April 22, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:45:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Here we go. | ||
| And boom, we're live. | ||
| Graham, great to see you again. | ||
| Nice to be back with you, Joe. | ||
| And we were just talking about your new book, America Before, that there's two versions of it. | ||
| There's one version, and then there's a newer version that's a Barnes& Noble version that's specific to Barnes& Noble that has an extra whole chapter in it. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Yeah, and so they can get that at Barnes& Noble. | ||
| I'm just trying to keep bookstores alive, man. | ||
| They're on the way out. | ||
| I think it's really important, and that's one of the reasons that I did this, because I had finished the book, and then Barnes& Noble came to me through my publishers and said they would like to do a special edition of the book, but in order to do that, I needed to write them some extra material. | ||
| And I had a lot of material that I hadn't put in the book, and I thought, well, this is an opportunity to put that out there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Beautiful. | |
| So if people want that, it's a little bit different, and there's a small gold square. | ||
| Well, okay, so first of all, my website, grahamhancock.com, has a page about America Before, and the link to the Barnes& Noble edition is there, as well as the link to the Standard Edition, which is on Amazon and iTunes and all kinds of other places. | ||
| So grahamhancock.com and the America Before page, the link To the Barnes& Noble edition is right there. | ||
| Alright, there it is. | ||
| So, how is this? | ||
| Before we even get into the book, what is it? | ||
| Go to Talks and Events. | ||
| Okay, we're on the Graham Hancock website. | ||
| No, go to books. | ||
| Go to books. | ||
| Go to America before. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Go to United States. | ||
| You can see Amazon, Barnes, and there's Barnes& Noble. | ||
| Special edition. | ||
| Special edition. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And then the e-book as well. | ||
| The e-book is available. | ||
| The audio book, which I read myself, is available there. | ||
| Then if you scroll down, oops, that shouldn't be there. | ||
| Damn pop-ups. | ||
| Damn pop-ups. | ||
| Sons of bitches. | ||
| I am so happy you read it yourself. | ||
| I get angry when someone else reads someone who I'm like, come on, he can talk. | ||
| Yeah, I enjoy reading my books myself. | ||
| And what I've learned from feedback I get from audiences at presentations is people like me doing that. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| It's just weird when someone else is talking in your voice. | ||
| Like, hey man, I know you're not Graham. | ||
| You know that I write fiction as well as non-fiction. | ||
| And the one thing I can't read is my fiction. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Well, yeah, because fiction requires accents. | ||
| You really need an actor to read a fiction book who can get into the different characters. | ||
| But for a non-fiction book like America Before, it's very straightforward for me just to read it myself. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I'm a tremendous Stephen King fan, but when I read Stephen King's books where he reads them or listen to them when he reads them, they're terrible. | ||
| He's awful at it. | ||
| I don't think a novelist should read their own novels. | ||
| I think that's a job for an actor. | ||
| Oddly enough, I've just been reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series. | ||
| Very near the end of the seventh volume of that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just a giant fan of his, but man, when he reads it, he reads it like he's just reading it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, oof, this is rough. | ||
| It's hard to get behind. | ||
| Anyway, America before. | ||
| So there's- Give us the- On the website, there's details about the book. | ||
| There's a page where there are links to the book. | ||
| And also, the other thing I would like to take this opportunity to mention is I'm in America and Canada. | ||
| For the next seven weeks. | ||
| And I'm going to be doing something like 25 presentations in something like 20 American cities and then three Canadian cities in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. | ||
| And that's all on the talks and events page of my website. | ||
| So if anybody wants to come along and meet this old man in person, I'll be doing those events. | ||
| And are you doing these at theaters? | ||
| And do you allow Q&As? | ||
| Absolutely, I allow Q&As. | ||
| I encourage that. | ||
| I feel as an author that, frankly speaking, I'm nothing without my audience. | ||
| I owe my audience, my readers, big time. | ||
| And what I try to do at events is to give back as much as I can. | ||
| So if people want to take pictures with me, I am absolutely up for that. | ||
| I don't understand why anybody would want to do that, but it's fun. | ||
| It's kind of fun. | ||
| And when people want to come to the desk where I'm signing and ask me personal questions, I'm ready to do that. | ||
| Sometimes on the British book tour, which I just finished, I was behind in the event space for four hours after the event finished. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Signing and taking pictures. | ||
| But it's a joy. | ||
| It's a really opportunity for me to interact with the people who actually make my work matter. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| So what inspired this? | ||
| I know there's always been – well, you – first of all, we should just say for people who don't know, you have been at the front of the line for decades talking about these lost civilizations and From reading your work, | ||
| I mean, I think I first read your work in the 90s, you exposed me to a lot of these, what were at the time, controversial ideas that have now been substantiated by actual evidence, particularly Gobekli Tepe and I mean, all the water erosion stuff on the Sphinx, and I've since had Dr. Robert Schock on the podcast to talk about that as well. | ||
| But all this stuff was, at one point, very controversial, and now far less. | ||
| I mean, whatever... | ||
| Traditional academics and traditional historians that are trying to – I guess it's archaeologists – that were trying to resist, they've let go a lot of that. | ||
| They've had to with things like Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| They've had to because the evidence has overwhelmed them. | ||
| And Gobekli Tepe is an excellent example. | ||
| Prior to the discovery and excavation of Gobekli Tepe, It which is a site in Anatolia in Turkey. | ||
| It was the view, very firm view of archaeologists that there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere on earth. | ||
| And when I say megalithic, I mean literally big stones, stone circles, huge constructions, nothing like that before at the very, very earliest 6000 years ago. | ||
| And they would point to sites in, for example, Malta, a site called Gigantia, which is about 5,800 years old. | ||
| That's the oldest megalithic architecture in the world. | ||
| And they could understand how that was because these were agricultural societies. | ||
| They generated surpluses. | ||
| You could free up people who could become specialists in architecture, in astronomy, in geometry, and they could apply their skills to the construction of these sites. | ||
| But what they never considered possible was that a society that was hunter-gatherers Would have created a gigantic megalithic site and then suddenly Gobekli Tepe is discovered. | ||
| It dates to 11,600 years ago. | ||
| It's more than 5,000 years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world. | ||
| And it is in the center where there had been no previous evidence of agriculture, but the moment Gobekli Tepe appears, agriculture appears as well. | ||
| And this is just something that's really hard for archaeology to explain. | ||
| They've suddenly got 5,000 years of missing Of missing history that they've just never taken into account. | ||
| And what I see them doing is largely avoiding the problem rather than getting to grips with it directly. | ||
| And in fact, there have been a great number of changes in the last 20 years which have worked generally in favor of the arguments that I've proposed. | ||
| Well, I'm so happy for you because I know that for a long time you were out there on your own with a lot of these theories. | ||
| Very much so, and also subjected to the most blistering and deeply unpleasant criticism from the archaeological fraternity and from their friends in the In the media, like how dare this journalist propose that history might be different or that we might have a forgotten chapter in the human story. | ||
| It was regarded almost as offensive that I would put this material out there. | ||
| And archaeologists felt it was their responsibility to show the public that I was full of shit. | ||
| And that was the whole way my work was greeted. | ||
| And to a certain extent still is greeted by archaeologists, but things have changed. | ||
| Central to my work was the notion of a global cataclysm roughly 12,500, 12,800 years ago. | ||
| It made sense to me in 1995 when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, but there was no compelling evidence for a global cataclysm then. | ||
| All the evidence seemed to point to that time and a massive global event. | ||
| And then from 2007 onwards, more than a decade after I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, we get a group of more than 60 people. | ||
| Major scientists who are seriously proposing that the Earth was hit by multiple fragments of a giant comet 12,800 years ago and that this caused a huge rise in sea level and extinctions of megafauna. | ||
| They are not saying that it also wiped out a lost advanced civilization of prehistory. | ||
| I'm saying that. | ||
| But what has changed is that we now have compelling, hard scientific evidence. | ||
| I'm not saying every scientist accepts it. | ||
| It's the nature of science to dispute findings. | ||
| nature of science to dispute findings. | ||
| But we have a group of 60 major figures who have seriously proposed this in all the leading mainstream journals. | ||
| But we have a group of 60 major figures who have seriously proposed this in all the leading mainstream journals. | ||
| And it's changed the balance of power in this argument because one thing that they used to say is, Hancock can't be right because there was no global cataclysm 12,000 or 13,000 years ago. | ||
| And it's changed the balance of power in this argument. | ||
| Because one thing that they used to say is, Hancock can't be right because there was no global cataclysm, you know, 12 or 13,000 years ago. | ||
| Well, now we know there was, and there are various explanations for it. | ||
| So that's moved things along. | ||
| And the other thing that's changed a lot is the attitude of the man in the street to authority. | ||
| That has changed. | ||
| Back in the 90s, authority figures were the gatekeepers. | ||
| They controlled everything. | ||
| If an authority figure in a discipline like archaeology said, Hancock is completely wrong, he's made all this stuff up, that would generally be believed, not by everybody, but by the majority of people. | ||
| Today, to have a mainstream authority figure say that to me is actually an advantage. | ||
| Because people are so distrustful of authority and rightly so because we've been lied to by authority figures in all fields for so long. | ||
| The bullshit has been so enormous that people are finally waking up and we can't trust what authority figures say. | ||
| I think we can thank the internet for that. | ||
| We can thank the internet for that. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen the more recent evidence of a crater that they just discovered, like fairly recently. | ||
| Greenland. | ||
| Yes, enormous, enormous crater. | ||
| It's an enormous crater. | ||
| It's 18 miles wide. | ||
| It had not been discovered before because it's under ice. | ||
| It's under a lot of ice. | ||
| At the end of the Ice Age, Greenland was one area which never lost its ice cover completely, whereas North America... | ||
| Everywhere north of Minnesota was covered in ice a mile, sometimes two miles deep. | ||
| Europe the same, northern Europe. | ||
| But Greenland kept its ice whereas the other parts of the world lost their ice at the end of the ice age. | ||
| And what's interesting about Greenland is there's already evidence of comet impact in Greenland, which goes back to papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, that they found what are called impact proxies in Greenland. | ||
| In other words, nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, and evidence of a lot of platinum and iron was found in a layer in the ice dated to 12,800 years ago. | ||
| But the next development, and you're absolutely right, and this was just a few months ago, was the discovery of this humongous crater in Greenland and evidence that it was caused by an iron impactor of some kind. | ||
| Now, dating of it, I would be irresponsible to say that that crater definitely dates to 12,800 years ago because the work has not been done to prove that yet. | ||
| But what I can say and what the specialists who have explored and excavated the crater are saying is that it's recent. | ||
| They can say for sure that it happened during the last ice age. | ||
| Under it, under the crater, is nothing but massively disturbed and destroyed and completely wrecked ice from the ice age, from the Pleistocene. | ||
| Above it is smooth, perfect ice from our epoch, which is called the Holocene, which began about 11,600 years ago. | ||
| So all the evidence suggests that this crater dates to that period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. | ||
| But to absolutely confirm that more work needs to be done. | ||
| But it's part of a growing pattern. | ||
| The Younger Dryas – Impact scientists. | ||
| They call this the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. | ||
| And it's because there was a period in the Earth's geological history that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which lasted for 1,200 years from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. | ||
| It's a very mysterious period. | ||
| We see all the megafauna dying off suddenly and rapidly. | ||
| We see rises in sea level. | ||
| We see a huge collapse in global temperature. | ||
| It's a cataclysmic epoch. | ||
| And what is becoming clearer and clearer is that the evidence that a comet was behind it is extremely strong. | ||
| And as more and more evidence comes in, we realize how widespread it was. | ||
| So they found evidence of the impacts as far south as Antarctica now. | ||
| Previously, they were focused very much on North America. | ||
| Now as far south as Antarctica, as far east as Syria. | ||
| This was truly a global event, and it changed the world. | ||
| And I think, and it's my case, that it wiped our memory of a previous episode of human civilization that right at the epicenter of this cataclysm was a civilization that we would regard as advanced, not a simple hunter-gatherer civilization, which was utterly wiped out in this cataclysmic event. which was utterly wiped out in this cataclysmic event. | ||
| And I should say, for anyone who's really fascinated right now, please maybe pause and go listen to the two that you did with Randall Carlson, where it really goes into depth about the impact, the evidence of these impacts, the evidence of the very quick demise of the Ice Age, | ||
| and what may have resulted in all these floods that you read about in the epic of Gilgamesh, that you read about in Noah's Ark, and that all these things are probably tales of stories that people pass down from generation to generation that survive this time. | ||
| Yeah, because we now know that at that time, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, truly global cataclysmic events involving rapid rises in sea level – Did occur and suddenly the worldwide tradition of a global flood stops being just a myth and starts being a memory, an account of real events. | ||
| It's been my privilege to work very closely with Randall Carlson. | ||
| Yeah, he's amazing. | ||
| Randall is absolutely amazing. | ||
| He is a total genius. | ||
| He's also a gentle giant and such a kind, generous, spirited person. | ||
| It's a joy to work with him and every minute spent with him is an education. | ||
| I had the privilege of traveling across the channeled scab lands in Washington state with Randall. | ||
| And seeing things through his eyes really opened my eyes to the scale of this disaster. | ||
| You know, you could look at these giant boulders called glacial erratics, and they just look odd sitting there in the landscape. | ||
| But when you really consider how they got there, that they got there in icebergs the size of oil tankers that were carried on floods that were at least 500 up to 1,000 feet deep that were tearing through the channeled scab lands, literally ripping the landscape apart, then the icebergs would ground on valley sides, the flood then the icebergs would ground on valley sides, the flood waters would recede, the icebergs would be left, they're giant icebergs. | ||
| And as they melted away, they revealed the rocks that they had in chain that were caught up within them, and they're scattered all over the landscape. | ||
| And you look at that and you think anything that was underneath that 12,800 years ago is gone completely. | ||
| There can't be anything left of it at all, utterly, utterly destroyed. | ||
| And I would encourage people that are interested in this to please watch the YouTube videos of it because Randall provides all sorts of video and photographic evidence where you can take a look at the landscape and you get a perspective of how immense this destruction was. | ||
| It's really important to see that because it's easy enough to talk about floods and cataclysms, but actually to see its effect on the landscape directly, it has an emotional impact. | ||
| I felt emotional traveling across the Channel Scablands, realizing that this was the heart of Of an event that changed the world completely. | ||
| And the evidence continues to build. | ||
| In America before, I've not gone over old ground that I went over in Magicians of the Gods that we covered in the various interviews and podcasts in which it's really a good idea that people take a look at. | ||
| But what I have done is added the new information published since 2015 Which further supports the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and the notion that multiple fragments of a giant comet hit the earth and created an absolute global catastrophe. | ||
| So what was the motivation behind creating this book, America Before? | ||
| It's a curious mixture of things. | ||
| I have been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 25 years. | ||
| That was the essence of my book Fingerprints of the Gods that was published in 1995 that there has been A huge forgotten episode in human history. | ||
| I continued to follow that in a series of other books and by the time I got to 2002 when I published a book called Underworld that followed seven years of scuba diving on continental shelves looking for structures that were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. | ||
| I really felt I'd done it. | ||
| I felt I'd walked the walk. | ||
| I'd I put out to the public a massive body of information and I thought my role in this is over and I can breathe a sigh of relief because it's hot in this particular kitchen and I can go do something else and I ended up writing a book about psychedelics. | ||
| I ended up writing supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind about the role of psychedelics in the origins of the human story but then new information started to come out that touched on the lost civilization idea and I couldn't just stand by and ignore that information. | ||
| That's why I published Magicians of the Gods in 2015. And then as I was researching that book, I became aware of something I hadn't realized before, that there's a massive new information from the Americas, specifically from the Americas, which completely rewrites the story of human history, that the Americas have been misrepresented for a very long time. | ||
