Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Wed, 16 Oct 2024
Graham Hancock a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last Ice Age, and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series "Ancient Apocalypse", the 2nd season of which has just been released. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep449-sc See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Graham's Website: https://grahamhancock.com/ Ancient Apocalypse (Season 2): https://netflix.com/title/81211003 Graham's YouTube: https://youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom Graham's X: https://x.com/Graham__Hancock Graham's Facebook: https://facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock Fingerprints of the Gods (book): https://amzn.to/4eM3QXC SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex Riverside: Platform for recording podcasts and videos from everywhere. Go to https://creators.riverside.fm/LEX LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (09:58) - Lost Ice Age civilization (17:03) - Göbekli Tepe (29:07) - Early humans (34:07) - Astronomical symbolism (45:36) - Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (1:03:55) - The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx of Giza (1:24:29) - Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest (1:33:49) - Response to critics (1:57:56) - Panspermia (2:05:22) - Shamanism (2:29:22) - How the Great Pyramid was built (2:36:41) - Mortality PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.
He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released. And it's focused on the distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist, scholar I love talking to on the podcast.
Extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and respectful in disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for note-taking, Riverside for making amazing-looking podcasts online, Element for hydration, Shopify for selling stuff online, and BetterHelp. for your mind. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexherman.com slash contact.
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
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Like I said, I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar, delicious electrolyte mix.
I drink it throughout the day, I'm drinking it now, and I'm actually pretty low on water and electrolytes at the moment because I did a really hard training session The training session was about an hour and a half and I think I only took one round off. And it was just hard training round after round after round.
And by the end of it, I was just sort of both in the zone technique-wise, but also kind of psychologically accepting whatever happens in each particular puzzle that is jiu-jitsu. So I trained against some really strong dudes today. It was... Wrestlers, intense. The technique was there too. So it's like, it's a battle for everything. Lots of just attacking for submissions over and over and over.
Everything in the transitions, there's no stalling in a particular position. It's just movement and movement and movement and constant attacks. Yeah, it was exhausting. Plus the heat, just all of that sweating. And I usually don't drink during training. So by the time I'm done, I'm just like, no water in me. And that's when the Element really helps out.
I go from feeling really shitty to feeling really good. So get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set up a store on lexfermer.com slash store. And I need to add shirts there, especially shirts that don't have my face on them.
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I think at the end of the podcast, Graham called death a leap into the next great adventure. Something like that. And I remember that made me smile, a kind of smile that just warms my heart and the warmth stays there for a time. It's a kind of joyful acceptance of the transitory nature of life. Those words and the way he said them.
And just as he said, death indeed is one of the great concerns for us humans. Whether we acknowledge it or not, it is the darkness beneath the surface waves of our daily concerns. At least I personally believe that there is a fear there, a great fear. that must be confronted and dealt with and integrated into our conception of what it means to be a human being and how to survive the waves.
Anyway, I'm a big believer that talking is one of the tools that should be used to understand your mind and to figure out what strategies can be used to navigate life. And yeah, that's what talk therapy can do. And I recommend the easiest way to do that is BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.
Let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history, that there was an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seeded what people now call the six cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Andes, and Mesoamerica. So let's talk about this idea that you have. Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?
It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness in the story that we are taught about our past. which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less 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.
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.
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?
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?
We cannot actually weigh and measure their brains, but from the work that's been done on the crania, it looks like they had the same brains that we do with the same wiring. So if we've been around for 300,000 plus years at least... And if ultimately in our future was the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn't it happen sooner? Why did it take so long?
Why was it such a long time? Even the story of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing. I remember a time when it was said that there hadn't been anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago. And then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia and then 310,000 years ago. There's a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle there.
But the big question for me in that timeline is why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why 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.
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.
And by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization. until the 1920s when railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins. I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. And these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally planned cities. Clearly, they're the work of an already sophisticated civilization.
One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley civilization is that we find a steatite seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture. And that seal is 5,000 years old. And the yoga posture is 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.
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
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
That whole idea, very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas event. It was an extinction-level event. That's when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct.
It's after that, it's after that event that we start seeing this, what are taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization. We come out of the upper Paleolithic as it's defined, the end of the old Stone Age, and into the Neolithic. And that's... when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But what happened before that?
