Kind: captions
Language: en
the big question for me in that timeline
is why didn't we do it sooner why did it
take so long why did we wait until after
12,000 years ago really after 10,000
years ago to start seeing the beginnings
of
civilization the following is a
conversation with Graham Hancock a
journalist and author who for over 30
years has explored the controversial
possibility that there existed A Lost
Civilization during the last ice age and
that it was destroyed in a global
cataclysm some 12,000 years ago he is
the presenter of the Netflix documentary
series ancient apocalypse the second
season of which has just been released
and it's focused on the distant past of
the Americas a topic I recently
discussed with the 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 this is Alex Freedman 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 a an
advanced Ice Age civilization that came
before and perhaps seated what people
now call the six cradles of civilization
Mesopotamia Egypt India China Indies and
meso America 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 uh 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 uh
straightforward evolutionary
progress uh we start out as Hunter
foragers then we become
agriculturalists the hunter for forager
phase could go back hundreds of
thousands of years uh I mean this is
where it's also it's also important to
mention that anatomically modern humans
and were not the only humans we 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 we carry Neal
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 Jeb 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 that 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 we cannot actually
weigh and measure their brains but from
the work that's been done on on the
crania it looks like they had the same
brains that we do with the same the same
wiring so so if we've been around uh for
300,000 plus years at least and if
ultimately in our fure future uh was uh
the the process to create civilization
or civilizations Why didn't it happen
sooner why did it take so long why why
why was it such a long time even the
story of of anatomically modern humans
has kept on changing I 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 um there there's a lot
of a lot of missing pieces in the in the
puzzle there um but the big question for
me in that timeline is why didn't we do
it sooner why did it take so long why
why why did we wait until after 12,000
years ago really after 10,000 years ago
to start seeing the beginnings what are
selected as the beginnings of
civilization uh in in places like like
turkey for example and then there's a a
relatively slow process of adopting
Agriculture and and by 6,000 years ago
we see ancient Sumer uh emerging as a
civilization and we're then in the
predynastic period in ancient Egypt as
well 6,000 6,000 years ago beginning to
see definite signs of what will become
the the dynastic civilization of Egypt
about about 5,000 years ago and
interestingly round about the same time
you have the indis valley civilization
popping up out of nowhere and and by the
way the IND valley civilization was A
Lost Civilization uh until the 1920s
when uh Railway workers accidentally
stumbled across some some ruins I've
been to haraa and madaro uh and these
are extraordinarily beautifully
centrally planned cities these clearly
they're the work of an already
sophisticated uh civilization one of the
things that strikes me about the indis
valley civilization is that we find a a
steti seal uh of an IND individual
seated in a a recognizable yoga posture
and that seal is 5,000 years old uh and
the yoga posture is mulab bandana 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 five 5,000 years ago what's the
what's the background to this China the
yellow the Yellow River civilization
again it's around about the same period
5 to 6,000 years ago you get these first
signs of something happening so it's
very odd that that all around the world
uh we have this this sudden upsurge of
civilization about 6,000 years ago
preceded by what seems like a a natural
evolutionary process that would lead to
a to a civilization um and yet certain
ideas being being carried down and
manifested and expressed in in many of
these in many of these different
civilizations
I just find that that whole idea very
puzzling and and very and very
disturbing uh 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 uh which was the young Adas
event uh it was an extinction level
event uh that's when all the great
of the Ice Age went extinct
it's after that it's after that event
that we start seeing this what 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 old 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 but what happened before
that and why did that 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 uh to answer some of
the questions that I have uh about about
prehistory um and and um I think it's
worthwhile to inquire into those
possibilities because the younger dras
event was uh a massive
uh Global cataclysm whatever caused it
uh and and um it's strange that just
after it we start seeing these these
first signs so the current understanding
in mainstream Archaeology is that after
the younger Drass is when the
civilizations popped up in different
places of the globe with a lot of
similarities but they popped up
independently independently and and and
by coincidence and by coincidence those
those big civiliz ations that we all
remember as the first civilizations Su
Egypt the indis valley civilization
China they all pop up at the pretty much
the same time um that is that is 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 RO of the role of agriculture in
that is uh also non obvious but it's
just there's a 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 everything about
that makes sense there is no doubt that
you're seeing uh evolutionary progress
uh social Evolution taking taking place
in those thousands of years before Sumer
uh 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 result 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 had seen
underwater by the time that book was
finished I I thought actually I've done
this story I've walked the walk I I
really don't have much more to say about
it and I I I turned in another Direction
and I I wrote a book called Supernatural
meetings with the ancient teachers of
mankind recently retitled uh 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 gobec Lee 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 I reached a point where I I
realized I have to get back in I have to
get back in the water and I have to
investigate this again and and gockley
tee was a game changer but I think it's
a GameChanger for everything because
gockley tee the uh extraordinary nature
of it we're looking at a major
megalithic site which is at least 5 and
a half thousand years older than say
gigantia in Malta which is was
previously considered to be the oldest
megalithic site in the world and uh this
led of course to a huge amount of
interest and attention both from uh the
Turkish government who see the potential
tourism potential of of having the
world's oldest megalithic site and 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
goeke uh and going down into Syria and
further down into the Jordan Valley as
far far as Jericho uh and even across a
bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus uh
is what Turkish archaeologists are now
calling the Tas civilization they're
calling it a civilization the Stone
Hills
civilization uh with uh very definite
identifying characteristics semi-
Subterranean circular structures the use
of t-shaped megalithic pillars sometimes
not anywhere near as big as those at
gockley tee it's clear that gockley Tee
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 ston Hills
civilization had had achieved uh but
what what is becoming clear is that this
is a period between before the
foundation of gocke as far as we know
that date of 11,600 years ago is the
oldest date for gck tee but of course
there's a lot of gocke still underground
so we we can't say for sure that that's
the oldest but it's the oldest so far uh
excavated what we're what we're seeing
uh is that in that whole region around
there there was something was in motion
and it began to go into motion round
about the beginning of the younger drers
and and this is where these two dates
are really important the younger dras
I'll round the figures off begins around
12,800 years ago and it ends around
11,600 years ago so gockley te's
construction date if it is 11,600 years
ago if they don't find older materials
marks the end of the younger dryers um
but the beginning of the younger dryers
we're already seeing the stirrings of
the kind of culture that manifests in
full form uh at
gocke uh and and after the construction
of GOC tee in fact even during the
construction of gole teepe uh we see
agriculture beginning to be adopted the
the people who created gock teepe were
all Hunter foragers at the beginning but
by the time gockley was finished and it
was definitely deliberately finished
closed off closed down deliberately
buried covered with Earth covered with
rubble uh and then topped off with a
hill which is which is why gocke is
called U what it is gocke means pot
belli Hill or the hill of the naval for
a long time gockley Tey was thought to
be just a hill that looked a bit like a
pot belly can you say how it was
discovered I think 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 go
gockley teepe is first of all the the
oldest 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
um 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 he was in 2013 and Dr Clash Smidt
the late Dr Clash Smidt who was who who
died a year later uh was very generous
to me and showed me around the site 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 gockley tee still underground um so
anything is anything is possible in
terms of the in terms of the dating of
Quebec T but what we have at the moment
is a series of almost circular but not
quite circular enclosures which are
which Are Walled with relatively small
stones and then inside them you have
pairs of megalithic pillars and the the
archetypal part of that site is
enclosure d uh which contains the two
largest upright megaliths about 18 ft
tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in
the range of 20 tons uh if I have my my
memory correct they're they're
substantial Hefty pieces of stone it
isn't it isn't some kind of
extraordinary feat to create a 20ft tall
or 20 ton megalith uh nor is it an
extraordinary feat to move it uh there's
nothing there nothing magical or or
really weird about that human beings can
do that and always have besides the
Quarry for the megalith is right there
it's within 200 meters of the of of the
main enclosure so that's not a mystery
but the mystery is the mystery is why
suddenly this this new form of
architecture this massive massive um
megalithic pillars appear and the the
pillars what 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 uh aligns to the rising of the star
serus and the rising points of the star
serus 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 gobec
tapy was completed
uh agriculture was being introduced and
and was was was taking place there now
you asked how gockley was found the
answer to that is that there was a
survey of that potbellied hill in the
1960s by um some American archaeologists
and they were looking absolutely looking
for Stone Age material for material from
the Paleolithic um 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 uh
Stone bits of very large and 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 bantine uh remains and they
abandoned the site and and never looked
at it further and it wasn't until the
German archaeological Institute got
involved and particularly CLA smidth who
I think was was a genius had real
insight into this uh and and started to
dig at gockley teepe that they realized
what they'd found that they that they'd
found potentially the oldest megalithic
site in the world uh and they'd found it
at a place where agriculture according
to the established historical timeline
that's where agriculture at any rate in
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
they were there there was no agriculture
11,600 years ago in goeke but by the
time gocke was decommissioned and I use
that word deliberately was closed down
uh and and buried uh agriculture was all
around it uh and and and this was
agriculture of of people who knew how to
cultivate 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 12200
years it was there and it continued to
be elaborated as a site and while it was
being elaborated as a site we see
agriculture I'm going to use the word
being introduced uh it had there had
been no sign of it before for and
suddenly it's there and to me that's
another of the mysteries about Glee and
then with the new work that that's being
done we realize that it's part of a much
wider phenomenon uh which it spreads
across an enormous distance um and and
um the puzzling thing is that after
gocke there almost seems to be a decline
things things fall down again and and
then we enter this long slow process of
the Neolithic thousands of years uh
gradual developments until we come to
ancient Sumer and and and Mesopotamia
but agriculture has taken a firm a firm
route by then actually one of the thing
I'll just say this in passing when 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 is fully
accepts that the idea of Agriculture was
introduced to Western Europe from Turkey
uh and that that the Western Europeans
didn't invent agriculture it was
absolutely introduced by Anatolian
farmers who who who traveled West so the
the notion of dissemination of ideas
perhaps shouldn't be so um 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 I didn't even know this When
I Was preparing for this yeah looking at
homoerectus yeah 1.9 million years ago
abely almost right away they spread out
through the whole world and we Homo
sapiens evolved from them and we should
also mention since we're talking about
sort of controversial debates going on
as I understand there's still debates
about the Dynamics of all that was going
on there like we mentioned in Africa
that it's the you know I think the
