Graham Hancock transitions from The Economist to investigating ancient mysteries, citing submerged structures and the Piri Reis map as evidence of a lost Ice Age civilization. He challenges mainstream archaeology with Göbekli Tepe's age and Cerruti Mastodon findings, arguing for pre-Clovis human presence in America. Hancock links Egyptian cosmology to Alabama mounds, suggesting a third-party legacy, while discussing the Serpent Mound's alignment within an impact crater. The conversation critiques the War on Drugs as a control mechanism, highlights psychedelic insights into consciousness, and proposes the Younger Dryas impact destroyed Atlantis 12,800 years ago. Ultimately, Hancock urges humanity to address cosmic threats like the Taurid stream and nuclear dangers by reconnecting with nature and recognizing shared human origins. [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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Lost Civilizations in Ethiopia00:15:01
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.
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 Dogger Land 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?
Einstein Validates Ancient Maps00:02:02
It was just 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.
Archaeologists Need New Frames00:11:33
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 Gebekli 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 12,000 years old.
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 Demeray 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.
And 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.
And 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 Demare'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 Demeret'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.
And 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're 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, in my view.
We shouldn't have a rigid bureaucracy that shuts down inquiry or closes off other avenues of investigation in the way that archaeology has done.
So I think there's a role for the heretic in all fields, actually.
And it may be very uncomfortable.
To be a heretic sometimes, and you may face all kinds of attacks on your name and on your reputation, but I think it provides a useful service that ultimately it shakes things up and it gets people thinking.
Of course, the heresy does need to be documented.
There's no point in just saying, I think stuff wasn't like this, I think it was like that.
You have to say why you think it was like that, and that's why there are 1,500 footnotes in my book.
The Role of the Heretic00:03:05
It's a remarkable book in the sense of how many different scientific minds you draw together for it and different disciplines.
And the book, I think, is such a breakthrough.
So let's get into some of the heresy of it.
The Native Americans and the Egyptians, they have something in common.
Well, they do.
And this becomes evident at a site called Moundville in Alabama.
Let me see how to best put this.
The ancient Egyptians were a culture that claimed they had received a legacy of knowledge from the gods.
It's very striking how much about ancient Egypt is at its best at the very beginning and then tends to decline.
And their explanation for this was that all their knowledge, all their wisdom, all their skill was a legacy.
And part of this legacy is a system of spiritual ideas about what happens to us when we die.
And there are very specific symbols and iconography within this system of ideas that the soul must ascend.
To the constellation of Orion, which the ancient Egyptians typified as the god of resurrection and rebirth, Osiris, must pass through the constellation of Orion to the banks of the Milky Way.
Orion is situated on the bank of the Milky Way.
And then must make a journey along the Milky Way, there to answer for the life that he or she has lived.
You were given a precious opportunity to be born in a human body.
What did you do with it?
Did you use it well or did you squander it?
These are the fundamental questions that are asked on that journey and they're manifested through certain confrontational figures, often monstrous serpents, for example, that will encounter the soul of the deceased on the way and challenge the soul.
Well, it turns out that the same set of ideas, the leap to the constellation of Orion, the passage through a portal in the constellation of Orion, which has been identified, it's the Orion Nebula.
Beneath the three stars of Orion's belt, the access to the Milky Way, a journey along the Milky Way, which in the Mississippi Valley was called the Path of Souls, the trials and ordeals that are confronted by the soul on that path.
Just every single detail is the same with extraordinary regularity.
Orion was not figured as a man in the sky in the Mississippi Valley, it was figured as a human hand with the fingers pointed downwards and with the portal in the palm of the hand and the belt stars forming the.
Forming the wrist.
But apart from that, the fundamental concepts are identical.
And this is, in my view, too much to be a coincidence.
Legacy of Remote Knowledge00:07:14
And it's also too much, particularly since we find it manifested most fully at Moundville, it's also too much to be explained by some kind of ancient Egyptian missionary expedition to Native America in historic times.
Because the plain fact is that ancient Egypt had been dead and gone as a civilization.
For 600 years before Moundville was created, there was no seeding of ideas directly from the Nile Valley to Moundville.
Those ideas must have been inherited in the Mississippi Valley, just as they were inherited in ancient Egypt.
And that's the conclusion I come to is that what we're looking at is not evidence for direct contact between the Mississippi Valley and the Nile Valley in historic times, but evidence for a legacy of knowledge that was passed down in both places from a remote third party.
Civilization, in other words, from a lost civilization.
And since the Americas have effectively been, were effectively cut off by sea level rise at the end of the last ice age, were effectively cut off from the Asian landmass from about 11,600 years ago until the time of Columbus, we must conclude that the legacy is older than 11,600 years.
Years ago, that it dates back before the time that I call the separation of peoples, that it's a legacy that goes back to the last ice age.
And this is found actually all over the Mississippi Valley.
The origin of sites in the Mississippi Valley goes back much further than Moundville, but the specific iconography related to Orion and the Milky Way is very much associated with Moundville.
The key point there is Moundville was made 600 years after the last of ancient Egypt had vanished from the story.
I don't know, maybe ancient Egyptians did come to America at some time.
Maybe Vikings came here.
Maybe Phoenicians came here as well.
Maybe Romans came here.
I wouldn't rule it out.
But they didn't make a lasting impact.
They did not leave a genetic fingerprint here in the Americas.
If small groups of people came across on boats and had some contact with ancient America, that is not sufficient to account for the vast.
Amount of similarity and detail in these systems.
And it's the same focus on the mystery of what happens to us after death.
And it's a focus that in our society we prefer to avoid and not think about or hive off to the mainstream religions who simply tell us what to think in this respect.
The message, both of the Mississippi Valley and of ancient Egypt, is that some aspect of the individual definitely does survive death and that we will be held accountable for the lives that we've led and that that accounting will take place on a journey that we have to undergo.
Amazing.
This is the scientific materialism creeping into the culture that if you can't weigh it, you can't measure it, it's not there.
And so it leaves us with a real deficit when we're coming to look at these issues or the cosmologies of these cultures.
It leaves us with a huge deficit.
Look, I mean, the issue of the journey of the soul and the identical nature of that in ancient Egypt and in the Mississippi Valley isn't confined to there.
If you go down to the Amazon, you're going to find very similar ideas connected to the consumption of ayahuasca.
The vine of souls or the vine of the dead, and again the afterlife realm and the afterlife journey of the soul, being encountered through direct experience rather than necessarily through teachings or written scriptures.
