people who disagreed with their point of view got burned at the stake. Well, you don't get burned at the stake today, but you can get lynched by a mob of archaeologists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's the other thing I noticed, which was the sneering aspect. Attitude towards me. They talk about my, you know, my wife, Santa, taking tourist photos of the places that we've been to. Well, we've never been anywhere as tourists. We haven't had a holiday for 20 years. But the working trips that we do are very intense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's part of this desperate search to say we archaeologists know everything and we must discredit in any way we can anybody who has anything opposite to say. It's an unfortunate human characteristic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This reliance on experts, I get it. I would like the pilot of my plane to be an expert pilot. I don't want him to be an amateur. But I don't think that archaeologists and aircraft pilots can be compared in that sense. Archaeology is a much more interpretive discipline. An aircraft pilot is not really interpreting situations that much. He knows what to do in such situations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Archaeologists are interpreting the past and yet they seem to get very upset by other interpretations of the past that are offered that don't agree with theirs. And this is the problem of expertise in our society. Yes, expertise is very important. It's incredibly useful. But we should not place all our faith and trust in experts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
We need to liberate our own consciousness and freely think about things and make our own decisions about things and resist experts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It was settled, in other words, during the Ice Age. And these were large planned migrations. When you're going to migrate to an island, you can't just go two or three people by accident because you'll become extinct. You have to bring in quite a large population.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, that was part of our adventure with season two of Ancient Apocalypse, was working with a really professional team in Brazil, led by an archaeologist, Marti Parsonen from the University of Helsinki, and a geographer from Brazil, Alceu Ranzi. Al-Sayyou, years ago, was the first person who noticed that there are these huge geometrical structures emerging out of the Amazon jungle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And he noticed it on a flight on a commercial aircraft in an area that happened to have been cleared by local farmers for planting crops, that there was this massive geometrical earthwork there. And that – he actually coined the term geoglyphs for these because he compared them in some ways with the Nazca lines, which again are really only visible from the air.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You get suddenly this massive scope and extent of these things. And it's the same with the geoglyphs in the Amazon. And here's the thing. The ones we know about up till now, we largely know about them because of these tragic clearances of the Amazon rainforest, which is maybe a short-term economic gain but is long-term really not a very good idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But now with LiDAR, it's possible to find these things without damaging any rainforest at all. And we had a LiDAR expert with us. And you can fly LiDAR off a drone now. That's amazing. Yeah. It's incredible. It's a pretty hefty drone. But they can fly anywhere. And we found – I say we. It was actually the LiDAR expert who found –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He found, you can see the edge of the rainforest where the clearances stop and the rainforest hasn't yet been interfered with. And then he flies over there. And within a matter of hours, he's found multiple more of these structures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That are deep in the rainforest. Covered completely. Covered completely. And LIDAR allows him to see through the canopy and to see what's underneath it without damaging it. And there are these huge earthworks. And this raises the question, how much more is there in the Amazon to find?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Even the archaeologists who are most reluctant are now willing to accept that the Amazon had a huge population before the Spanish conquest. It's so wild. That's such a shift. Millions, cities. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
A whole different way of life, a whole different kind of civilization from the one that we have today, one that lived in a man-made garden, which is what the Amazon really and truly is, and lived in harmony with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Definitely. They've determined that because of the preponderance of trees that serve human needs. They call them hyperdominant. And things like Brazil nut trees, which are providing food for human beings, are in massive dominance in relation to trees that aren't useful to human beings. And it's clear that this is the result of a long-term human project to make this jungle serve human needs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And they reckon that populations of 1,000 or so were being brought across that water, across the ocean, across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus. near the end of the last ice age, but not a single ship has survived to testify to that. Same with Australia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
What was the other one? The ice cream bean? What was that? Ice cream bean. I'm forgetting all of the details, but there's a bunch of food plants, which are hyper-dominant in the Amazon rainforest. And these food plants show that human beings have been nurturing, have been massaging this natural wonder and turning it into something that really serves human needs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Again, it was a great privilege to have the opportunity to stand in a pit of terra preta that is being excavated to get down 15 feet into that. Can they recreate it once they get it? It appears that modern – not modern but indigenous communities in the Amazon are still doing this. They're still doing it, mixing all kind of refuse and waste together and enriching the soil with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So it's not stopped. Terra Preta is still being made but most of it is very old and the oldest that they found so far is about 8,000 years old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, that's right. See, a rainforest, even when you choose trees that are going to serve human needs, it's not enough. You do need to be able to plant in the rainforest. And that is what Terra Preta has allowed people to do. Rainforest soils are not particularly fertile.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
50,000 years ago, human beings got there, and even at the lowest sea level, they would have had to cross about 90 kilometers of open water in large numbers. And again, no ships have been found to testify to that, yet archaeologists accept that they got there by ship. So to say that we haven't found any ships from the ice age is not really evidence about anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's what happened. I mean, before the lost city of Z, we have this very interesting report. I have mentioned it to you before in a previous episode. The expedition of Gaspar de Carvajal and his chronicler, Francisco de Oriana... which was an accidental expedition. They were just going hunting in a longboat, but the Amazon took them and wouldn't let them go back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And they traveled 4,000 miles across South America and ended up on the Pacific side and ended up in the Atlantic Ocean. Wow. And that's in the 1550s, 1560s. And they report seeing enormous, thriving, prosperous cities, highly civilized with advanced arts and crafts. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And they were not believed because 100 years later, when other Spaniards made that voyage and went into the Amazon, they couldn't find the cities. And the reason they couldn't find them is precisely the reason that you give, which is that the jungle had eaten those cities because the human population had been wiped out by disease brought by the Spaniards.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The Spaniards didn't have to have direct contact with those indigenous peoples in the middle of the Amazon. The diseases just jumped from population to population and just killed everybody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's an early example of a biological weapon. Yeah, right. And to some extent, it was used deliberately as a biological weapon, like those smallpox-infected blankets.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It may well be a rumor. But from what I've looked at from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, there was a realization that we can kill these people with smallpox. And it was spread. God. And we have some immunity to it that they don't have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. The diseases did. I mean the battles did kill some people. Sure. But not on the order of the diseases. Mexico City fell to the Spaniards. Primarily because of disease and secondarily because the Aztecs weren't popular with their neighbors. So it really wasn't just Cortes and 400 Spaniards.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It was Cortes and 400 Spaniards plus smallpox plus the Tlaxcalans who the Aztecs had used as a sort of farm for human sacrifices for 100 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And the Tlaxcalans looked at Cortes and they said, we can use this guy. And so they joined him. He had tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors. Otherwise, he would not have had that victory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's a very curious thing. And again, the moment we start talking about people's facial features, then they jump in with you're being a racist, you're being a white supremacist or whatever. Although the Olmec heads don't serve white supremacism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Again, the racism angle is just being used to shut it down. This is something that we, particularly in the climate in the world today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think it's very unfortunate that in serious and interesting discussions about the past. That this issue of race immediately gets dumped into it. Yeah. Because those who are dumping race into the issue know that that's a way to shut down a conversation. Nobody wants to be accused of being a racist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I'm leaning towards ever, too. Because, look, can we think of any other civilization that has survived for 3,000 years? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That you can go visit right now. But ancient Egypt, as a culture, survived for 3,000 years. It survived the Greek occupation. It survived the previous Persian occupation. It was only the Romans that brought it low. The Roman occupation of Egypt was the beginning of the end.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They certainly were. And I think they had mastery of techniques that we don't know about yet. And perhaps equipment. And perhaps equipment. The Great Pyramid remains to me an abiding mystery, which despite probably 100 or more visits to the Great Pyramid and being inside it and spending the night in it and exploring every passage and every chamber...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
including the relieving – so-called relieving chambers above the king's chamber. I still can't figure it out. I don't understand how it was possible to do this. And then the time span which Egyptology gives us because Egyptology is fixed on the idea that the Great Pyramid is a tomb and only a tomb. And then it was built in about 20 years. 23 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Because if it's the tomb of Khufu, then it had to be built in 23 years because that was his reign. He would start, in theory, building it at the beginning of his reign and it's finished by the end of his reign. That's 23 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And in the broader span, if you look at the fourth dynasty pyramids and even go back to the end of the third dynasty, the pyramid of Xhosa, the step pyramid, you find that this is a sudden... emergence of incredible skills, which lasts for about a hundred years, and then it goes away. It stops.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The pyramids that follow the Great Pyramid of Giza, the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau, the pyramids that follow them, the fifth dynasty pyramids, are really poor. They're very, very poor quality workmanship. They're falling to pieces. You can hardly recognize from the outside that they're a pyramid at all. When you get inside,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You do find wonderful chambers and you do find what you don't find in any of the Great Pyramids, which is huge numbers of hieroglyphs and accounts of the person who was supposedly buried in that pyramid.