Graham Hancock transitions from East Africa correspondent to exposing a suppressed Ice Age civilization, citing the Great Pyramid's alignment and submerged Doggerland structures as proof of advanced pre-agricultural societies. He challenges the "Clovis First" dogma using Dr. Tom Demare's 2017 discovery of 130,000-year-old human remains in San Diego, which contradicts mainstream timelines by 100,000 years. By highlighting the career destruction faced by researchers like Jacques Saint-Cyres who challenged these paradigms, Hancock argues that archaeological dogma has systematically erased evidence of a global seafaring culture predating known history. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Fingerprints of the Gods00:06:42
It's fantastic to have you all here, and it's amazing to have Graham with us.
It's not every day that we get Graham here in Cambridge, so it's quite remarkable.
It's great to have you here.
Good to be here.
Good to see you again.
Yes, absolutely.
Graham's new book is America Before, and it is taking everyone by storm.
It seems like there are so many new facts in this book that support all the work that you've been doing over the past three decades.
That whole three decades of research.
Going through this, opening up the Sphinx and the date of the Sphinx, coming really from a background working at Economist magazine, a totally different world, and then walking into this mystery, how did it happen?
I, for years, regarded myself as totally about current affairs.
I didn't have any interest in history at all.
And I was the East Africa.
Correspondent for The Economist, and that meant that I was based in Nairobi, in Kenya, and neighboring countries were on my beat.
And one of those countries was Ethiopia, which was in a state of civil war in the 1980s.
And I found myself during that war in the city of Aksum, where to my surprise, I discovered that they claimed to possess the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
And it hadn't been long before that I'd seen the Indiana Jones movie, you know.
So, my journalistic instinct said there's a good story here, but it clearly wasn't a current affair story.
Yes.
And I kind of put it on the back burner and began to look into it as and when I had time to look into it.
And as I began to look into it more deeply, I found A, that archaeologists were extremely dismissive of and full of dislike for the Ethiopian claim, which they regarded to be a total fantasy.
And at the same time, I found that there was really solid evidence on the ground in Ethiopia that they didn't appear to be considering.
For example, the presence of an indigenous community of Old Testament Jews in Ethiopia.
And their story was not being taken into account.
And the more I looked at it, the more I felt that the mainstream historians and archaeologists were not serving Ethiopia well and that the story deserved to be told.
And I set out to tell it as an investigative journalist, exploring a mystery and exploring to some extent a cover up.
And in that process, I got drawn more generally into the mysteries of the past.
So it wasn't really a particular moment or a particular instant, it was just that a story attracted my attention which involved the remote past.
And I took it from there.
While researching that book, I became interested in the possibility of a lost civilization, and that ultimately led to.
Fingerprints of the Gods, which is the book I'm best known for.
Yes, absolutely.
And that's a remarkable book.
That is from 1995.
Fingerprints was published in 1995.
The previous book, the book on the Ark of the Covenant, was called The Sign and the Seal A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant, and that was published in 1992.
And as part of the research for that book, I needed to go to Egypt.
It was the first time that I'd visited Egypt.
Found myself in front of the majesty and mystery of the Great Pyramid, and again found myself confronted by explanations from the mainstream which certainly did not satisfy me and which I felt were leaving things out of the picture.
It didn't seem to me conceivable that this extraordinary monument, which is 481 feet high and has a footprint of 13 acres and weighs 6 million tons.
And it is so precisely aligned to true north, it's just, you know, 360th of a single degree off true north.
It seemed to me to diminish the whole importance of the thing to suggest that it was simply the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh.
I mean, you can have a huge tomb if you like, but to take the trouble of orienting it within 360th of a single degree of true north suggests that something else is going on in the picture.
And I wanted to look at that and I wanted to see, just as I had in Ethiopia, Is there an alternative story to be told?
Is there something that isn't being considered?
And this led me ultimately to the notion that we are a species with amnesia and that there is very likely at least one major forgotten episode of civilization in the human story.