You're going to find enormous earthworks in the Amazon that are pretty much identical to the earthworks in the Mississippi Valley.
You're going to find that those earthworks are classic hinges.
A henge is a ditch with an external embankment, the whole thing made of earth.
So, everybody's heard of Stonehenge.
The henge bit of that is the earthwork.
Avebury, near where I live, is another henge.
The enormous sites that are emerging from the Amazon rainforest are true henges, earthwork sites, with a large embankment outside the ditch rather than inside.
That's why we know they don't have anything to do with defense, you know, because if your embankment is a wall, then you're going to put your moat outside the wall, not inside the wall.
Really, the intriguing thing is that in all of these places, the same kind of architecture, whether it's the hinges of Europe, whether it's the Great Pyramid of Giza, whether it's the hinges and earthworks of the Amazon, whether it's the giant pyramid of Cahokia in Illinois, that they're all connected to the same set of ideas about the journey of the soul after death.
And this to me suggests a remotely ancient origin for those ideas, and that we're just looking at the leavings and the traces of it in these historical cultures.
Absolutely.
When you have looked at these various mythologies and histories, is there any reason why it's Orion?
Well, that's an interesting point, Daniel.
I mean, Orion, well, first of all, it's a very striking constellation which stands out in the sky pretty much everywhere in the world.
It's hard to miss it.
Although different cultures construe its appearance in slightly different ways, it's the same constellation.
The reason why Orion, I think we are looking at a very ancient system of religious ideas which used powerful symbolism to focus the mind on the mysteries of life after death.
And I think that Orion and the Milky Way were deliberately selected as symbolic items on that journey.
It's not an accident that there's a narrow shaft cut through the southern side of the Great Pyramid that points directly at the lowest of the three stars.
Of Orion's belt.
The connection is obviously a very important one.
We could get more mystical and woo woo, you know, when it comes to the issue of that portal in the palm of the hand constellation as Orion was seen in the Mississippi Valley and its association with the Orion Nebula.
There may be mysteries beyond mysteries here, but what I can say is that at some point, and it has to be during the Ice Age, it has to be before 11,600 years ago, some group of people put together a very coherent system of spiritual ideas.
With very specific notions about what happens to us after death and relating those to specific bits of the sky, and that these ideas were then passed down all around the world.
It's fascinating, and that's a fascinating legacy.
Solstice Sites and Nature00:10:35
When we get these ideas and they come back to us, and you look at something like you spend all this time at the Serpent Mound in Ohio, this culture, how does this culture apprehend what they were trying to tell us?
Well, first of all, a recommendation.
Go see Serpent Mound.
Summer solstice is coming up, 20th, 21st of June.
That's the time to be there.
That's the time when that amazing earthwork speaks to the sky, communicates, and interlocks directly with the sky.
What's rather fascinating about Serpent Mound is, and again, it suggests an ancient worldwide system of ideas.
What you actually have at Serpent Mound is a natural ridge, and the head, if you like, the head end of that ridge.
Is oriented pretty much to the position where the sun sets on the summer solstice.
Now, this was clearly recognized by the ancients.
It was clearly recognized because then they came along and they did something to that ridge.
They didn't just leave it as a natural ridge, they built this beautiful 1,400 foot long serpent on top of it with a spiral tail and then a series of coils leading up to the open jaws of the serpent and the dead center line.
Through the open jaws, targets the setting point of the sun on the summer solstice.
What's fascinating, and again, I documented in America before, is that we've discovered only recently that the same enhancement of a natural alignment also took place at Stonehenge in Britain.
See, for a long time it was held that it was mysterious that all the stones of Stonehenge had been brought from elsewhere.
The very big ones, which can weigh up to 20 or 30 tons, which are called sarsens, are thought to have been brought from the Marlborough Downs, which is about 20 miles away from Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is.
And the smaller ones, the blue stones, were thought to have been brought from Wales.
And the big question that a lot of archaeologists ask themselves is why didn't they just build Stonehenge on the Marlborough Downs, where the sarsens lie about in plenty?
Why did they build it 20 miles away?
But what was discovered recently is that two of those sarsens were actually in position at Stonehenge all the time.
And those two sarsens are Sarsenstone 16 and the Heelstone.
And they line up perfectly to target the rising point of the sun on the summer solstice.
This was clearly recognized.
This is nature, earth, speaking to sky.
It was clearly recognized by the ancients.
And they then memorialized the whole site by bringing all the other sarsens from Marlborough Downs and the Blue Stones and creating Stonehenge.
As we know it today, built around that natural alignment.
So, the same thing is at Serpent Mound that the earth was already speaking to the sky, and human beings then took it further and created this beautiful mound site on top of it and very carefully targeted it to the summer solstice sun.
This is the Yardang.
The Yardang theory of the Sphinx.
The argument, of course, concerning the Sphinx is that it was a natural formation at one point, and there are many lion like natural formations called Yardangs.
In Egypt's western desert, which had been shaped by erosion over thousands of years.
And the suggestion is that this is what the Sphinx was, and that it was a yardang that was oriented to the equinox sunrise, and that this was recognized by the ancients, and they then carved it into the shape of a lion.
And I and my colleagues, Robert Baval, and I in particular, have long made the case that it was made the shape of a lion because of the constellation of Leo, which lay behind the sun at the spring equinox, roughly in the period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago.
But you're right, again, it's the same theme.
Let's find a place where earth and sky are already in sacred communion, and then let's celebrate that.
Let's create a beautiful monument on that site.
Let's add human ingenuity and creativity to the picture that emerges there, and then something magical happens.
And this idea is found widely distributed all around the world, and I think it goes back to a remote common origin.
But just to say on Serpent Mound, it really truly is a magical place.
And nobody should miss the opportunity of going there, and particularly of going there at the summer solstice.
To really see it, you need to do what we did.
My wife, Santa, is a photographer, and she brought a drone, and we put that drone 400 feet above Serpent Mount, so that you can actually see the sun and the head of the serpent in the same shot.
And you can see how amazing and beautiful this alignment is.
And you have to ask yourself how did the ancients conceive of that, even though they understood that it was pointing?
At the direction of the summer solstice sunset.
How did they understand that?
How could it be seen from above in that way?
Because that's the only place that you really get the full view of it when you situate yourself in a drone 400 feet above it.