| By archaeology. | ||
| And archaeologists will be annoyed with me for saying that. | ||
| They have a way of forgetting their own errors, of saying, oh, well, we knew that all along. | ||
| It wasn't the case. | ||
| But the fact of the matter remains that for the best part of 50 years from the 1960s through until about 2010, American archaeology was locked in a dogma that they actually had a name for, which was Clovis first. | ||
| They invented a name for a culture. | ||
| They called them the Clovis culture. | ||
| We don't know what they called themselves. | ||
| They were hunter-gatherers. | ||
| They first appear in the archaeological record 13,400 years ago, and they vanish from the archaeological record 12,600 years ago. | ||
| And for a very long time, it was maintained adamantly that these were the first Americans, that no human being touched the soil of the Americas until 13,400 years ago. | ||
| Just animals, but no human beings present at all. | ||
| And any archaeologist who attempted to dispute that dogma, and I use the word deliberately, there should be no room for dogma in science. | ||
| But any archaeologist who challenged that would face severe problems with his or her career. | ||
| They would be mocked and humiliated at conferences, like an archaeologist called Jacques Sankt-Mars from Canada who excavated in the Yukon. | ||
| Humiliated at conferences, insulted, accused of making stuff up. | ||
| Their research funding would be withdrawn. | ||
| Basically, to challenge Clovis first was the end of your archaeological career. | ||
| So naturally, very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis first. | ||
| What was this gentleman in the Yukon? | ||
| He's called Jacques Sankt Mars. | ||
| And interestingly, the Smithsonian, just in 2017, did a big kind of mea culpa, a big admission about this, that everybody had got things wrong, that Jacques Sankt Mars had been ruined by the Clovis first lobby, but he'd been right all along. | ||
| The site he excavated in the Yukon was re-excavated in 2017, and every single thing he said was correct, even though they had just sneered at him. | ||
| And what year was he? | ||
| He was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s. | ||
| Is he still alive? | ||
| He's still alive. | ||
| He's still alive, yeah. | ||
| Is he bitter? | ||
| Well, I think he's vindicated, you know, and it's kind of nice to be vindicated. | ||
| There's almost a place in folklore for the individual who is scorned and humiliated by others, but who turns out to be right, and he was right. | ||
| But my point about this is that What it meant was, since it was the dogma that Clovis was first, that the oldest dates were 13,400 years ago, there seemed to be no logic to archaeologists in digging deeper. | ||
| You know how it is with archaeology, that the upper levels are the youngest, and the deeper you go, the older it gets. | ||
| That's why we say upper Paleolithic for the late Ice Age and lower Paleolithic for the late Stone Age and lower for the older Stone Age. | ||
| And the feeling was, no need to dig below the Clovis Lair, because we already know that there were no human beings there before that. | ||
| And then a few archaeologists, I've mentioned Jack Sank-Mars, but another is Al Goodyear from the University of South Carolina, who excavated a site called Topper in South Carolina. | ||
| Now, Topper is an incredibly rich Clovis site. | ||
| It's full of their tools, their points. | ||
| They made these special flint points that were used as arrowheads and spears. | ||
| A great Clovis site. | ||
| He finished excavating the Clovis level and then he did something that was supposed not to be done. | ||
| He decided to dig deeper and he carried on digging down and there was a layer of about a meter and a half of barren soil and then beneath that more human artifacts and they finally date those back to more than 50,000 years ago. | ||
| And then in 2017, published in Nature by Tom Demare, who's the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and a bunch of other very high-level paleontologists, published in Nature magazine, evidence for human presence in North America 130,000 years ago. | ||
| Now this has really put the cat amongst the pigeons. | ||
| Now if humans were present in North America 130,000 years ago, and archaeologists have been telling us for 50 years that they were only present from 13,000 years ago, that's 10 times as long that we've had humans in North America capable of doing stuff, and the archaeological dogma has prevented any search for what they were doing until very recently. | ||
| What was the evidence from 130,000 years ago? | ||
| Let me be clear about this because this is something that is often misrepresented in my views. | ||
| It is not the evidence for an advanced civilization that we find 130,000 years ago in America. | ||
| The evidence that we find is evidence for human presence. | ||
| And what they were doing was very much Stone Age stuff. | ||
| It's a mastodon. | ||
| It's a mastodon skeleton that was excavated. | ||
| It was actually found by accident during road construction near San Diego. | ||
| And an archaeologist was attached to the road construction crew and immediately stopped construction and they investigated it thoroughly. | ||
| And what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it that they decided not to publish at the time. | ||
| Because what they found was evidence that those mastodon bones had been cracked open by human beings using tools and that the marrow had been extracted. | ||
| That one tusk had been left standing upright in the ground and another had been left beside it. | ||
| That a femur of the animal had been taken away completely from the site. | ||
| And there was assemblages of instruments that were used to smash and break the bones. | ||
| And the conclusion of the team was that only one kind of creature could have done that work using tools on a mastodon, and that's human beings. | ||
| That's classic, classic human behavior. | ||
| So this sets the goalposts in a totally different place. | ||
| Suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years. | ||
| We already know that a dogmatic approach of archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago. | ||
| And what it does is it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing 100,000 plus years. | ||
| We need to be looking at it hard. | ||
| Of course, the immediate reaction has not been to go looking for stuff in the other 100,000 years. | ||
| Most archaeologists have responded by saying, this is impossible. | ||
| It can't be so. | ||
| But that's precisely what they said to Jacques Sankt Mars, who said that humans were in bluefish caves in the Yukon 25,000 years ago. | ||
| And it's precisely what they said to Al Goodyear, who said humans had been at Topper 50,000 years ago. | ||
| And they were both right. | ||
| And I believe... | ||
| Tom Demare and his team, you don't get a big article published in Nature unless it's already pretty solidly based and pretty much peer reviews. | ||
| It has produced a reaction. | ||
| I would be wrong to say that it's universally accepted. | ||
| It's very much challenged, but it's intriguing. | ||
| What is the challenge? | ||
| The challenge fundamentally comes from we archaeologists know that there were no human beings in the Americas that far back. | ||
| To put it in perspective, it's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Europe. | ||
| It's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Australia. | ||
| And this is just evidence of the first human beings. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| We have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence of human beings. | ||
| Extremely difficult to find. | ||
| You know, sometimes we imagine that archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal material. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| I mean, the whole – this is one of the ironies. | ||
| The whole Clovis first dogma, you would think that they had masses of material to work with. | ||
| They did have the tools, but in terms of skeletal remains, just one. | ||
| Just one single skeletal remain. | ||
| Now – One of the things that Michael Shermer had sent me was this dispute that perhaps the bones had been cracked open by the excavation material, the excavation machines. | ||
| I saw Michael's email last night, and I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to engage with this subject, and that's his job. | ||
| He's a professional skeptic, and it's his role to do so. | ||
| What he misses out, it's true that a new paper has been published which raises questions over what's called the Cerruti Mastodon site, which is the site that Tom Demaret at San Diego Natural History Museum excavated. | ||
| And what's interesting, since Michael took the trouble to write the questions, can I just... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Can I just... | ||
| I want to read you something that I responded to on this, which is that basically this paper was in no way a refutation of the original paper in Nature. | ||
| As a matter of fact, The gentleman who wrote that paper never even looked at the archaeological remains that are now in the San Diego Natural History Museum. | ||
| What he based it on is reference, I'm quoting from the abstract of the paper itself, reference to a freeway right-of-way map and construction plans, contemporary road-building practices, and worksite photographs available on the internet. | ||
| In other words, the site was not visited. | ||
| They simply looked at secondary references. | ||
| They did not look at the archaeological material. | ||
| And they ignored the entire argument of Tom Demaret and his colleagues who had already addressed that issue. | ||
| They didn't look at the bones? | ||
| They did not look at the bones. | ||
| When you break a fresh bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone. | ||
| And Tom Demaret and his team specifically ruled out Road-making machinery as responsible for this breaking pattern because they actually carried out experiments on modern elephants, deceased elephants, and they broke their bones. | ||
| And the kind of fracture that you get in a fresh green bone is completely different from the kind of fracture you get in a fossilized bone. | ||
| So, unfortunately, this paper pays no attention to that. | ||
| It just looks at road plans and says there was road work there. | ||
| It must have been done by road work. | ||
| I think it's very sloppy, very weak, and it's certainly not the answer. | ||
| We can expect ongoing debate, and that is healthy, but this is not a strong case at all. | ||
| So this points to the first evidence that we found. | ||
| And is there any effort underway to try to uncover more evidence from a similar time period? | ||
| Well, I'm going to cite Tom Demare, the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. | ||
| That's what he would like to see. | ||
| He makes the point to me. | ||
| I interview him. | ||
| I spent a day with him at the Natural History Museum. | ||
| He was very generous with his time. | ||
| I did an extended interview, and I quote from it in America today. | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| That would be a proper scientific response. | ||
| Here is a thorough body of work put forward by a very senior group of scientists who hesitated before they published it. | ||
| They had the information back in the 1990s, but it wasn't until refined dating techniques later than in the 21st century that they finally were sure what they had and that they published it in Nature in 2017. It's an important study. | ||
| And I think what's going to happen is that we're going to find much more evidence of a very ancient human presence in the Americas. | ||
| And that's what Tom Demeray thinks as well. | ||
| And as he points out, if we don't look... | ||
| Then we're never going to find. | ||
| If we allow dogma to stop us looking and saying, oh, it's impossible that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago, so we won't bother to look. | ||
| What a failure of science that is. | ||
| And to spend all the time instead trying to get rid of the evidence that doesn't fit the current paradigm. | ||
| But it's so fascinating that just this fortuitous discovery during a construction site could change the way people perceive things. | ||
| You've got to wonder how much of that stuff is – I mean, how deep did they have to go to find these mastodon bones? | ||
| Well, so this is a road cut that's being made. | ||
| So those would be pretty deep down, 10, 15 feet down. | ||
| The grader is going through and flattening them. | ||
| It varies from place to place depending on soil deposition, the stratification of the soil. | ||
| But the key point is that what you need to do is go deeper than 13,400 years ago. | ||
| And you need to do so with dedication and vigor and with some kind of funding. | ||
| And at the moment, archaeology doesn't see the point of that. | ||
| If the paper in Nature by Tom Desmarais was alone, if there were nothing else than that, I wouldn't place so much trust in it. | ||
| But I've spent a lot of time during the researching of this book with archaeologists who did dig deeper. | ||
| And what those archaeologists all confirm is that there have been human beings in the Americas for tens of thousands of years. | ||
| And it's not surprising that that can be pushed back to 130,000 years ago. | ||
| Part of the argument about the peopling of the Americas has to do with a place that we now call the Bering Straits between Alaska and Siberia, which during the Ice Age were at times a land bridge. | ||
| They were exposed because of lowered sea levels. | ||
| But migrants who crossed that land bridge from Siberia on many occasions over periods of tens of thousands of years would find themselves confronted then by the North American ice cap, which oddly wasn't at the tip of Alaska but began further in. | ||
| So there was living space in a bit of Alaska, but you couldn't get through the ice mountains, these literally ice mountains, two miles deep, covering the whole of North America and preventing access to the unglaciated parts of America. | ||
| What happened around 13,400 years ago, there had been a period of global warming and the ice sheets began to melt and a corridor opened up between what's called the Cordilleran ice sheet and the Laurentide ice sheet, the two major ice keeps in North America. | ||
| And it's thought that the migration came through that corridor. | ||
| Well, the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago. | ||
| There was an episode of global warming, an ice-free corridor opened up, and the same opportunity to enter the Americas was there at that period than it was at the later period. | ||
| And Tom Demare's point and mine is that we have to pay much more attention to that earlier period. | ||
| And that's really why I've gone ahead and written this book is to try to put before a broad general audience, hopefully in language that makes sense, an assembly of all the latest information that casts doubt on the story we've been told. | ||
| a broad general audience, hopefully in language that makes sense, an assembly of all the latest information that casts doubt on the story we've been told. | ||
| Because my goodness, if archaeology is wrong about the story of the peopling of the Americas, if it's radically wrong, as it now appears to be, then our whole understanding of human history has to change. | ||
| Because my goodness, if archaeology is wrong about the story of the peopling of the Americas, if it's radically wrong as it now appears to be, then our whole understanding of human history has to change. | ||
| It's not just the history of the Americas. | ||
| It's not just the history of the Americas. | ||
| It's the history of the entire world. | ||
| It has been an absolute article of faith amongst archaeologists that civilization began in the old world. | ||
| And indeed, I have a book in my library called History Begins at Sumer. | ||
| And it's by Samuel Noah Kramer, a very renowned archaeologist. | ||
| And it's a good book, actually. | ||
| But the argument is that this is where civilization began in the culture that we call the Sumerians in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. | ||
| And that it began about 6,000 years ago. | ||
| And that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world. | ||
| It has nothing to do with the new world at all because the new world was populated so late. | ||
| This has been the argument. | ||
| And this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change. | ||
| That the Americas, this enormous land mass, resource rich, bountiful in every way, south of Minnesota, south of the ice cap, Vast land areas that are bountiful get into Central America, South America, the Amazon, just huge areas of land that offered great potential for human occupation. | ||
| Dogma has said there were no humans there. | ||
| Now the first bits of evidence are coming out that says there were humans there. | ||
| And if that's the case, then we must consider the possibility that the story of civilization might have begun in the Americas, not in the old world at all. | ||
| It might be a new world invention, not an old world invention. | ||
| Some of the more fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently about these channels and pathways that they've found in the Amazon that could not have been created any other way but by humans creating irrigation, humans creating, it appears like grids, like a city grid. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| The Amazon is a colossal mystery and it's one of the subjects that I explore in depth in America before. | ||
| First of all, to give some basic figures, the Amazon Basin is huge. | ||
| The Amazon Basin is 7 million square kilometers in area. | ||
| And within it, 5.5 million square kilometers remains almost entirely unstudied by archaeologists. | ||
| And that's the 5.5 million square kilometers that is still covered by dense rainforest. | ||
| And to put that into perspective, 5.5 million square kilometers is the size of the entire Indian subcontinent. | ||
| So it's like saying, we've done world archaeology, but we've just ignored India. | ||
| We've done world archaeology, but we've just ignored the Amazon. | ||
| It's the same argument. | ||
| Five and a half million square kilometers. | ||
| The view was, again, there was a dogma. | ||
| There was a preconception. | ||
| Human beings couldn't have flourished in the Amazon. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| It's not a resource-rich area. | ||
| The soils are poor. | ||
| It's a difficult area, challenging to get to very far from the Bering Straits. | ||
| So the view was that humans hadn't entered the Amazon until about a thousand years ago. | ||
| And then gradually, little by little, that view has begun to change. | ||
| And it's begun to change because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon, because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soya bean farms and cattle ranches. | ||
| And in that cutting down process has emerged things that shouldn't be there at all. | ||
| For example, evidence that large cities flourished in the Amazon, enormous cities which were larger than the – there was a Spanish explorer who went down the Amazon river system in 1541 to 1542. | ||
| He was the first European to cross the entire length of South America from west to east along the Amazon – He reported seeing incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving culture. | ||
| And 100 years later, when other Europeans got into the Amazon, they couldn't find these cities. | ||
| So they said, oh, Francisco Oriana, that was his name, made it all up. | ||
| It was just a fantasy. | ||
| And then in the last decade, as the clearances of the Amazon have proceeded, we've begun to see the traces of those cities. | ||
| What happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon. | ||
| Smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity to it. | ||
| There was a massive die off. | ||
| The cities were deserted. | ||
| Within 50 years, they were completely overgrown by the jungle and that's why they were not seen by the explorers who came in 100 years later. | ||
| But now the jungle is being cleared, those cities are emerging. | ||
| And we can say that a city like London, which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of that size all over the Amazon. | ||