And why did that suddenly happen then? And I can't help feeling, and I'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.
to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory. And I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the Younger Dryas event was a massive global cataclysm, whatever caused it. And it's strange that just after it, we start seeing these first signs.
So the current understanding in mainstream archaeology is that after the Young Address is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently.
Yeah, independently and by coincidence. And by coincidence, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, China, they all pop up at pretty much the same time. So that is the mainstream view.
And they don't just pop up. They kind of build up gradually. First, there's some settlements.
Oh, definitely, yes.
And then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture in that is also non-obvious, but it's just… There's first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living, then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff.
It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you're seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of years before 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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
For a long time, Gobekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.
Can you say how it was discovered? I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?
Well, 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.
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.
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
is enclosure D, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct. They're substantial, hefty pieces of stone. It isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20-foot tall or 20-ton megalith, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. There's nothing magical or really weird about that.
Human beings can do that. And always have. Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It's within 200 meters of the main enclosure. So that's not a mystery. But the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture, this massive structure, massive megalithic pillars appear. And the pillars, one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment.
And there is good work that's been done which suggests that enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star Sirius. And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions.
It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there. Now you asked how 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.
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.
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.
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.
And they'd found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that's where agriculture at any rate in Europe and Western Asia begins. It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
It was created by hunter-gatherers, yeah. There was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in 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.
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say, a time capsule, so protected by forming a mound around it?
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.
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.
And then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia. But agriculture has taken a firm route by then. Actually, one other thing, I'll just say this in passing.
When I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archaeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, and that Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture.
It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers. who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so annoying to archaeologists as it is.
And perhaps we should also state, if you look at the entirety of history of hominids, Humans or hominids have been explorers. I didn't even know this when I was preparing for this. Yeah. Looking at Homo erectus. Yeah. 1.9 million years ago. Absolutely. Almost right away, they spread out through the whole world. Yeah. And we Homo sapiens evolved from them.
And we should also mention, since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand, there's still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there, like we mentioned in Africa, that it's, you know, I think the current understanding, we didn't come from one particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations.
This is the out of Africa theory. I think it's more than a theory. It's really strongly evidenced. Why? Because we'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.
But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and... The astonishingly distant travels that they undertook. Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity.
I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the next hill. And I think that goes very deep into human character. And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of humanity. people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world.
I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.
So I guess the general puzzlement that you're filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements.
That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the 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.
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.
It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world. And They're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another and that are also distant from one another in time. They don't necessarily occur at the same time.
And this is where I think that 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.
And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do think about, what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all...
decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey.
And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America through Mexico through into North America, but it's also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we're looking at is
an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is this sequence of numbers that are
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.
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.
And the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so.
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.
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.
So if you imagine the extended north pole of the Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star, precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth. Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended north pole of the Earth points at empty space.
There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac, that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger. It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it's difficult.
You've 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So one of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archaeology is you take this sort of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously. I do, as I believe the ancients did. I think it's important to sort of... consider what humans would have thought about back then.
Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube, whatever. But back then, especially before sort of electricity, the stars is like, The sexiest thing to talk about.
There's no light pollution.
There's no light pollution, so there's... There's the majesty of the heavens. Every single night, you're spending looking up at the stars, and you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars, and sort of the scientists of the day. And I'm sure there's going to be these geniuses that emerge. They're able to do two things. One...
tell stories about the gods or whatever based on the stars. And then also, as we'll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example. So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright, and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it.
It was an overwhelming presence, and that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it's hard to miss... when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun, over the course of the solar year, is month by month rising against the background of different constellations.
And then there's a much longer process, the process of 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,
convention, but that the constellations were there, I think was very clear, and that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky, which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to.
Well, but detecting the precession of the equinox is hard, because especially they don't have any writing systems, they don't have any mathematical systems, so everything is told through words.
Yeah. 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.
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.
Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context. And actually, that's a very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time. One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history, is human beings love stories. We love great stories.
And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And So carefully done that actually it doesn't matter whether the storyteller knows that they're passing on that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it's repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on.
And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge.
So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
I take them very seriously. And the other... 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.
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.
But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.