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think it's a theory which deserves to be taken seriously along with other theories as to what it is. One thing I know for sure is that the theory that it was just a tomb and nothing else is bust. That is not a satisfactory theory anymore. So we should be open to a number of possibilities. And Chris comes to this from a background of machine tool making. He's a very precise guy. He's an engineer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He understands this kind of thing. And when he looks at particularly the At Saqqara, you have this thing called the Serapium, which is an underground labyrinth. And it's got wide corridors through it and then off each side are rooms. And in each room are these gigantic basalt chambers. which appear to have held the corpses of bulls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They're like sarcophagi for human beings, but they're on an enormous, gigantic scale, weighing hundreds of tons and cut out of the hardest possible rock, precisely engineered. Everything is exact. And it's that, amongst other things, that is attracting Chris's attention to the possibility of... A lost technology in ancient Egypt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And then he asked himself the question, well, what was the Great Pyramid if it wasn't a tomb? What might it have been? And he's come to the solution that it was some kind of energy generator, some kind of power plant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Oddly enough, there's just a recently published archaeological paper. concerning the step pyramid at Saqqara, which is suggesting that they used hydraulics to lift the big stones up inside there. And that begins to come close to the kind of technology in some ways that Chris is talking about. I think it's worth taking very seriously. I've always had great respect for Chris.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I've traveled to Egypt with him. And I think he's done very important work contributing to this. And also... Looking at the stone vases from ancient Egypt, I remember the first time I was drawn to this mystery, which was… You gave us one of them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, it doesn't make sense given what we are taught was the level of technology of Egypt at that time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, perhaps in some cases we are, but certainly in others, including those in the great museums in Cairo. They've now moved a lot of the content of the Cairo Museum out to a big museum at Giza, and some of it's in transition, but they have thousands of these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
How did you do that? Very thin necks, and then this bulbous base to it. It's all perfect. There's another piece, which it's hard to describe, but it's got a series of three flanges that come across. It's like a wheel. But nobody knows what it is. And it's cut out of incredibly hard rock or cut or shaped in some way. I've never seen a satisfactory explanation for this thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I've written about it in Fingerprints of the Gods. I bet Jamie's already found it. Is that it? No. Yes. Top left. That's the one. That? When I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, it's cut from Schist. This thing is hard. And when I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, I thought, how on earth did they do this? Why isn't this a big mystery? Why isn't this being seen as a mystery?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That looks like a piece of an engine. It does, doesn't it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Exactly. Exactly. And what is its function if it isn't something else? It's difficult to see what function it could have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Mastaba S311. Those are sort of tombs which have got two levels. What an incredible piece. It is an incredible piece.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And there it is, First Dynasty. And of course, you can't actually date the object itself. So they're dating it from context. What they're saying is that it was found in a First Dynasty context, but it may have been a legacy even then. It may have been an old object even then. We just don't know that. Because you can't carbon date it. Exactly. But it's at least that old from the context.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I don't know either, but I would have thought that if that was your project, you could do it without carving schist into that. Click on that thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It clearly had a function. Nobody would go to the trouble of creating something as complex and difficult to make as this unless there was a useful function. What is it made out of? Schist, which is a hard stone. That's crazy that that's made out of stone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I've never seen a satisfactory guess. But those like Chris Dunn, who are studying the technology of ancient Egypt, are confident that we're looking at the traces of a lost technology. We don't know how this was done. Like so much else in ancient Egypt, we don't know how the 70-ton blocks were raised to become the roof of the king's chamber either.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
There's so much that we don't know and that's not explained and that is easily written off by abusively arrogant experts who say there's no mystery here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's not true either, no. It's not true. And the whole notion of the origins of agriculture, I think archaeologists got a great deal more work to do on that. Often, I'm misrepresented as saying that survivors of my supposed lost civilization would have brought crops with them. I think that's most unlikely in a cataclysmic situation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
No, there's one original. I've no doubt people have tried to make copies with modern materials.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, it is. I think that's the way we're looking at a recreation. Okay. Whatever it is. The thing is, where you come to this, there's thousands of objects that defy explanation. What are those, Jamie?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
No, they definitely had the wheel. They definitely did? Whether they had the wheel in the old kingdom is another question. But certainly by the new kingdom, by the time of Ramesses, they had wheels. They had chariots.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, it's actually not clear to me when the wheel was invented.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I believe that's the case. But one of the things about wheel is you have to ask yourself in what circumstances, in what places, in what conditions are wheels useful? There are some conditions in which a wheel is not a useful thing and which is going to get bogged down in the sand and which is not going to be helpful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So the use of sleds was certainly part of how ancient Egyptians moved huge stones. And I don't dispute that. The problem is how they then get those stones 300 feet in the air. Right. You can slide anything on wet sand on a sled with enough people pulling it. How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber? How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber? That's the problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
How do you fit it perfectly? Perfectly. And, you know, I've been up there and I've been in every one of the chambers above it. And each one of them is floored with these 70-ton blocks and roofed with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
More advanced in a different way. I think this is part of the problem where I've been perhaps misunderstood by Egyptologists when I talk about an advanced civilization. I keep trying to emphasize… That we shouldn't look for ourselves in the past, that if we're going to go back 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 years into the past and talk about a civilization, it's not going to be like us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's going to be very different. It's going to have different priorities, different ways of looking at things. But one of the things that the ancient Egyptians had, which I'm not aware that any other civilization has had, is the ability to sustain essentially a single culture with a single culture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
set of spiritual ideas and to sustain that for 3,000 years and to keep people happy and fed and well looked after. This is an amazing achievement, amazing stability when you look at it. What our civilization, how old is it really? Can we trace it back to the Romans? Probably not. Maybe 500 years, the beginning of mechanization and so on and so forth in our civilization. Pretty amazing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
What they brought with them was the knowledge that crops can be domesticated. And it's precisely during the Younger Dryas that we see that shift from undomesticated to domesticated crops in the archaeological record. And what I'm suggesting is that these were people who had already... conquered that problem. They'd already solved that problem. They knew it could be done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think this is an area where I often get criticized. But I think when we look at a civilization and what it is and what it's achieving and why it's so special… When we look at our civilization today, we are fantastic at technology. We are brilliant at science. We can make the best possible machines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And we're a society that is built around production and consumption and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own, what they possess, what they produce. And it becomes a very materialistic society, a society that's focused on material things where we define ourselves by our material possessions. Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary. Their main thing was material. What are we here for? Why are we living this life? What happens to us when we die? They investigated that mystery more deeply than any other culture that I know of. And they were doing so right from the beginning of records.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, I think first of all, it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea. When it's found amongst cultures all around the world that apparently had no contact with one another and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source. And that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization, that these spiritual ideas are found all around the world. And they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Sometimes it's called an underworld, but really it's set in the sky. And this journey that takes place where you are judged on what you've done with your life. This is something else that we avoid in the world today is taking responsibility for our own lives. The ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And if you did not do so, the outcome after death would not be good. You had to... you had to celebrate the gift of life. You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given. And one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom. And that's one of the things, hopefully, that we all do as we get older, is get a bit more wisdom and a bit more understanding.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And they brought that knowledge with them and shared that knowledge with the people that they took refuge amongst. Because I don't think we're looking at a mass migration. I think we're looking at a few survivors who are taking refuge after a global cataclysm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But in the case of ancient Egypt, That idea is developed over 3,000 years. And it's essentially the same at the beginning as it is at the end. That the soul, that death is not the end. This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem. That death is not the end. We may think it is. Scientists may tell us it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But when a scientist says death is the end, there's nothing more, we're just physical bodies and when the light goes out, it goes out forever, that's actually not a scientific fact. That's not something that's been investigated or can be investigated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They're very perplexing questions which actually are of great significance to every one of us. Yeah. I mean suppose death just is the end. Then that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives, for the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused. Or for the joy that we may have caused.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
If death's the end, there's no up or downside to that, whatever we do. But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end. And you have been given the precious gift of life. What did you do with it? And there are moral aspects to that question. There's these 42 assessors. They're called the negative assessors. who ask the soul of the deceased questions about what they did in life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And those are all moral questions. They bear some relationship, actually, to the Ten Commandments. But there's another question, which is called the weighing of words. And that question is, what did you do with the gift we gave you? We gave you the gift of the human life. We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