And Fingerprints of the Gods was the first book where I really took that challenge on and documented it in great depth.
Absolutely.
And it's a remarkable book.
Even now, some 24 years later, that book still, you know, they're still finding out things.
They're still catching up with so many of the things.
I'm also grateful that my readers, still 25, 24, 25 years after that book was published, still find it useful.
One thing that I really appreciate is when people tell me that they've taken Fingerprints of the Gods to the Giza Plateau or they've taken it to Saxehuaman and Cuzco in the In the Andes, and found it a useful guide to get around those sites and begin to do explorations for themselves.
That's part of what I hope to do to open the door for others to do their own investigations and explorations.
And more generally, I think that's a healthy thing.
I think that we tend to leave very important issues to so called specialists or experts in our society and say, well, that's the experts who have to deal with that, and that's not my problem.
And I think that disempowers us as a general public.
I think it is our problem, and I don't think we should leave everything to experts.
Ancient Source Maps Revealed00:10:21
I mean, I don't claim that I should be flying a plane, you know, I've not been trained.
I'd rather have a trained pilot fly my plane.
But when it comes to issues of the human past, I think it's much more interpretive, and I think everybody has a role to play in investigating that.
No question.
You know, it's fascinating to me that it's not armchair research with you.
You're deep into it when you're doing these things.
Underworld, for example, you're going and you're diving under dangerous conditions.
My wife Santa and I did seven years of pretty intense scuba diving, looking at structures that were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age.
Again, it was an issue that I felt wasn't being well served by archaeology.
There are certain areas of the Earth's surface today which have.
Benefited, if that's the right word, from relatively minimal archaeological investigation.
And one of those is the continental shelves.
Sea level at the peak of the last ice age, 21,000 years ago, was 400 feet lower than it is today.
And that's because all of that water was locked up in enormous ice caps on top of North America and Northern Europe.
And it was the melting of those ice caps, sometimes very radically and suddenly, which then led to the rise in.
Sea level that covered those exposed continental shelves.
So, in terms of statistics, you're looking at roughly 10 million square miles of land that was above water 21,000 years ago that's underwater today.
And to put that in perspective, 10 million square miles is roughly the size of Europe and China added together.
So, I don't feel that archaeology can possibly say that it's got a complete grip on the human past, while 10 million square miles.
That was habitable 21,000 years ago is now largely, not completely, but largely untouched by archaeology.
I was pleased to see that some detailed survey work is being done on what's called Doggerland between Great Britain and continental Europe.
This area was above water during the last ice age.
But the survey nevertheless goes in with the preconception that all they're going to find is evidence of primitive tribes there.
And I don't think that we should go into any investigation with such a preconception.
It may be possible that we'll find.
Very surprising things, as indeed I did when Santa and I did this seven years of diving.
We found a number of really intriguing underwater structures that were known to local fishermen, that were known to local divers, but were completely ignored by archaeologists.
And it's worth making the point that we have two other areas of the Earth's surface that have been very substantially underserved by archaeology.
And one of those is the Sahara Desert, which was green during the Ice Age.
And the other is the Amazon rainforest, which is an enormous, vast expanse, and I go into this in depth in America before, that is just beginning to reveal its mysteries, and that is revealing its mysteries because of modern economic pressures leading to clearances of the rainforest.
And those clearances are exposing aspects of the cultural history of the Amazon, which we previously were completely unaware of.
And we still have an area roughly the size of the entire Indian subcontinent.
Within the Amazon rainforest, which has just not been studied by archaeology at all.
So, actually, archaeology cannot, in my view, claim to have the whole story on our past, while so much of the world that was habitable 21,000 years ago is not investigated today.
Absolutely.
And we're going to get to the amazing finds that you came across in the Amazon, especially the DNA aspects, which are off the charts.
One thing I wanted to mention, since we're still talking about the diving, though, is you actually dove the Bimini Wall.
The Bimney Road, yeah.
The Bimney Road, yeah.
That's a very easy dive.
Is it?
Yeah, right.
It's not so far down.