current understanding we didn't come
from one particular point of Africa that
there's multiple locations this is the
Out of Africa Theory I think it's more
than a theory it's it's really strongly
evidenced why because we're part of the
great ape family and it's and it's an
African family there's no doubt that
that human beings are deep Origins are
in Africa but then there as you rightly
say there were these very early
migrations Out of Africa uh by species
that are likely ancestral to
anatomically modern humans including
definitely Homo erectus and and and this
astonishingly distant travels that they
undertook yes I think I think there is
an urge to explore in in 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 of the next
Hill uh and I think that goes very deep
into human character and I think it was
being manifested in those those Early
Adventures of people who left Africa and
traveled all around the world and then
settling in different parts of the world
uh I think a lot of a lot of
anatomically modern human evolution took
place outside Africa as well not not
only in Africa so I guess the the
general puzzlement the you're filled
with is given that these
creatures explore and spread and uh 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 May maybe it didn't take so
long maybe maybe things were happening
that we haven't yet got hold of in the
archaeological record which which await
to be discovered um and of course there
are huge parts of the world that have
not been studied At All by archaeology
but the fact that the fact that huge
parts of the world have not been studied
At All by Archaeology is not in it on
its own enough to suggest that we're
missing a chapter in the human story uh
the reason that I come to that isn't
only puzzlement about 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 um and and uh
they're found amongst cultures that are
geographically distant from one another
uh 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 uh
because an idea um Can can manifest
again and again uh throughout the human
story so that so there are particular
there are particular issues uh for
example the notion of the afterlife
Destiny of the Soul uh what happens to
us when we die um and believe me when
you reach my age that's something you do
you do think about what what what
happens I to feel Immortal when I was in
my 40s but now that I'm 74 I definitely
know that I'm that that that I'm not
well it would be natural for human
beings all around the world to have that
same 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 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 uh in ancient Egypt uh in Ancient
India in ancient Mesopotamia the same
the same idea uh and I don't feel that
that can be a coincidence I feel 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 that 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 uh
in the expression of these ideas the
other thing very puzzling thing is um
this sequence of numbers that are a
result of the precession of the
equinoxes at least I think that's the
best theory to explain them um here I
think it's important
to pay tribute to the work of Georgio to
santiana and her of vend Geor Georgio de
Santana was professor of History of
Science actually at MIT where where
you're based back in the
60s um and he vend was professor of the
history of science at Frankfurt
University and they wrote an immense
book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill
uh and and Hamlet's Mill uh
differs very strongly from established
opinion on the issue of the phenomenon
of precession and I'll explain what
pression is in a moment um generally
it's held that it was the Greeks who
discovered the
pression uh and the dating on that is
put back not very far maybe 2,300 years
ago or so santiana and vesan 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 uh
results from the fact that our planet is
the viewing platform from which we
observe the Stars uh and our planet of
course is rotating on its own axis at
roughly 1,000 M hour at the equator uh
but what's less obvious is that it's
also wobbling on its axis and that it so
if you imagine the extended North Pole
of the earth pointing up at the sky in
our time it's pointing at the star
Polaris and that is our pole star but
Polaris has not always been the pole
star precisely because of this wobble on
the axis of the earth uh 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 the
path of the sun the Earth is orbiting
the Sun uh and we are seeing what's
behind it what's what's in direct line
with the sun in our 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 uh Today We Live in the
age of Pisces uh and it's definitely not
an accident that the early Christians
used the fish uh as their symbol uh this
is another area where I differ from
archaeology I think I think the
constellations of the zodiac were Recon
recognized as such much earlier than we
suppose anyway to get to the point uh
the key marker of the Year certainly in
the northern hemisphere was the Spring
Equinox uh this was the question was
what constellation is rising behind the
sun what's what constellation is housing
the Sun at dawn on the Spring Equinox uh
right now it's Pisces in another 150
years or so it'll be Aquarius we we do
live in the dawning of the age of
Aquarius uh back in the time of um the
late ancient Egyptians it was Aries
going back to the time of rames or
before before that it was Taurus and so
on and so forth It's backwards through
the Zodiac uh 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 it un
the whole cycle and it is a cycle it
repeats itself roughly every 26,000
years put a put a more exact figure on
it
25,920 years uh that may be a convention
some Scholars would would say it was a
bit less than that a bit more but you're
talking fractions it's it's in that area
25,920 years um and and uh 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 in a period of 72 years is
about the width of your finger uh it's
not impossible to notice in a lifetime
but it's but it's difficult you got to
pass it on um and and what seems to have
happened is that some ancient culture
the culture that santiana and vesan call
some almost unbelievable ancestor
culture worked out the entire process of
procession and selected the key numbers
of procession of which of which the most
important number the governing number is
the number 72 uh but but we also have uh
numbers related to the number 72 72 + 36
is 108 108 divided by 2 is 54 uh these
these numbers are also found in
mythology all around the world there
were 72 conspirators uh who um were
involved in killing the god OS ciris in
in ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a
wooden Coffer and dumping him in the in
the Nile um there are
432,000 in the rig basa 432,000 is a
multiple of
72 uh and and um at Anor in Cambodia for
example you have uh the bridge to Anor
Tom and on that bridge you have figures
on both sides sculpted figures which are
holding the body of a serpent uh that
serpent is vuki 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 aml's Mill uh there are
54 on each side 54 plus 54 is 108 108 is
72 + 36 it's a pressional number
according to the work that santiana and
vesan did and the fascination with these
this number system and its Discovery all
around the world uh is one of the
puzzles that that intrigue me and and
suggest to me that we are looking at
ancestral knowledge that was passed down
and probably was passed down from a
specific single common source at one
time but then was spread out very very
widely around the world so one of the
defining ways that you
approach the study of human history that
I think contrasts with mainstream
archaeologies do you take this sort of
astronomical symbolism and the
relationship between humans and the
Stars very seriously I do as I believe
the Ancients did I think it's important
to sort of uh 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 and
whatever but back then especially before
sort of electricity the stars is like
yeah the sexiest thing to talk about
there's no light pollution there's no
light pollution so there's there it's
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 yeah they're able
to uh 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 oh yeah so like
it makes sense that the Stars had a
Primal importance for the ideas of the
times for the status the for religious
Explorations it was an everpresent
reality yes and it was bright and it was
brilliant and it was full of Lights uh
it it it's inconceivable that the
Ancients would not have paid attention
to it it was it was an overwhelming
presence and that's one of the reasons
why I'm really confident that the the
constellations that we now recognize as
the constellations of the zodiac were
recognized much earlier because it's
hard to miss when you pay attention to
the sky that the sun over the course of
the solar year is month by month Rising
against the background of different
constellations and then there's a much
longer process the process of procession
which takes that Journey backwards and
where we have a period of
2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac
I think it would 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 uh
convention but that the constellations
were there uh I think was very clear and
that they were special constellations
unlike other ones higher up in the sky
uh which were not on the path of the sun
that that people paid attention to well
but detecting the procession of the
Equinox is hard because especially they
don't have any writing systems they
don't have any mathematical systems so
everything is told through words yeah
they well they have let's not
underestimate oral Traditions uh the or
oral Traditions that's something we've
lost in our culture today one of the
things that happens with the written
word uh is that you gradually lose your
memory um actually there's a nice story
from from ancient Egypt about the God th
the god of wisdom who is very proud of
himself because he has invented
writing look at this gift he says to uh
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 and um the
Pharaoh in this story replies to him no
you have not given us a wonderful gift
you have destroyed the art of memory uh
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
that's that's that's a very interesting
point and 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 in any time in any period of
history is human beings love stories we
we love great stories and and one way to
preserve information uh is to encode it
embed it in a great story uh and and so
carefully done that that actually it
doesn't matter whether the Storyteller
knows that they're passing on that
information or not uh the story itself
is the vehicle uh and as long as it's
repeated Faithfully the information
contained within it will be will be
passed on and I I do think this is this
is part of the the story of the pre
preservation of knowledge so that's one
of the reasons that you take myths
seriously I take them very seriously and
and the other many reasons but but I
can't help being deeply impressed and
deeply puzzled by the worldwide
tradition of a global cataclysm within
human memory I mean we know that we know
scientifically that there have been many
many cataclysms in the past going back
millions of years I mean the best known
one of course is the kpg event as it's
now called that made the dinosaurs
extinct 65 million or or or 66 million
years ago but has there been such a
cataclysm in the lifetime of the human
species um yeah the Mount Toba eruption
about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad uh
but a global cataclysm the younger dras
really ticks all the boxes as a as as a
worldwide disaster which definitely
involved sea level rise both at the
beginning and at the end of the younger
dras it definitely involved the
swallowing up of lands that previously
had been above water uh and I think it's
a an excellent candidate uh 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 uh underwater the fact
that this story is found all around the
world uh suggests to me that the
archaeological explanation is look
people suffer local floods all the time
I I mean as we're talking there's
there's there's flooding in Florida uh
but I I I don't think anybody in Florida
is going to make the mistake of
believing that that's a global flood
they they know it's they know it's local
um but that's the argument largely of
archaeology dealing with the flood myths
or that some local population
experienced a a nasty local flooding
event and they decided to say that it
was that it affected the whole world I
I'm not persuaded by that particularly
since we know there was a nasty Epoch
the younger dras when flooding did occur
and when the Earth was subjected to
events cataclysmic enough to extinguish
entirely the meapa of the Ice Age so
there is the younger D impact hypothesis
that provides an explanation of what
happened during the period yeah that
resulted in such rapid environmental
change so can you explain this
hypothesis yes um the the younger dras
impact hypothesis yd for short uh is uh
is not a lunatic fringe Theory as its
opponents often attempt to write it off
um it's the work of more than 60 major
scientists uh working across many
different disciplines including
archaeology uh and and including
oceanography as well
um and and uh they are collectively
puzzled by the sudden onset of the
younger dryers and by the fact that is
it is accompanied 12,800 Years Ago by a
distinct lay in the earth uh you can see
it most clearly at uh Murray Springs in
Arizona for example you can you can see
it's about the width of a human hand uh
and there's a a drawer there that's been
cut by flash flooding at some time and
that draw has revealed the sides of the
drawer and you can 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 wild fires there's a lot of
soot in it uh there are also Nano
diamonds in it there is shocked Quartz
in it there is quartz that's been melted
at temperatures in excess of 2,200 de
Centigrade um 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
who made that incredible Discovery uh
initially their their Discovery was
based entirely on impact proxies just as
the younger druses there was no crater
and for a long time they were
disbelieved because they couldn't