At your choice, we gave you the gift to live in a human body, to have this incredible consciousness, to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres. What did you do with it? Did you leave the world a better place or a worse place than when you came into it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Did you hurt and damage and cause pain to others consistently out of wicked intent, not accidentally but deliberately causing pain? And there are human beings who do that. For the ancient Egyptians, that kind of behavior meant an introduction to Amit, the eater of the dead. And Amit is displayed in the judgment scene. He's a creature, part hyena, part lion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And he sits there and certain souls do not go on. Their journey ends and it ends because of the choices they made during life and because they never took responsibility for what they did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The beautiful art that they made. Yeah. The perfection of their geometry, their incredibly advanced astronomy. All of these things are the hallmarks of a very sophisticated, very advanced civilization. Sure, they didn't have iPhones, but…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, the answer is we don't know. We don't know. There's so much that we don't know. And it's that attitude towards the past, which I think would be more helpful, is that we have this mysterious... background to we human beings. As you said earlier, anatomically modern humans, we think that they first appeared about 300,000 years ago. Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, 310,000 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Now, I can remember a time not so long ago, back in the 1990s, when it was thought that the first anatomically modern humans were as recent as 50,000 years ago. And then they shifted it, new finds were made to 110,000 years ago, now 310,000 years ago. We don't really know how far into the past that goes. And we don't know about the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, who were also human beings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Certainly they were human, the same species as us, because they could interbreed with us. You can't breed with another species. And that takes the journey back even further. And that's one of the reasons why I have a problem with the notion that civilization just emerges 6,000 years ago. Because we had the same kit, the same wiring, the same brains for at least 300,000 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And we weren't doing any of this stuff, apparently. I suspect we were, but it's not made the record.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It certainly did. The bounty, however, goes back much further. This is one of the reasons why I kept on trying to talk about the Sahara during the debate. This vast area, which frankly has not been studied properly by archaeology at all, hardly a fraction of it has been studied, this vast area I'm often accused of creating what they call a God of the gaps argument.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I'm saying you haven't looked enough in the Sahara. You haven't looked enough in the submerged continental shelves. You haven't looked enough in the Amazon rainforest. And the argument is that I'm trying to put my lost civilization into these gaps. But these are very special gaps. The submerged continental shelves were... Prime real estate during the Ice Age.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That was the place to be just as it is today, to be near coastlines. The Amazon rainforest was a bountiful place and the Sahara Desert was green and rich for thousands of years during the Ice Age with lakes, with rivers. It was the kind of place where a civilization might well have emerged.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
No, it hasn't. It's too vast. It's too vast, and it's too expensive to excavate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Nobody knows because it's not been investigated properly. It's a desert and it's had relatively little attention. We do know there's some amazing rock art from the upper Paleolithic in the Tassili in Algeria, in the Sahara. But not enough has been done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This is the problem for me with saying archaeology has basically got the story of the human past nailed down, is that there's huge areas which have not been investigated. And I reject the idea that that is a God of the gaps argument because that's not why I'm proposing there was a lost civilization. And that's all I'm doing. I'm not insisting. I'm not demanding that people believe me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I just want to inject this idea into the discussion so that it can be considered. Taken out of context was a little clip where you asked me during the debate, is there any evidence for your lost civilization in what they've found? And I said, in what they've found, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And then I went on to say, but that brings us to the point of what they've looked for and what they've not looked for, what they've found and what they've not found. That has been taken again and again as me saying that there's no evidence for my lost civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Whereas what I'm actually saying is there's no evidence in what archaeologists have studied for a lost civilization because I'm not studying what archaeologists study. I am very happy to use material from archaeologists, and I could not do what I do if I didn't use material from archaeologists. It's a very important basis to my work. However, it's the astronomy. It's the astronomical alignments.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's the precision. It's the precision of the Great Pyramid. It's the myths of a global flood. all around the world. It's a universal story of a massive cataclysm with a few survivors who bring their knowledge to others. This is one of the reasons why I think the Atlantis story, which Flint Dibble is so opposed to, deserves to be taken seriously. because it's part of a global tradition.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's yet another flood myth, in fact. It's the story. It's just like those 150 or 200 other flood traditions that come from around the world. And it's not enough for archaeologists to say, oh, people experienced a little local river flood or there was a tidal wave that day. And so they decided that the whole world was submerged with water. That doesn't satisfy me at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The fact that this is found all around the world to me is a memory of something that happened to our ancestors, something so traumatic, something so huge that it's been preserved better than almost anything else from our past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Reichardt structure, Mauritania. I would not like to say one way or the other because I've not been there. I've not had boots on the ground there. I've not been able to look at it. Yes, it's very intriguing. Very.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Probably was, but you might have to go back many millions of years to get to that point. The honest answer to that question is I don't know. I'm open-minded on the Richat structure. It's something that I would like to study, but I have not had time to yet. Future work is something that I may study.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And after studying it, I may come to the conclusion that it's just a remarkable natural phenomenon of which there are many. Or I may come to a different conclusion. It depends what the evidence shows me. But I try not to spout off on things that I'm not personally acquainted with and don't really know about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Found by an amateur. Turns out to be a real place. I think the myths are the memory banks of our species. And I don't think archaeology takes them seriously enough. There's a tendency to just dismiss them as fantasies, as things that were made up by the ancients for some bizarre reason of their own.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But they're the memories we have from the time before writing, from the time before documents were kept. And they're a precious resource in understanding our past. So it's things like that. And then at the end of the day, to say, to twist what I said, that in what archaeologists have studied, there's no evidence from my lost civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
is completely wrong because I've written thousands of pages of books. This is one of the issues. Like in that debate, I was supposed to prove everything about a lost civilization. I didn't even come here to prove it. I came here to explain why I'm interested in it and why I want to share my interest. and my curiosity about the past with others.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But if I'm asked to prove it, I would say don't refer to what I managed to say during a three-hour debate. I'd say refer to the eight or so major books that I've written with thousands of pages and thousands of documented footnotes. That's where my argument is in place. And you'll find that that argument is not based on what archaeologists have studied.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's based precisely on what they've not studied about the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Again, I will withhold judgment until I have my boots on the ground there and have a look at it. And even then, that might not be enough. I do know that the property owners there are doing a lot of ground-penetrating radar, and there may be results from that. But at the moment, I would not say that's definitely a man-made structure, nor would I say that's definitely a natural structure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I would say that's an intriguing structure. But it is in the geological context where other things like that are found. If I were asked to put money on it. There it is. Yeah. Boy, that looks. I mean, it really is hard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Oh, it does. It goes deeper. That's what the ground penetrating radar. How far? Is about 30 feet. 30 feet. In fact, I was yesterday. That looks so man-made. Yeah, it really does. When I look at that photograph, to me, that is a man-made structure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But I realize now in the environment in which I live, surrounded by archaeologists who are extremely hostile to my work, that it's not in my interests to leap to a conclusion about anything before I've studied it. And I do intend to go to Sagewall. I was yesterday with Michael Collins, who's the guy who's done a lot of the Videography on sage wall.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He doesn't know whether it's natural or man-made either more work needs to be done But it's an intriguing issue and it may be part of the lost history of the Americas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Is it part of the lost story of the Americas? There's so much that's been lost, particularly in North America, with the massive destruction that took place during the 19th and 18th and early 20th century. It's reckoned that there were a million mound sites in North America. If you go back to 1500, there's about 100,000 left, which is a lot actually.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But most of them are massively destroyed and the other 900,000 disappeared. have gone, just plowed under, turned into farmland. And how much else of the prehistory of North America has been lost as a result of a process where, first of all, there was a conviction that the indigenous inhabitants had only been here for a very short time, whereas we now know they've been here for a very long time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And secondly, there was a propagandistic desire not to give too much credit to them. So let's get rid of some of their stuff. Wow. I was very disappointed when we were shooting season two of Ancient Apocalypse that we were not allowed by the authorities to film in Cahokia, which is one of the great mounds that still survive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
because they've been told that I'm a pseudo-archaeologist and that I'm going to mislead the public if I go there. So the best way is just to stop me going there. We tried to film in Moundville in Alabama as well. And again, we were denied permission to film there. There's no doubt that archaeology has joined ranks to do their best to prevent me doing what I do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And, you know, here's what archaeologists say. Here's an alternative point of view. Yeah. You're an intelligent member of the public. Make up your own mind. You're being reasonable. That's outrageous. It's a most unfortunate thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
More and more. It's a fascinating phenomenon. I do see it as an extension of our interest in our own genetic origins, for example. A lot of people, I haven't done it yet, but I'm kind of keen to do 23andMe or whatever it's called.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They'll sell your data away. They'll sell your data away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
My eldest son, who is half Somali and half English, had his DNA done with 23andMe. And what it showed was that he's 50% African and 49% British and 1% Spanish. And we tried to figure that out. And the answer is that my ancestors came from Cornwall in the southwest of England.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And that's where the Spanish Armada washed up and the survivors of the Spanish Armada washed up and then integrated with the local community and contributed their genes. So, you know, there is an interest in the past. There is an interest in our personal past, our personal origins, our ancestors, who we are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And there's a much broader interest in the story of humanity that has brought us to where we are today and this haunting feeling of That something's missing and that we have a civilization today. I often would like to compare it to a sort of furious – in terms of the level of consciousness, our civilization today is like a furious, petulant teenager.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But in terms of what it can do, in terms of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, it's a god. So we have godlike powers with the consciousness of an immature teenager. That's what we're looking at in the world today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And maybe by understanding our past better, by understanding our unity that comes down from the past, maybe we can learn something that would be helpful to us in not carrying on in this way. Because we do live at an inflection point just now. This is... One thing I'm pretty sure that quote-unquote my lost civilization didn't have and that was nuclear weapons.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But we have nukes today and we have them in an enormous scale and behind each of those nukes is a fragile human being with his own or her own ego and complexes and fears and paranoia. And we're reaching a point where those buttons are going to be pressed. We are, as far as I know, the first human civilization that has the capacity to actually wipe itself out completely.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