It's not so far.
It's about 15, 20 feet.
It's a very easy, relaxed, gentle dive with lots of lovely, friendly little nurse sharks down there, which don't eat you.
Oh, that's good.
You can go play with them.
And then there's this extremely regular pattern of large blocks on the seabed.
And that pattern of large blocks is the subject of a controversy.
Archaeologists believe it to be totally natural.
Because they do not believe, given that it's been covered by water for thousands of years, they don't believe that any population was capable of creating a megalithic site on that scale, perhaps not during the Ice Age, but say even 8,000 or 10,000 years ago.
And they therefore say it must be natural.
It's a natural site.
Actually, I don't really care whether it's natural or man made.
The fact is that that's.
Bimini Road feature is shown on an island above water on the Piri Rees map, which was drawn in 1513, and which is based, as Piri Rees himself tells us, on more than 100 older source maps that had derived from the Library of Alexandria before it was burnt down.
It puts an island right where the Bimini Road is, and it actually shows the Bimini Road on that island, except above water.
And that says somebody was mapping the world a long time before people are supposed to have been mapped.
Mapping the world.
It's incredible, and you've given various, you know, you've informed people about Charles Hapgood's work in your books.
Charles Hapgood really did breakthrough work in a book called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, published in the 1960s, where he was really the first to document this anomalous category of maps that were.
What's confusing about the maps is that they were typically drawn in our era, between the 1300s and 1700s of our era.
But the Piri Rees map is the best example because Piri Rees states it in his own handwriting on the map that it's based on more than 100 older source maps.
This is the case with the other maps as well.
They derive information from older source maps now lost.
And in so doing, they incorporate certain puzzling features.
They incorporate extremely precise relative longitudes.
And that is something that we couldn't do until the end of the 18th century.
So, it's already a puzzle when on a map from 1513 you find extremely accurate longitudes.
That's, you know.
And he's saying it's older.
That's 250 years before we could do accurate longitudes.
But then, when you discover that that map is actually derived from much older source maps and contains features that show the world as it looked during the last ice age, then you have to consider the possibility that we're looking at a legacy of information contained in these maps.
And that legacy must have come from a global seafaring and navigating civilization that had reached at least the level of navigational technology that our culture had achieved by the end of the 18th century, but during the Ice Age.
And that is, of course, an unacceptable idea to archaeology, but one that I feel is worth pursuing.
And Charles Hapgood was the first to really put that on the record.
And I'd highly recommend Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings to anybody who wants to look deeper into this fantastic, fantastic book.
Well, what's remarkable about Hapgood's other book on crustal displacement is that the introduction was done by Albert Einstein.
The introduction was done by Albert Einstein, yeah.
This is somebody who knew how to look at things differently.
Yeah, this is extremely annoying to archaeologists as well.
How dare Albert Einstein give an introduction to this politically incorrect book, which is how archaeologists regard it.
But Einstein gave that introduction because he was an open minded man who refused to be shut down and narrowed down, and he saw the potential.
In these ideas, and you know, he put his words there and put himself on the record in support of Hapgood, and good for him.
Yes, it is remarkable.
The source of the maps, at least for Piriris, where do you think the source of the maps came from?
Well, Piriris says that his source maps had been rescued from the Library of Alexandria before it was burned down and had been taken off to Constantinople, the city that we now call Istanbul, where Piriris was based, and which then was a very important city within the Roman Empire.
So it makes sense that they would have been taken there.
Where had those maps come from originally before they were archived in the Library of Alexandria?
Well, this brings me to my point.
I think we're dealing with a lost civilization of the Ice Age.
That's been my argument, and all my work, pretty much all of it, for the last 25 years, few exceptions.
I've written some novels.
Yes.
I wrote a book called Supernatural about shamanism, but pretty much all of my other work has been focused on this issue of a lost civilization and presenting the data and the evidence for it.
And I see myself just as you do as a journalist, as a reporter.
I do not see myself as a scientist.
I do not see myself as a discoverer.
I see myself as a reporter.