Well, we've had this before with the Nazca Lines, which is very unexplainable because they didn't have flight, obviously.
So it poses a problem.
And yet they were able to create these monuments on an enormous scale.
You mentioned the photographs with the drone and Santa, the incredible photographs in the book.
Are remarkable and really bring your time there home, I think, through those images.
So they're just remarkable.
A few things about the Serpent Mound, its connection to the solstice and the concept of the Manitou.
Serpent Mound is a Manitou, and a Manitou ultimately is a natural phenomenon which may be enhanced by human activity, which has enormous innate power and resonance that's.
Speaks to us, you sense its almost divine attributes, that it's almost a living creature, and at the same time, a work of nature.
And the Serpent Mound is a classic Manitou in serpent form, connecting earth and sky in that way.
And this is a concept, of course, that's widely distributed in Native America.
It's remarkable.
And it seemed to me, when I was looking at the Serpent Mound, I was thinking of Kuku Khan.
And Potts Cotal and the serpent.
Feathered serpent, yeah.
So there's that serpent again, and here in this one, his jaws are open.
Yeah.
Serpents everywhere.
Absolutely.
You know, one could go into all sorts of reasons for that.
There's a very interesting oval earthwork immediately in front of the open jaws of the serpent.
And some researchers have recently drawn attention to the similarity of that oval earthwork to the Carolina Bays.
This is not my work, but it's the work of others, Michael Davias, for example.
Fascinating.
And there has long been an argument about whether the Carolina Bays are connected to comet impacts, which is another theme that I explore in some depth in this book.
Absolutely.
It's interesting because, of course, the Serpent Mound is in a comet.
Serpent Mound is already in an impact crater.
Yes, yeah.
Much older.
But it is an impact crater.
And that place on the horizon where the sun sets is one of the outer rings of the impact crater.
They seem to know that to put the sacred site there somehow.
There seems to be knowledge, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Absolutely fascinating.
It's a cosmic impact crater.
Yeah.
That's literally where it resides.
Quite remarkable.
It's called the Serpent Mound Crypto Explosive Structure.
It's a great name.
What was the most remarkable thing that you saw when you were there?
Because it seemed to me that you were moved by it.
And it's funny because in the book, I mentioned this to you that parts of it you write like a travelogue, which I thought was kind of unique.
In this book, and it made it so approachable that it's not just a lot of archaeological facts.
Well, my first ever book was a travel book.
It was called Journey Through Pakistan.
It was published in 1981.
There we go.
Yeah, I think it's important to be a traveler and write as such, and that's what I've tried to do over the years.
But what moved me most about Serpent Mound, apart from the magical connection of earth and sky that is sacralized there, was the people.
Who come there, people who come there from all over the world who are drawn to that site to celebrate that magical moment.
Serpent Mound is not a dead effigy.
Serpent Mound is speaking to the modern world.
And there are communities within the modern world that are responding to it.
The big weigh and measure and count communities of mainstream materialist science are not responding to it.
But there is a new mood afoot in the world today where people are questioning.
Everything and are open once again to the possibility that the ancients have much to teach us.
See, that's one of the mistakes of our civilization our arrogance and our conceit and our pride and our mistaken belief that the whole historical process has been about us and that we're the pinnacle of all of this.
And we tend to look down on earlier cultures as in some way inferior to our own.
What I'm seeing all around the world, particularly amongst the younger generation.
Is a recognition that there is great wisdom in the ancient cultures and that they have something to teach us, and maybe even something that can save us from ourselves, from the technological nightmare, the robotic, highly controlled mind games that are played within our society.
That maybe there's wisdom there that can save us from that mess that we're presently marching into.
Yeah, we're hurtling at fast speed, kind of like a comet towards our fate.
Taking Power Back00:05:06
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which can only be stopped by.
By sovereign individuals taking command of their own consciousness and thinking for themselves, and by refusing to be told what to think.
The time for that has passed when politicians, scientists, commercial leaders had the power and the authority to tell us what to think.
They may imagine they still have that power and authority, but they don't.
And times are changing very, very rapidly.
And that was one of the things that came home.
Very forcefully to me at Serpent Mount was this international gathering there.
People recognizing this place matters, this place speaks to us, this place can, in some intangible way, change our lives.
Amazing.
And that's an awareness that's building, and it was just sort of palpable when you were there.
It's definitely building.
I've been conscious of this for several years.
I suppose I got into it over my intense opposition to the war on drugs.
Which I believe to be one of the most evil and wicked crimes that has ever been inflicted upon humanity.
Because what the war on drugs is doing is saying that sovereign adults are not capable of making responsible decisions about their own health and their own bodies.
And that cannot possibly be right.
And I see more and more people today who actually are saying no, it's not right that the government should tell me what I may or may not put into my own body and should punish me with criminal sanctions.
If I disobey the law.
So kudos to the citizens of Massachusetts for voting for the legalization of power.
It finally happened.
It finally happened.
And what's exciting about it is it's a citizens' initiative.
It's from the ground up.
It's not big government saying, OK, this is what you're going to do now.
It's people taking their power back into their own hands.
And this issue has not been typified enough in the way that it should be.
The heart of this issue is not getting high.
Or getting stoned, or being whatever the ideology of the war on drugs says that that involves.
That's not the heart of the issue.
The heart of the issue is the right of adults to make decisions about their own health, their own bodies, and their own consciousness without reference to any government agency.
And that is a fundamental human right.
And if we are not free to make those decisions about our own bodies and our own health and our own consciousness, then any talk we have about freedom is complete and utter bullshit.
Completely meaningless.
There is no freedom when there is no freedom of consciousness.
And that's why this obnoxious thing called the war on drugs is so, so wrong.
And it fails completely, even in its own terms, because it does not stop people from taking dangerous and harmful drugs.
The best way to do that is to have genuine, reliable information out there.
And then people will make up their own minds in a responsible way, just as the vast majority of people have made up their own minds about smoking cigarettes.
Nobody was ever sent to jail.
For smoking cigarettes.
Nobody ever had their job taken away or their life ruined.
Nobody had to do a urine test for nicotine.
But the fact is that a great majority of people who were smokers 20 or 30 years ago are not smokers today because they've seen the information and they've made the responsible adult decision.
And I suggest it's the same with all drugs and that the war on drugs was in fact invented to empower enormous armed bureaucracies which control our lives in all kinds of ways.
And if we accept That government may tell us what to do with our health and our consciousness and our bodies, then we're going to accept everything else that government tells us as well.