We don't need a comet impact. We don't need a solar outburst. We can do it to ourselves. And that requires humanity to make a major step forward in consciousness. And I think making that major step forward in consciousness will be helped by better understanding our own past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You went with Brian Morareschi. Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He's a very interesting man. You guys are homies now. Yeah, we're homies. We had a nice dinner together. And it's partly because who needs more enemies and hatred in this world? And I said some very cruel and harsh things to Zahi in the past. And I felt the time had come to apologize for those. So I went to Egypt to apologize to him. Really? And we had a fantastic dinner together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
His son joined us. Santa was there. It was very friendly and very positive. I love stories like that. And, you know, we've agreed that we will, if by chance, we get a season three of Ancient Apocalypse, which we may or may not get. I'm not in control of commissioning decisions at Netflix. But if we get a season three of Ancient Apocalypse, I would like it to be entirely on Egypt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And what I would like is for Zahi to confront me on every point as we go through Egypt. Whatever one says about Zahi's explosive personality, he's been immersed in ancient Egyptian Egyptology for his whole life. And he has very strong points of view on it. And he's a fun guy in some ways.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, I'm hoping to persuade him of that. I think it'll be an interesting dialogue if we get to have it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This is propaganda. This is archaeological propaganda. That's been said to me repeatedly, that I'm suggesting that all the achievements of certain indigenous cultures around the world should actually be handed to a lost civilization, that ideas were brought to them. Yet, weirdly, those same archaeologists recognize that agriculture was introduced to Europe before
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
by immigrants from precisely the gobekli tepe area that's that's where agriculture wasn't present in europe until five or six thousand years ago it was brought in by other people people this is part of the human nature that we share ideas sure somebody has a great idea we look at that we think we'd like a bit of that too teach me how to do it and this happened this happens all the time and it doesn't mean that the person who's being taught is any less than the person who's doing the teaching the person who's being taught may have things to teach themselves
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I've always felt that there were – if there was a lost civilization at all and I believe there was but I can't absolutely prove it. I think we're looking at a terrible cataclysm. Part of it happened near Gobekli Tepe. Abu Huraira in Syria was hit by one of those airbursts, absolutely incinerated at that time. A terrible cataclysm with relatively few survivors.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And that those survivors, just as we would do today, took refuge amongst people who'd made it through the disaster better. And those people who'd made it through would most likely have been hunter-gatherers. Because hunter-gatherers are so resilient and so able to survive disasters, whereas people in a quote-unquote civilized condition are often not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I understand that the hurricanes that are happening in the U.S. at the moment are horrific, horrific natural events which are killing people. But we're talking about something on a scale vastly larger than that. And it's difficult for me to see. We find it hard enough to make it through a hurricane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I find it difficult to see how we could make it through another Younger Dryas impact event or how we could make it through a man-made cataclysm as a result of nuclear war, which is I suspect and I fear is much closer than we think. I hate the idea. that nuclear missiles may be flying in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But I have to say, honestly, it's a possibility with the state of the world at the moment and the low state of consciousness of the people who lead us. The leaders and governments are behind this. It's not human beings, individual people who are behind this hatred in the world today. It's leaders and governments who are mobilizing that hatred to serve their own interests. And it's very dangerous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
If we didn't have nukes, it would be less dangerous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Generally, with any archaeological site, they don't excavate more than 5% of it and often less than 2% of it. Is that because of funds? It's often because of funds, but it's also because of the feeling that as technology improves, more may be learned from these sites in the future. And that's a reasonable argument. Because excavation is destruction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
To a certain extent, excavation destroys what's being excavated. And therefore, when you interfere with a site and start excavating it, you may be destroying materials that in 100 years, technology would be able to interpret in a completely different way. I mean, go back 100 years from where we are at present, and you didn't have carbon dating, you didn't have... You didn't have LIDAR.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You didn't have all kinds of methods of dating objects. You know, luminescence, the luminescence from rocks is another way of dating. We didn't have any of those technologies. We do have them now. And so I think the speculation is 100 years in the future, archaeologists may have technologies that would be able to extract more information than this. That's the case that's made. I get it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But I think Gobekli Tepe is such an important site. And we know...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I know for sure because I spent three days with Klaus Schmidt who was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe that underneath that place there are dozens of huge unexcavated stone circles with enormous megalithic pillars in them all under the ground waiting to be excavated and the decision appears to have been made not to excavate them. And I do find that slightly suspicious. I do find it odd.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think the site has got such an important role. It's such an iconic site that to just stop the excavation or to only continue it in a very small way isn't satisfactory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. Please do. Jump right in. But there is an issue here. I've noticed that it isn't just attacks on me that certain archaeologists are making. It's also attacks on other specialists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
For example, Danny Hillman, who is the geologist who brought to the world's attention the mystery of Gunung Padang in Indonesia, which appeared in the first episode of season one of Ancient Apocalypse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
the possibility that this site is more than 27,000 years old, that we're looking at a pyramidal structure that has had several phases of work done on it and that the earliest phases go back deep into the last ice age. He managed to publish a peer-reviewed paper on this, but unfortunately for Danny, he'd appeared on my show.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And that led archaeologists to dive in on him, and there was a ganging up of archaeologists, and complaints were made to the peer-reviewed journal that published it, and finally they retracted his paper without any good reasons. I've got a major article by Danny on my website explaining what happened here. It's like... It's like we don't want too much attention brought to this. Let's crush it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Let's crush it right now. The same thing is happening with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. An enormous amount of attacks are being made on that hypothesis rather than considering it as an interesting explanation for the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age. A lot of people are just focused on trying to destroy it in every way possible. And I can't help wondering.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Maybe there's some truth, deep truth to this, that there was a cataclysm, that there was an ancient apocalypse, something really horrific that happened. Maybe it's a cyclical disaster. Maybe it's coming around again. This is something that would lead any government to want to avoid panic, to suppress, to cover up these issues. So that would be the conspiracy theory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I'm not saying I buy it, but I'm saying that it's possible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's also possible. That's also possible. But in their favor and to their credit, the excavation of that whole area around, not Gobekli Tepe itself, but other neighboring sites, Karahan Tepe is the best known, was Turkish archaeologists, it's interesting, are calling this now a civilization. They're calling it the Tas Tepeler civilization, the Stone Hills civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And they're finding that the same iconography, the same building techniques, not quite on the scale of Göbekli Tepe, are repeated all across the region. They extend all the way down to the south of the Jordan Valley to Jericho. The ancient site of Jericho is part of that lost civilization. or emerging civilization that appeared at the end of the Younger Dryas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Cyprus is another example I was mentioning about how it was settled in what appeared to have been planned, organized settlement events near the end of the last Ice Age. Again, you find that same iconography that you find at Gobekli Tepe turning up there. Which iconography specifically? The tendency to use T-shaped pillars, to use certain designs like a V-shaped necklace that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This kind of iconography and the structures, these circular structures, semi-subterranean structures that are so characteristic of Gobekli Tepe, they're found there as well. They're found all across the region. Jericho in the Jordan Valley is absolutely intriguing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The massive tower there, which again dates back right to the end of the last ice age, a huge megalithic tower with the world's oldest known structure. megalithic stairway that runs up inside it. So what's emerging as a result, if Gobekli Tepe hadn't been found, none of this would have happened. But it's led to a widespread interest in the whole area.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So while excavation may have stopped at Gobekli Tepe or may have slowed down, it is continuing elsewhere across the region. And to be fair to archaeologists, we need to recognize that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yes. So far, the ones that have been found, Gobekli Tepe is unique. And I think it's clear now that Gobekli Tepe itself was the end of a process, not the beginning of a process. It was something that marked... It was a marker.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It was something that brought together the best of everything that they'd accumulated and created it in one place and left it there, finally at the end, burying it, sealing it as a time capsule, which then was untouched for more than 10,000 years before Klaus Schmidt opened it up in 1996. I can't help feeling that's precisely what Gobekli Tepe is. It's a time capsule.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's a memorial to a lost time. And I think that what we're looking at in that whole area is the outcome of contact with an earlier largely lost civilization. I think it passed on its cultural genes right there in that area of Turkey and down into the Jordan Valley and Cyprus. And not only there, also the Indus Valley civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's incredible iconography, which shows a man between two felines. It's a very striking image. You see a man and two tigers or leopards on either side of him. And he may be holding them apart. He may be gripping them in some way. What is this so Jamie can find it? You can find it on the Gebel al-Arak knife handle from Egypt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You can find it from Saybuk, S-A-Y-B-U-R-K, in Turkey, the man between two felines. And you can find it in the Indus Valley civilization right across in Pakistan on these steatite seals that they used to make where, again, you see that same icon of the man between two felines. And it suggests that cultural ideas way back in the remote past were being spread around the world very, very rapidly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, there we are. That's Harappa. That's from the Indus Valley civilization, man between two felines. What do you think that supposedly represents? Nobody knows what it represents, but what's intriguing is that it turns up in so many different places. But I'd like to find the... Just give me one second just to find something. I hope I'm online. Here I am.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Hang on, Joe. Bear with me. No worries. One minute. This is where I have to take my bloody glasses off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