And I think it's an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm of which one of, but not the only, distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater. The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archaeological explanation is, look,
People suffer local floods all the time. I mean, as we're talking, there's flooding in Florida. But I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood. They know it's local. But that's the argument largely of archaeology dealing with the flood myths, that some local population experienced a
a nasty local flooding event, and they decided to say that it affected the whole world. I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the Ice Age.
So there is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change. So can you explain this hypothesis?
Yes. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short... is not a lunatic fringe theory, as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It's the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archaeology and including oceanography as well. And they are collectively puzzled
by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the earth. You can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see it's about the width of a human hand. And there's a drawer there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time. And that drawer has revealed the sides of the drawer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12,860 years ago, There's a massive global plunge in global temperatures, and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age. And it's almost literally overnight. It's very, very, very rapid. Normally, in an epoch when the Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise.
But there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. And then equally dramatically and equally suddenly, the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up.
And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of 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.
That's when the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas, and it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.
Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? Like, what explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?
The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part, 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.
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
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.
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.
The suggestion is that the Taurid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago, came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the Sun and went into orbit around the Sun, an orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, The likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.
But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments, 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.
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.
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.
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.
If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the Taurid meteor stream and about the risk of... cosmic impact.
So the suggestion is that it wasn't one impact, it wasn't two impacts, it wasn't three impacts, it was hundreds of 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That's why it's the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. And of course, it has many opponents, and there are many who disagree with it. And there have been a series of... peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. One, I think, was in 2011. It was called a requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
And there's one just been published a few months ago or a year ago, you know, called a complete refutation of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title. So it's a hypothesis that has its opponents. And even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view.
Robert 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.
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.
How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations? So is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have... erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?
In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying. It's the Younger Dryas that's central to what I'm saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger. Something caused it. I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we're looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there,
and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation. But I don't mind other explanations. It's good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet. And that word advanced civilization... This is another word that is easily misunderstood.
And I've tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved something certain things.
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.
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.
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.
There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is, these portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the Ice Age. They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula. And the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass.
And that was the case during the Ice Age. That was the Sunda shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by 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.
I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age. But that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following that exploration instinct, that they knew how to navigate. They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before. They knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world.
Those maps... were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and recopied. We don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it's likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire.
I suggest it's likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, and that's where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.
So from this perspective, when we talk about advanced Ice Age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of They're scholars of the stars and they're expert seafaring navigators.
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.
And perhaps some...
building tricks and skills of how to well definitely and this again is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza plateau in Egypt with the three great pyramids and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself.
This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.
Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them? Well, first of all, the astronomy.
And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubix, who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx.
John West picked that up, and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt, and he was… hugely versed in ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right. Maybe there was some kind of flooding here.
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.
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
was a completely different place during the Ice Age. There were rivers in it. There were lakes in it. It was fertile. It was possibly densely populated. And there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx.
The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert 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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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...
are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely. And that it, over the thousands of years, it became damaged. It became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out.
By the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, the head of the lion, original lion head, would 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.
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.
I mean, it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high, and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, you would be better... You'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the Sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion?
And again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies, and putting on the ground, as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau It's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute.
But the fact that the 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.
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
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,
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.
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.
And those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there. So I think Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids.
They were closely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramids as we see them today.
But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older, and that when we look at the Three Great Pyramids, we'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.
And that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians.
So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptians to celebrate further an already holy place.
Yeah, and there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today, but the... the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time.
So what's the case, what's the evidence that the Egyptologists used to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?
Well, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing, is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? And the timeline... that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid, is the pyramid of the Pharaoh Djoser, the step pyramid at Saqqara, about a hundred years or so before the Giza pyramids were built.
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.
And then suddenly, once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt. And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them
is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place, whereas the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti About which there is some controversy. Basic statistics, it's a six million ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long.
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.
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.
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
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
One of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.
If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of 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.
It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus already in place. Above the king's chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the king's chamber of the weight of the monument.
But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down, where more weight was involved, you have the queen's chamber and there are no such relieving chambers above that.
In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard 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.
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.
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.
He's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure.
And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 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.
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.
You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. The theory of Egyptology... is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu.
But after cutting out that 300-foot-long, 26-degree sloping passage, 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
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
the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier. And why that's important is, in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology from a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, Most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged and they desperately scattered across the globe. Seeking refuge.
Seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars. Mm-hmm. Their knowledge about the stars. Yeah. And their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.