So I see a wonderful change taking place in the younger generation who are literally refusing to put up with this crap any longer and are thinking for themselves and taking initiatives and actions for themselves.
And has Massachusetts fallen to pieces since cannabis was legalized?
I don't think so.
So far, so good.
I don't think so.
Has California fallen to pieces?
This was the ideology of the war on drugs.
If we legalize drugs, these societies will completely collapse.
California seems to be doing pretty well to me.
So does Washington State.
So does Oregon, you know.
So does Colorado, who now, just while I was there, decriminalized the use of psilocybin as well.
Colorado is leading free thinking in this respect.
You know, we have to move into a world where we start thinking for ourselves and stop accepting dogma that's been passed down to us through our religions and through bureaucratic figures.
And if we don't do that, then we're just meat robots and there's no point to us at all.
Yes, absolutely.
Wow.
Ayahuasca and Scientific Reasoning00:04:21
Graham, before we go into the Amazon, where you've made these incredible discoveries and the DNA aspects there off the charts, since you're talking about this subject, you, of course, have done a lot of writing and a lot of investigation, a lot of personal experience with shamanic consciousness, psychedelic experience.
In relation to your work, how does it influence your work?
Oh, it's influenced my work enormously.
My particular relationship has been with ayahuasca.
In the form of the beverage that is made in the Amazon jungle, and also to some extent with smoked and vaped dimethyltryptamine, DMT.
Well, the experiences that I've had with these substances over the years have first of all taught me that I must work harder to be a better human being and to be more nurturing and more helpful to others around me.
And given me that lesson very clearly.
I'm not saying that I always act on that lesson, but I've received that lesson.
And secondly, opened up to me with great clarity the notion that I am not my body, that the ancients' ideas of the soul are worthy and important ideas, and they cannot be confined simply to a trip to paradise or hell.
It's much more complicated than that.
And thirdly, that the ancients were filled with wisdom.
Ayahuasca itself is an example of that because ayahuasca is a combination of two different Amazonian plants.
One of them is a vine and one of them is a shrub.
The shrub contains, the leaves contain dimethyltryptamine, but dimethyltryptamine is not normally orally active.
We experience it in the West by smoking it or vaping it.
But they've made it orally active in the Amazon by cooking the leaves of that shrub, which is called chacruna, with the ayahuasca vine.
The reason is that there's an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase that switches off DMT on contact.
The ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
And, you know, I have to ask how could this be done out of 150,000 different species of plants and trees and vines in the Amazon?
How did they isolate these two?
Neither of which, in an oral form, are psychoactive on their own, they only work when put together.
This to me looks like evidence of scientific reasoning.
In the Amazon, a very, very, very long time ago.
Yes, yes, fascinating.
Before we go to the Amazon, there's something very unusual I found in the book, and I wanted to get these terms right.
It has something to do with a Native American female figure called the Brain Smash.
The Brain Smasher, yes.
Well, this was again, there are multiple examples in the book, and we can't go into all of them here, but when I'm comparing the ancient Mississippi Valley, Notions of the afterlife journey of the soul and the ancient Egyptian notions of the afterlife journey of the soul, it's indeed the case that in the Mississippi Valley there is a female figure called the brain smasher or the brain taker.
And what she does is she literally smashes out the brains of the damned, of unworthy souls who've lived vicious and cruel lives, who've not helped others, but who've hurt and hindered and harmed others.
They get their brains smashed out on the afterlife journey.
And it's fascinating that in the ancient Egyptian book of what is in the Duat, which describes the afterlife journey of the soul as the ancient Egyptians conceived it, I came across a vignette which shows.
A goddess with her hands stretched out to the figure of a man who's kneeling before her, and he is smashing out his own brains with a hatchet.
That was simply described by the translator of the book, but the translator did not actually translate the hieroglyphs relating to the role of that goddess.
So I had an expert in hieroglyphs at the British Museum translate those specific hieroglyphs, and lo and behold, it turns out that the role of that goddess is to smash out the brains of the dead.
Atlantis Disrupts Patterns00:11:55
Wow.
Exactly as is the case in the Native American system.
And that's why I feel.
We can't account for this with coincidence.
There's too much of it.
There's too many examples.
At a certain point, it becomes crazy to suggest that it's coincidence and more reasonable to suggest that there's some kind of remote common origin at the heart of it.
Common origin.
The lost civilization, traditional archaeology will hold, Sumeria was the birthplace of civilization.
History begins at Sumer.
Yes.
That's the title of the book.
That has been dogma in archaeology for a very long time.
And again, they're going to have to look at all that with fresh eyes in the future.
But the radical proposition I'm making in this book is that it's possible that actually civilization as we know it originated in the Americas, not at all in the Old World, that the Old World came to it second rather than first, that it was here first, and that after the cataclysm of the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, it was transferred from the Americas to many other parts of the world, including parts of the Americas.
Remarkable.
And that story has often been given the title Atlantis.
Yes.
And Plato gave the name Atlantis.
Yes, the name Atlantis comes from Plato, from the Timaeus and Critias dialogues.
We know how Plato got the story of Atlantis.
We know that he got it through his ancestral family line, through the Greek lawmaker Solon, who visited Egypt in 600 BC and was there told the story of Atlantis by the priests of a temple at Sice in the Delta that was dedicated to the goddess Neith.
That temple no longer exists.
But they pointed to writings on the walls of the temple and they told Solon that this was the story of a great civilization called Atlantis that had been destroyed in an enormous flood cataclysm.
And when Solon asked them when this happened, they said 9,000 years ago.
And that was in 600 BC.
So that means they're actually giving us a date that we can relate to.
That's 9,600 BC.
And the point about it is that 9,600 BC is the end of the Younger Dryas, and it's accompanied by a massive rise in sea levels, nominated by geologists as Meltwater Pulse 1b.
And the notion that archaeologists prefer that Plato made the whole story up is seriously questioned by the dating he gives us, which coincides with the latest geological information on enormous sea level rise at the end of the last ice age.
And it's important to be clear that Plato is the sole surviving.
Original source that we have for Atlantis, that all other sources are either channeled or derivative of Plato.
And therefore, you know, Plato does need to be taken seriously in this respect.
And it's the fact that he gives us that date and that we know that it coincides with an enormous rise in sea level that I find particularly intriguing.
Amazing.
It's an amazing foundation.
When he is talking about where it is, he is looking across the Atlantic.