We're back. Okay. We found these images. So this is from, Jamie, maybe you could expand that, the cyborg relief. I think you have to do it. Okay, it's on my yeah, there we go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So so this is this is about 10,000 years old It's from a site in the area of gobekli tepe Called say book and it's gone And and it's a it's clearly a man between two felines and interestingly he's holding his dick Exactly like that piece that you just showed from Quran Debbie and then if we go on I don't understand what I'm doing with this thing. There it is. So then the Indus Valley, again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You are. Okay. So there's the man between two felines. Again, expand that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Human mastery of animals is the only one I've heard that's being suggested. But it seems like they're trying to get him. It does in that case, rather than, or that he's holding them at bay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. And then if you go down to the Egyptian one, which is the Gebel Alaric knife handle, there it is. That's from ancient Egypt, pre-dynastic Egypt, same thing. Wow. And then the next one is from Tiwanaku in Bolivia. That's a redrawing from Tiwanaku in Bolivia. And again, it's a man between two felines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So when I see this kind of complicated image turning up all around the world, I can't help feeling that there's a remote common source, which is sharing. It's not each culture representing or influencing the other. It's a remote common source that they all share.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, it looks like two felines that he's holding apart. Right, but what are those things that are dangling down? I absolutely have no idea, and I'm not sure if anybody else does, although I'm reminded in that one of the handbags that we see in some of the figures from ancient Sumer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's a spiral of mystery. I honestly don't know the answer to that question.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It would be nice if there were written records from Tiwanaku, which told us what it was about, but unfortunately there aren't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So what I'm saying is we're seeing a sudden emergence of something that is being recognized as a civilization in Turkey just immediately after Göbekli Tepe, around the time of Göbekli Tepe. And we're seeing it in the Jordan Valley, and we're seeing it in the Indus Valley, and we're seeing it in South America as well. The same iconography keeps on repeating, and I don't think it's a coincidence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I wouldn't be surprised if they have. Villa Hermosa, the sort of central of the Olmec area, is a very highly populated area. It's been heavily developed. The areas where LIDAR has been used in Mexico and Central America and Guatemala has been finding thousands of Mayan ruins that nobody knew were there before, again, under the jungle canopy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
LIDAR has been used extensively in the Yucatan in Mexico and into Guatemala. As well. But whether it's been used, there we go. Look at that. Hundreds of them. And Olmec ceremonial centers. Wow. This is all, thank you, LIDAR.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And nobody knew. And nobody knew. Yeah. And, of course, the Amazon rainforest is an even bigger rainforest than this. And what's hiding in it is a... a mystery that needs to be solved in the coming years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
If we're going to have any idea of our own past. I think the Amazon is incredibly important. It's why I chose to focus season two of Ancient Apocalypse on the Americas because I think... In terms of the quest for the origins of civilization, the Americas are the most neglected area. Archaeologists haven't looked there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They define themselves as being in favor of indigenous peoples and against any kind of supremacy. But by and large, they look to Europe and to the Middle East as the origins of civilization and don't consider that it might have been in the Americas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And what we're trying to show is that the story in the Americas is much older than it's been and that there are mysteries here that have never been explained by archaeology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
A very tiny proportion. I worked with the team who are doing this, and they're solely in the province of Acre in the southwest of Brazil. They haven't worked in other areas. What would be needed, I'm hoping some amazing philanthropist will come forward. And if such a philanthropist will come forward, I can connect him with the people who are doing the work in Acre.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
that we have a LIDAR survey of the whole of the Amazon. That's what I'd like to see. And it wouldn't be a billion dollar project because it can be done with drones now. It could be relatively cost efficient.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. And we have the tech. We can do that. We can do a LiDAR survey of the Amazon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think it was in Ecuador or Colombia. I can't remember. That was Percy Fawcett, wasn't it? And kind of... echo of that earlier discovery of lost cities in the Amazon. These stories won't go away because there is a hidden past in the Amazon and because there were cities in the Amazon and God knows what was in them, you know, before the Spanish came along and destroyed everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
If we could find it was a real place, I wish we could.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Wow. I think we're going to find the lost city of X and Y as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, not enough is known. And I think it's right and proper that we have curiosity about our past. And I think it's unfortunate that people, including myself, who express that curiosity... without any dogma, but simply are mystified by problems from the past, are so likely to get slapped down and face this abusive power grab by archaeology who are saying the past is ours.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You may not intrude here. We will define you as a pseudoscientist. We will call you a hoaxer and a liar. I defy anyone out there to find a single statement I've made that is a lie. And a lie is a knowing untruth. As far as I know, I have never, ever told knowingly an untruth. What a stupid thing to do that would be. That would scupper my whole work. I may have made some honest mistakes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Everybody does, including the most godlike archaeologist. But I have never knowingly told an untruth, and I never would. Of course not. The interesting thing, though, is- But seriously, I'd like an example because this is thrown at me so many times.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It was most unfortunate. I think he let archaeology down very badly in the way that he manipulated that debate. And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come back with the fact-checking, but it was necessary to do. And I'm very grateful to a number of completely independent, separate individuals on the Internet who have drawn attention to some of what Flint did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
One calls himself an illegitimate scholar. And the other calls himself de-dunking. And they got into this material very, very early and helped me to understand how I'd been duped by this material. Because I took it all at face value.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And there's also that feeling of just being patronized by the so-called experts. Nobody wants to be patronized and feel that somebody else regards them as too stupid to make up their own mind on something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Not at all. Archaeologists have done some fantastic work. And it's really important work. What I've realized is that there's almost two different mindsets at work here in looking at the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think archaeology is very determined to demonstrate that it's a science, that it's a hard science, that it's completely rational, that it's all based on scientific method and anything that sounds unscientific, which include myths, must be avoided. And also, I do find that archaeology, and it may be true in other sciences as well, are very reluctant to use the imagination.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The imagination is seen as a deadly threat. Whereas I think imagination is a really important thing in interpreting the past. We should be open to possibilities rather than coming into what we confront with a closed idea. We should consider how it might have been, what might have happened. Let's use our imagination and think about this. Think what all this means.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Think what that common iconography all around the world means rather than just saying, oh, it's a coincidence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It does. I mean, to be honest, I felt beaten up after that debate. But looking back in retrospect on the whole thing, I think it actually makes the point that we have a very arrogant, very controlling discipline in archaeology which has established a narrative about the past and which will fight tooth and nail to maintain that narrative, including using dirty tricks. And I...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Could be Polynesia, could be Africa. And then there are these other faces which in the video I've put out, I've shown some of these. It's not just myths of a bearded foreigner turning up in the Americas. which Flint Dibble and other archaeologists say were all concocted and invented by the Spaniards. We discussed that during the debate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I have a real problem with that because that is patronizing to the indigenous people. I think the myths were there amongst the indigenous people, and I think the Spaniards saw how they could use them, how they could manipulate them. But I don't think they made up the myths and somehow imposed them upon the indigenous people who then believed that they were their own myths.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I don't think they were that stupid. They knew what their myths were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But this is a kind of – Conspiracy theory that's being proposed that the Spanish Cortez and Pizarro and others who were involved in the conquest of the Americas that they got together and they created a fiction and then they made the indigenous people believe that fiction while accepting everything else that the indigenous people believe that was a fiction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