| Huge numbers of them. | ||
| And a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yes, 20 million. | ||
| This is the latest evidence from the Amazon. | ||
| And then you ask yourself, how did they do that? | ||
| How did they feed 20 million people in the Amazon? | ||
| Because it's a fact. | ||
| Rainforest soils are poor. | ||
| It's one of the reasons these soya bean farms are a really stupid idea, because once you clear the rainforest, the land is largely unfertile and you can't grow stuff on it for very long. | ||
| So how did they feed all these people? | ||
| The answer was, they invented a soil. | ||
| And that soil has a name. | ||
| It's called terra prater. | ||
| Archaeologists refer to it as Amazonian dark earths or Amazonian black earth. | ||
| It's a man-made soil. | ||
| It's thousands of years old. | ||
| It's full of microbes that are not found in adjoining soil. | ||
| It's based around biochar. | ||
| And you can take a handful of 8,000-year-old terra praetor, and you can add it to barren soil, and that soil will instantly become fertile. | ||
| It's highly sought after in the Amazon, and it explains how they fed these people. | ||
| There was science in the Amazon. | ||
| How did they create this? | ||
| Well, this is something that's not understood. | ||
| It's still not understood by soil experts to this day as to how that was done, but it's one of many intriguing evidences, pieces of evidence of much higher... | ||
| It's a development in the Amazon that it has been given credit for and of a kind of science in the Amazon. | ||
| Jamie's got an image of it up there. | ||
| So this is it? | ||
| This is Terra Prater. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So was that done by burns? | ||
| Did they use controlled burns? | ||
| They did. | ||
| One way that it was achieved was to do wet burning of middens. | ||
| They would be burned and smolder. | ||
| They wouldn't burn fiercely, which just produces charcoal. | ||
| They would burn and smolder. | ||
| And that, what is called biochar, would result. | ||
| And that's part of the fertility of the soil. | ||
| But the mystery is the microbial content of this soil, which is completely different from the microbes in neighboring soils. | ||
| And that remains unexplained. | ||
| So what are the theories? | ||
| Composting? | ||
| Some sort of advanced composting? | ||
| Some sort of advanced composting. | ||
| But again, what has not been explained is the microbial content of these soils. | ||
| There, first of all, is an issue of how, two things, how large populations get fed in the Amazon and evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could support large populations with the invention of terra preta. | ||
| Secondly, new evidence, previously not recognized, the Amazon is basically a garden. | ||
| The Amazon is a man-made rainforest. | ||
| There are certain trees like Brazil nut trees or the ice cream bean tree, which are food crops, which are very, very valuable, and they dominate the tree regime in the Amazon. | ||
| They're what's referred to as hyper-dominant species. | ||
| In other words, people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees, which they then cultivated and grew. | ||
| So the whole thing is not simply a wild, pristine rainforest. | ||
| It's a very ancient man-made environment. | ||
| And emerging from that man-made environment, as well as evidence of large cities, large populations and this mysterious dark earth, are huge geometrical structures. | ||
| And again, I go into this at length in America before because I love this mystery. | ||
| We have in the UK structures that are called henges. | ||
| I live in the city of Bath and about 30 miles away there's a beautiful site called Avebury and another more famous site called Stonehenge. | ||
| And what a henge is... | ||
| Is a ditch, which has been dug deep, and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch. | ||
| When people first saw these structures, they wondered if they'd been built for defense. | ||
| But then it became obvious they hadn't been built for defense, because if you want to create a moat, You put it outside your embankment, not inside your embankment. | ||
| So a henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it. | ||
| It can be circular, it can be square, and in the UK and other parts of Europe it often contains stone circles, megalithic stone circles as well, but the henge itself is entirely an earthwork. | ||
| What we find in the Amazon are thousands of henges that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared area of the jungle and others that have been identified for the first time with LIDAR. LIDAR technology is being employed in the Amazon. | ||
| It's non-destructive. | ||
| You can see what's under the trees. | ||
| What is LIDAR? Light imaging and detective radar. | ||
| They bounce laser beams down into the jungle. | ||
| There's a whole pattern of them. | ||
| You need helicopters, but it doesn't damage the rainforest. | ||
| And you can strip away and see what's there. | ||
| If this isn't too much of a diversion, let me give you the example of Guatemala. | ||
| Guatemala is a small country. | ||
| If I remember correctly, it's not much more than 100,000 square kilometers in size. | ||
| It is filled with intriguing Mayan ruins. | ||
| Everybody has heard of Tikal. | ||
| What archaeologists didn't know was that literally within walking distance of Tikal, surrounding that whole area were more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified. | ||
| And these have all been identified by LIDAR in a country that's just 100,000 kilometers in area. | ||
| So you have to ask yourself, in that five and a half million square kilometers of the Amazon, if LIDAR technology could be applied comprehensively, what would we find beneath there? | ||
| And the evidence already is extremely tempting and extremely tantalizing. | ||
| And I'm intrigued by these huge geometrical figures which involve primarily circles and squares. | ||
| And they are classic hinges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments. | ||
| They're extremely geometrical. | ||
| For example, you can find an octagon surrounding a square. | ||
| At a place called Jacosa in the Amazon, you can find a square perfectly enclosing a circle. | ||
| Now, that is an exercise called squaring the circle that our academics have given to the Greeks. | ||
| They said the Greeks were the first people who performed that exercise. | ||
| But now we find in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks. | ||
| What are the dates? | ||
| The earliest dates that have been found in these sites now are about 3,500 years old. | ||
| About 3,500 years old. | ||
| But the evidence is that the sites have been constantly remade. | ||
| And what intrigues me is what remains in that 5.5 million square kilometers that has not been investigated yet. | ||
| We are just, I think, looking at the edges of a mystery. | ||
| The archaeologists involved, who are mainly from Finland and also from Brazil, feel the same. | ||
| Their estimate is that there are thousands of these structures remaining in the jungle, and they're open as to how old they may ultimately prove to be. | ||
| The investigation needs to be done, but what's fascinating about them Is this very powerful geometry and astronomy. | ||
| So a number of the sites are perfectly aligned to true north, true south, true east, and true west. | ||
| I'm not talking about magnetic north. | ||
| I'm talking about true astronomical north. | ||
| To do that, there's only one way to do it, and that's with astronomy. | ||
| So that tells us that astronomers were at work in the Amazon. | ||
| The geometry is very complex and very precise. | ||
| That tells us that people with geometrical skills were at work in the Amazon. | ||
| And thirdly, the scale of the sites of hundreds of meters, gigantic earthworks on the scale of hundreds of meters, tells us that this was a highly organized project that was undertaken on a very large scale by very large numbers of people. | ||
| It's a wonderful mystery, and it deserves much further attention. | ||
| And yeah, that's Jack O'Saar, exactly, the squares. | ||
| Squaring the circle. | ||
| So you can see the outside embankment and then inside it is the square ditch. | ||
| And then there's another embankment inside that and a circle inside that. | ||
| It's crazy that they made a road right through that. | ||
| What assholes. | ||
| Well, a modern road, yeah, you know, because there's no respect for the ancient world, unfortunately. | ||
| And there's another one. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Wow, that's incredible. | ||
| So there are thousands of these things. | ||
| The stuff that they found in the Amazon, what imaging technology were they using to find all this? | ||
| Initially, it was entirely found because areas of the rainforest had been cleared. | ||
| Economic interest said, we want to make a cattle ranch here, or we want to make a soya bean farm here. | ||
| So we're just going to... | ||
| Clear the rainforest. | ||
| In the process of clearing the rainforest, they start discovering these earthworks that had previously been completely overgrown by the jungle. | ||
| Then the next step was to say, what can we do to find out more about this? | ||
| Obviously, they don't want to destroy more jungle. | ||
| And luckily, we have a technology, which is LiDAR, as I mentioned, which uses radar. | ||
| And using LiDAR, they've been able to identify many more of these sites. | ||
| And then to get to the sites without destroying the jungle, And to begin excavations on them and to find that they go back in the cases of the ones that have been explored so far at least 3000 years. | ||
| This is an intriguing development, completely unexplained in our understanding of the Amazon. | ||
| And what it suggests is a heritage of extremely ancient knowledge. | ||
| You don't wake up one morning and create a perfectly geometrical square or circular earthwork that's perfectly aligned to true north, south, east and west on an enormous scale. | ||
| There has to be a background to that. | ||
| There has to be a reason for doing it. | ||
| And the evidence is none of these sites were lived in. | ||
| There's no habitation refuse found in them whatsoever. | ||
| They were – we don't know what they were used for. | ||
| I make the case in America before that they're connected to a system of ideas which is found all around the world, which is to do with death and the afterlife destiny of the soul. | ||
| And I go into the issue of ayahuasca in this book because, first of all, ayahuasca is itself another example of Amazonian science. | ||
| As you and I and many of the listeners and viewers know, the active ingredient of ayahuasca is DMT, dimethyltryptamine. | ||
| But dimethyltryptamine is not normally accessible through the gut. | ||
| We have to smoke it or vape it to get that rocket ship to the other side of reality. | ||
| And the journey lasts, what, 10-12 minutes, not much more than that, sometimes quite a lot less. | ||
| What ayahuasca does is it makes DMT available through the gut. | ||
| The reason it's not available through the gut is because of an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase. | ||
| That switches off DMT on contact. | ||
| The ayahuasca vine, which is one of the two ingredients of the ayahuasca brew, the other ingredient is leaves that contain DMT, The ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which switches off the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT to be accessed orally, which produces a rather different journey from the smoked or vaped DMT trip. | ||
| It's a much longer journey. | ||
| It's four or five hours. | ||
| It allows you to integrate and to interrelate with the strange landscapes in which you find yourself amongst and the entities that you encounter. | ||
| I'm not making any claims about the reality status of those entities, but what I am saying, and it's a fact, is that people who work with DMT and ayahuasca do encounter what they construe to be entities who communicate with them intelligently. | ||
| So somebody in the Amazon, out of 150,000 different species of plants and trees, selected two that are not psychoactive on their own, but when put together, create an extraordinary visionary brew. | ||
| And ayahuasca means the vine of the dead. | ||
| And what it's connected to in South American religious and spiritual thinking is what happens to us when we die. | ||
| And the Tucano, who are an Amazonian people who work regularly with ayahuasca, I mean the Tucano actually will give a teaspoonful of ayahuasca to a newborn infant. | ||
| They feel ayahuasca is so important that there is a hidden realm around us which we are not normally aware of and we need to be aware of it. | ||
| And ayahuasca is an important part of that. | ||
| In their ayahuasca journeys, the Tucano shamans experience visions and they will then come back to an alert, normal problem-solving state of consciousness and they will paint and depict their visions. | ||
| And what's intriguing and I go into it in the book is that quite a number of the Tucano paintings of the other world, of the afterlife realm, of the entrance to the other world are geometrical and they look exactly like the geoglyphs. | ||
| So I'm beginning to wonder whether these geoglyphs were part of a system of spiritual ideas concerning what happens to us after death and what we need to do in this life to ensure a beneficial outcome. | ||
| And oddly enough, that same system of ideas is found in the Mississippi Valley. | ||
| In the Amazon, it involves particularly ayahuasca and the belief that the ayahuasca journey takes you to the afterlife realm and a journey along the Milky Way. | ||
| In the Mississippi Valley, the mound builder sites up and down the Mississippi Valley, particularly Moundville in Alabama, exactly the same system of religious ideas associated with geometrical constructions. | ||
| That on death, the soul, they're very specific, ascends to the constellation of Orion, transits from the constellation of Orion to the Milky Way, makes a journey along the Milky Way, which they call the path of souls, and encounters challenges and ordeals where the soul must account for the life that it has lived. | ||
| Then we go to Egypt, and what do we find? | ||
| The same system of ideas. | ||
| The soul must rise up to the constellation of Orion. | ||
| There's a narrow shaft cut through the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which targets directly the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt. | ||
| Widely accepted as a star shaft or a soul shaft, the soul would rise up through that shaft, get to the constellation of Orion, which stands by the banks of the Milky Way. | ||
| It would then transit to the Milky Way, which the ancient Egyptians called the winding waterway. | ||
| And it would make a journey along the Milky Way where it would be confronted by challenges and ordeals. | ||
| Very similar idea to the Tucano. | ||
| Very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley. | ||
| As far as we know, none of these cultures were in contact with one another. | ||
| Either we're dealing with a huge, unbelievable, extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas, or we're looking at a legacy that was inherited in all of these different places from a remote common ancestor. | ||
| And I believe that that's what we're looking at. | ||
| What do we think the people from the ancient Mississippi Valley, that culture, what do we think they were using if they weren't using ayahuasca? | ||
| Or do we think that's what they were using? | ||
| Well, that's an interesting question, whether visionary substances are the only way to get into altered states of consciousness. | ||
| And I would say they are definitely not. | ||
| Of course, there are visionary substances which are used in Native American vision quests. | ||
| I've had the privilege of peyote ceremony with the Native American church. | ||
| I've never done that. | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| I loved it, actually. | ||
| I thought it was amazing. | ||
| It doesn't overpower you in the way that DMT or ayahuasca does. | ||
| It's much gentler. | ||
| You feel much more integrated and connected with nature. | ||
| Your thought processes are quite clear. | ||
| It felt just like a very beautiful and healing experience. | ||
| And I love the ceremony that I'm inside a teepee with 30 or 40 other people. | ||
| There are specific roles that are assigned to those different individuals. | ||
| One will keep the door, another will be responsible for the fire, which is a work of art in itself. | ||
| Just gazing into that fire and the glowing embers is enough to induce an altered state of consciousness on its own. | ||
| Incredible drumming, which drives your state of consciousness into a kind of peak experience. | ||
| This is a technology for accessing other levels of experience and other levels of reality. | ||
| And it's clear that the Native Americans had A number of advanced technologies in this area. | ||
| The Sundance doesn't use a substance, but it uses austerity. | ||
| It uses pain to drive an altered state of consciousness. | ||
| The objective in every case seems to be let's just for a while get ourselves out of the narrow, rigid frame of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness. | ||
| People need that. | ||
| It's incredibly useful. | ||
| Hunter-gatherers need it just as much as people in cities need it. | ||
| But it's not the only state of consciousness available to human beings. | ||
| And maybe that's one of the big mistakes that we're making in our culture and was not made in shamanistic societies. | ||
| That is a really interesting breakdown, that maybe that is one of the big mistakes we're making in our culture. | ||
| When people point to the problems that we have in this country, one of the problems we have is our inability to connect with each other or to recognize that we're all sharing this space and time together and instead wanting to uphold our own religious or ideological ideas as being the only one way to get going, the only one way to get through. | ||
| And one of the things that I've found These psychedelic experiences, it really makes ideologies seem, if not preposterous, at the very least, insignificant in comparison to human experiences. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The experience of camaraderie and friendship and love. | ||
| You realize, oh, this is what's important. | ||
| This is what it's really about. | ||
| Not enforcing your ideas or pushing them on other people and forcing people to behave the way you behave, but instead, love. | ||
| And think about religious ideas, which cause so much division, so much chaos, so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion in the world today. | ||
| Really what we want to do as human beings, simply to accept a package of ideas that were believed in by our ancestors, to accept them whole, without question, as absolute fact, which we regard as such authoritative fact that in some cases we're willing to be deeply unpleasant to people who hold different views or perhaps even kill them. | ||
| We've had this, you know, this recent event in Sri Lanka, primarily a religiously motivated terrorist event. | ||
| It happens all over the world. | ||
| People feel so convinced that the inherited package of ideas that they had nothing to do with creating and that they have never questioned, they're so convinced that those ideas are right that in extreme cases they're actually prepared to kill other human beings who hold different ideas. | ||
| Are they so insecure in In their own beliefs that they're prepared to go to that level of actually murdering another human being. | ||
| They're so threatened by the other beliefs that other human beings hold. | ||
| So it's an abnegation of our responsibility as human beings. | ||
| We should be questioning things. | ||
| We should not be accepting packages of ideas intact, fully formed, and using them to drive the way we behave towards one another. | ||
| That was part of the human story, but we need to move on from that. | ||
| It's a very dangerous situation in a very complex modern world with Billions of human beings on the planet to have these kind of energies being generated where certain groups of people are saying, we are absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong. | ||
| We are superior. | ||