Plato very specifically says that it's an enormous island that lies to the west of the Pillars of Hercules, which are the Straits of Gibraltar.
Yes.
And if you want to, Find a really enormous island that lies to the west of the Straits of Gibraltar, you're looking at America.
Yes, absolutely.
You're looking at the Americas, which is essentially one huge, huge island lying there in the Atlantic Ocean, exactly where Plato said we should be looking.
You know, it's fascinating, and this is what's so intriguing about the book and why I think it upsets history so much because, you know, we're talking about traditional archaeology and it begins in Sumer and all the rest of it.
The Atlantis story kind of sits there in the middle of that, disrupting that whole pattern.
Because it suggests there's something much older.
It does.
It's heresy from the point of view of archaeology.
How dare Plato suggest that there was a civilization that was destroyed 11,600 years ago and God knows how long it existed before that?
That's a very annoying idea to archaeologists.
And that's why they consistently seek to diminish and downplay Plato and suggest that he's giving us some kind of political analogy and that it's not a true history at all.
And they don't consider the possibility that he may be using that true history in order to make.
A political point.
And I rather do the same myself because I don't think it's impossible that we are going to be the next lost civilization.
And if we do not wish to be the next lost civilization, then we need to listen to the voices of the past and make certain changes.
No question about it.
If we face that great comet explosion that they faced there in that period, somewhere 13,000 years ago, our culture would.
Eliminated.
My view is that Western industrialized civilization, not just say Western, industrialized civilization in toto, it's all one thing all around the world, would not survive such a cataclysm because we don't have survival skills and we're very specialized and very dependent on the specialisms of others.
We all contribute our little bit to the overall picture, but we're not in command of the overall picture.
And if you have a major disruptive cosmic event like further comet impacts, Which are by no means impossible, then our civilization would not make it through.
We're not psychologically prepared to survive a cataclysm of that nature.
And those who are psychologically prepared are the simplest people in the world, are the hunter gatherers, those who do not have elaborate technological cultures, those who are daily in the business of survival.
They would be the ones who survive, and they're exactly the ones who Plato says survived the last cataclysm.
That it wasn't the advanced citizens of Atlantis who survived, it was the shepherds and the herdsmen in the mountains who survived, and they didn't have letters.
And that's why we all have to begin again like children with no memory of what went before.
And I make the case, and I think it is the case, that a very strong effort was made to pass down a memory of these events and to pass a warning to the future.
I don't want to get all kind of doom and gloom over this, but.
You avoid that in your work.
And we've not gone into detail about the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which I set out at full length in this book.
But it's the work of more than 60 major scientists, and their argument, compellingly put in very major peer reviewed journals such as the Journal of Geology or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, not largely read by the general public, but their argument, very coherently put, is that the Earth was hit 12,800 years ago by multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet, that there were further impacts 11,600 years ago,
and that these account both for the beginning and the end of the Younger Dryas, and that These impacts are traced to a giant comet, which may have had a diameter of more than 100 miles, that entered the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago on an Earth crossing orbit.
For the next few thousand years, not much damage was done.
The Earth and the comet missed each other, but comets always break up into multiple fragments.
And as they do, a meteor stream is formed.
And the meteor stream that was formed by this disintegrating comet is called the Taurid meteor stream.
And we still pass through it.
Twice every year.
And there are still extremely large objects which are fragments of the original giant comet within the torrid meteor stream, which is now 30 million kilometers wide.
Each passage takes 12 and a half days in June and again in November.
And the scientists working on this have just very recently, just in the last few weeks, published a new paper pointing out that this June we are going to be coming very, as close as we've been for a very long time to the core of the torrid meteor stream.
And that this represents a tremendous observational opportunity to calculate.
The real dangers that the torrid meteor stream represents to us.
And when I say I don't want to spread gloom and doom, it's because there is a problem there and we can do something about it should we choose to do so.
It's not an insoluble problem, it's a problem within our capacity to solve.
But if we continue to deny that there's any problem at all, or if we prefer, as we do at present, to devote most of our resources to warfare and weapons of mass destruction, then we're never going to get to grips with that problem.
And we could indeed become.
The next lost civilization.
It would indeed be the hunter gatherers who we coexist with in the world today, in the Amazon jungle, in the Namibian desert, for example.
It would be their descendants who would carry the human story forward.
Amazing.
It would happen all over again.
And they would tell a myth of how there was once a great civilization on this planet, which fell out of harmony with the universe and got destroyed.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
When you think about NASA, and they did this recent.
Simulation of destroying one of these comets, and by accident, they to save I think it was to save New York, they no, to save Denver, they destroy New York.
Yeah, the idea was to blow the comet up or blow bits off it, and one of those bits hit New York and destroyed it in the simulation.
In light of your work in here, did you find that unnerving?
Well, I found it spooky because NASA has consistently and doggedly over the last 20 years denied that there's any cosmic danger at all, and suddenly it's wargaming a cosmic impact.
And if you follow the headlines over the last four or five years, we've had more and more near misses with asteroids and comets.
And I think it's worth paying attention to because when a big enough object comes in through the Earth's atmosphere and hits the Earth at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, you have, by definition, a giant cataclysm.
And we don't want that to happen.
We don't want to become the dinosaurs made extinct by a cosmic impact.
We would like.
The human family to go on.
And we'd like our children and our children's children to have a beautiful garden of a planet to live upon.
And we're doing so many things wrong in terms of ensuring that at the moment.
Many, many things wrong, but one of the things we're doing wrong is not paying attention to immediate and near dangers in our immediate cosmic environment that we could pay attention to and we could divert should we choose to do so.
It seems like they're more willing to talk about it suddenly.
What you don't want to do is blow the thing up, though.
That's not good because then you get this sort of shotgun blast instead of the single large artillery round.
And the shotgun blast can be just as bad or even worse.
What you want to do is nudge it and move it.
And that's doable.
Should we choose to apply our technology to a positive end rather than applying it to negative ends or ends that are purely to do with consumption and material wealth?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's fascinating.
And this is the period that we're in where we have to consider these things.
It's like we're staring in a mirror at this last period.
Of destruction and ways to avoid the similar.
Deliberate Messages from the Past00:09:06
It's a very odd thing.
I've made this point in many previous books that there's a phenomenon called precession, and it's caused by a wobble on the axis of the Earth.
The Earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars.