There's no document which says that Spaniards conspired to create these stories. I believe that when we find them in Mexico, when we find them in Peru, when we find them in Colombia, when we find them in Bolivia, we are looking at indigenous traditions. And I have no doubt that the Spanish saw those traditions and said, we can use this. We can take advantage of this. We can exploit this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. Yeah. It's about that. That's about what it comes to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Very, very recently. I think Santa and I went to Denisova Cave in 2013. Crazy. Something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Previously unknown. And there's so much that's unknown about our past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It certainly wasn't. I think you're looking around 2000s, 2010 maybe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think instead of smearing people who talk about the possibility of a lost civilization or people who even talk about aliens, I think instead of smearing them, archaeology should understand why people are asking those questions. People are asking those questions because they're not satisfied with what archaeology is offering.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Why not? Why not? Why should it be impossible? It has a parallel with the Bigfoot story, of course, a different size of creature. But maybe creatures have survived, which we think are extinct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's what I'm so grateful to the universe for and so grateful to my readers for is that I have been given this opportunity to live a fun life. and to travel the world and to investigate mysteries and to put across my point of view on those mysteries. I couldn't do any of that if it wasn't for my readers. I've never had sponsorship. I've never sought anybody to fund me to do anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I started out massively in debt. I've got to the place now where I can travel whenever I want and explore places. And that's all down to my readers. It's not just me. It's me and my readers that are making this possible. And I'm enormously grateful to them. And these days, my viewers as well. You're a very lucky man.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Exactly. That's why I don't see – I'm 74 years old now. I don't see myself retiring. The idea of retirement is just out of the question to me. You try to retire. I'll go find you. I'm going to go grab you, drag you out. Give you some vitamins. I love doing what I do. And I hope it's contributed something useful to the world rather than just flim-flam.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's not providing a nurturing, satisfying resolution to many of the problems that come from the past. And that's what drives me is curiosity about anomalies in the past. I'm often misrepresented as saying that somehow I've proved that a lost civilization existed. And I don't claim to have proved that. What I do say is, join me on this journey. There are mysteries in the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's what brought me into this field. Before that, I wrote all about current affairs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Cataracts over their eyes. And let's not forget that there's an indigenous population of Old Testament Jews in Ethiopia, the Falashas, who have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant happened. got there, different from the Ethiopian national epic, which is called the Kebra Nagast, the glory of kings. That's why I got into this field.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I was a current affairs guy, and Ethiopia was on my beat. And I just kept on coming across this story. And I realized it was central to Ethiopian culture. And I decided to investigate it and explore it. And it led to The Sign and the Seal, which was published in 1992. And that's what set me on the path to Fingerprints of the Gods and everything that followed that. So who is getting the cataracts?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The guardian of the Ark. This is a monk who is appointed. The place is Aksum in the province of Tigray in northern Ethiopia. It's a massively interesting place. Aksum has these huge granite stele. They're very similar in many ways to ancient Egyptian obelisks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They're a bit different in shape, but same sort of height, some of them going 110 feet high, cut out of solid granite right up there in the highlands of Ethiopia. And then they have an ancient church, the Church of St. Mary, Cathedral actually of St. Mary of Zion, where the Ark apparently was kept for hundreds and hundreds of years. Before that, it was kept elsewhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And then now it's been moved into a chapel that stands next to St. Mary of Zion Cathedral. And that chapel is guarded by armed men. The whole town is an armed camp that is protecting what they believe to be the Ark of the Covenant. But it's guarded particularly by one guy. who is the official guardian of the Ark. And he's elected by other monks to be the guardian of the Ark.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And several of them have run away when they get that election. Because once you're elected as the guardian of the Ark when the previous one has died, you're going to be kept in that chapel forever. You'll never be allowed to leave it. So they're close to whatever this object is, they're close to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And I met three of them over a succession of years because their mortality is, once they're appointed, they die very soon. And they all had these cataracts over their eyes and they all blamed the object in that chapel, whether or not it's the Ark, for causing their blindness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I don't know what it was. I think it's what is rightly described as an out-of-place artifact. Because if you look at the description in the Book of Exodus, the very precise dimensions of it, I think in modern terms we'd say three feet nine inches long by two feet three inches high and wide. It's got a layer of gold. It's got a layer of wood. It's got another layer of gold.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's very precisely specified like a blueprint in the Book of Exodus. And then it does all this stuff. It shoots out jets of fire and kills completely innocent people. It kills 50,000 Philistines in the city of Ashdod when they briefly capture it from the Israelites and make the mistake of –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
treating it like a tourist object, and they open the Ark of the Covenant and look inside, and suddenly everybody in that city is dying, and what they're dying of is cancerous tumors. This is described in the Old Testament. So it's intriguing that this object is so precisely specified and is reported to have done these terrible things. It's just insane that we know where it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Let's see if they're explained by archaeology or if they're not explained. And I found quite a number that are not explained by archaeology. And that's particularly to do with astronomical alignments, with traditions that are shared all around the world. It's to do with things that archaeologists by and large don't study.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, we know that I believe Ethiopia has a very strong claim to it, but that's all I can say because I've not seen it myself. I've been right outside the door of that sanctuary chapel several times.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. And they all blame the Ark. And one of them, it's a resonant phrase, sticks in my memory. I asked him why. And he said, the Ark is a thing of fire. Just that. Did he describe it to you? He did describe it as a box, rather like the biblical description, unsurprisingly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Wow. And, of course, gold is a very good insulator against radiation. I don't want to go too far down this track. To me, the fascinating thing is that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that actually claims to have the Ark of the Covenant. That it's central to religion and culture in Ethiopia today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That there's much to support that argument, particularly in the form of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews, and their very ancient traditions about how they got to Ethiopia in the first place. In context of all of that, I think Ethiopia has a very good claim, very interesting claim, and that's why I wrote a book about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. Well, let's not forget that one of the world's best known flood myths also comes from the Bible, which is the flood of Noah, which again is part of this worldwide tradition of which I am absolutely convinced Atlantis should be understood as a part of that worldwide tradition of a global flood and the loss of a former civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And again, it's one of the reasons why I've done the work I've done over these years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yes, definitely. I have learned from the criticisms of archaeologists. And one of the first things that became very clear to me, and they're absolutely right, is we need more indigenous voices in this series. And that's what we've made sure to do. We have an amazing archaeologist, indigenous archaeologist from Easter Island.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
We spent quite a bit of time filming in Easter Island and it's a strong... This series doesn't do country by country episodes. It's all merged together. Different bits of the story come together in each episode. But a good chunk of it is on Easter Island. And there, Sonia Hoa Cardinale is an indigenous Easter Islander. Her married name is Cardinale because she married an Italian guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And she gave us incredible material on Easter Island. And she revealed that she and her team have found what are called banana phytoliths. Now, phytoliths are a minute part of the banana plant. They've excavated them from a crater in Easter Island, and they found that those are 3,000 years old. Now, this is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, bananas do not propagate naturally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You can't get bananas to Easter Island without human beings bringing them there. That's how they got there. And secondly, the date that she's found 3,000-year-old banana phytoliths in Easter Island blows out of the water the notion that Easter Island was only settled 1,000 years ago or less, which is the current idea of archaeology. Again and again, we've had indigenous…
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
guests on the show who have brought real important information to it. Amongst those geoglyphs in Brazil, we had a member of the Apurina people who is a caretaker for those geoglyphs. And he talked to us about what is special to him about the geoglyphs, about how this is a sacred place to his tribe and how they still gather there today and how they
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
understand that is somehow connected to the journey to the next world, to the journey of life after death. And that then rings a bell in my mind of that whole idea of a journey to the afterlife and a portal through which we pass into that other realm. We find that right there in Brazil.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, 3,000 years ago, you're still within the period of the Polynesian expansion. This is not the Ice Age. This is more recent. It's early in the Polynesian expansion rather than late. Easter Island was seen as one of the last places that the Polynesians got to. This new evidence is suggesting it may have been one of the first places that the Polynesians got to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's right. Which is, by the way, White Sands. Have you been there? No, I haven't. What an incredible, ethereal, otherworldly place. And Alamogordo is sitting right in the middle of that. This is where they did the nuclear tests and the trinitite, which was created there. And there's gypsum sand. It's not normal. It's just the most amazing, amazing place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But the question that arises is, did they find the Moai already in place when they came there even 3,000 years ago? And I think there's a lot of evidence for that. I think that this is going to make archaeologists absolutely furious with me. But I hope that I'm paying full respect to indigenous traditions. We had an amazing Easter Island elder who told us the tradition of the lost land of Hever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Easter Island has its own flood myth. They say that there was a huge land in the Pacific far, far away called Hever, HIVA, and that it was destroyed in a flood cataclysm. and that there were survivors, specifically seven wise men. That's another thing that is found all around the world. It's found in ancient Sumer. It's found in ancient Egypt. It's found almost everywhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Specific seven wise men who came and settled Easter Island after this great cataclysm. So it's great to have indigenous testimony on that. And then you have the mystery of the Easter Island script. How did that happen? How come this tiny island... which only ever had a population of a few thousand, did something that is normally only done by big civilizations, which was create a written script.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But they have a script, the Easter Island script, and it's written on wooden boards. And we learned that these were the boards we see today, none of which, by the way, are in Easter Island now. They're all in museums around the world. They themselves were copies of copies of copies of earlier wooden boards that wore out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And these things go back far into the remote past as far as the indigenous people of Easter Island are concerned. And to have a fully formed elaborate script, which nobody can interpret today, you have to remember the tragic history of Easter Island. There was a point where Easter Island's population was reduced to just 11 people. And it was reduced to 11 people by Peruvian slave raids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They came and slaved the people of Easter Island, and they took them to work in Peru and put them elsewhere in the Pacific. Eventually, there was a movement to restore them to their homeland, and gradually people came back. But at one point, its population was reduced to 11. All the elders were wiped out, those who were the memory carriers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And so what's left now is just a hint of a memory of these things. But they speak with awe of these tablets with the script on it. And to me, that is a sign, again, that there's something wrong with our understanding of Easter Island. How can we explain that this tiny little place produces its own written language?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Why would it even need a written language when you can walk across the island in three hours? It wouldn't need to communicate in that way, and yet it had its own script.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