produce a crater uh but when they
finally did produce that deeply buried
chicks Glo 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 dest boundary layer all
around the world um so so it's the fact
that at the moment when the earth tips
into a radical climate shift it it 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
and the world suddenly gets as cold as
it was at the peak of the Ice Age and
and it 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 dryers and then you have this
long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600
years ago and then equally dramatically
and equally suddenly the angoras comes
to an end and the world very rapidly
warms up and you have a a recognized
pulse of meltwater at that time as the
last of the glaciers collapse into the
sea uh called meltwater pulse 1B round
about 11,600 years ago so so this is um
this is a period uh which is very
tightly defined uh it's a period when we
know that human populations were were
grievously Disturbed that's when the the
so-called Clovis culture of North
America vanished entirely from the
record uh during the younger dras and
it's the time when the mammoths and the
saber-tooth 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 meridianal overturning
circulation of which the Gulf Stream is
the best known part uh 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 because was caused
by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream
basically uh which is part of the
central heating system of our planet so
no wonder it became cold but what's not
really been addressed before is why that
happened why
the Gulf Stream was cut why a sudden
pulse of meltwater went into the world
ocean and and it was so much of it and
it was so cold that actually stopped the
Gulf Stream in its tracks and that's
where the yeras impact hypothesis offers
a very elegant and very satisfactory
solution uh to the problem now the
hypothesis of course is broader than
that uh amongst the scientists working
on it are for example Bill Napier an
astrophysicist and astronomer um they
have assembled a great deal of evidence
which suggests that the culprit in the
younger dras
impact event or events was what we now
call the torrid meteor stream uh which
the Earth still passes through twice a
year it's now about 30 million
kilometers wide takes the earth a couple
of days to 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 torid
meteor dream is the end product of a
very large comet that entered the solar
system round about 20,000 years ago came
in from the or 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 um 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 cuz these are chunks
of rock held together by Ice uh 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 torid meteor stream
and was hit by multiple impacts uh all
around the planet certainly from the
west of North America as far east as
Syria uh and that we are by and large
not talking about impacts that would
that would have caused craters although
there certainly were some uh we're
talking about Air Bursts when an object
is 100 or 150 m in diameter and it's
coming in very fast uh into the Earth's
atmosphere uh 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 tongus event in
Siberia which took place on the 30th of
June
198 the tunguska event was nobody
disputes it was definitely an airburst
of of of a cometary fragment and the
date is interesting uh because the 30th
of June is the height of the beta TDS
it's one of the two times when the Earth
is going through the torid meteor stream
well luckily that part of Siberia wasn't
inhabited uh but 2,000 square miles of
forest were destroyed if that had
happened over a major city would all be
thinking very hard about objects out of
the torid meteor stream and about the
risk of uh Cosmic impact so the
suggestion is that it wasn't One impact
it wasn't two impacts it wasn't three
impacts it was it was hundreds of Air
Bursts all around the planet coupled
with 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 melt water 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 dras boundary and
where they find overwhelming evidence of
an air burst and where they find all the
shocked quartz the carbon micros ferial
the Nano Diamonds the trinitite and so
on and so forth all um of of those
impact proxies are found at Abu Herrera
that was a a settlement within 150 miles
of gockley teepe and it was hit 12,800
years ago and it was obliterated
interestingly it was reinhabited by
human beings within probably 5 years but
it was it was completely obliterated at
that time uh and it it it's difficult to
imagine that the people who lived in
that area would not have been very
impressed uh by what they saw Happening
by the the these massive explosions in
the sky and the the obliteration uh of
of Abu hrera now this is a theory the
younger dr's 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 dras impact hypothesis and of
course it has many opponents and there
are many who disagree with it uh and
there there have been a series of of
peer-reviewed papers that have been
published supposedly debunking the
younger dras impact hypothesis one I
think was in 20 2011 it was called a a
requim for the younger dras impact
hypothesis and there's one just been
published a few months ago a year ago
you know called a a complete uh
refutation of the younger dras impact
hypothesis something something like that
some lengthy title um so so it's it's a
hypothesis that has its opponents and
even within within those of us who are
looking at the alternative side of
history there are different points of
view uh 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 um he doesn't go for the
younger dras impact hypothesis he think
he he fully accepts that the younger
dras was a global cataclysm uh and that
the extinctions took place but he thinks
it was caused by some kind of massive
solar Outburst so there there what
everybody's agreed on is the younger
drus was bad um but there is dispute
about what caused it I person have found
the younger dras impact hypothesis to be
the most persuasive uh which most
effectively explains all the evidence
how important is the impact hypothesis
to your understanding of um the Ice Age
Advanced civilizations so is it possible
to have another explanation for
environmental factors that could have um
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 Young drus
that's Central to what I'm saying and
the younger drus required a trigger
something something caused it uh I think
the younger drus impact hypothesis the
notion that 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 uh is is
the best explanation but I don't mind
other explanations it's good that there
are other explanations the younger dras
is a big mystery and it's not a mystery
that's been solved yet and that word
Advan
civilization this is another word that
um that is easily misunderstood and I've
tried to make clear many many times that
when we 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
certain things so amongst the clues that
intrigue me are those precession numbers
that are found all around the world and
are a category of ancient maps called
Panos which suddenly started to appear
just after the Crusade that uh entered
Constantinople and sacked
Constantinople the Panos suddenly start
to appear and they're extremely accurate
Maps the most of the ones that have
survived are extremely accurate maps of
the Mediterranean alone but some of them
show much wider areas for example on
these portolano style Maps do find a
depiction of Antarctica again and again
and another thing that these maps have
in common is that many of the map makers
state that they base their maps on
multiple older Source Maps which have
not survived these maps are intriguing
because they have very accurate relative
longitudes our civilization did not
crack the longitude problem until the
mid- 18th century with Harrison's
chronometer which was able to keep
accurate time at Sea so you could could
have uh the time in London and you could
have the local time at sea at the same
time on and then you could work out your
longitude um there might be other ways
of working out longitude as well but
there it is the fact is these Panos 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 a much extended
Indonesia uh and Malaysian Peninsula and
the series of islands that make up
Indonesia today are all grouped together
into one land mass and that was the case
during the Ice Age that was the that was
the Sund 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 map
makers they felt that the world needed
something underneath it to balance it so
they put a a fictional land mass there
um I I I don't think that makes sense I
think somebody was mapping the world uh
during the last ice AG but that doesn't
mean that they had our kind of tech uh
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 uh and they
explored the world and they mapped the
world those
Maps very very were made a very very
long time ago some of them I believe
were lightly 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
uh I 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 uh and uh 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 uh we talk
about Advanced ice AG civilization it
could have been a relatively small group
of people with the technology of their
Scholars of the stars and their expert
seaf fairing 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 um I don't see I don't see any
evidence for that and perhaps some
building tricks and skills of how to
well well def definitely and this this
again is where you come to a series of
mysteries which are perhaps best
expressed on the Giza plateau in in in
Egypt with the three great
pyramids and the extraordinary
megalithic temples that many people
don't pay much attention to uh on the
Giza plateau and the Great Sphinx itself
this is a an area of particular
importance in understanding this issue
well can you actually describe the
Sphinx and the great params and what you
find most mysterious and interesting
about them well first of all the
astronomy uh 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 old
older than it had been actually he got
that idea from a from a philosopher
called schalla dubik 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 he was hugely versed in
ancient Egypt and when he looked at the
Sphinx and at the strange scalloped
erosion patterns and the vertical fishes
particularly in the trench around the
Sphinx um he began to think maybe SCH
was right maybe there there was some s
some sort of flooding here and that's
when he brought Robert shock second
person I'd like to recognize Geist at
Boston University he brought shock to
Giza and shock was the first geologist
to stick his neck out risk the r the IR
of egyptologists and say well it looks
to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at
least a thousand years of heavy rainfall
and as 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 a half thousand years ago
during the younger dras for the creation
of the Great Sphinx and then of course
this is the period of the 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 densely populated and
there was a lot of rain there's not no
rain in Giza today but there's Rel ly
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 is Robert
bval uh Robert and I have co-authored a
number of books together unfortunately
Robert has been very ill for the last
seven years he's he's
um uh got a very bad chest infection and
I I think also that that Robert became
very demoralized by the attacks of
egyptologists on his work uh but Robert
is the genius and it does take a genius
sometime to make these connections cuz
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
uh in the sky he was the ancient
Egyptians called the irion constellation
sahu and they recognized it as the
celestial image of the god Osiris so
what's being copied on the ground is the
belt of a deity of a Celestial deity
it's not just a random
constellation um and then when we take
procession into account you find
something else very intriguing happening
first of all uh you find that the exact
orientation of the pyramids as it is
today and and pretty much as it was when
they're supposed to have been built
4,500 years ago uh it's it's not
precisely related to how Orion's Belt
looked at that time there's a there's a
bit of a a Twist is they're not they're
not quite right but as you press the
Stars backwards as you go
back and back and back and you come to
around 10,500 BC 12 a half thousand
years ago in the younger dras you find
that suddenly they lock perfectly they
match perfectly with the three pids on
the ground and that's the same moment
that the Great
Sphinx an noal Monument aligned
perfectly to the Rising Sun on the
Spring Equinox anybody cont test this
for themselves just 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 um but the question
is what constellation was behind the
Sphinx and 12 and a half thousand years
ago it was the constellation of Leo and
actually the constellation of Leo has a
very Sphinx like look and I and my
colleagues are pretty sure that the
Sphinx was originally a lion entirely uh
and that it over the thousands of years
it became damaged it became eroded
particularly the part of it that that
sticks out the head uh there were
periods when the Sphinx was completely
covered in sand but still the head stuck
out um by the time you come to to the
fourth Dynasty when the Great Pyramids
are supposedly built by the time you
come to the fourth Dynasty the head of
the the the lion original lion head
would have been a complete mess and we
suggest that it was then recarved into a
fonic head egyptologists think it was
the Pharaoh cafre uh but there's no real
strong resemblance but it's definitely
wearing the nemis headdress of of an
ancient Egyptian pharaoh uh and we think
that that's a result of a recarving of
what was originally not only a lion
bodied but also a lion headed Monument
it wouldn't make sense if you create an
equinoxial marker in the time of caffra
4,500 years ago and the Sphinx is an
equinoctial marker I mean it's 270 ft
long and 70 ft high and it's looking
directly at the Rising Sun on the
Equinox if you create it then uh 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 uh and and again we think that's