So changes in its orientation in space alter the rising times and the positions of stars in the sky as viewed from the Earth.
And it's a cycle.
So it unfolds, the complete cycle takes 25,920 years to unfold.
And it's just interesting to me that we're halfway around that cycle now from the time of the Younger Dryas impacts 12,800 years ago.
We're almost exactly halfway around that cycle.
If you multiply 12,800 by 2, you get, I think, 25,600.
25,600?
Yes.
Which is just a fraction off that 25,920 that is the processional cycle, which unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
Enormous numbers of monuments around the world that have these numbers incorporated into them, so that the Great Pyramid is a scale model of the northern hemisphere of the Earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200.
43,200 is one of those numbers that's derived from precession of the equinoxes, it's 600 times 72.
The height of the Great Pyramid multiplied by 43,200 gives you the polar radius of the Earth, and the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid multiplied by 43,200 gives you the equatorial circumference of the Earth.
And Egyptologists say that's a coincidence.
That's remarkable.
And maybe if the scale was 1 to 57,820 or 1 to 36,240, which would also give you a big monument, maybe if the scale was that, it could be a coincidence.
But it's not.
It's not a random number, it's a highly significant number.
So we have a monument that targets the true north pole of the Earth within 360th of a single degree.
It is situated on latitude 30 degrees, which is a significant latitude, one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole.
And it gives you the dimensions of the Earth on a scale defined by a key motion of the Earth itself, which is the precession of the Earth's axis.
For all that to be a coincidence is just lunacy, from my point of view.
It's obviously not a coincidence, it's obviously deliberate.
And this tells us that sometime in remote prehistory, there were great minds at work on this planet who were doing extraordinary things and seeking to pass messages down to the future.
It's slightly spooky that we're half a processional cycle away from the last big impact.
There's no question.
That's really remarkable.
You know what's amazing to me about that also is they knew that we would attain this again, and it's almost like it's vouchsafed.
I can't prove that, but I feel that's the way.
I feel that a message has been sent forward deliberately to our time.
And it's not an accident that the astronomers who are working on the Taurid meteor stream say that the next 30 years are crunch time between us and the Taurid meteor stream, and they are largely being ignored, but attention should be paid to them.
And this work is again published in solid peer reviewed journals, it's not fringe science.
It needs to be looked at, and I set out the documentation in the book.
Is it possible that the ancients knew that?
That the cataclysm that brought down their civilization was part of a cycle, was something that didn't just happen once, was something that would happen again, that we would re encounter those bits of the Taurid meteor stream that are particularly dangerous 12,800 years after our first encounter?
Remarkable, absolutely remarkable.
I have to say that probably the biggest breakthrough in the book relates to DNA, interestingly enough.
And again, I have to put my hand on my heart and state clearly that is not my breakthrough.
I am simply reporting what the leading scientists in the field have observed.
And the leading scientists in the field of ancient DNA publishing again in Nature, people like Professor Eski Willislev of the University of Copenhagen and Cambridge, Scoglan and Reich, many others, have published key articles in Nature about this.
There is a very puzzling DNA signal, which you find only in Australasia and in the heart of the Amazon jungle.
And you don't find it anywhere else.
You don't find it on the supposed route of migration up through East Asia and across the Bering land bridge and into America and down through.
You don't find it anywhere on that route.
You don't find it in North America.
You don't find it in Central America.
You only find it amongst Australian Aborigines.
And Melanesians from Papua New Guinea and amongst certain tribes in the Amazon rainforest.
And furthermore, it's really old.
And again, this is where science and the study of ancient DNA is really changing things in archaeology.
Because skeletal remains from the Brazilian Amazon, dated to 10,400 years ago, carry this same signal.
And that tells us that the signal has been in the Amazon for at least 10,400 years.
And probably long before that, given how little of the Amazon has actually been.
Studied, and it's certainly the view of the researchers who published this report that the signal reached the Amazon in the late Ice Age.
So then you have to say, how did it get there in the late Ice Age?
It certainly didn't come by that land route, or it would have left DNA fingerprints.
It must have come across the ocean.
A reproductively viable population must have been brought all the way across the Pacific Ocean and settled in the Amazon rainforest, where their descendants remain to this day, still carrying.
That DNA signal.
And this is regarded as completely impossible by archaeology that human beings would have been capable of crossing an ocean on the scale of the Pacific.
Maybe one or two individuals on rafts by accident might have made it.
But a reproductively viable population which can preserve a specific set of genes and pass them down over hundreds of generations is a completely different proposition.
That's a large settlement project.
And for that to be documented in the ancient DNA of the Amazon, Is absolutely intriguing and very hard to explain.
And I'd like to be clear I don't dispute that the Polynesians were amazing navigators and that the Polynesians were the masters of the Pacific Ocean, but that was 3,000 years ago or 3,500 years ago.
That was not 13,000 years ago.
For such a voyage to have taken place 13,000 years ago in itself rewrites history.
And again, the problem is that archaeology are now looking for ways to explain this away.
Rather than considering what this means for our paradigm of the past, they would like the whole thing just to go away.
This is amazing because, like when the evidence was presented geologically for the Sphinx, that the water weathering dated it back to somewhere near 10,000 BC.
Archaeology, which was more opinion based and largely, as I found out through your work, Egyptology largely comes from 18th, 19th century research.
So, you know, with our modern tools, you might think you'd update that picture at a certain point.
Yes, yeah.
I think, for example, the rigid and fixed view of archaeology that no humans were capable of crossing a major ocean with a reproductively viable population 13,000 years ago, the very first thing they should do with this ancient DNA is question that view.
Rather than question the new facts.
The effort is to question and pour scorn upon the new facts rather than to consider what the new facts mean for our previous models of how things were done.
It's just unfortunate that that is the case.
But it won't go on.
And I see more and more evidence as I travel around, I meet young archaeologists in the field who are very different from their elderly colleagues and who are much more open minded and much more.
Willing to see.
I definitely see a change.
And I see it in, I meet many students who've enrolled in archaeology and are learning archaeology, and they are carrying a passionate wish to change archaeology and to make it into the discipline that it can be, which is an open minded and adventurous exploration of our past, rather than a rigid and hierarchical pre imposed view of what our past should be.
Absolutely.
It's remarkable.
We're going to open it up to questions in a couple of minutes, everyone.
It's great to have everyone here.
Graham's new book, Is America Before?