If you look up the word rongo rongo, R-O-N-G-O, rongo rongo tablets.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And there, yes, they found human footprints dated back more than 23,000 years. What do they think that environment was like 22,000 years ago? Well, it would still have been like that. It would have been gypsum dunes then in that place. Gypsum dunes. They wouldn't have left the footprints. I'm not exactly sure why the gypsum is there, but there it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It bears some curious similarities to the Indus Valley script, which has also not been deciphered. And let's hope AI can decipher both of them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And the way it runs is you read from left to right along the top row. Then you go from right to left along the next row. Then you go from left to right along the nexo and so on and so forth, a sort of snake-like. How do they know that? Because that's one of the memories that's been preserved by the Easter Islanders and because of the way they all run on. And what do they think it represents?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Nobody knows it. All we have is an oral tradition, which itself is very fragmented and very faint because of that reduction of Easter Island's population to just 11 people. And the fact that the elders who were, within historical times, able to read these tablets were all wiped out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Cuneiform, I think, because of its relationship to later languages, which were known. I mean, cuneiform is a writing system. You find the earliest version, I think, amongst the Sumerians and then in later Babylonian society as well. But when you have a language and you have a language that it's related to that you can read...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Or where you have a text in two different languages, but it's the same text. Then you're in a place where you can begin to translate it. That's what the Rosetta Stone does in ancient Egypt because we have it in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but we also have it in Greek. And that's why suddenly the code of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was cracked because of the Rosetta Stone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, there isn't a Rosetta Stone for the Easter Island script or for the Indus Valley script. But I think in the case of the cuneiform, there was something similar, some context to place it in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The issue of erosion, it's not so much erosion, it's the deposition of sediment. It's the deposition of sediment. Over time. Over time. And what we're looking at with these Easter Island heads, I was fortunate to know, there we are. I was just going to say, I was fortunate to know Thor Hardal, and there he is in the blue safari suit standing at the shoulder of the Easter Island Moai.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And you can see that the dark bit is the bit that was above ground And then they dig down and they find that it goes down 30 feet underground this enormous thing and this is not as a result of of being exposed by erosion. This had to be excavated in order to reveal it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And the issue is, on this tiny island, if this thing is only 700 years old, which is something that archaeologists often say, 700 or 1,000 years old, if it's only that old, how do you get 30 feet of sedimentation on this tiny island in just 700 years? It looks like a much longer period that would be required to create that depth of sedimentation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, this is where I'd like to defer to the work of Dr. Robert Shock who's a brilliant expert in this field. We invited Robert Shock to join us in season two of Ancient Apocalypse but he – I think that's unfortunate because I think Robert Shock has done breakthrough work on Easter Island. And it's Robert Shock who first realized that this is a problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's a very fine, very white sand. And it just goes on forever. And the dunes are sculpted and massive and huge. We had an amazing time there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This deep burial of these statues by natural sedimentation is a problem. It's a chronological problem that speaks to these statues being much older than we imagine they are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I've always regarded Robert as a good friend, but he and I have not spoken since 2015. On purpose? Well, I would love to speak to Robert. Does he try not to talk to you? And I take every opportunity to express my admiration for him. And Robert has been very brave. He is a credentialed geologist, and he has stuck his neck out on the Sphinx.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And a lot of people want to cut his head off for doing that. And I appreciate his courage, and I appreciate his openness of mind and his willingness to get into this. But I don't know. Somewhere between... 2013, we were still good friends. We traveled to Gunung Padang together in 2013.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
No, I don't know why it is. Maybe I did something that offended him. Sometimes I can be very unpleasant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Get out of here. Well, we're all nice guys, but we all have a dark side. And sometimes I am very harsh and very unpleasant. I don't think I was with Robert. I don't understand what the problem is between us. He and I disagree over the cause of the Younger Dryas cataclysm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Robert Shock believes that it was a massive solar outburst that brought this catastrophe about, and he focuses on the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago. I'm more of the view that the comet research group is right and that we're looking at the effect of largely of airbursts of large cometary fragments right across the surface of the Earth, which caused the Younger Dryas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
No, I don't see why they're mutually exclusive. I don't see why one has to write off the other. What we both agree on is that the Younger Dryas, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, was an extraordinary global cataclysm, which changed everything, which extinguished all the megafauna of the Ice Age. We agree on that, and we agree that it likely wiped out a lost civilization of the Ice Age as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
There's thousands of them. And what's amazing when you actually see the footprints is you can see the interactions between the human beings and animals. You can see that somebody is reacting to a giant sloth, which has suddenly turned around, and the person who's behind it suddenly turns around as well. Wow. Mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints and then human footprints overlaying those.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
We disagree on the mechanism, but I don't see why we shouldn't be friends for that. So, Robert, if you're listening... If you're listening, please, let's work together because we have many common enemies. And this is one of the problems with the alternative side is that there's a lot of infighting in the alternative side and everybody's scrambling for their own bit of turf.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Whereas the archaeological side, they're very unified in terms of attacking what they call pseudo-archaeology. They work as a team and that teamwork makes them very efficient. We're very inefficient on the alternative side.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I'm not sure. I think Robert is open to doing television. The fact is we invited him to come to Israel and to give his point of view and he declined. And therefore he must have a strong reason to do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Remember, it's a small island. It's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's 2,000 miles from Tahiti and 2,000 miles from the coast of Peru. It just seems strange that there's so many of those statues in this one area, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, it's what it calls itself, Tepitu or Tehenua, the navel of the earth. It calls itself the navel of the earth. And it's not the only place. Delphi in Greece calls itself the navel of the earth. Heliopolis in Egypt close to Giza was a navel of the earth. Angkor Wat in Cambodia is a navel of the earth. Gobekli Tepe means... The naval, the hill of the naval.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This notion of navels of the earth, I think it's connected to an ancient geodetic survey of the earth, that there were certain anchor points that lines of longitude were drawn from by a civilization that didn't have our tech, didn't have our iPhones, but did explore the world. did sail the oceans.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And I'm not surprised that we haven't found their ships since we haven't found the ships for those who sailed to Australia or for those who sailed to Cyprus either. But it had abilities that we do not attribute to period of that time. And those abilities included the ability to calculate longitude, something that our civilization didn't crack until the 18th century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And I suggest it's only a theory that these multiple navels of the earth around the world were fixed points on the earth where longitude connections were made. They were established places. So I do not think it's an accident. that Angkor Wat is 72 degrees of longitude east of Giza.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Because that number 72 occurs in ancient myths all around the world and is strongly connected to this phenomenon called precession of the equinoxes, which, first of all, it changes the pole star. At the moment, the Earth wobbles on its axis, but it's a very slow wobble over 26,000 years. It changes the pole star. Now it's Polaris. In the past, it was Thuban. In the past, it was Draco.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But now it's Polaris because the extended north pole of the Earth is spiraling in the heavens and it's pointing at different bits of space over a roughly 26,000-year period, 25,920 years to be exact. One degree of precession takes 72 years to unfold. That's why the fact that the relationship of the Great Pyramid to the Earth being on the scale of 1 to 43,200 is interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
If it was on the scale of 1 to 57,000, I couldn't care less. But 43,200 is one of those numbers that we find in mythology and traditions all around the world. And there's very solid scholarly backing for this in a book I've mentioned to you before, which is called Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschen. Giorgio was professor of history of science at MIT.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And it goes down for meters under the ground. So you have a very deep stratification of these impressions that have been left behind by our ancestors. and by animals that are now completely extinct. Mammoths and mastodons went extinct during the Younger Dryas, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They draw attention to this, that there appears to have been a very ancient knowledge of this obscure astronomical phenomenon. which our culture attributes to the Greeks and thinks only goes back a couple of thousand years. Santillana and Van Deschen were of the view that it goes back to what they called some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of the remote past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
You have to observe for more than one human lifetime. You've got to keep observing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, you may have to observe for hundreds of years. To conclude that it's a wobble is another thing. But to conclude that the skies are changing at a regular fixed rate, that's going to take observation over a few hundred years. 72 years is one human lifetime. In that 72 years, the processional shift would be the equivalent of the width of your finger held up to the horizon. Very hard to note.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But if you extend it for several hundred years, it'll be very clear that something is going on. And what's going on is the constellation that rises behind the sun, particularly notable at key moments of the year, the summer and winter solstice and the spring and autumn equinox and the age in which we live. Of course, astrology is another one of those things that archaeologists despise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But as anybody who follows astrology will know, we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. And that's because the sun on the spring equinox is, within the next 150 years, is going to move entirely out of Pisces, where it sits at the moment, and is going to move into Aquarius.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The age of Pisces, with Pisces housing the sun on the spring equinox, began around the time of Christ, about just over 2,000 years ago. And before that, it was the age of Aries. We have all this ram symbolism in ancient Egypt at that time. Before that, it was the age of Taurus, constellation of Taurus housing the sun. All of this is a process that unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So when I find that the Great Pyramid models the earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200, which is 72 times 600, I wake up and I think this is interesting. And when I find that Angkor, one navel of the earth, is separated from Giza, another navel of the earth, by 72 degrees of longitude, that rings another bell. And I think that's something curious and worthy of exploration.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The presence of the sky in our lives if we're living in a city is close to zero. It's not zero, but it's close to zero.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's very intimate to see a footprint, to see those five toes, to see the heel mark. To see sometimes a child walking beside a mother, that's there in the record as well. It's quite something special. And it opens the door. Archaeology has been very reluctant to accept a much older peopling of the Americas than previously was held. It was held for a long time, but it was about 13,000 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