because of that observation of the skies
and and and putting on 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 uh 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 you'll see that the
Milky Way is very prominent and 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 uh as the site for this for this
very special place so the point I want
to make is that that an
astronomical um design on the ground
which memorializes a very ancient date
does not have to have been done 12,00
500 years ago if if if from the ancient
Egyptian point of view you're there
4,500 years ago uh and there's a Time
8,000 years before that which is very
very very important to you you could me
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 uh and we're
pretty sure that the Sphinx at least
does date back to 12 a half thousand
years ago uh and with it the megalithic
temples uh the so-called Valley Temple
uh which stands uh 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
valley Temple attributed to caffra on No
Good Grounds whatsoever um is a huge
megalithic construction with blocks of
limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each
um and yet it has been remodeled refaced
with granite there are Granite blocks
that are placed on top of the the core
Limestone blocks and those core
Limestone blocks were already eroded
when the Gran 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 the
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 the when we look at the three Great
Pyramids we're looking at a renovation
and a restoration and a enhancement of
much older structures that had existed
on the Giza Plateau for a much longer
period before that actually the Great
Pyramid is built around a natural hill
uh and that natural hill might have been
seen as the original primeval Mound uh
to to the to the ancient Egyptians so
the idea is that the Sphinx was there
long
before the pyramids and the pyramids
were built by the Egyptian to celebrate
further an already holy Place yeah and
there were Platforms in place where the
pyramids stand not the pyramids as we
see them today um but the the the bases
the base of those pyramids uh was was
already in place at that time so what's
the case what's the evidence that the
egyptologist used to make the
attributions that they do for the dating
of the pyramids and the Sphinx well um
the three Great Pyramids of Giza are
different from later pyramids this this
is another problem that I have with the
whole thing um is the the the story of
pyramid building when did it when did it
really begin and the timeline that we
get from egyptology is the the first
pyramid is the Pyramid of the Pharaoh
Zoser uh the step pyramid at
Sakara um about a hundred years or so
before the Giza Pyramids are built uh
and then we have this explosion in the
fourth Dynasty uh of of true pyramids uh
we have three of them attributed to a
single pharaoh sneferu who built
supposedly the pyramid at maum and the
two pyramids at dashur the bent and The
Red Pyramid uh and then within that same
100-year span uh 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 uh and
the pyramids of the fifth Dynasty are
Frankly Speaking a mess outside they're
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 uh
and imagery repeating the name of the
king who was supposedly buried in that
place whereas the Giza Pyramids have no
internal inscriptions whatsoever uh what
they do what we do have is one piece of
graffiti about which there is some
controversy
uh basic statistics it's a 6 million ton
structure um it each side is about 750
ft long yeah um it's aligned almost
perfectly to True North Southeast and
West uh within 360th of a single degrees
the 60th because degrees are divided
into 60s um and and um uh it's the
Precision of the orientation and the
absolute massive size of the thing uh
plus it's very complicated internal
passageways uh that that that that are
involved in it
you you know in the 9th century the
Great Pyramid still had its facing tone
stones in place but there were there was
an Arab an Arab khif Khalif Al
Mamon 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 uh for a distance of maybe 100
ft and then the hammering that they did
dislodged something they heard a little
bit further away something big falling
and they realized there was a cavity
there and they started heading in that
direction and then they joined the
internal passageway of the S of of the
Great Pyramid the descending the
ascending corridors that go up when you
go up the ascending Corridor every one
of the internal passageways in the in
the Great Pyramid that people can walk
in slopes at an angle of 26° 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
in in the creation of the Great Pyramid
um if you go up the grand Gallery which
is at the end of uh the So-Cal 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 uh already
in
place above the king's chamber are five
other Chambers these are known as
relieving Chambers uh 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 VI who who
dynamited his way into those chambers in
the first
place allegedly found well he claims he
found the graffiti uh a piece of
graffiti left by a work gang naming the
Pharaoh kufu and it's true I've been in
that chamber and there is the cou of
kufu there uh quite quite recognizable
but the dispute around it is whether
that is a genuine piece of graffiti
dating from the Old Kingdom uh or
whether howardv uh actually put it there
himself U because he was in desperate
need of money at the time um I'm not
sure what the answer to that question is
another reason why but it's one of the
reasons that that egyptologists feel
confident in saying that the pyramid is
the work of kufu um another is what is
called the W aljaf papai uh where uh on
the Red Sea uh a diary the Diary of an
individual called merer was found and he
talks about bringing um highly polished
Limestone uh 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 kufu so that's
another reason why the the the Great
Pyramid is attributed to kufu um but I
think I think that we're we kufu was
undoubtedly involved in the Great
Pyramid and in a big way but I think he
was building upon and elaborating a much
older structure and I think the heart of
that structure is the Subterranean
chamber which is a 100 ft vertically
beneath the base of the Great Pyramid
anybody who suffers from claustrophobia
will not enjoy being down there you got
to go down a 26° sloping Cor door uh
until a distance of about 300 ft it's
100 ft vertically but the slope means
you're going to walk at a distance of
about not walk you're going to AP walk
you're going to 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 uh
if you go forward you keep bumping your
head on them because they're only 3' 5
in high uh you get down to the bottom
you have a short horizontal passage and
then you get into the Subterranean
chamber um the theory of Egypt
egyptology is that this was supposed to
be the burial place of kufu but after
cutting out that 300t long 26° sloping
um passage lot of which passes through
bedrock and having cut the Subterranean
chamber out of Bedrock gone to all that
trouble they decided they wouldn't bury
him there and they built what's now
known as the Queen's chamber as his
burial chamber but then they decided
that wouldn't do either so they then
built the king's chamber and that's
where the phoh was supposed to have been
buried those Arab Raiders under khif
Mamon 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 yes from a much older
civilization the idea is that during the
younger
dras most of That civilization was uh
either destroyed or damaged and they
desperately scattered across the the
globe seeking Refuge seeking refuge and
telling
stories of um maybe one the importance
of the Stars MH their knowledge about
the Stars yeah and their knowledge about
building and knowledge about navigation
MH that's that's that's that's roughly
the idea uh so it's interesting that the
ancient Egyptians uh have an a notion of
an Epoch that they call zepe which is
the first time it means the first time
this is when the gods walked the Earth
uh this is when uh seven sages brought
wisdom to ancient Egypt uh and that is
seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian
civilization there are King lists in by
the ancient Egyptians themselves there
are King lists that go 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 that
reference to to remote time now what you
also have in Egypt are what might almost
be described as secret societies uh the
followers of Horus are one of those
specifically tasked with bringing
forward the knowledge from the first
time uh into later periods uh The Souls
of pay and Neen are another one of these
um mysterious secret society group
groups who are possessors of knowledge
that they transmit to the Future and and
what I'm broadly suggesting is that
those survivors of the younger daas
cataclysm who settled in Giza may have
been relatively small in number it's
interesting that that they are referred
to in the the edu building text as seven
sages because that repeats again and
again it it's it's also in
Mesopotamia uh it's seven sages seven
apaloo Who come out of the Waters of the
Persian Gulf and 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 forages who lived at Giza at
that time and who also passed on their
knowledge to those Hunter forages 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 uh in the fourth Dynasty in in
ancient Egypt and and you know the
notion that knowledge might be
transferred over thousands of years uh
shouldn't be absurd uh 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 2 2000 BC
and and knowledge has been preserved
from that time right up to the present
day so if you can if you can preserve
knowledge for 4,000 years you can
probably preserve it for right now of
course the air bars on this are quite
large but if uh an advanced ice
civilization existed where do you think
it was where do you think we might find
it one day if it existed and uh how big
do you think it might have been well
this is where 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 um these are very special gaps that
I'm interested in uh and I'm interested
in them because of all the Curiosities
and the puzzlement that I've expressed
to you before it's it's not just because
there are gaps in the archaeological
record um it's 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 uh which was not a
desert during the ice and and and went
through this warm wet period when it was
very very fertile uh certainly some
archaeology has been done in the Sahara
but it's fractional it's it's 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 uh for that um and and um uh the
Amazon rainforest is another example of
this I think the Sahara is about 9
million square kilm
the Amazon that's left under dense
canopy rainforest is about 5 million
square kilm maybe closer to six um and
then uh you have the Continental shelves
uh that were submerged by sea level rise
at the end of the Ice Age now it's it's
well established that sea level Rose by
400 feet but it didn't Rise by 400 feet
overnight uh it came in dribs and drabs
there were there were periods of very
rapid quite significant sea level rise
and there were periods when the sea
level was Rising much more much more
slowly so that 400t 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 M meltwater
pulse 1 a uh when the flooding was was
really immense how big do you think it
might have been and do you think it was
across the spread across the globe so if
they were expert
Navigators do you think they spread
across the globe well 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
all I'm seeing are Clues and Mysteries
and puzzles that that that intrigue me
and which suggest to me that something
is missing from our past uh and I'm not
inclined to look for that missing
something in for example northern Europe
because northern Europe was not a very
nice place to live during the Ice Age I
mean nobody smart would 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 and welcoming
to human beings during the ice asan that
of course includes the coastlines that
are now underwater uh 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 uh for quote unquote my Lost
Civilization um and because I think
largely from those ancient maps that it
was a navigating seafaring Civ
civilization uh I suspect that it wasn't
only in one place uh it was probably in
a number of places and then I I can only
speculate uh maybe maybe there was
um there was a cultural value where it
was felt it was felt that it was not
appropriate to interfere with the lives
of Hunter foragers at that time uh maybe
it was felt that that they should keep
their distance from them Ju Just as even
today uh there is a feeling that we
shouldn't be interfering too much with
the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon
rainforest uh although in interestingly
some of those some of those tribes are
now using cell phones um that
possibility may have been there in in
the past and only when we come to a to a
global cataclysm does it become
essential to have Outreach and actually
to take refuge amongst those Hunter
forager populations that is the
hypothesis that I'm putting it forward
I'm not claiming that it's a fact but
for me it helps to explain the evidence
so that speaks to one of the challenges
that archaeologists provide to this idea
is that there is a lot of evidence of
humans in the Ice Age and they appear to
be all hunter
gatherers but like you said only a small
percent of areas where humans have lived
have been um studied by archaeologists
that's right very tiny percent and even
a tiny percent of every archaeological
site has been studied by archaeologists
too typically 1 to 5% of any
archaeological side is excavated I mean
that's why uh go back to T it fills my
mind with imagination especially seeing
it as a time
capsule you know it's almost certain
that there is places on Earth we haven't
discovered that once we do uh even if
it's after the ice age will change our
view of human history no uh do you think
there's going to be a place like what
what what would be your dream thing to
discover like go back tape that says a
definitive like perturbation to our
understanding of Ice Age history some