It's a remarkable breakthrough on many levels because we're getting into archaeology, we're getting into DNA, we're getting into various scientific disciplines that you brought forward in it.
A Global, Not Private Legacy00:10:06
There was one aspect I wanted to get into, which was this thing about squaring the circle and how that gives us that picture, also.
Can you get into that a bit?
Well, it's first of all important to be clear that what I draw attention to, what happens.
In the Amazon, and what also happened in Ohio was a mathematical and geometrical exercise similar to the Greek notion of squaring the circle, but certainly not identical to it.
They're playing the same kind of mathematical and geometrical games.
So, what you have in the Amazon at a site called Jakosa on a scale of 200 meters, let's say 650 feet along each side, what you have is an enormous square embankment.
With a square ditch inside it, with a second square embankment inside that, and then with a circle touching the edges of that second inner square.
So they are comparing squares and circles and the areas of the two objects.
And they're doing so not just in a theoretical way, but in a very large earthwork on the ground, which photographed from the air shows you very clearly the circle contained within the.
Within the square.
And these kind of mathematical and geometrical exercises that we see unmistakable proof of in the Amazon because they're there, you know, they can't be magicked away or wiped out, they're sitting there, have traditionally been attributed to the Greek geometers and not been considered that such clever and sophisticated games could have been played in ancient Native America, not only in the Amazon but also in Pike County, Ohio,
where there was a very similar earthwork which had, in this case, a circle enclosing a square.
And that, unfortunately, is one of the tens of thousands of earthworks that have been destroyed by development in North America since the middle of the 19th century.
It was documented by Squire and Davis in 1846.
There's a map of it, but it no longer exists.
And that's true of many, many sites, unfortunately, in the Americas.
In fact, I would say that roughly 90% of the giant, impressive earthwork sites of North America that were documented in the 19th century are now gone.
Completely, and they've been plowed under for agriculture or turned into industrial parks or housing estates.
They've just been swept away.
How did the Serpent Mound survive?
I think Serpent Mound survived because it was kind of adopted locally, the local people paid attention to it, who had the power to keep it there.
It was a beautiful thing, and after all, it's a tourist attraction.
Yes, right.
It has economic potential, as does Cahokia, as does Newark Earthworks in Ohio.
Which is one of the most majestic earthwork sites in the whole of the Americas.
Newark Earthworks has many geometrical figures, but the most important is a combination of an octagon and a circle.
And by the way, that combination of the octagon and circle targets every one of the key rising and setting points of the moon over its 18.6 year cycle.
However, it's still there because it's inside a private golf club.
A private golf club set itself up in The heart of Newark Earthworks back at the beginning of the 20th century.
And they make a point and they advertise their golf club that in fact on 11 of the 18 holes you may play golf amongst mysterious ancient Native American earthworks.
Unbelievable.
Well, the fact is, although I do find that annoying, the fact is that that site would not be there at all if it hadn't been turned into a golf course.
It's the commercial interest that's kept that site alive.
There's movement now for the Ohio History Connection, which also runs Serpent Mound.
To take over the Newark Earthworks.
And I hope that will happen because it should be, first of all, preserved.
And thank you to the Private Country Club for preserving it thus far.
But it should be preserved for the whole public, not just for those who can pay to get into a Private Country Club.
This is a global legacy, not a private legacy.
Absolutely.
One of the kind of short asides that you make in the book is how it almost seems like people are chosen or people are elected to protect a particular ancient site.
I find that as I go around the world.
Klaus Schmidt.
Very much in the case of Klaus Schmidt at Gobekli Tepe, who was a brilliant researcher and very open minded as to what Gobekli Tepe meant, and wholly responsible for the revelation of Gobekli Tepe, for the excavation, for bringing it forth before the public.
Unfortunately, he died in 2014.
And the new regime who've taken over at Gobekli Tepe are very different people who do not, in my view, respect the sanctity of the site or its importance.
And, you know, there are many others.
Ross Hamilton at Serpent Mound has basically volunteered his life to protecting and interpreting and drawing attention to that incredibly significant site.
John Anthony West and Ancient Egypt, you know, these individuals become self appointed guardians for a past that for a long time it seems that nobody cares about.
But thank goodness there are some who do care.
Do you call them Hierophanes?
Is that the word?
Hierophants.
I think that's just another word for a kind of priest.
Yes, right, exactly.
It's kind of a fascinating way to look at it.
I also like the idea that nature is instructing people where to put the sacred sites.
Yeah.
That's a reverse.
Well, it is, because the ancients knew that we are part of nature and that we resonate with nature and we need to listen to nature.
And nature cannot be separated from the cosmos.
This bubble of a planet is floating in a giant ocean of the cosmos.
Everything is connected.
We're connected to the most distant parts of the cosmos, parts that we cannot even imagine or see.
Nevertheless, we are connected to them.
We're part of this.
This connectedness.
That comes through as the message of ancient civilizations, whereas what comes through in our civilization is disconnectedness.
We're disconnected from the earth.
We don't see the earth as a sacred realm.
We see the earth as a material commodity to be mined and exploited and used without any sense of the sacred, without any sense that this is a goddess who is willingly giving us of her gifts to allow us to flourish and develop upon her, but who expects us to give back in certain ways.
Our society regards itself with such pride and arrogance as just cut off from that.
We cut ourselves off from the sky.
Live in a city, you never see the stars.
And this failure to respect the earth is evident in the horrific story of pollution around the world, in the elaboration of nuclear weapons.
I mean, what an insane and incredibly stupid thing to do to invent nuclear weapons in the first place, but then having done so to allow them to proliferate around the world.
Only a society that's really lost contact with its sanity would do that.
These are incredibly dangerous, poisonous, wicked, evil things.
There is no justification for having them whatsoever.
They do not defend us, they put us in great danger.
How can this not be obvious to anybody?
I don't know, but it's because we live in a disconnected society disconnected from the universe, disconnected from nature, disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from our own consciousness.
Disconnected from our own sovereignty over our own health.
Absolutely.
When you think about the nuclear thing, it seemed like three decades ago they were closer to solving it, and now they want to reinstall the whole arms race all over again.
I despair.
I despair.
If we're a rational and a sane society, we would make it a high priority to get rid of these things and to figure out other ways to get on with fellow human beings that don't involve hanging over the head.
Their heads, the threat of total annihilation.
You know, that's not a great way to make friends with people.
If you're not friends with us, we're going to annihilate you.
No.