And if I'm doing anything useful, it's putting the pieces together to see a bigger picture that would not be seen if the pieces are all kept separate and isolated from one another.
But I'm reporting evidence and information that is already out there in the field, but perhaps is not being paid enough attention to, or perhaps is lost in obscure academic journals.
Gobekli Tepe Beings00:10:48
And perhaps has not been correlated with other information, which suddenly gives it much more force.
So, for example, the discovery by the German Archaeological Institute of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey was an extremely important find and one that has rather tended to validate arguments that I had put forward.
It's not my achievement, I didn't discover Gobekli Tepe.
The German Archaeological Institute excavated it.
Lo and behold, discovered that it's probably the largest megalithic site on earth because most of it's still underground, although identified with ground penetrating radar, and that it dates to 11,600 years ago.
Now, that's a really big problem for archaeology because 11,600 years ago, until the discovery of Gebekli Tepe, no one was supposed to have been able to create a massive megalithic site with a series of stone circles.
There was a firm view in archaeology that such works could only be achieved.
By stable and settled agricultural communities that had already formed themselves into towns or mini cities that were creating food surpluses that allowed individuals to specialize on tasks like architecture or geometry or astronomy, which in a hunter gatherer society, according to this view, they would not be able to do.
And so, this is why a place like Malta, with its amazing megalithic temples such as the Hypogeum and Such as Gigantia and Hagaim was felt to be evidence of this.
It was felt that Malta was a settled agricultural community, that they had the specialists, and this is how about 6,000 years ago they were able to begin to create these gigantic megalithic sites.
The problem then comes with Gobekli Tepe, which is at least 5,500 years older than that, which is set amongst what was prior to the construction of Gobekli Tepe an entirely hunter gatherer community.
But during the construction and after the construction of Gbekli Tepe, it mysteriously became an agricultural community.
And I just don't see that as a group of hunter gatherers who woke up one morning magically equipped with the ability to create the largest megalithic site on earth with very precise astronomical and geometrical alignments, and at the same moment just invented agriculture.
To me, that looks much more like evidence for a transfer of technology that somebody came to that place who already knew about megalithic architecture.
And who already knew about agriculture and used the creation of that site and the mobilization of the population around that site as an instrument to pass on and transfer skills and knowledge.
And I think that the more widely we are prepared to look, the more such sites we are going to find.
Santa and I went and investigated one of them at Karahan Tepe, just about 60 miles from Gobekli Tepe, where the same T shaped megaliths are sticking out of the ground of a completely neglected hill in a farmer's backyard, you know.
There are more sites like this, and that's the point because I want to pay tribute to John Anthony West, who originally proposed absolutely, John Anthony West is one of my heroes.
Thank you for that shout out.
Who originally proposed that the Sphinx is much older than 4,500 years ago and proposed this on the basis of the weathering and erosion patterns of the Sphinx, and was able, and kudos to him, was able to get the support of Dr. Robert Schock, professor of geology at. Boston University, in that erosion study, to confirm that John was right and that the Great Sphinx is indeed geologically more like 12,000 years old than it was.
They had the evidence from one and a half thousand years old.
It's solid work.
But the critique of that from archaeologists was look, the Sphinx can't possibly be 12,000 years old because there are no other major megalithic sites in the world that are 12,000 years old.
And that's what Gobekli Tepe blows out of the water because it is 11,600 years old, which is right there in the same window.
And it's an enormous megalithic site, and definitely, if you can make Bekli Tepe, you can make the Great Sphinx.
So, suddenly, we do have a context, and I think again and again, if archaeologists were prepared to look more widely and if they did not get rigidly locked into a particular frame of reference, more and more evidence might be found.
In America, before, I report the work of Dr. Tom Demare at the San Diego Natural History Museum and his excavation of what is called the Cerruti Mastodon site.
And the Cerruti Mastodon site evidences human beings in America, specifically just south of San Diego, 130,000 years ago.