kind of archive some kind of Hall of
Records there's uh both mystical
associations with the Hall of Records at
Giza from people like the Ed casei
organization there's also ancient
Egyptian Traditions which suggest that
something was concealed uh beneath the
sphin um this is not an idea that is
alien to ancient Egypt it's it's quite
present in ancient Egypt uh so far as
far as I know nobody has um dug down
beneath this things and of course
there's very good reasons for that you
don't want to damage the the place too
much but I let's call it the Hall of
Records I i' I'd love to find that uh
but I think in a way that's what gocke
is gocke is a Hall of Records you know
it's interesting that that just as I've
I've tried to outline I hope reasonably
clearly that the three Great Pyramids of
Giza match Orion's Belt in 10,000 500 BC
just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500
BC
12,500 years ago or so pillar 43 in
enclosure D at gockley tee uh contains
what a number of researchers myself
included regard as an astronomical
diagram Martin swatman of Edinburgh
University is is is 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 uh uh
very much like we represent the
constellation of Scorpio today um and
that above it is a vulture without
stretched Wings which is in a posture
very similar to the constellation that
we call Sagittarius and on that
outstretched Wing uh is uh 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
uh at the summer solstice uh 12 a half
thousand years ago that's that what it's
marking uh and and um it's interesting
that the same date can be deduced from
pillar 4 of course it's controversial
Martin sweatman's ideas are by no means
accepted by by archaeology but he's done
very very thorough detailed statistical
work on this and I'm personally
convinced so we have a a time capsule at
gockley which is memorializing a date
that is at least 1,200 years before
gockley was built uh if that dating of
11,600 years years ago Pro proves to be
absolutely the oldest date uh as it is
at as it is at present the date
memorialized on pillar 43 is 12,800
years ago the beginning of the younger
dryness the beginning of the impact
event and then Giza does the same thing
but in much larger scale it it it draws
our it uses massive megalithic
architecture which is very difficult to
destroy and a profound knowledge of
astronomy to encod 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
indis valley civilization or with the
Easter Island script we don't have to
have a script that can't be interpreted
if you use astronomical language then
any astronomical literate civilization
will be able to give you a date the
Hoover Dam has a star map built into it
U and that star map is a is is part of a
an exhibition that was put there at the
founding of the of the Hoover Dam and
what it does is it freezes the sky above
the Hoover Dam at the moment of its
completion and Oscar Hansen the artist
who created that uh piece uh 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 uh a particular date
quick pause bath and break sounds good
good so to me the story that we've been
talking about it
is both exciting if the mainstream
archaeology narrative is correct and the
one you're constructing is correct both
are super interesting because the
mainstream archaeology perspective means
that there is something about the human
mind from which the
pyramids the these ideas spring
naturally you place humans anywhere you
place them on Mars it's come out that
way so that's an interesting story of
human psychology that then becomes even
more interesting when you evolve Out of
Africa with Homo sapiens how they think
about the world that's super interesting
and then uh if there's an ancient
civilization advanc civilization that
explains why uh there's so many similar
types of ideas that spread that means
that there's so much undiscovered yeah
still about the sort of the spring of
these ideas of civilization that come so
to me they're both fascinating so I
don't know why there's so much sort of
infighting but I think it's partly
territorial I think that I think that
um I don't I can't canot speak of all
archaeologists but but some
archaeologists feel very very
territorial about their profession uh
and they do not feel happy about
Outsiders uh entering their realm uh
especially if those Outsiders have a
large platform um um and that's I found
that the attacks on me by archaeologists
have increased step by step with the
increase of my exposure uh and 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 uh but when
Fingerprints of the Gods was published
in 1995 and became a a global bestseller
then I started to attract their
attention and and uh appeared to have
been regarded as a as a threat to them
and I I and that is the case today that
is why uh ancient apocalypse season 1
was defined as the most dangerous Show
on Netflix uh it's why the society for
American archaeology wrote an open
letter to Netflix uh asking Netflix to
reclassify the series as Science Fiction
it's why they accused this they accused
the series of
anti-Semitism uh
misogyny uh White
supremacism uh and a whole I don't know
a whole bunch of other other things I
there have nothing to do with anything
that's that's that's that's in the
series it was it was it it was like we
must shut this down this is so dangerous
to us is certainly not a danger there
are many more dangerous things in the
world than a than a television series um
going going on right now but but maybe
it was seen as a danger to archaeology
that this non- archaeologist was in
archaeological terrain and being uh
viewed and seen by large and read by
large numbers of people maybe maybe that
was part of the problem and human nature
being what it is I noticed that uh two
of my principal critics John hoops from
the University of Kansas and Flint
Dibble who's now teaching at the
University of Cardiff in in Wales in in
the UK uh are both people who like to
have media exposure um and uh John Hoops
had just recently started a YouTube
channel Flint dible has had one for for
quite a while uh pretty small number of
followers I think that they they they
feel that they should be the ones who
are getting the global attention and
that it's not right that I am and and
that the best way to stop that is to
stop me uh to shut me down to get me
cancelled and basically requiring
Netflix to re relabel my series from a
documentary to a science fiction which
is what they actually had the temerity
to suggest Netflix uh that would 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 under documentary so it was
a deliberate attempt to shut me down and
and I see that going on again and again
and it's so unfortunate and so
unnecessary I've become very defensive
towards archaeology I I I hit
back after 30 years of these attacks on
my work uh I'm tired of it and and I'm 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 uh of ancient apocalyps maybe I
should have been a bit gentler and a bit
Kindler and I've tried to reflect that
in the second season uh and and and to
bring also many more indigenous uh
voices into the second season as well as
the voices of many more
archaeologists yeah in general I got a
chance to get a glimpse of the
archaeology community and U in in Arch
ology in science in general
I don't have much patience for this kind
of arrogance or snark or dismissal of
uh General human curiosity that I think
your work conspires in people so that's
why uh people like Ed barnhard who I
recently had a conversation with you
know he radiates sort of kindness and
curiosity as well and it's like that
kind of approach to ideas especially
about human history it inspire
people inspires millions of people to
ask questions I mean that's why you had
the KE Reeves on the on the new season
he's basically coming to the show from
that same perspective of curiosity keano
is is is genuinely curious about the
past and and very very interested in it
and and and he's bringing to it
questions that everybody brings to the
Past he's he's speaking for every man uh
in in in the series so given that can
you maybe
Steelman the case that uh archaeologists
make about this period that we've been
talking
about can you make the case that that is
indeed what happened is it was hunter
gatherers for a long time mhm and then
there was a cataclysm a very difficult
period in the human history with the
young adras and that changed the
environment and then led to this the
springing up of civilizations to
different places on Earth can you sort
of uh make the case for that oh no I
completely understand why that is the
position of archaeology because that's
what they' found Archaeology is very
much wishing to Define itself as a
science uh and uh it uses the techniques
of weighing and measuring and Counting
are very key to to what Archaeology does
and in what they've found and what
they've studied around the world uh they
don't see any traces of of A Lost
Civilization and and the idea that um
besides the the we live in a very
politically correct world today and the
idea that that uh some kind of Lost
Civilization brought knowledge to other
cultures around the world is seen as
almost racist or colonialist in some in
some way it triggers it triggers that
aspect as as as well but basically AR I
think majority of archaeologists are in
complete good faith on this I I I I
don't think that anybody's really
seeking to frame me I think that I think
that what what we're hearing from most
archaeologist 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 uh and to that I
I must reply please look at the myths
please consider the implications of the
younger dras 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
attracted during the Ice Age and that
have hardly been studied by archaeology
at all uh before you tell us that your
theory is the only one that can possibly
be correct in fact it's a very it's a
very arrogant and silly position of
archaeology because archaeolog
archaeological theories are always being
overthrown it can take years it can take
decades it took decades in the cas case
of the clov first hypothesis for the
settlement of the Americas uh but sooner
or later a bad idea uh will be kicked
out by a prop of evidence that that idea
does not explain if we can just look
back at your uh debate with Flint dible
on Joe Rogan Experience what are some
takeaways from that uh what have you
learned maybe what are some things you
like about Flint you said that he's one
of your big critics but what do you like
about his ideas and what uh what were
you maybe bothered by first of all just
very recently and it can be found on my
YouTube channel channel and it's
signaled on on my website I I have made
a a video runs about an hour uh which
looks at a series of statements that
Flint made during the debate which I was
not prepared to answer um and it turns
out that some of those statements are
not
correct uh the the notion for example
that there were three million
shipwrecks uh that have been mapped
Flint actually uses the word mapped 3
million shipwrecks that have been mapped
at one point in the debate and I've I've
put that clip into the video that I've
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
expresses that word out L out loud so
those who are listening to the podcast
rather than watching it wouldn't even
have a chance to see that and I sitting
there in the studio didn't see that word
estimate either and I didn't know that I
thought my God Flint has a point here if
there have been 3 million shipwrecks
found and mapped if that's the case the
absence of any shipwreck from A Lost
Civilization of the ice age is a problem
but then I 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 uh still a large number uh but
most of them from the last Thousand
Years uh and 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 in the video
is that there is uh indisputable
evidence that human beings were seaf
farers uh as much as 50 or 60,000 years
ago the peopling of Australia involved a
relatively short 90 km 100 km ocean
Voyage but nevertheless it was an ocean
voyage and it must have involved a large
enough people uh 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 um and uh no ships have survived
that speak to the settlement of
Australia and no ships have survived
that speak to the settlement of Cypress
either but that doesn't mean that that
thing didn't happen I I should just like
Linger on this because for me it was the
shipwrecks thing was convincing and then
looking back first of all watching your
video but also just realizing the
peopling of Australia
part that's my boggling 50,000 years ago
just imagine being the person standing
on the shore looking out into the ocean
standing on the shore of a harsh
environment looking on to the ocean of
an even harsher environment and deciding
that you know what I'm going to go
towards near certain death mhm and I
don't know what's on the other side of
that water you can't see 90 K humans did
it yeah I love again it's that urge to
explore and I suggest that it it
probably began with a few Pioneers who
made the journey there and back they
ventured into the water they definitely
had boats uh and lo and behold after a 2
or three day Vo Voyage they ended up on
a coastline you're an individual you've
got my relatively straightforward island
hopping with where each island is within
sight of each other as far as timore and
when you get to timore suddenly you
can't Island toop anymore there's an
expansive ocean that you can't see
across but that urge to explore that
Curiosity that is Central to The Human
Condition would undoubtedly have led
some adventurous individuals to want to
find out more and even be willing to
risk their lives and that that first
reconing of what lay beyond that
straight would have undoubtedly been
undertaken by very few individuals uh
not enough to create a permanent
population in Australia but when they
came back with the good news that
there's a whole land there that's the
that's the land that was in it that that
geographers call uh sahul which in just
as Sunda was the Ice Age Indonesian and
Malaysian peninsula joined together into
one land mass 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 uh we need to bring more
people here uh and and that would have
involved larger larger craft uh you you
need to bring people uh with resources