| You are inferior. | ||
| This is a very, very dangerous path that we're on and it needs to be changed. | ||
| I know this is not a comment that will go down well with many people, but I am strongly opposed to nationalism. | ||
| I don't see any virtue in nationalism. | ||
| It is an accident of birth which nation you were born in. | ||
| It was nothing that you did for your own merit. | ||
| You didn't earn that. | ||
| You were born by accident in a particular nation. | ||
| Why should we automatically feel that other people who were born by accident in that particular nation have something special in common with us and that we together are a group who are much more important than other groups of people? | ||
| I've been privileged to spend my life traveling around the world, living with communities all over the world. | ||
| And one thing that really comes across to me strongly, it should be a cliche, and yet it's not, is that we are all one family, that humans are intimately interconnected all around the world, that you can go to the remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams that we have in industrialized that you can go to the remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the same hopes, the same fears, the | ||
| So our similarities as human beings and what we share in common at the emotional level and the level of love and at the level of heart are far more important than our differences that are defined by the nation or the political group in which we grew up in. | ||
| And when I say I'm against nationalism, I need also to make clear that does not mean... | ||
| And I hope I'm not taken out of context by others who are listening to this. | ||
| That does not mean I'm in favor of world government. | ||
| I detest governments. | ||
| That's another thing we need to grow out of. | ||
| We don't need governments anymore. | ||
| If we have them, they should have a very minimal role in our society. | ||
| I think it's possible for the human race to relate as one family without leaders and governments who are exploiting the worst aspects of our character, the lowest common denominator of our society, Deliberately encouraging fears and hatreds and suspicions. | ||
| What responsible leaders should be doing is encouraging love and unity. | ||
| And their failure to do that, in my view, disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely. | ||
| And that's why I've often said, I would like to see a situation in which no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he or she has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca. | ||
| That would be the condition. | ||
| Don't even bother applying for the job if you haven't done this. | ||
| And we have to be there where you have it. | ||
| And we have to be. | ||
| We want to see that you're drinking every drop. | ||
| And we want an experienced shaman present who's really going to guide you through the journey. | ||
| And I suspect that that would be a transformative experience for many of our political class and that they would start to question why they do what they do, why they exploit fears in order to magnify their own position. | ||
| They'd start to question that and to wonder about a different destiny for humanity. | ||
| But that's a dream. | ||
| I guess it's not going to happen. | ||
| It's very, very, very well said. | ||
| And I couldn't agree more. | ||
| My hope is that what you were saying and what we were discussing earlier about how the internet has sort of eroded our faith in many institutions as being the only or the primary source of knowledge, that I hope that that takes place globally in terms of the way we view government. | ||
| And that we do. | ||
| And that your idea of like, I love what America stands for. | ||
| And what America stands for is kind of a nation that's Where people go to. | ||
| This is one of the more insidious problems with this idea of building walls and keeping people out and making it incredibly difficult to get here. | ||
| The reason why I'm here is because it was pretty easy to get here. | ||
| That's why I'm here. | ||
| That's the essence of America. | ||
| A free and open society. | ||
| Come here and do better. | ||
| That's the whole idea behind it. | ||
| I would hope that this idea of being able to just, if you want to do better, you can. | ||
| I believe it can spread out and, you know, I see many signs of hope in America. | ||
| America has become a big part of my life, not just because I wrote this book, but because I have children who are now living in America. | ||
| I have a son and daughter-in-law who live in LA. I have another son and daughter-in-law who I live in Boston. | ||
| I'm British, but America has become a very central part of my life, and it's a fascinating and amazing country, and it's been my privilege to travel thousands of miles across America, across many, many, many different states, and I love this country. | ||
| It's an amazing place. | ||
| Only in America could we see happening what has happened with cannabis. | ||
| You know, the fact that at a local level, individuals have got together, mobilized petitions, organized votes, and changed the law. | ||
| Changed the law. | ||
| Literally stuck a finger up at central government and said, fuck off. | ||
| This is none of your business. | ||
| What I do with my consciousness in the inner sanctum of my own life is not the business of the state. | ||
| That's a very American feeling. | ||
| It's something that you don't find often in other countries where the state is granted much more I think we're good to go. | ||
| See, the thing about democracies is that in order to get things done in a democracy, you need to persuade people of your point of view. | ||
| So information becomes very important in democracies. | ||
| And information can be abused. | ||
| People can be misled with information. | ||
| They can be told that what they're receiving is the truth, whereas, in fact, it's not the truth. | ||
| And you can end up with a kind of dictatorship that the people have given their assent to on the basis of false information. | ||
| And frankly, I'd rather have a real dictatorship, which is out in the open and clear, rather than one that has been subtly manipulated into position through manipulating the views of the voters. | ||
| And remain enormously encouraged by America. | ||
| It may seem like a trivial issue, but the fact that state by state, cannabis is being legalized, and that is resulting from a grassroots movement, that this enormous change has been made. | ||
| It's ironic, it's strange that at the federal level, even though, what, eight states now totally legal for recreational, Twenty-three, twenty-four states legal for medical use that at the federal level it's still a Schedule I controlled drug. | ||
| This is a huge state of dissonance that exists and America is going to have to put it right. | ||
| What it says to me is that people can change things. | ||
| People can get together at the local level and they can make a better world because there's no doubt that the cannabis laws were vicious and wrong and cruel and evil and ruined people's lives for decades. | ||
| And it's people who've changed that. | ||
| It's not government who's changed that. | ||
| It's the people at the grassroots level. | ||
| America's a country where that can happen. | ||
| And I remain encouraged about the role of the American people while often in despair about the role of the American state. | ||
| Yeah, I'm encouraged as well. | ||
| And, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| Ben and Jerry released something yesterday, which is really on 420, I should say, Which was talking about the drug laws in this country and talking about how many – it's really opening the idea of how unjust these laws were and how many of these laws targeted people of color and how many people who are white people have profited off of this and how many people are still in jail. | ||
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Yes! | |
| For crimes that they committed, you know, air quote crimes, that are no longer crimes. | ||
| That are no longer crimes. | ||
| Yeah, and this is ridiculous. | ||
| These records should be expunged. | ||
| They should be completely expunged. | ||
| I see that California has made some steps in that direction. | ||
| There has been some expunging of records. | ||
| Well, we can only hope that also what opens up next is psilocybin is now going to be on the ballot. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And when that opens up, I mean, you really think marijuana is a gateway drug? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| It is if psilocybin gets in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because psilocybin can legitimately change the world. | ||
| It certainly can. | ||
| It really... | ||
| I mean, I think marijuana can change the world, and I really do think that cannabis is changing people's perceptions and making people more calm and friendly. | ||
| And even what they talk about with paranoia, I welcome that. | ||
| And the reason why I welcome that is I think people are entirely too cocky. | ||
| The life we live is bizarre as you could ever imagine in a book, and we're just accustomed to it because it's our day-to-day existence. | ||
| Take it all for granted. | ||
| Marijuana removes those blinders, and it really makes you understand that this is a strange, strange life. | ||
| And a lot of these pitfalls and problems that we have in our society are due to fear, and they're due to ignorance, and they're due to this lack of connection with each other. | ||
| And cannabis and many of these other psychedelic drugs, they encourage this connection with each other, which is, I think, what we need. | ||
| It's certainly what we need. | ||
| And it's an aberration in human culture that we've created a society that demonized these substances and made them illegal. | ||
| It's a relatively recent thing. | ||
| It's really just the last hundred years. | ||
| It's a tiny part of the human story, and yet we're so arrogant as a society that we can set aside thousands of years of human tradition and experience and wisdom working with the plant medicines. | ||
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We just... | |
| What a huge and stupid mistake that is. | ||
| on cannabis as a quote-unquote gateway drug, it absolutely is in this sense that the legalization of cannabis is going to open the doors, as you say, to the legalization of psychedelics because what's happening is that the population is completely waking up to the fact that they have to the legalization of psychedelics because what's happening is that the population is completely waking up to the fact that they have been bullshitted | ||
| And once that dawns on people, the realization at a direct personal level, here's this herb I love, I have been lied to, systematically misinformed by central government about this herb, that leads to questioning of everything that central government does. | ||
| And so in that sense, it is a gateway to a questioning society. | ||
| The psychedelics are different in that psilocybin actually does lead you to question stuff. | ||
| It leads you to really ask questions about everything, about your role in the world, about you as a person, about how you relate to other people, and about the whole system on this planet and the beautiful, gorgeous planet that we have and what we're doing to it. | ||
| That also enters awareness. | ||
| It erodes confidence and authority and it also erodes confidence and authority that doesn't have experiences that you've experienced. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the part of the problem is that these people that are holding people back from these psychedelic experiences, they've never had them. | ||
| They've never had them. | ||
| So they don't even know what they're rallying against. | ||
| They're coming to it from a place of fear and prejudice. | ||
| They're simply accepting stuff that they've been told without really thinking it through and examining it. | ||
| And again, it's a failure of what human beings should be doing. | ||
| We have to get rid of this fear. | ||
| And ironically, it's bad for them as well. | ||
| It's bad for the people that are actually encouraging these laws to be enforced. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's bad for the whole of society because it is healthy for a society where adults become self-realized individuals, where they make their own responsible choices about their own lives, where they don't say, oh, government must make this choice for me. | ||
| That's the next step for humanity. | ||
| We need to start becoming our own leaders and making our own choices. | ||
| And that is what's being revealed now that we're getting to the skull beneath the smile of the war on drugs. | ||
| We're realizing that it's part of a big program of lying that has been about keeping people's minds closed down, not wanting free thinking. | ||
| I've made this point several times but our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such. | ||
| Our society will allow Big Pharma to make billions of dollars with drugs that alter consciousness like Ciroxat and Prozac antidepressants, which in my opinion, having had some experience of them, are amongst the most horrible drugs on the planet. | ||
| They are very harmful, very dangerous drugs, but they're completely legal and they're encouraged with our system. | ||
| Likewise, alcohol, very dangerous drug, causes fights, causes drunk driving accidents, leads to cirrhosis of the liver, completely legal and open. | ||
| Our society is not against altered states of consciousness. | ||
| As such, it's against particular kinds of altered states of consciousness that lead to questioning of the existing control system. | ||
| That's what's going on here. | ||
| Hear, hear. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| And as you know, I have my own story with cannabis. | ||
| Yes, well, you and I had a moment. | ||
| We had a moment, which was quite a life-changing moment for me, because if I may just rehearse a little bit of this for the audience. | ||
| In 2011, I had a series of ayahuasca sessions in which it was shown to me that I was using cannabis completely wrong. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| if only to overcome it, that it was making me paranoid, that it was making me suspicious, that I approached everybody around me in a state of suspicion. | ||
| And I was shown this by ayahuasca and given a very strong message, you need to quit cannabis. | ||
| What I didn't realize at the time is that the problem was not cannabis. | ||
| The problem was me. | ||
| That I needed to fix those aspects of myself before I could have a proper relationship with cannabis. | ||
| So after that ayahuasca session, having smoked cannabis for decades, literally 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, I quit. | ||
| I quit for 3 years. | ||
| And then I'm on your show. | ||
| And we're sitting opposite one another as we are now. | ||
| And you asked me a question, are you still off the cannabis? | ||
| And I say, well, I'm thinking of dipping my toes back in the water, at which point you produce a joint. | ||
| And we smoke it together. | ||
| First of all... | ||
| After three years, your tolerance is way down on cannabis. | ||
| So I got really stoned. | ||
| I did listen to that interview back and somehow I held it together. | ||
| Oh, you held it together brilliantly. | ||
| You opened up and it was like a wave of information came pouring out of you. | ||
| It was wonderful to watch. | ||
| It was a liberation for me. | ||
| And what it said to me is, it's time to go back to cannabis. | ||
| But perhaps in a different way. | ||
| I need a different relationship with this amazing medicine. | ||
| And if I can forge that, if I can make that different relationship happen... | ||
| Then it can be a constructive and positive part of my life. | ||
| And I can say definitely that that has been the case. | ||
| That's excellent. | ||
| And so it's all thanks to you, Joe. | ||
| I probably would still be off cannabis if it hadn't been for that joint. | ||
| Well, I think people can develop these patterns of behavior that are destructive with anything, whether it's with alcohol or cannabis or sex or anything. | ||
| People get in ruts. | ||
| It doesn't mean that the cannabis is bad. | ||
| It means that you are on a bad mental path. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| I mean, I'm not encouraging it for everybody, because some people, it genuinely, biologically doesn't jive with them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But the fundamental thing is, we as adult human beings need to take responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions. | ||
| And we need not hand that responsibility over to governmental institutions, especially when it concerns something as intimate and personal as our consciousness. | ||
| And my view is, the ancient world had the right attitude to this kind of thing, and the modern world I think it was a civilization that emerged from shamanism But did not stay | ||
| at the hunter-gatherer stage, but that took the essence of shamanism and integrated it into a very different kind of civilization from our own, which pursued things in different ways. | ||
| A lot of archaeologists have said to me, but we don't find any plastic bottles from the Ice Age. | ||
| That means there was no advanced civilization during the Ice Age. | ||
| Well, hang on. | ||
| Maybe an advanced civilization might have decided never to get involved in plastic in the first place. | ||
| Maybe there would have been a clear choice not to make plastic. | ||
| Maybe they did things in completely different ways. | ||
| Maybe they cultivated powers of the human mind that we dismiss and regard as completely unimportant. | ||
| You know, woo-woo. | ||
| Yeah, this is the thoughts about Egypt, correct? | ||
| It's about Egypt and about other things. | ||
| I mean, the specific example I give Is above the king's chamber in the Great Pyramid are five further chambers. | ||
| And these chambers are roofed and floored with granite beams that weigh about 70 tons each. | ||
| And there are hundreds of them. | ||
| And these 70-ton granite beams, which to put in context a 70-ton beam is equivalent in weight to 35 large SUVs, these 70-ton granite beams have been elevated to a height of more than 350 feet above the ground and carefully and precisely placed in position. | ||
| It is very hard for archaeologists to explain how that was done using purely leverage and mechanical advantage. | ||
| You can say, oh, perhaps they built a ramp and hauled the stones up the ramp. | ||
| But then you have to confront basic laws of physics. | ||
| You can't haul a stone weighing tens of tons up a slope that exceeds 10 degrees. | ||
| Then you start doing the calculation. | ||
| How long a ramp do I need with a 10 degree slope to get to 350 feet above the ground? | ||
| And the answer is you need a fucking long ramp. | ||
| Which should still be there because it couldn't have been a sand ramp. | ||
| It would have collapsed under the weight of those stones. | ||
| It had to be as massive as the pyramid itself. | ||
| So this begins to seem like an absurd idea, the idea that is foisted on us by archaeology. | ||
| Maybe the idea that they regard as absurd, namely that psychic powers were cultivated by ancient civilizations, that they could use powers of the human mind that we have allowed to lapse, maybe that idea deserves further consideration. | ||
| We have gone down a path of leverage and mechanical advantage. | ||
| We're used to relying on machines. | ||
| But we hear anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic powers, who can move things with their minds, of people who have telepathic powers. | ||
| And our automatic reaction is to just dismiss all of that because science says it's impossible. | ||
| Because science regards consciousness as local to the brain and doesn't see how it can exert itself outside of that. | ||
| But maybe we should open up to those possibilities that we're dealing with a very different kind of culture that used techniques that we have allowed to lapse. | ||
| And maybe we could wake those techniques up again. | ||
| Maybe the ability of human beings to do almost superhuman things is resident within all of us, but sleeping. | ||
| Well, it's pure speculation that they use some sort of a telekinetic power, but it's absolute that they did something that we don't understand. | ||