And that's twice as long as human beings have been in Europe, and it's twice as long as human beings have been in Australia, and it's 10 times as long as human beings were supposed to have been in the Americas.
Until relatively recently, it was held as an object of faith by archaeologists that there had been no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years.
Years ago, and suddenly we have Tom Demaray, a very senior figure, chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and a whole team of other researchers who put their reputations on the line.
A major paper published in Nature on the 26th of April 2017, documenting the presence of humans 130,000 years ago.
Tom Demaray's point is well, he actually thought that archaeologists would be excited about this, but in fact, they were not.
They were very upset about it and very angry about it.
The whole focus of archaeology.
Since this discovery was published in Nature, the whole focus of archaeology has been to try to discredit the discovery, to try to minimize it, to try to find any other way to explain the evidence that was found other than human presence.
And I get the case for destructive treatment of new ideas.
I understand that a new and radical idea deserves to face the fire of criticism.
But I also think that it would be very useful if archaeologists were to look at the other side of the story and consider well, what actually would.
This implies if this were so?
And what can we look at?
What can we find that actually supports what has been said?
Tom Demeray's point is that there were two episodes during the Ice Age when it became feasible for the Americas to be peopled, particularly by overland migrations across the Bering Straits, which were then a land bridge, and into Alaska, and thence into what is now Canada, and thence into the USA, and down south from there.
And these two episodes were between About 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago, and then much more recently, around 13,400 years ago, a much shorter episode of about 600 years at that time.
And archaeologists have focused on that recent episode and have ignored the earlier episode when climate conditions also made peopling of the Americas possible.
And Tom Demare's find drops right into the middle of that earlier window of opportunity between 140 and 120,000 years ago.
His find is dated to 130.
Thousand years ago.
And his point is that he would have hoped that the response of archaeologists would be to go dig in those deeper deposits.
To go, you know, with archaeology, the deeper something is, the older it is.
And the dogma, which was called Clovis First, which held that the Clovis, so called Clovis culture, were the first Americans and that they'd arrived 13,400 years ago and then mysteriously vanished 12,800 years ago, that dogma was rigidly reinforced.
And archaeologists who challenged it, And who sought to dig deeper, like Jacques Saint-Cmars at Bluefish Caves in Canada, like Al Goodyear at Topper in South Carolina, faced enormous censure from their colleagues and really quite vicious and radical attacks upon their integrity.
It ruined their careers.
And literally, literally ruined their careers.
So those archaeologists who don't want to have their careers ruined are pretty careful not to step into this kind of territory where other archaeologists will descend upon them like a pack of hyenas and utterly.
Or attempt to utterly destroy them.
And Tom Demaray, as a paleontologist, wasn't quite prepared for this archaeological ferocity.
He thought it would be really exciting to archaeologists that he'd found this evidence, and that their response might be to go dig deeper in a few places and look at those older deposits and see what is in there.
And that's part of my point in this book that because of archaeological dogma, about 100,000 years of American prehistory has simply not been studied, it's not been ignored.
And now, yes, most archaeologists will admit Clovis was not first.
There were human beings here before.
The new evidence has reached the point where it overwhelms the old paradigm, but in the process of doing so, many archaeological careers were ruined, and information that the public deserved to know was suppressed.
And this, to my mind, is not good scholarship.
It's not helpful.
Because they were right at the wrong time.
They were right at the wrong time.
You put it exactly correctly.
That's the problem.
These days, it's a bit easier, but as Tom Demre's example shows, not that easy.
There's a massive resistance to the idea of a very early peopling of the Americas.
I'm not even sure why.
It's just that it kind of got set in stone at some point.
Well, your book, you're kind of a heretic in a sense.
Yes, I suppose so.
Everybody has a role, and my role appears to have been to write and publish heresy over the last 25 years.
Absolutely.
Particularly archaeological heresy concerning the past of the human species.
And I just feel.
I just feel that this is a really important matter.
We are all human beings, you know, and we want to know where we came from and what our story is and what the whole background is.
And the more voices that are brought to this inquiry, the better.