and you bring need to bring enough of
them both men and women in order to
produce a population that will not
rapidly become extinct and and it's the
same in Cyprus there the the detailed
work that's been done suggests very
strongly that we looking at planned
migrations of groups of people in excess
of a thousand at a time bringing animals
with them and this certainly would have
involved multiple boats and boats of a
of a significant size and there's no
archaeological evidence of those boats
none whatsoever the oldest boat that's
ever been found in the world is the Doos
shipwreck of Greece which is around
5,000 years old if I recall correctly so
everything that's makes a boat is lost
to time yes boats can be preserved under
certain circumstances there's a wreck at
the bottom of the Black Sea almost 2
miles deep I I didn't know the Black Sea
was that deep but there's a wreck and
there's no Oxygen down there um that is
that is more than 2,000 years old and is
still in pretty much perfect condition
um but in other conditions
uh the structure of the ship evaporates
sometimes what you left with is the
cargo of the ship and you could say
there was a ship that sank here but the
ship itself has the ship itself has gone
uh the fact is we know that our
ancestors were seaf farers as much as
50,000 years ago and no ship has
survived to testify to that yet we
accept that they were do you think you
think one day we'll find a ship that's
10 20 30 40 50,000 years old uh it's not
impossible um I I think it's I think
it's quite unlikely given that given the
very thin survival of ships the further
back you go in time uh with the oldest
as I say being about 6,000 years old now
and then the other the other thing to
take into account is the younger dras
event itself and the the cataclysmic
circumstances of that event and and and
um the roiling of the Seas that would
have taken place then H 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 so okay
so that's back to the 3 million
shipwrecks yeah so what's your take away
from that debate uh well my take away
from that debate is um that I should
have been better prepared uh and and I
should have been less angry uh I have to
say that Flint had had had really um
Disturbed me with the these this
constant snide not quite exact
references to racism and white
supremacism in in in my work I I I
detest such things uh and to have those
labels stuck on me he's always avoided
taking direct responsibility pretty much
always avoided there's one example that
I include in the video I've made uh
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 uh came to the
conclusion that grahe hanock is a racist
and a white supremacist and that really
got under my skin and it really upset me
and I felt I felt angry about it and I
felt that I was there uh to defend
ancient apocalypse season 1 whereas in
fact what I was there to do was to
listen to a series of lectures where an
archaeologist tells me what
archaeologists have found 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 listen
I feel you I've seen the intensity of
the attacks and the whole racism label
is uh is the one that can get under your
skin and it's it's a toolbox that's been
prevalent over the past let's say decade
maybe a little bit more as a method of
cancellation when when a person
has is the opposite of racist very often
it's kind of hilarious to watch but it
can get under your skin especially when
you have certain uh dynamics that happen
on the internet where it seeps into a
Wikipedia page page and then other
people read that Wikipedia page and you
get to hear it from like friends oh I
didn't know your act whatever and you
you realize that Wikipedia description
of who you are is actually has a lot of
power not by people that know you well
but by people that just kind of are
learning about you for the first time
definitely and they can really start to
annoy you and get under your skin when
people are kind of indirectly injecting
they're writing articles about you they
can then be by Wikipedia it can really
bother a person who is actually trying
to do good science and or just trying to
inspire people with different ideas I
felt that my work was being deliberately
misrepresented uh and I felt that I as a
human being were being was was being
insulted and wronged uh in in ways that
are deeply hurtful um my wife and I have
have six children between us and we have
nine grandchild and of those nine
grandchildren seven are of mixed race um
and and this is my family 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 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
debator he's got a very sharp mind he's
a very clever man and he's very fast on
his feet and I recognize that I I was
definitely up against a superior debater
uh in that debate I'm not sure that I
have those debating skills and I
certainly didn't have them on on that
particular day I also admire about Flint
uh something else which is that he was
willing to be there uh most
archaeologists don't want to talk to me
at all they want to insult me from the
sidelines uh they want to make sure that
Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudo
archaeologist or a p purveyor of pseudo
archaeological theories they want to
make sure that the hints of racism are
there but they actually don't don't want
to sit down and confront me at least
Flint was willing to do that and I'm
grateful to him for that and I I think
in in that sense it is an important
encounter between people with uh 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
he he he doesn't give up so all of those
things about him I I admire and and and
respect um but um uh I think he fought
dirty during the debate and I've said
exactly why uh in this video that I now
have up on YouTube to say a positive
thing that I enjoyed I think towards the
end in him speaking about agriculture
was pretty interesting so the techniques
of archaeology are pretty interesting
like where where you can get some
insights through the fog of time about
like what people were doing how they
were living that's pretty interesting
it's very interesting it's a very
important discipline and I've said many
times before publicly I couldn't do any
of my work without the work that
archaeologists do I emphasize very
strongly in this video that I don't
study what archaeologists study um 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 when I look at the Great Sphinx
and the studies of archaeology saying
that this is the work of the Pharaoh
caffra despite the absence of any single
contemporary inscription that ascribes
it to caffra and in fact the presence of
other inscriptions that say that it was
already there in the time of kufu uh I I
am not looking at what egyptologists
study they just dismiss all of that and
lock into the cafr uh connection at
gocke I'm I'm not really looking at what
archeologists look at I'm looking at the
alignments of the megaliths and how they
seem to track procession of the star
serus over a period of time
archeologists aren't interested in in
any of that so I 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 and also
that that archaeologists would be
willing to trust the general public to
make up their own minds 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 uh
because they somehow underestimate the
intelligence of the general public and
think the General Public just going to
accept that much 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 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 uh with
a gentleman like Ed Barnhart M was very
much the case with uh archaeologist
Marty paronan uh from the University of
Helsinki and with geographer ala ranzi
uh Brazilian geographer very very senior
figure 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 liar indeed we
found some of them ourselves with lar
while we were there yeah those was an
incredible part of the show that I got a
chance to preview
that it's like there's all this earthw
works yeah the traces of things built on
the ground that probably you can only
really appreciate when you look from up
above that's right so the idea that they
buildt stuff that you can only
appreciate when viewed from up above
means they had a very kind of deep
relationship with the the sky with the
sky 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
earthw with a lovely Circle earthwork
right in the middle of it uh whatever
else they were they were geometers they
they they they were not just Builders of
fantastically huge Earthworks that
nobody expected in the Amazon
uh not just Builders of cities that we
now know existed in the Amazon but that
they were astronomers and mathematicians
as
well everything we're talking about is
so full of mystery it's just fascinating
especially the farther back we go that's
what I love about the past is the
mystery that's there and that's another
thing that I regret about some
archaeologists is 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 uh that
uh that appear to be scientific I I
think that's that's most unfortunate the
past is deeply mysterious the whole the
whole story of life on Earth is deeply
mysterious I I mean we were talking
about the timeline of of human beings
but you know if you go if you go back to
the formation of the Earth itself if
I've got the figures right it's about
four and a half billion years ago that
the Earth supposedly formed it was then
incredibly hot and inhospitable to life
uh for the next several hundred million
years but it was actually Francis Crick
who pointed out something odd that
within a 100 million years of the Earth
being cool enough to support life
there's bacterial life all over the
planet and and Crick wrote a book called
life itself that was published in 1981
and he suggested that life had been
brought here by a process of panspermia
now that's an idea that's around in
circulation that that comets may carry
bacteria which concede life on on
planets but Crick actually in life
itself was talking about directed pania
he envisaged uh this is Crick not me he
he envisaged an alien civilization uh
far away across the Galaxy which faced
uh Extinction 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 uh let's uh put
bacteria genetically engineered bacteria
into cryogenic Chambers and fire them
off into the universe in all directions
and bottom line of cric's theory in life
itself is one of those cryogenic
containers containing bacterial life
from another solar system crashed into
the early Earth and that's why life
began so suddenly here on Earth if we as
a human civilization continue I think
that is a one way to uh create backups
of us elsewhere in the universe given
the space is to do a life gun and shoot
it everywhere and it just plants yes and
you kind of hope that whatever is the
magic that that makes up human
consciousness and if that magic is
already there in the initial DNA uh of
the
bacteria the potential for that magic is
there the potential is there and and
evolutionary forces will will will work
upon it in in different ways in
different environments uh but that the
potential is there yes it's something
that we would do if we were facing a
complete Extinction of Life on planet
Earth uh a major Global effort would be
made uh to preserve it somehow uh and
and that might well include firing off
cryogenic Chambers uh into the universe
and hoping that some of them would land
somewhere hospitable and uh as you were
mentioning there's just so many
interesting Mysteries along the way here
for example I mean it's
like I think like three billion years it
was single cell organisms so it seems
like life is pretty good for single cell
organisms that there was no need for
multicellularity that like for animals
for any of this kind of stuff so why is
that it seems like you could adapt much
better if you're more complic organism
it took a really long time to take that
leap is it because it's really hard to
do and what was the uh uh what was the
forcing function to do that kind of leap
and the same I mean for us to be selfish
and self-obsessed for us humans like
what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens
from the other hominids and why did Homo
sapiens win out against the Andals and
the other competitors why are they not
around uh anymore so those are all
fascinating Mysteries and it feels like
the more
we propose sort of radical ideas about
our past and take it seriously and
explore uh the more we'll be able to
sort of uh figure out that puzzle that
go leads all the way back to Homo
sapiens and maybe all the way back to
the origin of life on Earth yeah yeah I
think that homo sapiens is the tail end
of a very long deep series of mysteries
that goes back right to the beginning of
Life on this planet and and probably
long before actually because this planet
is part of the universe and God knows
what else is out there in the in in the
universe why do you think Homo
sapiens uh evolved why like what what
was the magic things there's a bunch of
theories about fire leading to meat to
cooking which can fuel the brain that's
one the other is like social interaction
we're able to use our imagination to
construct ideas and share those ideas
and tell great stories and that is
somehow an evolutionary Advantage do you
have any like favorite conceptions of um
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 the popular
views is that anatomically modern humans
wiped out the Neanderthals that we we
killed them off um but at the same time
we were into breeding with the
Neanderthals in a sense the Neals are
not not gone they they are still within
us today we are part part part neanda
there's another theory that I've read
about what there is some evidence that
neanderthals were cannibals that there
was ritual cannibalism took place
amongst neanderthals and particularly
the eating of human brains uh and this
uh can cause a Kuru uh which can kill
off whole populations that's what
another suggestion of why then the anals
died out there's lots of possibilities
that been put forward maybe we just outc
competed them you know maybe maybe
anatomically modern humans had some
brain connections that they didn't have
even though the Neal brain was bigger
than the brain of anatomically modern
human beings as the old saying goes size
isn't everything uh maybe we just had a
more compact more efficient brain the
fact of the matter is uh that uh neanda