| If you think about the distance between us and the construction, just the modern accepted construction dates of the Great Pyramid, it's more than 5,000 years ago or close to 5,000 years ago. | ||
| The Great Pyramid is supposed to be about 4,500 years old, yeah. | ||
| That's really old. | ||
| To think that someone back then could do something that would perplex us today with modern machinery. | ||
| And that somehow or another they figured this out. | ||
| It's almost like what they had done was leave behind something that was so stupendous So monstrously impressive that it would transcend time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that you would have to look at it even thousands and thousands of years later and say, hey, like, this defies conventional explanation. | ||
| This is not a simple – and I've seen some of the conventional explanations of the construction of the pyramid, and they conveniently neglect those chambers above the king's chamber. | ||
| They do. | ||
| They conveniently neglect a lot of those massive stones. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| And it's because it's one of those things you just go, oh, I don't know. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| There are the chambers above the king's chambers. | ||
| And each one of those floors consists of a row of 70-ton granite blocks that have been raised 350 feet above the ground. | ||
| And not only that, but brought from Aswan in the south of Egypt, 500 kilometers south of the Great Pyramid. | ||
| If there's any time in history where you could go in a time machine and go back and observe, would that be the time? | ||
| I am just completely fascinated by the Ice Age at the moment. | ||
| If you had one shot to go back and see what it was like in some place, you wouldn't go to the construction of the Great Pyramids? | ||
| I think right now where I'd go is 12,800 years ago in the beginning of the Younger Dryas. | ||
| Ah, just to see. | ||
| Because I think that's where the whole human story changes. | ||
| I think that's where we change tracks from one path to another path. | ||
| And following those cataclysmic events of the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago... | ||
| Following those, the signs of civilization that we see emerging are not the beginnings of civilization. | ||
| They're a restarting of civilization that had existed before the cataclysm. | ||
| And for that reason, I would like to be present during that cataclysmic event, if only to satisfy myself that it was indeed a comet. | ||
| You see, the one thing there's no dispute about anymore is that the Younger Dryas was a cataclysm. | ||
| You can't argue about that. | ||
| The megafauna that die off, the disruption of human activity that takes place at that time, the huge climate changes. | ||
| This was a cataclysm by any standards. | ||
| Where the argument still goes on is what caused the cataclysm. | ||
| I vote strongly for comet, multiple fragments of a comet hitting the North American ice cap and hitting Greenland as well. | ||
| But there are other researchers in the field like my colleague Robert Schock who thinks that the sun is more involved. | ||
| This is healthy. | ||
| This is very healthy. | ||
| We should be approaching this problem from many different perspectives and trying to figure out what the fuck caused this extraordinary event that occurs at a pivotal moment in the human story. | ||
| The end of the Stone Age, the beginning of the Mesolithic, the end of the Ice Age, the beginning of the current age of the Earth. | ||
| And suddenly we see these signs of civilization appearing and in places like Gobekli Tepe those signs already include highly sophisticated knowledge. | ||
| And that's why I feel we really need to investigate the Amazon. | ||
| There are three places in the world which are really lacking in the investigation right now. | ||
| One of them is the Amazon, five and a half million square kilometers, very little archaeology done. | ||
| Another is the Sahara Desert. | ||
| The Sahara Desert, tough place to work. | ||
| I can understand why there's little archaeology done there. | ||
| But the Sahara Desert was green during the Ice Age. | ||
| It had a completely different climate regime. | ||
| We should consider the possibility that missing parts of the human story are there. | ||
| And then under the continental shelves, because sea level rose 400 feet. | ||
| These are three domains that archaeology has largely not investigated. | ||
| And it has largely not done so. | ||
| They say, well, why would we spend the money on marine archaeology? | ||
| It's much better to spend it on looking for shipwrecks rather than looking for signs of a lost civilization because we archaeologists know there was no lost civilization. | ||
| So that's the argument for the resources there. | ||
| And the same with the Amazon and the same with the Sahara Desert. | ||
| Places in the very places in the world that those amongst us who are charged with the responsibility of interpreting the past have not looked at. | ||
| Are the very prices we should be looking at. | ||
| I had a thought once while I was under the influence. | ||
| And it was a thought that one day computational powers will reach a point where they will be able to take into consideration all of the objects on Earth and what we know about the history and vividly recreate the past through computation to the point where you could actually know who did what, when people did things, and that, I mean, I don't even know if this would be physical. | ||
| Today, certainly not be possible. | ||
| The exponential increase in computational power and technology and innovation that one day will reach a point where you'll be able to watch. | ||
| You'll be able to see what happened. | ||
| And they'll be able to recreate what happened exactly. | ||
| And that this would be something that would be... | ||
| Impossible for us to imagine that someone would be able to do that right now. | ||
| But that one day with technology, as it gets more and more advanced, we will reach some sort of innovation or some sort of an invention that will allow us to go back and see, literally see, what happened, how things were done. | ||
| Technology is changing our whole understanding of the past and what you're envisaging is perfectly possible. | ||
| We will come to a time if... | ||
| A hundred years, 500 years? | ||
| Perhaps less. | ||
| If we don't first destroy ourselves entirely as a civilization, we will come to a time where our cleverness and our techniques will allow a much wider opening up of the past than has presently happened. | ||
| But it is already happening. | ||
| One of the areas of science that I go into in America before is genetics and DNA. This is an area of science that was not much informing archaeology until about the 1990s, but since the 2000s. | ||
| has become very important in archaeology because the technology has been developed where ancient DNA can be extracted and tested and you can actually genotype an entire individual from DNA that may be 15, 20,000 years old. | ||
| And this new technology of genome sequencing and DNA is another factor that is raising huge question marks over the past of the Americas. | ||
| And one of the issues I go into In this book, is the presence in the Amazon rainforest of a very specific, clearly identifiable pattern of DNA, which is only found in one other place in the world, and that is in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea, and amongst Australian Aborigines. | ||
| It's Australasian DNA. In South America? | ||
| Not only in South America, but in the depths of the Amazon rainforest amongst tribes who have only been contacted in the last 20 or 30 years. | ||
| And furthermore, although skeletal remains are rare, it has been found in ancient skeletal remains that are close to 11,000 years old in the Amazon. | ||
| So that tells us that this DNA signal has been in the Amazon for at least 11,000 years. | ||
| The geneticists think that it came to the Amazon during the last ice age. | ||
| And this raises a huge mystery because the peopling of the Americas is supposed to have occurred from Siberia across the Bering Straits, down through that ice-free corridor into North America, down through North America, into South America, into Central America, and finally into South America. | ||
| If that was the whole story, then we would find this DNA signal in North America and in Central America. | ||
| We would not find it only in the Amazon. | ||
| I talked to some of the leading geneticists about this, specifically Professor S.K. Willislev at the University of Copenhagen, who's been the lead author in a number of major studies of ancient DNA. And I asked him, what do you make of this Australasian DNA in the Amazon? | ||
| And he said, honestly... | ||
| We don't have a proper explanation for it at the moment, but what he did say is that the most parsimonious explanation, he used that specific word, the most parsimonious explanation is that a group of people during the Ice Age crossed the Pacific Ocean And ended up in South America and settled in the Amazon and brought their DNA with them. | ||
| That would account perfectly for the DNA data. | ||
| And when a scientist says the most parsimonious explanation, what that scientist is saying is he likes that explanation. | ||
| That it's a simple, direct, clear explanation of the DNA mystery. | ||
| But then he added, however, it doesn't make practical sense. | ||
| And I asked him, well, why doesn't it make practical sense? | ||
| And he said, because the archaeologists tell me that no human population was capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age, at which point it was natural for me to say, do you really trust the archaeologists? | ||
| And he said, well, in science we do trust the work of other scientists. | ||
| We don't really question it. | ||
| We don't really investigate it. | ||
| That's their side of the business. | ||
| And my view is that that is rather than taking this weird anomalous Australasian DNA signal in the heart of the Amazon as something to be explained away and as something to be – for it to be denied that it could be connected to a voyage across the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| Maybe it's the first compelling evidence that voyages were taking place across the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age. | ||
| And maybe we should be opening up that whole issue for exploration. | ||
| And again, I think a lost civilization is the best answer and that near the end of the Ice Age, when the younger Dryas cataclysm unfolds, it's not an overnight thing. | ||
| It's very bad 12,800 years ago. | ||
| There's about 1,200 years of horror. | ||
| I don't think the civilization went down in a single day and night. | ||
| I think there were survivors. | ||
| I think bits of it were left. | ||
| I think their project was to restart civilization. | ||
| And I suggest very strongly that where they tried to mount that project was amongst the hunter-gatherers who coexisted in the world with them at that time. | ||
| We ourselves are an advanced civilization, at least that's what we call ourselves, and we coexist in the world with hunter-gatherers. | ||
| It's not an odd idea that an advanced civilization and hunter-gatherers should coexist. | ||
| And there is separation between us and the Amazonian hunter-gatherers. | ||
| There are tribes in the Amazon that are uncontacted and that we don't know even exist. | ||
| If a catastrophe on the level of the younger Dryas were to occur today, I don't think that our civilization would make it through. | ||
| We are the spoilt children of the earth. | ||
| We are just used to having everything laid on. | ||
| You know, the supermarket shelves are groaning with food. | ||
| We can get food delivered to our homes. | ||
| We have roofs over our head. | ||
| We have shelters. | ||
| We have clothing. | ||
| Everything is taken for granted. | ||
| I guess you're an exception, but very few people in modern Western culture know how to survive. | ||
| They don't have survival skills. | ||
| They don't know how to hunt. | ||
| They don't know how to gather. | ||
| They don't know how to grow crops, because they've handed that responsibility over to others. | ||
| We live in a society that's highly segmented and specialized, and different people specialize in different things, but nobody has the vast general survival skill that a hunter-gatherer has. | ||
| So in a global cataclysm, Actually, at first, counterintuitively, the people who would survive it would be the hunter-gatherers. | ||
| And an advanced civilization would be smart, if they were survivors, to seek refuge amongst hunter-gatherers, to make that the place where they might try to restart their civilization. | ||
| And that's why I think… That this Australasian DNA signal in the Amazon may be part of the evidence for a sort of outreach effort that was being made by a lost civilization, seeing the disaster coming down on it and realizing that something needed to be done. | ||
| Well, it's fascinating to me that the geneticists would rely on the archaeologists, being that the geneticists have the actual DNA that they can examine, where the archaeologists are piecing things together. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Little tiny bits of information over the entire landscape, and then you consider how much information they don't have access to that's in the ground. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I strongly resist the idea that archaeology is a science. | ||
| I don't think it should be described as a science. | ||
| What do you think it should be described as? | ||
| It's more like a kind of philosophy. | ||
| It's an attempt to interpret the past based on rather flimsy and limited evidence. | ||
| And what you find in that interpretation is that the preconceptions of the individuals involved are being imposed upon the evidence, which then turns out to support their preconceptions. | ||
| And that's not a scientific way of doing things. | ||
| A scientific way of doing things is testing hypotheses and seeking to falsify them and seeing if they work out. | ||
| So the problem is drawing these conclusions and then being too rigid with these conclusions upon further evidence. | ||
| That's my view, that archaeology has been much too rigid. | ||
| And that there's a climate of fear in archaeology. | ||
| I don't mean to pick particularly on archaeologists here. | ||
| I think this is generally true across other disciplines as well. | ||
| These days, academics are driven by the need to publish research papers. | ||
| That's what they build their careers on. | ||
| If they can get a paper on their bit of research published in Nature or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, etc., That's good for their careers. | ||
| But then you confront the gatekeepers in those publications who regard any archaeological idea that is not part of the mainstream accepted consensus with great suspicion and are most reluctant to publish that information. | ||
| Now, what is the mainstream, when archaeologists talk about seafaring humans, what do they date that to? | ||
| Well, the great seafaring adventure that is accepted by archaeology is called the Polynesian expansion. | ||
| And it's a remarkable story. | ||
| And that occurs roughly 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. | ||
| And those Polynesians were amazing ocean navigators. | ||
| They could cross distances of thousands of kilometers. | ||
| I mean, it's not an accident that the Polynesians found Easter Island. | ||
| Finding Easter Island is a really challenging project. | ||
| Easter Island is 2000 miles from the coast of South America. | ||
| It's 2000 miles from the nearest other island, which is Tahiti. | ||
| It's just a little speck in the middle of the ocean, but the Polynesians found it and settled there and appear to have brought a reproductively viable population there and appear to have made voyages back and forth. | ||
| But that was 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. | ||
| That was not 12,800 years ago. | ||
| And this is where archaeology's adamant position that ocean voyaging was begun by the Polynesians and that there was no major ocean voyages before that. | ||
| I think needs to be strongly questioned and it needs to be strongly questioned in the light of this DNA evidence from the Amazon rather than rejecting the evidence. | ||
| And tempts should be made to consider what that might mean. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because we know that the Egyptians had boats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, I mean, if there were boats 4,500 years ago, why do we think that they didn't try them out in the ocean? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense, especially if they existed 1,000 years prior, which is also possible. | ||
| Archaeologists wouldn't argue that the Egyptians had boats, but that is still within the framework of accepted history. | ||
| It's the notion of a global navigating culture. | ||
|
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Mm-hmm. | |
| In the Ice Age that archaeologists can't swallow. | ||
| It's a subject that I've kept on coming up against over a number of years. | ||
| I think the best evidence for it is ancient maps which show the world as it looked during the last Ice Age. | ||
| I first explored this in Fingerprints of the Gods and I've touched on the mystery again and I have an appendix on the subject in this book because I think these are very important. | ||
| We're talking about maps that were drawn roughly between the 1300s and the 1700s. | ||
| In other words, in relatively recent history. | ||
| However, these maps were largely based on much older source maps, which they copied. | ||
| And we can say that for sure, because one of the famous maps is the Piri Reis map, which was created by a Turkish admiral called Piri Reis in the year 1513. Actually, only a corner of his map has survived. | ||
| It was originally a world map. | ||
| We now just have a bit that shows the East Coast of South America and North America and the West Coast of Africa. | ||
| Piri Reis writes in that map that it is in his own handwriting that he based it on more than 100 older source maps, some of which had come from the Library of Alexandria. | ||
| In other words, that maps had been – when the Library of Alexandria had been destroyed in the 4th century AD or whenever it was – Some of its contents had been rescued and brought to Constantinople, which became the Turkish capital, and Piri Reis had access to those maps, and he incorporated information from those maps on his maps, as well as incorporating more recent navigational information. | ||
| And this is one of a whole category of maps which are extremely hard to explain. | ||
| All of them based on older source maps now lost, all of them incorporating extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes. | ||
| Latitude is not that difficult a technological feat, but longitude is a difficult technological feat. | ||
| Longitude involves a chronometer. | ||
| It involves knowing the time at the place you began your voyage and the local noon as well, and calculating the difference between them. | ||
| You need a chronometer that will keep accurate time at sea with the motions of a ship. | ||
| And it's just a plain fact that our civilization did not invent such a chronometer until the late 18th century. | ||
| Before that, we didn't know what longitude we were at. | ||
| And ships were constantly sailing unexpectedly into coastlines that they thought were hundreds of miles further away. | ||
| So the discovery of the technique to do longitude was a major civilizational advance. | ||
| Its presence in maps based on much older source maps that actually show the world as it looks during the last ice age suggests that somebody during the last ice age was mapping the world and had mastered the technique of calculating longitude. | ||
| Classic example of these maps and I make a point of this is what's called the Pinkerton world map which was drawn in the year 1818 And it was based on the latest navigational information at that time. | ||
| I reproduced that map in the book. | ||
| What's missing from the map, entirely missing, is Antarctica. | ||
| There's just a hole at the bottom of the world. | ||
| There's nothing there. | ||