The human race, we need to mature beyond that and come on to a next level where we recognize that we are, in fact, all members of one family, that we all have the same hopes and dreams, that we all have the same capacity for love, that there are no differences between human beings that are far less important than the similarities, and we should focus on the similarities.
That we all share as the whole human race.
And if we did that, how could we possibly conceive of murdering millions of fellow human beings with nuclear weapons?
How could we even think of doing that?
Isn't it obvious that when we invest so much in that, we are in fact insane as a society?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's remarkable.
You know, one quick thing about the book is so scientific and so well researched in so many ways.
And I think that you present the case and you back up the facts so well.
And I know that you don't lend yourself to woo woo in the book, as you say.
But I do want to make this point, which is it seems to me that some of those synchronicities we were talking about with people and sites have happened to you also, including Gobekli Tepe, which you got a strange invitation to be there with Schmidt just before he died.
Poems About Ancient Discoveries00:07:39
Just before he died, yeah.
Well, I've certainly played a part in spreading the word about a number of these sites, and I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to do so.
I feel very.
Privileged to have had the opportunity to do so.
And if I've had the opportunity to do so, it's entirely because of my readers.
That's how I get this work done.
I don't rely on funding from any external sources.
I don't raise money on the internet, but research trips cost money, and it's people who read my books that make it possible for me to do that.
So, gratitude.
Unbelievable.
Fantastic.
The idea that when you were in your teens, you had this experience where you were electrocuted.
Yeah.
I had my near death experience.
Yes.
Do you think that has given you some insight that maybe an ordinary researcher wouldn't have had because they didn't?
I mean, can you describe the experience?
I made little of it at the time.
Yes, I can describe the experience.
I had a party.
I was a teenager, I was 18, and my parents had gone away for the weekend.
And we lived in a little semi detached house, you know, on a very.
Sort of quiet street, but I had.
I threw a party, an all night party with 300 people at it.
And it was wild.
The neighbors were furiously angry, and the house was trashed.
And then the next day I was left alone.
Pretty much everybody went.
And finally, by the early evening, my parents were due back late at night.
By the early evening, I was alone in the house and cleaning up the last of the mess and in the kitchen, washing up with bare feet.
I'd already spilt water on the floor from the sink, and I had bare feet and wet hands.
And then I got this obsessional urge to check that the back of the refrigerator was plugged in, which I'd done many times before because I am slightly obsessional.
And I didn't look, I just put my hand to where the plug was.
And what had happened was during the night, the back of the plug had got knocked off.
And I put my wet hand, standing in wet feet, in a pool of water on the live terminals and suffered a massive electric shock and definitely left my body.
I had a distinct experience of being up there around the light and looking down.
On myself, and I just thought it was really interesting.
I just thought this is really interesting.
And then I was back in my body, and I didn't have all the other aspects of a near death experience at all.
It was just that feeling of leaving my body, an out of body experience that I had.
And I guess that what it did was it helped me in the long term to get to grips with the realization that I really came to much later in life, which is that we are not our bodies.
I was open to that realization because I'd had that experience as a teenager.
Fantastic.
I wrote a poem about it at the time.
I used to write poems in those days.
And I found the poem recently.
And what I remembered was the poem didn't have a firm date on it, it just said May of the year 1968.
I need to check my notes.
And I was able, because I knew it was a full moon that night, I went for a walk with my dog afterwards and saw the full moon.
I remembered that it had been the full moon.
So I was then able to search for the date of the full moon in May.
1968, and I believe it was the 12th of May.
Again, I'd have to double check.
Wow.
I found the actual date that it.
You were able to track it back?
Track it back to when it happened, and I was 18, coming on 19 years old at the time.
Anyway, it was at least an interesting experience.
No question.
Well, the mystery schools and that whole kind of tradition would say you astral traveled right there.
Yeah, I had some.
And I'm firmly of the view that we are not our bodies, and that we're here to learn and to grow and to develop, and that to the extent that our society nourishes us, In that learning and growth and development process, it's a good thing.
And to the extent that it diminishes us and shuts us down and prevents us from learning and growing and developing, it's a bad thing.
And we should change the bad things and focus on the good things.
Fantastic.
I just want to ask you briefly, Graham, John Anthony West, a colleague of yours, close friend, passed away fairly recently last year.
2018, yeah.
Yeah.
And you spent, you had actually a remarkable Interview together with him, his last interview.
Can you tell us anything about that connection that you guys had?
It was quite remarkable and inspired a lot of people.
Well, I first met John in 1993 in Egypt.
I had become aware of his fantastic guidebook to Egypt, Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt by John Anthony West.
If anybody wants a real guidebook to Egypt, that's the one to go for.
And I was using it as my guidebook when I was doing some research travels in Egypt in 1993.
When I discovered that John was in Luxor and leading a tour.
So I went to see him and I had my first meeting with him.
And after that, we became very close friends and colleagues over a very, very long period of time and had many, I would regard him as a comrade in arms, many engagements with the forces of archaeology.
And the friendship grew and developed.
And finally, I proposed to John in 2016 that we do an on stage interview.
Together.
I was doing an event in New York anyway, and I said, Why not join me?
And before I do my event, let me interview you and try to bring out some of your wisdom and knowledge for the public.
And I'm very glad I did that because a month later he was diagnosed with cancer and a few months later he was dead.
Remarkable, remarkable.
Incredible legacy of work that he left.
And it's so interesting with the two of you because you're so different in a way, just stylistically.
And he was sort of like the gruff Indiana Jones guy, and you had all the facts and you had all the research.
Oh, John had all the facts too.
Yes.
You could never defeat John on the facts.
I've yet to meet an archaeologist who could even stand toe to toe with him in an argument.
He's a brilliant debater.
Yeah, yeah.
And his fundamental look at Egypt was on that same thing, which is that it was a legacy culture.
Very much.
Not a legacy, not a development, but a legacy.
That's John's words.
That this is how the mystery of the perfection that you find at the beginning of the ancient Egyptian story can be explained.
And why it actually goes downhill after that.
I mean, the pyramids of the fifth and the sixth dynasties are shambolic by comparison with the fourth dynasty pyramids.
And the best explanation for that, in John's words, is that ancient Egypt was not a development, it was a legacy.
Incredible.
Wow.
Everyone, it's great to have you here.
The book is America Before the Key to Earth's Lost Civilization.
Graham, a remarkable work and three decades or more of truly remarkable insights.
We really thank you and thank you so much for being here.