and denisovans did not survive the rise
of homo sapiens for our discussion
though what is interesting is all the
hominids seem to be explorers yes they
spread I mean I didn't know this the
fact that homoerectus was all over the
planet more than a million years ago uh
is Testament to that uh and I I do think
that exploration urge is is fundamental
humanity and I I would like to say
that's what I think I'm doing I'm I'm
exercising my urge to explore the past
in in my own way making my own path and
defining defining my own route
that's the leap from non-human to
human uh one of the things you've
discussed is your idea of what was the
leap to human
civilization what is the driver what is
the inspiration for humans to form
civilizations and for you that's
Shamanism definitely can you explain
what that means I think that um
Shamanism is the origin of of of
everything of value uh in humanity
uh I think it was the earliest form of
science when I spend time with uh
shamans in the Amazon I observe people
who are constantly experimenting with
plants in a very scientific way uh
they're always trying a pinch of this
and a pinch of that in different forms
for example of the iasa Brew to see if
it enhances it or makes it makes it
different in in in any way uh the
invention of curari is a remarkable
scientific feat which is entirely down
to shamans in the in the Amazon they are
the the scientists of the hunter forager
uh state of society um and they were the
ancient um leaders of human civilization
so I think all all civilization arises
out of shamanism uh 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 that one group
perhaps more than one group uh went a
bit further than other groups did and
and used that study of the skies and
developed navigational techniques and
and were able to sail and explore the
Earth uh but that ultimately what lies
behind it is the same curiosity and
investigative skill that shamans are
still using uh in the Amazon to this day
uh and and I do see them as as as
scientists in a very proper use of the
word but do you think something like
iasa was a part of that process yes iasa
is the result of shamanistic
Investigation of what's available in the
Amazon of course iasa is All The Fad in
Western industrialized societies today
and and some people see it as a miracle
cure for all kind of ailments and
problems and perhaps it is perhaps it
can be uh in in certain ways iasa itself
is not an Amazonian word it it comes
from the qua language and it means the
vine of souls or the vine of the Dead uh
but the iwasa vine is only one of two
principal ingredients in the iasa brew
and the other ingredient are leaves that
contain dimethy tryptamine and there are
two sources of that one is a bush called
cotri veridus that's its botanical name
they call it shakuna in the Amazon
and its leaves are rich in dthy
tryptamine DMT which is arguably the
most powerful psychedelic uh known to
science um and and uh the other source
comes from another Vine diopter
Cabana uh which the leaves of that vine
also contain DMT so the iasa vine on its
own is not going to give you a Visionary
journey and the leaves that contain DMT
on their own whether they come from
diopter or whether they come from
shakuna 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 mono
Amin oxidase in the gut that shuts down
DMT when absorbed orally basically DMT
is not accessible
orally unless you combine it with a
monoamine oxidase inhibitor and that's
what I mean when I'm talking about
science in the Amazon because there's so
many tens of thousands hundreds
thousands of 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 experience
just imagine the number of plants they
had to have eaten yeah it consumed and
smoked or all kinds of combinations to
arrive at that exactly exactly to
realize that this is something this is
something very special and then and then
to use the principles there to to find
another form of it so iwasa is the form
that is made with the awasa vine and the
leaves of the shakuna plant uh but yahi
uh is made from the awasa vine and the
leaves of another Vine deis Cabana uh
which contain not only n n DMT which is
the DMT that everybody's pretty much
familiar with these days but also five
Meo
DMT uh and the yahi experience which I
have I have also had uh in my view is
more intense uh and more powerful almost
to the point of being overwhelming uh
than the than the iasa experience but
but what the result of this uh
sophisticated chemistry that we find
taking place here uh is is uh a brew
which is hideous to drink it the taste I
find it quite repulsive um I almost
wretch just just smelling it in the in
the cup um but then unleashes these
extraordinary experiences and it isn't
just pretty visual
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 iasa breu and certain
other psychedelics like like some cyan
mushrooms in a high enough dose can do
it as well LSD can do it but aasa is the
master in this of of lowering the veil
to what appears to be a seamlessly
convincing ing other realm other world
and of course the Hardline rational
scientists will say that's just all
fantasies of your brain um but I don't
think we fully understand or even close
to understanding exactly what
Consciousness is and I remain open to
two possibilities that Consciousness is
generated by the brain is made by the
brain in the way that a factory makes
cars uh 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 um and and um that if that if
that is the case then we locked into the
Physical Realm we need our everyday
Alert problemsolving state of
consciousness and that's the State of
Consciousness that Western Civilization
values and and and and and highly
encourages uh but these other states of
Consciousness that allow us to access
alternative
realities are possibly more important it
may be apocryphal uh but it was reported
uh 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 krie Mullis and the
polymeres Chain Reaction he said he got
that under the influence of LSD so the
notion that the alert problemsolving
State of Consciousness is the only
valuable State of Consciousness is
disproved by valuable experiences that
people have had in in a Visionary State
and but the question that remains
unresolved is those entities that we
encounter in the and not everybody
encounters them and you're certainly not
going to encounter them on every iasa
trip there are iasa journeys where
nothing seems to
happen um 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 you're learning it
anyway um these sentient others that are
encountered what are they you know are
they just figments of our brain on drugs
or are we actually gaining access to a
parallel reality where which is
inhabited by Consciousness which is in
non a non-physical form uh and and I'm
equally open to that idea I I think that
may be maybe what is going on here with
with aaska but the other
thing is that there is a presence within
the awasa brew and she is present both
present both in aasa and in yahi and
that's one of the reasons why the
shamans say that that actually the
master of the process is the awasa vine
not the leaves it's as though the vine
has harness the leaves to gain access to
human consciousness and there if you
have sufficient exposure to iasa or yahi
you drink it enough times I've had maybe
75 or 80 Journeys with with
aasa uh you 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 iasa there are some
tribes in the Amazon who interpret the
spirit of awasa as male uh but in all
cases that spirit is seen as a teacher
uh that's fundamentally what iwasa is
it's a teacher and it teaches moral
lessons and that's fascinating that a
mixture of two plants should cause us to
reflect on our own behavior and how it
may have hurt and damaged and affected
others and fill us with a a powerful
wish not to repeat that negative
behavior again in the future uh you the
more baggage you carry in your life the
harder the beating that aasa is going to
give you until it Force you to confront
and take responsibility for your own
Behavior Uh and and that is a that is an
extraordinary thing to come from a from
a a plant Brew in that way and I think
in in yes I I think iwaska is the most
powerful of all the plant medicines uh
for accessing these mysterious Realms
but there's no doubt you can access them
they're all tryptamines they're all
related to one another in in one way you
can access them through LSD and you
certainly can access them through
through side side mushrooms as well in
large enough dose both possibilities as
you describe are interesting and to me
they're kind of akin to each other uh
just I wonder what the the limit of the
brain's capacity is to create imaginary
worlds and treat them seriously and make
them real and in those
worlds explore and have real sort of
moral deep brainstorming
sessions uh up with those entities so
it's almost like the power of the human
mind to imagine taken to its limit it is
um and the Curious Thing is that the
same
iconography people paint their Visions
after iasa sessions people were painting
in Europe in the cave of Lasco for
example and of course they had access to
silicide mushrooms uh in prehistoric
Europe uh then a remarkable commonality
in the imagery that is that is painted I
I I like to give credit to where credit
is due and there are two names that need
to be mentioned here one is the late
great Terren 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 that's what
switched on the modern human mind and
very much the same idea began to be
explored a bit earlier by Professor
David Lewis Williams at the University
of WWEs Rand in South Africa fabulous
book called The Mind in the cave uh
where where he is again arguing that
these astonishing similarities in in
cave art and rock art all around the
world can only be properly explained by
people in deeply Altered States Of
Consciousness attempting to remember
when they return to a normal everyday
State of Consciousness inm attempting to
remember their visions and document them
uh on permanent media like the like the
wall of a cave so typically you get a
lot of geometric patterns but you also
got entities and those entities often
are theanthropos part animal part human
in form might have the head of a wolf
and the body of a human being uh might
have the head of a bird and the body of
a human being and so on and so forth and
that they communicate with us in the
Visionary State interestingly although
this sounds like woow woo and it is an
area that most scientists would steer
clear of at risk of their careers there
is very serious work now being done at
Imperial College in London and at the
University of California at San Diego
where volunteers are being given
extended DMT there's a new technology uh
dmtx uh where the DMT is fed directly
into the bloodstream by drip and it's
possible to keep the individual in the
peak DMT State uh which normally when
you smoke a vape d M to you 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
um but uh 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 there's no tolerance there so
that's how they can they can use that
lack of tolerance to to keep Volunteers
in this state and then when they debrief
those volunteers they're also putting
them in MRI scanners and looking at
what's happening in the brain but when
they debrief them they're all talking
about encounters with sentient others
there's even a group now called sentient
others where people are exchanging
volunteers are 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
left it they're exchanging their
experiences and it's all about
encounters with insentient others who
wish to teach them moral lessons now to
me that's wild what what is going on
here uh what what what what what how do
we account for this yeah I get the
notion of hallucinations and brightly
colored visuals but the moral lessons
that come with it th those are very odd
yeah and would you say that the reason
that could give birth to a civilization
is it
because the such Visions can help create
myths and especially like religious
myths that would be a cohesive thing for
a large group of people to get around
yeah and can help us to be better
members of our own Community 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 for for any
Community I'm I'm I've said this a dozen
times but uh I'll say it again if if I
had the power to do so
I would make it a law an absolute law
that anybody running for a powerful
political position particularly if that
position is president or Head of State
in any kind of way that that person has
to undergo the iwasa ordeal first they
have to have 10 or 12 sessions of
iasa uh as a condition for applying for
the job uh I suspect that most who had
had those experiences wouldn't want to
apply for the job anymore they would
want to live a different kind of life
and those who did want to carry on being
a leader of a Nation would be very
different people from the people who are
leading the nations of the earth into
chaos and destruction today yeah they'll
be doing it for the right reasons I
mentioned to you I recently interviewed
Donald Trump and actually brought up
this same same idea that it would be a
much better world if most of Congress
and most politicians would take some
form of psychedelic at the very least I
have no doubt that but it would be a
better world I mean this raises an
interesting point which is the role of
government in controlling our
Consciousness uh and in my opinion the
the the so-called War on Drugs is one of
the fundamental abuses of human rights
that have been undertaken in the past in
the past 60 years uh it should be a
republican issue if I understand the
Republican Party correctly the
Republican Party believes in individual
freedom for adults as much as possible
uh and particularly the freedom to make
choices over their own bodies uh but in
the case of even cannabis I know this
one of the great things that's happening
in America it's it's happening state by
state where cannabis is being is being
legalized and that Draconian hand of
government is being taken off the back
of people who are who are consuming a
medicine that is far less harmful than
alcohol which is glorified uh in in our
society um we cannot say that are free
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 and may or may not
experience in the inner sanctum of our