| And the reason there's nothing there, there's another Pinkerton map that shows that. | ||
| The reason that you need to find one that's centered on Antarctica. | ||
| The reason that Antarctica is not there is that our civilization hadn't discovered Antarctica in 1818. | ||
| So they couldn't authentically put it on a map in 1818. | ||
| Actually, we discovered it in 1819, and that's when it starts appearing on modern maps. | ||
| The problem is that Antarctica appears repeatedly on these much older maps, and it appears in the right place. | ||
| And a bit bigger than it is today, but very much as it looked during the last ice age. | ||
| So what all of this suggests to me is that the world was mapped and explored by a global seafaring culture with a level of technology that was at least equivalent to ours at the end of the 18th century during the Ice Age. | ||
| Wasn't there also a map of Greenland that showed it underneath the ice? | ||
| Yes, there are. | ||
| And another intriguing thing, I mentioned the Piri Rees map just now. | ||
| Shown on the Piri Rees map lying off the east coast of North America is a large island with a row of megaliths, like a road of megaliths, running up the middle of it. | ||
| That island is in the exact place of the Grand Bahama banks. | ||
| And... | ||
|
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Is it on this one? | |
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But can I point it out to you? | ||
|
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Sure, sure. | |
| It's there. | ||
|
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That's right there. | |
| Okay, this thing. | ||
| That one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
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Right here. | |
| That's great that you can bring this up, Jeremy. | ||
|
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That's really good. | |
| So this island is sitting there off the southeast coast of North America. | ||
| Look at the way they used to draw things back then, too. | ||
| And what you see running down the middle of it is this road-like feature of Megalus. | ||
| Yes, I see. | ||
| Right there, yeah. | ||
| He's here. | ||
| Now, the thing is, It was a long period of my life when I did a lot of scuba diving, and I was looking at underwater structures. | ||
| And one of the sites I dived on was the Bimini Road, which is in the Grand Bahama banks. | ||
| And the Bimini Road is exactly where that island is. | ||
| And here's the issue. | ||
| I don't care whether the Bimini Road is natural or man-made. | ||
| For me, the mystery is that it is shown above water on that map. | ||
| And the last time it was above water was thousands and thousands of years ago. | ||
| So for me, this is all evidence That we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that our ancestors had achieved a level of technology where they could explore and map the world's oceans. | ||
| We shouldn't dismiss that. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| So we don't know what those stones are, how they were created, but boy, do they look artificial. | ||
| That's the Onaguni in Japan we're looking at now. | ||
| Go back to that image, Jimmy, the last image that we were just looking at. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| I mean, that looks so man-made. | ||
| And you can see that it's rather like the pattern that's shown on the island in the map. | ||
| How deep is that today? | ||
| Oh, it's not very deep. | ||
| It's about 20 feet. | ||
| But we think that that was above water at some point in history? | ||
| It was definitely above water during the last ice age. | ||
| When it finally went underwater, it may have been as late as 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. | ||
| Is there anything else compelling that's in the immediate area that seems to indicate that there was some sort of a man-made structure? | ||
| Well, nobody's looked for it. | ||
| And the whole effort of archaeology has been to dismiss the significance of the Bimini Road. | ||
| How would they dismiss that? | ||
| Well, they say it's totally natural. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Go back to that image again. | ||
| This is the argument. | ||
| Go back to that image that we just saw. | ||
| Are you sure? | ||
| As somebody who spent a lot of time diving on the Bimini Road, I can tell you I absolutely do not think it's natural. | ||
| I think it's a man-made structure. | ||
| But the argument is that it's a kind of beach rock that forms in these blocky formations. | ||
|
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Does it? | |
| Yes, beach rock does form in blocky formations. | ||
| But here I believe that the beach rock has been used as a construction material. | ||
| But, I repeat, the key issue is not whether the Bimini Road is man-made or not. | ||
| The key issue is that it features on a map above water. | ||
| And that is a dating project. | ||
| That tells us that somebody was mapping that bit of the world when it was above water. | ||
| And that takes us back a very long way into the past. | ||
| The one that you just pulled up. | ||
| Yeah, look at that one. | ||
| That's a stunning place. | ||
| It's an amazing sight. | ||
| It's just like the odds of that being in that order with those uniformly sized rocks. | ||
| How long is that? | ||
| Oh, hundreds of feet. | ||
| It's actually shaped like the letter J. It's a giant underwater structure. | ||
| It's really an enormous thing and very beautiful to dive on. | ||
| And there's lots of very gentle, sweet nurse sharks down there that you can play with. | ||
| So that looks much more like random. | ||
| That's more random. | ||
| And bits of it do look more random. | ||
| And bits of it look highly constructed. | ||
| I would not seek to claim that the Bimini Road is absolutely man-made. | ||
| My claim about the Bimini Road is it's really fucking weird that it appears on a map above water, a map that was drawn in 1513 based on older source maps. | ||
| Now, when they found that ancient Greek computer thing, what is that called? | ||
| The Antikythera mechanism. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Again, that testifies to a lost navigational skill that we have not taken account of before. | ||
| Incredibly complex. | ||
| And it took a long time for them to figure out what that even is. | ||
| What do they think that is now? | ||
| It tracks the movements of the planets. | ||
| It's a navigational device. | ||
| It's a geared, cogged device. | ||
| A system that allows you to track the passage of time and figure out where you are. | ||
| It's some kind of navigational device. | ||
| It's not fully understood. | ||
| And how old is that? | ||
| I think that goes back to Greek times. | ||
| I'm guessing here because the Greek times are not of great interest to me, but I'm thinking around about 500 BC. So, at least 2,000 years old, 2,000 plus, and we know that there had to be more than one of these things. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| You can't have something like that without a vast effort behind it. | ||
| Human beings were working on creating this geared and cogged machinery that reflected the patterns in the sky. | ||
| Oh, is that a recreation of it? | ||
| That's a recreation of something like that. | ||
|
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Wow! | |
| Can you buy one of those? | ||
| It looks like you could buy that. | ||
| Dude, bookmark that. | ||
| We need one right there, right next to the plastic cells. | ||
| So such a thing is a cultural artifact which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. | ||
| It has to have a context. | ||
| It has to have a background. | ||
| And again, my suggestion would be Perhaps a secret technology. | ||
| It's very odd that very few of these have been found and it may be that ship owners and navigators in Greek times were extremely careful about who they shared this technology with. | ||
| It may have been as top secret as nuclear power is in our world today. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| But the fact is that then we have to... | ||
| It exists. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| And then we must consider what's behind it. | ||
| What led to that? | ||
| Is that just the latest manifestation of something that goes much more deeply back into human culture? | ||
| And I think that is. | ||
| I suppose my main message is that we have... | ||
| A so far untold backstory that we're concentrating entirely on the front story. | ||
| And the backstory is missing, very largely missing from the picture. | ||
| And what I've tried to do is to fill in bits of the backstory. | ||
| Do you have anything in this book about the Ormex? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I mentioned them briefly. | ||
| I explored the Olmec mystery in considerable depth. | ||
| Can you explain that to people? | ||
| In Fingerprints of the Gods. | ||
| Yes, so it's considered to be the earliest high culture of Central America. | ||
| Everybody's heard about the Aztecs. | ||
| Everybody's heard about the Maya. | ||
| But before the Aztecs and before the Maya, there were a culture who are referred to as the Olmecs. | ||
| Again, we don't know what they called themselves. | ||
| That's what the Aztecs called them. | ||
| They called them the Olmecs and it means the rubber people because they – a rubber producing area of Mexico. | ||
| They worked in giant megalithic constructions. | ||
| What they're most famous for is these huge carved human heads, which can be on a scale of up to 20 to 25 tons in weight and which have curious features, which have been interpreted variously as Polynesian, African, don't which have been interpreted variously as Polynesian, African, don't look like classic Native American features. | ||
| But one of the things I've realized is that there is no classic Native American feature, that Native Americans have a very complex genetic story with very many different elements brought into it. | ||
| And we shouldn't be necessarily surprised by the supposedly non-Native American look of these omakettes. | ||
| What do we think those helmets were that they were wearing? | ||
| Nobody knows, because no physical example of such a helmet has ever been found, just like no physical example of an Egyptian pharaoh's crown has ever been found. | ||
| All we see is the stone reproductions of them. | ||
| Do they universally wear these helmets? | ||
| They pretty much all wear these helmets in the Olmec stonework. | ||
| There's another fascinating figure from La Venta, One of the Olmec sites, which is the earliest ever image of a plumed or feathered serpent. | ||
| The feathered serpent is a famous icon in Central America. | ||
| Quetzalcoatl, who's the god of peace, the bringer of civilization. | ||
| Who is associated, for example, with the famous pyramid of Kukulkan, which is just another name for Quetzalcoatl at Chichen Itza, where on the spring equinox, a shadow effect creates the image of a serpent coiling down the stairway and joining with the carved head of the serpent. | ||
| There's the image from Leventer. | ||
| That's the earliest image of a plumed serpent in the Americas. | ||
|
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Absolutely. | |
| And sitting in the middle of it, and I made a big deal out of this because I think it is a big deal in Magicians of the Gods, sitting in the middle of it is this human figure who's holding this strange bag in his hand. | ||
| And it's just a fact that those identical bags are found in ancient Sumer in the hands of individuals who were considered to be civilization bringers. | ||
| And they also show up on Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I call them man bags. | ||
| And in that case, at Gobekli Tepe, we know they're at least 11,600 years old. | ||
| So I wonder if we're looking at a sort of badge of office of a group of civilizers who traveled around the world trying to bring back to life a lost civilization and pass down... | ||
| I deploy a concept in this book that I actually got from Richard Dawkins. | ||
| Richard Dawkins is the author of the book called The Selfish Gene and he's not one of my favorite people because he's a materialist reductionist and he doesn't believe in spirit or any mystery in life that we're just accidents of chemistry and biology. | ||
| He also has no psychedelic experience. | ||
| I did challenge him at a public event to go have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca. | ||
| Just take acid once. | ||
| Oh, just once would be enough. | ||
| But he has an excellent out, and sadly he's had a stroke, so he has a good excuse for not doing that. | ||
| But he's a clever man, and one of his concepts that he's introduced into human culture is the concept of the meme. | ||
| We're all, I think, familiar with that word. | ||
| Genes are physical reproductive mechanisms. | ||
| They reproduce themselves down the generations. | ||
| They replicate. | ||
| They multiply. | ||
| They're passed on from one individual to another. | ||
| Memes are cultural objects, cultural ideas that are passed on and replicate and reproduce themselves. | ||
| And what I see right across the Americas and right across the old world as well is a set of memes that That involve the sky, that involve the ground, that involve geometry, that involve notions of life after death. | ||
| And I think the only way to explain these is that they have been inherited from an earlier culture that was in some way connected with the ancestors of all of these cultures. | ||
| I think that's what we're looking at in the Amazon. | ||
| and we're looking at a meme which was deliberately created. | ||
| Once you mobilize a population to start creating huge geometrical structures, you are also facilitating many other possibilities that an organized population allows. | ||
| I think that's what happened at Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| I think that's why they created the megalithic site there, to mobilize the local population of hunter-gatherers, to give them a project to do, to engage them, and in the process of engaging them, to teach them the skills of agriculture. | ||
| which are fundamental to any concept of civilization. | ||
| And it's weird the way agriculture just suddenly appears in Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| And there's huge agricultural mysteries in the Amazon as well. | ||
| May I share a couple of those mysteries with you? | ||
| Before you do that, though, can you pull up that image from Gobekli Tepe of Pillar 43 in Enclosure D? I would like to see that guy holding that bag. | ||
| That is really fascinating. | ||
| The bags are in a row along the top of the pillar. | ||
| It's pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe. | ||
| Is there an image of that online that's available? | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| Yeah, there's the bags. | ||
|
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So there's the bags in a row along the top. | |
| It's the same sort of square-shaped bag with a curved handle that you find on the earliest image of the feathered serpent and that you find... | ||
| No, you have to go above that, Jamie. | ||
|
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Oh, there you go. | |
| Just a little bit higher up the pillar. | ||
| Those bags, right at the top there. | ||
| It's odd that this symbol crops up in many different cultures and tends to be associated with some kind of… What's the mainstream interpretation of those bags? | ||
| There is no mainstream interpretation of those bags. | ||
| That's my interpretation of those bags. | ||
| Which I freely confess. | ||
| That's how I read them. | ||
| I'm intrigued by the anomaly that the similar bag and turns up in the hands of the Quetzalcoatl figure and turns up in Mesopotamia repeatedly in the hands of the individual so-called the Apkalu, the magicians of the gods, the bringers of civilization. | ||
| And the plume serpent, Quetzalcoatl, it's an Aztec god, right? | ||
| Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec god, but the Aztecs acquired him from earlier cultures. | ||
| The very fact that an image of the plume serpent is given such priority in Olmec culture tells us that that system of ideas was present during Olmec times, which takes us back at least to 1500 BC, probably quite a bit earlier than that, whereas the Aztecs are 1500 AD, So there's 3,000 years between the Aztecs and the Olmecs and that same system of ideas is running through all of those cultures. | ||
| And the Mayans had a name for it as well? | ||
| Kukul Khan. | ||
| And what do you think that plume serpent was? | ||
| I think it's very clear from the accounts that have survived that what he's associated with are two things in particular. | ||
| One of them, he's a god of peace. | ||
| He's not a war god. | ||
| And the other thing that he's primarily about is giving the gifts of civilization. | ||
| This is what you human beings need to know in order to move on to the next level. | ||
| That is the function and the role of Quetzalcoatl. | ||
| And there are very similar, we could refer to them as civilizing heroes, who are found in other cultures and other locations. | ||
| Osiris in Egypt plays that role. | ||
| As a bringer of civilization. | ||
| There's hardly a culture in the ancient world that doesn't remember a time far back in remote prehistory when some kind of supernaturals or advanced human beings, and I prefer the latter, that some kind of advanced human beings were involved in a project to disseminate civilization. | ||
| I mentioned the Tucano in the Amazon who are big drinkers of ayahuasca. | ||
| The Tucano have a fascinating origin myth. | ||
| The origin myth states specifically that their ancestors were brought to the Amazon. | ||
| They were brought to the Amazon by a group of supernaturals who included the daughter of the sun and an individual called the helmsman who steered the serpent canoe. | ||
| In which this settlement mission in the Amazon was performed. | ||
| And what these so-called supernaturals did was they brought the ancestors of Tucano to the Amazon and they showed them the best places to settle. | ||
| The best places where they might find hunting. | ||
| The best places where they might create a village. | ||
| The best places for agriculture. | ||
| And then they left. | ||
| But they left them behind one gift. | ||
| And that gift was ayahuasca. | ||
|
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Wow! | |
| That's the story of the origin myth of the Tucano. | ||
| And it sounds to me... | ||
| Rather like the other side of the story of that DNA signal in the Amazon, that a group of people were deliberately settled in the Amazon by human beings who they chose to regard as supernaturals. | ||
| That's what makes sense of it to me. | ||
| When I interrupted you to talk about Quetzalcoatl, what were you about to say? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I'm in California. | ||
| I've been smoking lots of dope, you know. | ||
| We were talking about different things in the Amazon. | ||
| Should we rewind and figure out what we said? | ||
|
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Yeah, the serpent god, you were talking about... | |
| Before Quetzalcoatl, before that. | ||
| I have another question. | ||
| The Olmecs, you were talking about the genetics of these people that live, Native Americans. | ||
| They vary widely. | ||
| But the Olmecs seem to have very similar features. | ||
| The thick lips, the wide noses. | ||
| Why do we think that is? | ||
| Well, this is part of a curious mystery that is not unconnected to the genetic mystery. | ||
| It's been known by archaeologists for quite a long time that there are anomalous skulls in parts of Brazil, which... | ||
| appear to show very strongly Polynesian or African features, very much like the features that we see on the Olmec heads. | ||
| And a number of archaeologists who got into trouble with their colleagues for this have used that to argue many years ago, 30, 40 years ago, that the settlement story of the Americas is much more complicated than we've realized today. | ||
| And what the DNA is doing is it's telling us that there was something really weird happened with settlement. | ||
| You see, what happened with those... | ||
| African or Polynesian-looking skulls was that they were tested for DNA when DNA technology was not as advanced as it is today. | ||