That's a beautiful way to put it. That's exactly what we are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It was an ever-present reality. It was impossible to avoid it. That is why it's so crazy to say that the phenomenon like precession wasn't discovered until the Greeks about 2,200 years ago, because the ancients were living with those skies for thousands and thousands of years before, and they were paying very close attention to them. There's strong evidence that the constellations of the zodiac...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
were not inventions of the Greeks either. I mean, in a sense, the constellations aren't inventions because they happen to be on the path of the sun. The zodiac are the constellations which roughly are in the place in the sky that the sun occupies through the course of the year. That's why we see them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But there's increasing evidence that the Greeks inherited that and that the knowledge was very early and it may well go back into the upper Paleolithic. There's this incredible figure of Taurus in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux Cave in France, one of those cave paintings, which shows the stars of the Pleiades above the shoulder of the bull exactly where they should be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, again, you have the official position on this and you have the unofficial position. What's the official position? Well, the official position is that it's something that developed during the time of the late Mesopotamians and the Greeks. This notion that somehow there was a connection between the events in the sky and what happens to us. But I think it's much older than that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think the idea that the sky in some way determines our destinies is a very ancient idea, not a recent idea. And it kind of makes sense. I mean, it's weird to think this. I don't mean to be selfish to the human race, but we would not be here. No human beings would be here if it were not for that whole vast universe out there. It would be wrong to say that the universe exists so that we can be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But the fact is we would not be. We're part of that huge cosmos. And you're right. It's forgetting that we're part of the cosmos or regarding the cosmos as something that we must conquer, which is the modern mindset, which is most unhelpful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
They've abandoned that now. They did cling on tooth and nail for decades, but that's been abandoned. It's accepted that human beings came here long before 13,000 years ago. And White Sands is one of the places which provides just absolute definite irrefutable evidence of that, that they were here 23,000 years ago. But we don't know yet how long before that they were here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Well, it must come from a place where we feel connected to the universe. And we feel that the universe influences us directly. Right. Not the way we look at it at the moment as sort of something out there that doesn't mean much to us, except that we're going to conquer it with spaceships. Right. You know, and go to the moon and...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But to see it as an ever-present reality, we understand that we're affected by the climate on planet Earth. We understand we're affected by the weather, by the oceans, by the winds. They affect us. They affect our personalities. So why shouldn't we be affected by the broader universe that surrounds us?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's not been a central focus for me. My central focus has more been on the evidence for really precise ancient astronomy. particularly amongst the ancient Egyptians, but also fantastically advanced amongst the Maya in Mexico as well. And we have a big focus on the Maya in season two of Ancient Apocalypse. And I was fortunate, blessed...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
to have a brilliant archaeologist, Ed Barnhart, who joined me there in Palenque. And he's not sneering at me. He doesn't agree with everything I say. He's very clear on that. But he's not sneering at me. And he feels that there's something useful being contributed by this approach.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I think that archaeologists are very reluctant to accept the broader idea. They are willing. They can hardly deny that some structures are specifically aligned to the equinoctial rising point of the sun, in other words, due east. And other structures are aligned to the rising or the setting of the sun on the summer or the winter solstice. That cannot be denied.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Serpent Mound in Ohio is a classic example of that, which is oriented precisely to the setting sun on the winter solstice. But the broader idea that, for example, positions of stars in the sky might be replicated on the ground, that's an idea that archaeology completely rejects.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And that's where I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend Robert Boval, who's been very ill for the last many years. But Robert Boval brought us the Orion Correlation. And my God, did archaeology descend upon him like a ton of bricks. for just noticing that the three great pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And then when we work precession into the equation, we find that they're not laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt as it looked in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built. They're laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
This is part of the problem. I often remember a site called the Cerruti Mastodon site in San Diego. I went to see – the exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Demaree. And they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there. It was a butchering of a mastodon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So it's like a marker on the Giza Plateau speaking to that age, just as Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe speaks to that age in the astronomical diagram on that pillar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, that's right, because it's a cycle. It goes back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah, the Sphinx is another one. The... Sphinx aligned with it. It was looking at the rising sun and behind it the constellation of Leo 12,500 years ago. But if you go back 25,000, 26,000 years before that, you'll find the same alignment occurring. It's a cycle. It's not a one-off event. It's a cycle that occurs every 26,000 years. It's a mind blower.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It's a mind-blower, and that's why John Anthony West, who I'm so glad you had him on your show before he passed. He was such a genius and such a funny guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
I probably watched it 30 times. He was an absolute genius. And John was of the view that the Sphinx is more than 30,000 years old rather than just 12,500 years old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. That's the really important matter that Robert Shock has brought to the table, which no other person has dared to do. Now, John Anthony West started that process. He was aware of a problem in the weathering of the Sphinx, but he wasn't quite sure what the problem was. He was following up some writings by
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
A scholar called Schwaller de Lubix back in the 1920s or 1930s who said something about water weathering on the Sphinx. And so John brought Robert Shock there to Giza. And Robert Shock immediately recognized the weathering patterns on the Sphinx as the result of heavy rainfall, exposure to heavy rainfall for thousands of years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And you have to go back to the Younger Dryas to get that kind of heavy rainfall back. in Giza, hence the notion that the Sphinx geologically, whatever else we may say about it, is 12,000 plus years old. And it was courageous of Robert to do that. He put his own career in jeopardy, just like anybody who sticks their neck out in this field does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He put his own career in jeopardy by standing up for a much older Sphinx. And I just hugely respect him for doing that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
First of all, thank you to the viewers of season one of Ancient Apocalypse. And I hope you'll enjoy season two. I hope we're bringing really important new information to the table. And a special request, if you do like it, please give it a thumbs up on Netflix. Season two is all about the Americas. Secondly, I will be doing a speaking event in the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It'll be the only speaking event that I do in 2025. And that's going to be in Sedona, 19th and 20th of April 2025.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
But the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings. The thing is – It's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old. And, you know, this opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they were in Europe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
Yeah. Yeah. 19th and 20th of April 2025, and it's going to be called The Fight for the Past, because I believe that's what's going on here. So I hope that people will enjoy the show and express that enjoyment. That would be really, really helpful. I know they will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And the final thing I want to say is thank you to Keanu Reeves. Thank you to Keanu Reeves for joining me on the show. Keanu reached out to me some years ago because he's making this incredible comic book series called Berserker, B-R-Z-R-K-R, about an immortal warrior who's born 80,000 years ago but has the power of a god and cannot be killed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And back, I think, in at least two years ago, Keanu reached out to me for some advice, some historical advice on where in the world could such an individual have been born 80,000 years ago. And we talked about that and we exchanged emails and then we had some nice Zoom conversations together. Oh, that's cool. And I sense that this is a very open-minded, very curious, very interesting person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
So when we were doing season two, I did ask him, would you join me and speak about this and speak about your curiosity of the past? And he knew what he was up against. Actually, just before Keanu and I spent a day together filming for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, he'd watched the debate between me and Flint Dibble.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He knew what he was facing getting into this, but he had, again, the courage and the integrity to stand up, to stand by me in that story. And I'm enormously grateful to him for doing that. And I found along the way, I suspected it when we knew each other just by Zoom and by email.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
i found along the way what an incredible gentleman keanu reeves is how kind-hearted he is how humble he is how he turned up for the shoot carrying his own baggage um he he's just a gem of a human being and he he radiates kindness and decency and care and love towards others and i feel privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know him uh and i hope our paths will continue to cross in the future that's awesome
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
He's an awesome guy. Everything that people say about Keanu is right. He's a great man.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And especially when you consider the possibility of ships having gone through a cataclysm. But there's a more central point than that, which really needed to be brought up by the archaeologists in this, which is that archaeology universally accepts that human beings were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago. And I put the evidence on this into the video. It's not even in dispute.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
And that becomes... That's crazy. That's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities which have been neglected. I think that... The prejudice that the Americas were only settled very late in the human story led archaeology to not have their eye on the possibility of what happens if they were here earlier. And they tend not to, and they tend not to look to that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
It was found by accident. The first footprints were found completely by accident. And they were found by indigenous local people who alerted the National Park Service to them. And we have a number of indigenous spokespeople who speak to the White Sands mystery and how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2215 - Graham Hancock
The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind will reveal them again. And they're fragile. They can be easily destroyed and wiped off. And in a way, it's a miracle that they've survived. But to see the stride of a mammoth You see how far apart those huge footpads are. And to realize this thing was alive.