own Consciousness I think it's a
fundamental violation of adult
sovereignty uh and we would have much
less drug problems if these drugs were
all legalized and made available to
people without shaming them without
without punishing them in any way but
just part of normal social life and then
you could be sure that you were getting
good product rather than really shitty
product which has been cut with all
sorts of other things ultimately The Way
Forward is for adults to take
responsibility for their own behavior
and for society to allow that to happen
and not to have big government taking
responsibility for decisions that should
be in the hands of individuals and for
me also it's exciting some of these uh
substances like Cy are are being
integrated to Scientific studies large
skilles it's really interesting we've
seen a revolution in in the way science
looks at psychedelics in the last 20 25
years um they 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 that syas ibin and other
psychedelics are very helpful in a range
of conditions from which people people
suffer post-traumatic stress disorder uh
the fear of death when you're when
you're suffering from terminal cancer
can be overwhelming and it's been found
that that that uh psybin can can remove
that uh deep depressions can be
evaporated with one single massive silos
cybin 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 yeah I actually uh just
recently found out that you had a TED
Talk war on Consciousness yes that was
taken down yeah and that was just part
of just the the general resistance cuz
it was it was a pretty it wasn't a
radical it wasn't I I was talking about
iasa 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 or shaming as a
result but this so it was a Ted X talk
not a TED Talk organized by a local Ted
Ted group they call them Ted X talks um
and uh I I gave this I gave this talk
about the war on Consciousness and it
was immediately pulled down from Ted's
main channel uh with all kinds of
bizarre reasons being given but
unfortunately it was too late because a
number of people had already downloaded
the talk and then uploaded it onto other
YouTube channels and actually their
Banning of it made it go viral uh in a
way that would not have 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 uh are simply dismissed and shut
down uh or at least attempts are made to
to do so in general just along that line
of thinking I'm pretty sure that what we
understand about Consciousness today
will seem silly uh to humans from 100
years from now you bet it will uh
especially if we harness psychedelics to
investigate Consciousness and and uh 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 DNT but in this
case they're looking entirely at the
experiences that people have and why
they're so similar from people from
different age groups and different
gender in different parts of the world
are all having the same experiences and
for me from an engineer perspective it's
interesting if it's possible to engineer
Consciousness in artificial beings yeah
it's it's it's another way to approach
the question of how special is conscious
human consciousness how from where does
it
arise uh is it is it something that
permeates all of life and then in that
case what is the thing that makes life
special like what is life what is these
living organisms that we have here and
uh that that evolve to create humans and
what is truly special about humans and
it's both scary and exciting to consider
the possibility that we can create
something like this yeah but why not
we're a vehicle for Consciousness in my
view uh I think Consciousness is present
in all life on Earth uh 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 doesn't have
but when I look at two pigeons sitting
on my garden fence and rubbing up close
to each other and enjoying each other's
company and taking off together and
hanging out together I think they're
conscious beings um and and I think I
think Consciousness is everywhere I
think it's the basis of everything and I
suspect that fundamentally Consciousness
is non-physical and that it can manifest
in physical forms where it can then have
experiences that would not be available
in the non physical state that's a
that's a guess that'd be a fascinating
because then you can construct all kinds
of physical forms to manifest the
Consciousness and see if Consciousness
enters if they become conscious is isn't
there some suggestion that artificial
intelligence is already becoming
conscious that makes humans really
uncomfortable yeah because we are at the
top of the food chain we consider
ourselves truly special and to consider
that there's other things that could be
special is uh is scary well look how
other people make us uncomfortable too I
mean look at the state of the world
today uh all the conflicts that are that
that that are raging uh that's that's
because we're afraid when I say we I'm
speaking Nation by Nation the we 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 it's the root of many many
conflicts this this fear and so fear of
AI may not be such a good idea after all
it might be very interesting to go down
that route and see where it comes
certainly in terms of exploring
Consciousness it is very interesting
yeah fear here is a useful thing but it
can also be destructive well it can be
destructive and and it can shut you down
completely if you look into the into the
future maybe the next 100 years what do
you hope are the interesting discoveries
in archaeology that we'll that we'll
find well I'd really like to know how
the Great Pyramid was built uh and and
we now have with new tech with with
scanning technology it's now become
apparent that there are many major voids
within the Great Pyramid right above the
grand G there's what looks like a second
Grand gallery that has been identified
with remote scanning uh and and um new
Chambers one of them has even been
opened up uh already are being found as
a result of this so so it may be that
the SE that the Great Pyramid will
ultimately give up its Secrets I often
think that the Great Pyramid is is
partly designed to do that it's designed
to invite its own initiates some people
aren't interested in the Great Pyramid
at all uh 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 question so it's like saying here
I stand investigate me find out about me
figure out what I am why have I got
these two shafts cut into the side of
the so-called Queen's chamber why do
they slope up through the body of the
Great Pyramid why do they not exit on
the outside of the Great Pyramid why
when we send a robot up those shafts do
we find find them after about 160 ft
blocked by a door with metal handles why
when we drill through that door to see
what's beyond it 3 or 4 feet away we see
another door uh it's like very
frustrating but it's it's saying to us
keep on exploring if you if you're
persistent enough we'll eventually give
you the answer so I'm hoping that that
answer will come as to how this most
mysterious of monuments was actually
built and the inspiration that lay
behind it certainly
I'm sure it was never a tomb or a tomb
only uh the later pyramids might have
been actually no fonic burial has been
discovered in any pyramid but 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 Sakara uh
were were tombs um but but uh the Great
Pyramid to go to that length to create a
tomb to make it a scale model of the
Earth uh to orient it perfectly to True
North to make it 6 million tons this is
not a tomb uh 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 I hope
egyptologists will be willing to set
aside that prejudice that they're only
looking at a tomb and consider other
possibilities and as new tech is
revealing these previously unknown inner
spaces within the Great Pyramid I think
that's going to become more and more
likely so not just the how it was built
but the why but the why but the why and
to you it seems obvious that there would
be a cosmic motivation yeah very very
much so as above so below uh you know
which is which is an idea in the
hermetica uh the God Hermes for the
Greeks was the Greek version of th the
wisdom god of Ancient Egypt and that's
where that saying comes from it comes
from the hermetica but it's expressing
an ancient Egyptian idea to mirror the
Perfection of the heavens on Earth so
you think there's something interesting
to be discovered about the how it was
built you mean beyond the sort of the
the ideas of the using ramps and what
yeah ramps won't do it ramps won't do it
nor will wet sand uh it's true that the
ancient Egyptians did haul big objects
on sleds on wet sand uh there are even
reliefs that show the process where an
individual is standing on the front of
the Sledge pouring water down to to
lubricate the sand underneath and and
that's a perfectly respectable way to
move a 200 ton block of stone uh across
sand if you flat sand if you have enough
people to pull it but that is not going
to help you get dozens of 70 ton Granite
blocks 300 ft in the air uh 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 uh yeah ramps are proposed
osed as the solution but but where are
the remains of those ramps if you're
going to carry uh 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° slope and it's
calculated that a 10° slope is about the
maximum slope that human labor can haul
objects up a ramp um 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 any
trace of those so-called Rams that are
supposed to have involved in the
construction of the pyramid I think we
don't know I think we have no idea it's
built that's why there's so many
different theories we haven't got the
answer yet but the how of it is one of
the big mysteries from our past I love
the gray pyramids as a kind of puzzle
that was created by the ancient peoples
to be solved yeah by later peoples I
mean this is I don't know if you're
aware of the uh 10,000 year
clock that was built by Jeff Bezos and
Danny Hillis in uh Sierra Diablo
mountains in Texas so they're building a
clock that takes once a year for 10,000
years oh wow so it's talking about and
it's supposed to sort of run you know if
there's a nuclear apocalypse it just
runs and it's it's an example of modern
humans thinking like okay if 10,000
years from now and Beyond yeah if
something goes wrong or or the future
humans they're way different come back
and they they analyze what happened here
how can we create monuments that they
can then analyze yeah and in that way be
curious about in in their curiosity
discover some deep truths about this
current time it's an interesting kind of
notion of like what can we build now
that would last and the answer is that
the majority of we build now wouldn't
last wouldn't uh it would be it would be
gone uh within a few thousand years um
but what would last is massive
megalithic structures uh like the Great
Pyramid that would that would last uh
and and it could be it could be used to
send a message to the Future uh I think
gockley Tey serves a similar function I
mean there it was it was
buried uh 10,400 years ago and then for
the next 10,000 years nobody touched it
nobody knew it was there it it it took
the genius of CLA SMI the original
excavator to realize what he'd found and
what it and what it was but the great
thing about the sealing of gockley tee
the deliberate burial of gockley is it
means that no later culture Trot 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 result of us humans struggling with
our mortality 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 uh 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 there's no more of us there's
no such thing as the soul but that's not
a proven Point there's no experiment
that proves that's the case we know we
die but we don't know whether there's
such a thing as a soul or not yeah it's
the great mystery it's a great mystery
that we all share and those cultures
that have investigated it and ancient EG
ancient Egypt is the best example uh
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 uh that
notion is found right around the world
and it and it even manifests into the
three monotheistic face that are still
present in the world today well you're
one such human uh and you said you
contemplate your own death yeah are you
afraid of it no I'm not afraid of death
at all uh I'm curious about death I
think it could be very interesting uh I
think it's the beginning of the next
great adventure
um so I don't fear it and and um I would
like to live as as long as I'm my my
body is is is healthy enough to make
living worthwhile um but I don't fear
death what I do fear is pain uh I do
fear the humiliation that old age and
the collapse of the faculties can bring
I do fear the cancers that can strike us
down and riddle us with pain and Agony
that I fear very very much indeed but
death is 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 uh
that there's something Beyond this life
uh 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 uh who who found that children up
to the age of seven often have memories
of past lives and in cultures where
memories of past lives are discouraged
they tend not to express that much but
in cultures where memories of past lives
are encouraged like India they do
express it and he found several subjects
children under the age of seven in India
who were able to remember specific
details of a past life and he was able
to go to the place where that past life
unfolded and validate those those those
details so if if cons ious 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 uh may have a much bigger
purpose than than just
accident what a beautiful mystery this
whole thing is yeah we are immersed in
mystery we live in the midst of mystery
we're surrounded by mystery and if we PR
pretend otherwise we're deluding
ourselves and and Graham thank you so
much for inspiring the world to explore
that mystery thank you for talking today
thank you Lex it's been a pleasure
thanks for listening to this
conversation with Graham Hancock to
support this podcast please check out
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let me leave you some words from Charles
Darwin it is not the strongest of the
species that survives nor the most
intelligent it is the one that is the
most adaptable to
change thank you thank you for listening
and hope to see you next time