| And what that DNA showed was that they were more closely related to modern Native Americans than they are to any other people in the world. | ||
| So the notion that there was some connection with Polynesia or Africa But now that we have very firm evidence of an Australasian genetic signal, Australian Aborigines, Papua New Guinea, Melanesians, with those kind of features, now that we have the genetic evidence that that is found in the Amazon, we have to go back to that old evidence and reconsider it. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Yeah, I would love to find out what that is. | ||
| They've always fascinated me. | ||
| The Olmecs, it's always been such a strange image, the large heads with the helmets on them. | ||
| Do they universally look like that? | ||
| All of the features are very similar. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And always with the helmets. | ||
| Almost always. | ||
| I won't claim that every single Olmec head has a helmet on it, because I think I've seen one that didn't. | ||
| It's quite a while ago since I We've explored the Olmec area. | ||
| But what's fascinating about them is they are supposedly the first high civilization of Central America, that they create structures on a massive scale, that you can see connections between them and the later Maya. | ||
| That whole mystery of the Mayan calendar was clearly inherited from the Olmecs. | ||
| It wasn't something the Maya made up. | ||
| The Olmecs used that same symbolism. | ||
| The Mayan calendar is actually an Olmec calendar and if we then consider the possibility that the Olmecs may just be the latest, the earliest surviving manifestation of that calendar, it could go back much further than that. | ||
| Do you plan on having any debates with people that oppose these ideas? | ||
| Well, it was interesting on your very show, Joe, to have the debate that involved Michael Shermer, who's the editor of the Skeptic magazine, and some colleague of his who came in online, who I got a bit annoyed with, and myself and my great friend and colleague, the genius, Randall Carlson. | ||
| And I felt that that was a very useful debate. | ||
| I felt that it's possibly the first time that those of us on the alternative side of the argument about history were given an opportunity really to put our evidence forward and to confront so-called skeptics. | ||
| Well, so-called, that's what he calls himself, Michael Shermer, with this evidence. | ||
| And obviously I'm biased, but I don't feel that he fielded the situation particularly well. | ||
| I don't think mainstream archaeology came out of that looking well. | ||
| really good. | ||
| I think it came out of that looking rather ignorant and uninformed. | ||
| And a man like Michael Shermer, who is a professional skeptic, cannot begin to match the knowledge of a man like Randall Carson, who has devoted his whole life to walking the walk of the geology of the end of the Ice Age in North America. | ||
| And that showed on that debate. | ||
| So I think the debate was worth doing. | ||
| I think it showed that the alternative side isn't just wishy-washy stuff out there on the fringes of things, that there are those of us working in this field who are using really solid information and who our project is to rewrite history. | ||
| And we're not going to do that with slight information. | ||
| It has to be solid information. | ||
| I think we had the opportunity On your show, to say that that solid information is there. | ||
| I'm not claiming it was a complete victory for the alternative side. | ||
| Michael Sherm is a smart guy, and he put forward some good arguments too. | ||
| And there were constructive aspects of that debate, which I appreciated. | ||
| I'd like to see much more engagement and much more positive approach. | ||
| I wish the skeptics – welcome to their skepticism – but I wish they'd be less hateful, less full of derision, less despising. | ||
| Well, they're so defensive with their ideas. | ||
| And so defensive with their ideas when the possibility is there for a constructive debate, you know. | ||
| Well, what's interesting to me is that as this evidence piles up, and it seems to be continuing to pile up, as more like these impact sites and more of this ancient civilization material gets unearthed, it's almost insurmountable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this is how paradigms shift. | ||
| I mean, everybody's familiar with the concept of a paradigm shift. | ||
| And there's a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, which outlines what a paradigm shift is, where an established model in some discipline of science that has been in control of people's thinking for a very long time suddenly falls apart. | ||
| And it doesn't fall apart suddenly. | ||
| What happens is that there's an accumulation of evidence which that model cannot explain. | ||
| That paradigm cannot explain it. | ||
| It seemed like a great paradigm at one point, but then it doesn't explain this. | ||
| And then it doesn't explain that. | ||
| Like the paradigm that says that megalithic architecture is only 6,000 years old and that the first megalithic architecture was in Malta. | ||
| That can't explain the massive megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey 5,500 years before that. | ||
| It's evidence like that, the slow accumulation of evidence that the existing system cannot explain, that at an eventual point, no matter how strongly the advocates of the existing system hold on to it, no matter how determined they are in their defense, no matter what dirty tricks they may choose to deploy to undermine their opponents, no matter what dirty tricks they may choose to deploy to sooner or later the evidence overwhelms them and the paradigm goes down and you have a new way of thinking. | ||
| And that is the story of science and it is a story that I think we're at a tipping point in our understanding of the past of the human species. | ||
| I am not saying that I am 100% right. | ||
| I believe that what I'm doing that's worthwhile is I'm asking questions about the past that haven't been asked enough. | ||
| I'm putting archaeologists on the spot and demanding that they explain themselves. | ||
| I don't claim that I'm right. | ||
| I'm offering an alternative theory, and my objective is to get people to think for themselves, to think about this stuff, and not to accept the voice of authority as the sole medium of truth. | ||
| That's what I've tried to do. | ||
| Have you had any archaeologists review any of this work and change their opinions? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| But what I have found, and I found it interestingly during the research trips for America before, is a younger generation of archaeologists who are in the field. | ||
| And they are quite different from the older generation of archaeologists who were running the whole scene 25 years ago. | ||
| Now we have a very different younger generation, a younger generation that has been exposed to open-minded thinking, that has been exposed to the Internet, that itself as part of the general pattern of the younger generation is suspicious of authority. | ||
| I'm meeting young archaeologists on sites. | ||
| For example, I met a couple of really amazing young minds on a site called Blackwater Draw in Arizona, New Mexico, where one of the first Clovis sites. | ||
| The young archaeologists I met there were incredibly open-minded and really willing to consider extraordinary possibilities about the past and privately admitted to me that they'd read my books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha. | |
| Well, that's where I get the hope. | ||
| I get the hope in this young generation that is growing up with the internet that does understand that there's a lot more out there than just what they're being taught in schools. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| This is where the hope lies, and it lies in every area. | ||
| And it's why... | ||
| One of the intriguing things that has happened with me, and your show is an important part of this, is that when I go around giving public events, doing a public presentation of my work, the demography of the audience is extremely interesting. | ||
| And this is true whether I'm giving the talk in Britain, whether I'm giving it in Canada, whether I'm giving it in America. | ||
| Part of the audience are older people. | ||
| Who read me in the 1990s, who got onto my work with Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, and they've stuck with me, and they've carried on reading my work. | ||
| But another part of the audience, a very big part of the audience, consists to a large extent of young people, most of whom are men, but there are women amongst them as well. | ||
| And what those mainly young men come up to me and say at the end of the event is, We first encountered your work on Joe Rogan's show, and it completely opened our minds. | ||
| I've had so many young men say, this has changed my life. | ||
| And then I asked myself, well, why should a different take on the past change people's lives? | ||
| Why should people feel that their lives have been changed by a different take on the past, which I add they would not know about unless you'd Have the good grace to bring me on your show. | ||
| These ideas would not be known, but they are known because of the amazing outreach of your show. | ||
| And the answer to that question, why does it change a person's life, is that once we realize that we have been misinformed about our past, That everything that we've built our idea of who we are upon and of where we're going as a culture may be founded on falsehoods and perhaps even deliberate lies. | ||
| Once that is realized, then all the questions about the nature of the society we live in become open. | ||
| And young people are feeling the need to take an independent path, not to follow the path that has been set down for them by previous generations. | ||
| And in some way, and I'm very gratified to hear this, the fact that I'm an elder now. | ||
| I'm 69 next birthday. | ||
| You look great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The fact that I, as an elder, have consistently pursued an independent path, have been willing to put up with the shit that's been thrown at me over the years, but have stuck to my guns and have continued to add new information to the dossier of information that I put forward. | ||
| That is, and I'm encouraged to see this, that's found as inspiring by younger people. | ||
| And what better gift? | ||
| Could an old guy hope to leave to the world than a younger generation who feel inspired by that person's work to change the world? | ||
| Well, I'm very, very thankful that I could introduce people to you because your first book that I read of you, Fingerprints of the Gods, changed my view of the world. | ||
| I mean, I remember putting that book down after I was finishing and going, wow, if he's right, this whole thing is a mess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A complete mess. | ||
| Because our idea of who we are is very much founded in our idea of who we were. | ||
| And I think one of the mistakes that's made in our civilization is that we are very conceited. | ||
| We're very big-headed. | ||
| And we tend to view the whole story of history as though it's a project that leads to us, that we're what it's all about. | ||
| And I think what is, how can I put it, undermining of the existing system, About a new take on the past is the notion that we're not what it's all about at all. | ||
| That there may have been an earlier civilization that reached a high level of advancement, perhaps different from ours, but nevertheless an advanced civilization which was just taken out of the story completely by a global cataclysm. | ||
| Then we suddenly realize that in a way we're here accidentally, that it's not been a process that's been all about us. | ||
| And that if we've been misinformed about how we got here, then we need to get the true information about what's going on. | ||
| So these are in a way profoundly revolutionary ideas. | ||
| They do lead people on a path of inquiry that leads to questioning of everything. | ||
| And our fears that you were just discussing earlier about how soft we are in comparison to past civilizations in terms of our ability to live off the land, that's one aspect that bothers me. | ||
| But one of the big ones that bothers me is the fact that everything is digital. | ||
| All of our information is stored on hard drives. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| And if that goes down, there's not much left. | ||
| You have paper books and a few thousands of years. | ||
| Imagine what would be left. | ||
| We would lose all of our advancement. | ||
| Well, I can speak to this at a personal level. | ||
| There was a time when I was an excellent map reader. | ||
| I could navigate anywhere with maps. | ||
| My wife, Santa, and I did huge journeys in Mexico back in the early 1990s in really cheap hire cars with maps, and we found our way everywhere without any problem. | ||
| Today, I can hardly use a map. | ||
| The skill of using a map has lapsed within me. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of GPS. | ||
| GPS technology has come along and it always tells me where I am. | ||
| And being a bit lazy, I just accept that technology. | ||
| But then I had caused to ask myself this just the other day. | ||
| Supposing GPS, supposing all those satellites go down and there's no GPS, the whole industrialized human race is going to suddenly be lost. | ||
| All those Uber drivers who don't know their way from A to B and who rely entirely on their GPS, they won't know where they're going. | ||
| And it's true with digital data. | ||
| Digital data, unlike print data, Is very fragile and requires programs in order to access and interpret it that are much more complicated than simply cracking the code of a lost language. | ||
| I mean, the programs vary between different phone platforms. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They vary in computer platforms. | ||
| It's just, it's so fragile and it's so, I mean, I don't know if there's any precautions that have been taking place to preserve this information in case of, like what Robert Schock described, coronal mass ejection or something crazy. | ||
| Take down all the satellites. | ||
| No, I don't think preparation has been made. | ||
| And it's very clear that preparation is not being made for the risk of another cosmic impact. | ||
| And again, a point that I'd like to make about this is that we are at… We are in a sense in a place where history can repeat itself, that there are certain cycles at work. | ||
| The work on the comet impact 12,800 years ago has very clearly and specifically identified the debris trail of that comet, and that debris trail is the torrid meteor stream. | ||
| And it's called the Torrid Meteor Stream because it appears to emanate from the region of the sky in which the constellation of Taurus sits. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| It's within our solar system. | ||
| It's an optical illusion. | ||
| The Torrid Meteor Stream is a giant complex of debris. | ||
| It is 30 million kilometers wide. | ||
| What you had was an original comet that might have been 100 to 200 kilometers in diameter, a small moon, which fragmented and broke up into multiple, multiple parts. | ||
| And those parts began to spread out along the whole orbit of the Taurid meteor stream and to widen. | ||
| The whole thing widens, so it's like a giant tube of debris. | ||
| And the evidence and the argument is that 12,800 years ago, several large bits of that debris fell out of the torrid meteor stream and impacted with the Earth. | ||
| The problem is that the torrid meteor stream still exists, and our planet still passes through it twice a year. | ||
| And those passages take place in June and in November. | ||
| And each passage takes 12 and a half days. | ||
| And the same group of scientists who are looking at the evidence for the impacts 12,800 years ago are deeply concerned that we may face future impacts from the Taurid meteor stream, that there are still large objects up there. | ||
| This is not theory. | ||
| This is a fact. | ||
| There's a comet up there. | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| Asteroids within the torrid meteor stream of a diameter of a kilometer or more, which would have catastrophic effect if they hit the Earth. | ||
| And responsible astronomers regard the torrid meteor stream as the greatest collision hazard facing mankind at the present time. | ||
| And it's not something that we need to fall into despair about, because it's perfectly within the level of our technology to do something about it. | ||
| What could they do? | ||
| Well... | ||
| To give you an example, commercial interests are looking right now and the technology is there to mine asteroids. | ||
| We can go to asteroids if the commercial interest is high enough. | ||
| We can go to them, we can mine them, we can extract minerals, we can bring them back to the Earth. | ||
| The same technology would allow you to move asteroids or comet fragments. | ||
| You don't want to blow them up with a nuke. | ||
| That would be a really bad idea. | ||
| That would turn... | ||
| One large object into multiple smaller objects which could cause equally massive devastation and would be very difficult to predict where that devastation was going to fall. | ||
| What you want to do is to nudge them and move them out of a dangerous orbit into a less dangerous orbit and the evidence is in the next 30 years we are going to be passing through dangerous filaments of the torrid meteor stream and if we were smart... | ||
| We would be devoting some resources to protecting our cosmic environment. | ||
| Just as there are many issues that we need to devote resources to, unfortunately, the one that's most attractive to our politicians at the moment is warfare. | ||
| We devote limitless resources. | ||
| to technologies of mass destruction. | ||
| There really is no end to the amount that we're prepared to spend on that in terms of our so-called security. | ||
| We feel somehow we're making ourselves more secure by having these incredible weapons and spending trillions of dollars on them. | ||
| But the cosmos doesn't give a fuck about any of that. | ||
| The cosmos is out there with these giant objects which have a far greater explosive power than all the nuclear... | ||
| Weapons stored on Earth at the present time. | ||
| The Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jupiter in 1994, had a total calculated explosive power of 300 gigatons. | ||
| If you took the entire nuclear arsenal of the world today and blew it all up at once, it would yield 6.4 gigatons. | ||
| So these objects are producing catastrophic results on a scale that far beyond anything that we ourselves could do with nuclear weapons. | ||
| It's time we spent a bit less time and money on weapons of mass destruction and a bit more on looking after this beautiful garden that we call the earth and that is our home and it will be the home of our children and our children's children. | ||
| I'm a grandfather now. | ||
| I feel passionately about this. | ||
| We need to look after this planet. | ||
| It's our responsibility as a human species to do so. | ||
| And one of the challenges – it's not the only challenge. | ||
| There are many, many other challenges. | ||
| One of the challenges is to pay attention to our cosmic environment and to realize that the cosmos can intervene. | ||
| Cataclysmically in the human story and that the torrid meteor stream in particular may have been a hidden hand in human history, that there may have been other impacts in the last 13,000 years that have affected and changed the course of humanity on this earth. | ||
| And the ancients were very good at paying attention to the sky. | ||
| We ourselves have amazing tech to study the sky but for some reason we're ignoring this problem of cosmic impacts and that's incredibly irresponsible because as I said a moment ago, it is a solvable problem. | ||
| It is within the limits of our technology. | ||
| It would require a global cooperative effort to sweep our cosmic environment clean but it could be done and a side product of that global cooperation might be a friendlier, more nurturing, more loving, more positive human community. | ||
| It is very odd that we have this infantile nature, even as grown adults and world leaders, that we do like to ignore imminent danger, as long as it hasn't affected us in the past. | ||
| There's no real moment we can point to other than Tunguska. | ||
| In, you know, photographic history, modern history, where you could take pictures of things, where we had a giant impact. | ||
| If I can pause you on that very point, the evidence is compelling that the Tunguska event was an object that fell out of the Taurid meteor stream. | ||
| That happened at the peak of the Beta Taurids in June 1908. It is extremely likely that that Tunguska object came from the Taurid meteor stream, because we were passing through the Taurid meteor stream at exactly that time. | ||
| And the Tunguska object is estimated to be between 60 and 190 meters in diameter. | ||
| So it's not a very big object. | ||
| It's not a kilometer scale object. | ||
| It's big, but it's not that big. | ||
| It doesn't even hit the earth. | ||
| It's an airburst. | ||
| It explodes in the sky. | ||
| Above, fortunately, an inhabited area of Siberia. | ||
| But the devastation is huge. | ||
| It wasn't even noticed for some years afterwards until scientific teams went in and studied the area and discovered that 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometers had been completely flattened by that airburst. | ||
| And to put that in context, 2,000 square kilometers is the size of London. | ||
| So anybody who knows London is aware that there's a ring road around London called the M25. | ||
| If that airburst had taken place over central London, everything of London out as far as the M25 would have been gone completely. | ||
| Is that what it looks like today? - Okay. - Pretty close. | ||
| It says like 100 years later, there's still no trees. | ||
| And if you look above there, you're looking at the black and whites that were taken in the early 1900s, which revealed the extent of this damage. | ||
| So it's just stupid of us not to pay a bit more attention to this, especially when we have the tech to actually do something about it. | ||
| We have that... | ||
| There's a curious denial. | ||
| There's a denial of the role of cataclysms in the human story. | ||
| And there is even a word for that in science, and it's called uniformitarianism. | ||
| And this is a particular philosophy of science where the view is that Everything as we see it in the world today is how things have always been. | ||
| So if we don't see cataclysms today and they're not playing a major part in our story today, then there weren't cataclysms and they didn't play a major part in our story in the past. | ||
| That's why, although it's before the time of human beings, when the evidence that the dinosaurs were made extinct by a comet or an asteroid, First came out, Lewis and Walter Alvarez, the father-son team who were behind that science, were ridiculed by their colleagues and they were told it's absolutely absurd. | ||
| Of course, no cosmic event could have made the dinosaurs extinct. | ||
| They spent 10 years taking that ridicule until they found the crater in the Gulf of Mexico. | ||
| Since then, the whole scientific community has accepted that the course of life on this planet was radically changed by a cosmic impact. | ||
| And, you know, I like to joke about it, but it was a cosmic impact that was big enough literally to turn dinosaurs into chickens because that's what's left of the dinosaur line is, you know, the birds. | ||
| And at the same time, skulking in those primeval forests is this little mammal that. | ||
| And it looks a bit like a shrew. | ||
| 65 million years ago. | ||
| Going nowhere. | ||
| The dinosaurs rule the earth. | ||
| Then the cosmos intervenes. | ||
| The dinosaurs are swept out of the way. | ||
| And what happens? | ||
| The mammals start to evolve very rapidly. | ||
| And they start to occupy niches that were previously closed to them. | ||
| And the bottom line is, we would not be here. | ||
| The human species would not be here. | ||
| We would not be having this conversation if the dinosaurs had not been made extinct. | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| it is there any evidence that there was other species of human beings that existed in the americas like we're finding in russia and there's many of them that are being discovered all over the world now these subspecies of human beings yeah um This is an issue that I go into in America before. | ||
| And what first drew me into it was Denisova Cave in Siberia. | ||
| I think everybody's heard of the Neanderthals. | ||
| And these days, I think everybody's heard of the Denisovans as well. | ||
| A lot of people haven't. | ||
| Well, I guess a lot of people haven't. | ||
| But first of all, let's take the Neanderthals. | ||
| For a long time it was held that the Neanderthals were stupid, primitive subhumans, shambling, lacking symbolism. | ||
| Turns out that that's not true at all. | ||
| The latest scientific evidence on the Neanderthals is that they were symbolic creatures, that they did do art, that they were, in every sense, human. | ||
| And they were, in every sense, human because anatomically modern humans interbred with Neanderthals. | ||
| You can't interbreed with another species. | ||
| They clearly were human beings, but they looked rather different from us. | ||
| And that's why certain populations in the world today still have 3 to 5% of Neanderthal DNA. | ||
| Then in Russia, in Denisovacave, they find a single pinky bone from a little finger. | ||
| And they do the DNA testing on it. | ||
| They're able to get a complete genome from it. | ||
| And what they discover is this isn't a Neanderthal. | ||
| This isn't an anatomically modern human being. | ||
| This is another human species who they named the Denisovans. | ||
| They think they're more closely related to Neanderthals than they are to anatomically modern humans. | ||
| But they're clearly another human species. | ||
| And they also interbred with anatomically modern humans. | ||
| And Denisovan DNA survives, interestingly enough. | ||
| It survives predominantly in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea and amongst Australian aborigines. | ||
| So as part of the research for this book, I went to Denisovan cave recently. | ||
| I had an amazing, actually just incredible trip to Russia. | ||
| I hadn't expected it to be like that at all. | ||
| Siberia. | ||
| I mean, America is vast, but my God, crossing Siberia, this is endless rolling plains, you know, this just vast area. | ||
| How did you cross it? | ||
| I took a car. | ||
| You can't travel independently in Russia. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| You have to get permission, and you have to state in advance where you're going to be stopping off at. | ||
| So what I found, and I just did so through the internet, was a local guy called Sergei Kurgin, who had a little tour business in Siberia, in the city of Novosibirsk. | ||
| I got in touch with him. | ||
| He found a translator who would translate my emails and I said, we want to make this journey to Denisova Cave. | ||
| And can you set this up for us and get all the permissions? | ||
| And he did. | ||
| And so we flew into Novosibirsk. | ||
| Sergei and his translator, who turned out to be a Russian student who spoke good English. | ||
| How long did it take? | ||
| Oh, it took us three days to get to Denisova Cave. | ||
| Of driving every day? | ||
| Three days of driving every day. | ||
| Some stopping off along the way. | ||
| Incredible hospitality of the Russians that we were amongst. | ||
| Very independent people. | ||
| People who are living out there in the wilderness and who actually do know how to survive. | ||
| It's the first time I've ever drunk milk fresh from the cow. | ||
| Literally milked right out of the cow and poured down my throat. | ||
| How was it? | ||
| It was delicious! | ||
| And the cream! | ||
| I mean, thick, thick cream. | ||
| So there was a lot of things about Russia that surprised me. | ||
| Denisova Cave is a fascinating, beautiful place to visit. | ||
| It's another example of a missing chapter in the human story that is beginning to be pieced together. | ||
| It's obvious now that we were not alone, that there were multiple other human species who were human enough to interbreed with us and leave DNA. And this Denisovan species was only discovered in like, was it 2000-something? | ||
| Very recently, the 2000s. | ||
| It's a very recent discovery. | ||
| Did they leave behind art? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm? | |
| Did they leave behind art? | ||
| Better than that. | ||
| They left behind certain physical objects which are extremely hard to explain. | ||
| One of them is a green stone bracelet that And that bracelet is in the form of a torque, which was therefore slipped on sideways onto the hand. | ||
| It's not a full ring. | ||
| And a hole has been drilled through the bracelet. | ||
| And from that hole, it's been possible to reconstruct that a pendant was hung. | ||
| Then the archaeologists started to take a look in detail at the drill marks on that hole, and what they discovered was a huge anomaly, that that was drilled with a stable fixed drill, and it was drilled at extremely high speed. | ||
| This is thought to be 40,000 or 50,000 years old. | ||
| There is not supposed to have been any such technology in that period that was capable of drilling with a stable fixed drill. | ||
| And yet, there it is. | ||
| And there it appears. | ||
| So there are also incredible, very fine needles, bone needles that the Denisovans made, very long ones, which suggest that they were stitching very heavy stuff together. | ||
| And the suggestion has been, were they making skin boats, for example, to use to navigate? | ||
| That would explain how they managed to get themselves to Australia, which is where the largest amount of Denisovan DNA is. | ||
| There's one of those needles. | ||
| So there are indications of strangely out of place technology amongst the Denisovans, which is 20-30,000 years earlier in the human story than it should be. | ||
| Those kind of needles, that kind of bracelet, you could expect to find them in what archaeologists call the Neolithic, but to find it in the Paleolithic is very puzzling and very odd, and it suggests that the Denisovans We're certainly not shambling subhumans. | ||
| They were refined creatures. | ||
| Can you find out what year they discovered the Denisovans? | ||
| Jamie, can you Google that real quick? | ||
| I want to say it's in the 2000s, but I mean, imagine that human beings have been around for this long, here we are in 2019 and within the last decade or so, they figured this out. | ||
| Yeah, we're discovering new stuff about ourselves. | ||
| We're discovering that our story is much richer, much more textured, much more layered than we thought it was. | ||
| It's not a simple story. | ||
| It's a very complicated story and we ourselves We are a hybrid species. | ||
| We are the result of interactions with all kinds of different-looking human beings, and the end result is ourselves. | ||
| So it's not just that we carry Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. In a sense, we are Neanderthals and Denisovans. | ||
| They are part of the anatomically modern human heritage. | ||
| You make a good point. | ||
| The fact that this is only being discovered now, and that it's an incredibly important, I mean, it completely rewrites the story of our ancestry. | ||
| The notion, the notion... | ||
| That was the 1970s. | ||
| 1970s. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I'm way off. | ||
| The real work that's been done in Denisova Cave has been done in the 2000s, from 2006, 2007 onwards. | ||
| Genetic examination. | ||
| That's when the major papers have been published. | ||
| 2008, there it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which have revealed the genome of the Denisovans and revealed the Denisovan connection to anatomically modern humans. | ||
| The fact that we're only finding this out now, that we told the story of our past and weren't aware of this, raises the question how much else in the story of our past is there that we're not aware of? | ||
| Let's stop being so arrogant, so sure of ourselves, so confident in our findings. | ||
| Let's be more tentative. | ||
| Let's keep an open mind and see where it takes us. | ||
| That's the main message that I have from all of this. | ||
| And I think and I hope that this will be an effect of this book. | ||
| I'm not kidding myself that the archaeologists are going to jump on board overnight, particularly so since I'm very critical of American archaeology in this book. | ||
| And I'm critical of it specifically and explicitly because of the dominance of the Clovis first model for so long, which prevented the I have to say, archaeologists like to insult me by calling me a pseudoscientist. | ||
| I can't think of anything more pseudoscientific than the Clovis First Doctrine, which locked American archaeology for 50 years in a particular framework, which we now know was totally wrong. | ||
| Nothing good about it at all. | ||
| A complete mistake. | ||
| What I'm hoping the book will do in the long run is that it will lead to more attention being focused on the Americas. | ||
| This is a very neglected area of the world as far as deep and ancient archaeology goes. | ||
| The recent history of the Americas has been relatively well studied, but the deep and ancient history has not been well studied. | ||
| And I think America is going to contain revelations for us about our story and about our past. | ||
| And I'm serious when I suggest that America is the most plausible and the most likely home base for a lost civilization, if you're going to propose a lost civilization. | ||
| There are certain preconditions. | ||
| You can't have it on a small island. | ||
| There's got to be a large landmass with enormous resources and the ability for population to grow and for those resources to be mobilized. | ||
| And what I suddenly realized, you asked earlier why I started to write this book at all, is what the new evidence is pointing to is that the Americas have been wrongly neglected. | ||
| That here we have a giant continental landmass with extraordinary resources that has just been ruled out of the story of human civilization. | ||
| But once we take account of the fact that there was a giant cataclysm over North America 12,800 years ago, once we start looking, as I do in America before, at the incredible deep in-depth similarities between, for example, | ||
| the religious system of ancient Egypt and the religious system of the Mississippi Valley, Then you realize that you're into a global mystery here and that the answer to that mystery may not at all be in the old world and may very much be in the Americas. | ||
| See, it's odd. | ||
| I mentioned Moundville earlier on. | ||
| It's kind of odd that we should find what is essentially the ancient Egyptian religion. | ||
| Manifesting in the symbolism of Moundville, the ascent to Orion, the transit to the Milky Way, the journey along the Milky Way. | ||
| These are very specific and idiosyncratic ideas. | ||
| And what makes it doubly odd is Moundville isn't that old. | ||
| Moundville as a site is about a thousand years old. | ||
| Ancient Egypt had already been gone completely from the world. | ||
| For at least 600 years before Moundville was created. | ||
| The end of ancient Egypt, there's Moundville. | ||
| And what we're looking at in the foreground is Mound B and we're looking at Mound A in the distance. | ||
| And a complete circle of mounds. | ||
| What is odd about it is we find this system of ancient Egyptian ideas in Mounville 500 years after ancient Egypt has gone from the world. | ||
| The Romans were the end of ancient Egypt. | ||
| By 400 A.D., ancient Egypt is gone. | ||
| Mounville doesn't even exist then, but 600 years later it is created and it manifests the entire set of ancient Egyptian ideas. | ||
| Clearly it did not get that as a result of direct transmission from ancient Egypt unless they were time travelers. | ||
| The only way I think it could have got it is as a result of a legacy passed down from a much earlier civilization that had been influenced and affected many different parts of the world. | ||
| And the characteristics of that civilization, the shamanistic heart of it, the use of altered states of consciousness, the focus on those, are amongst the reasons that I would suggest that America is the place that we should be looking. | ||
| And the big mysteries are in the areas that were so devastated at the end of the last ice age, up in the north of North America, the channeled scab lands in particular. | ||
| And then the Mississippi Valley, the whole story of the Mississippi Valley. | ||
| Yes, Moundville is a thousand years old, but then you can go back to Poverty Point in Louisiana, which is 2,700 years old. | ||
| You can go to Watson Break in Louisiana, which is 5,500 years old. | ||
| You can go to sites like Conley, which are 8,000 years old. | ||
| The system keeps on going back and disappearing back into time. | ||
| And I think the most fruitful new work on exploring the origins of civilization is going to occur counter-intuitively. | ||
| In the Americas, the very last place on earth that archaeologists have ever thought to look. | ||
| What do mainstream archaeologists, what do they think caused those drill marks in the Denisovan bracelets? | ||
| I've not really explained it. | ||
| The Russian archaeologists who published the report on that are themselves mystified by it, and they realize that it's dynamite. | ||
| It's an explosive discovery. | ||
| It's an out-of-place technology. | ||
| And so they're trying to explain how come fixed stable drilling, which we thought was... | ||
| Introduced first in the Neolithic maybe 7,000, 8,000 years ago. | ||
| How come that is now found in a site that's 40,000 or 50,000 years old? | ||
| That's how old those bracelets are? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Those bracelets are 40,000 years old? | ||
| They may have been older. | ||
| There's recent research suggesting that they may go back 65,000 to 70,000 years. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| They're extremely ancient, and therefore they're incorporating an out-of-place technology, which doesn't fit with the timeline of history that we've been— I didn't realize how out-of-place it was. | ||
| Very, very out of place. | ||
| Very, very, very odd feature that we have here. | ||
| So what this says to me is that we as a species, and I guess this is kind of my pet phrase, we are a species with amnesia. | ||
| It's my favorite phrase of yours. | ||
| We have forgotten so much more about ourselves than we remember. | ||
| And what the process of history and archaeology should really be about is a process of We shouldn't be imposing our ideas of what we should have been on the past. | ||
| We should allow the past to speak for itself. | ||
| And when it does so, it speaks eloquently. | ||
| One of the sites that we visited and explored for America before was Serpent Mound in Ohio. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever been there, Jamie. | ||
| No, I've heard of it, though. | ||
| It is an amazing... | ||
| Jamie's from Ohio. | ||
| You ever be there? | ||
| Yeah, Jamie and I were talking about it earlier. | ||
| There's Serpent Mound. | ||
| There's an aerial view of Serpent Mound. | ||
| Oh, that is crazy. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
|
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That's beautiful. | |
| You see the head end of Serpent Mound there? | ||
| So, Santa and I went there at the summer solstice in 2017. We were there on June 21st, 2017. And my wife, Santa, is a photographer and we acquired a drone for this specific purpose. | ||
| And she flew the drone up 400 feet above Serpent Mound and we sat it up there watching the sun set. | ||
| And what happens on the summer solstice, and you can only see it perfectly with a drone. | ||
| There's pictures of it in the book here. | ||
| What happens on the summer solstice? | ||
| You can see it from ground level, but you get up 400 feet, you really get it. | ||
| The head of that serpent is pointing directly at a niche in the distant hills through which the sun sets. | ||
| On the summer solstice, on the longest day of the year. | ||
| So it's a sky-ground alignment, a perfection that is taking place there. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing to see, to watch that sun majestically sinking down into the horizon and see this awesome figure of the serpent gazing directly at it with its jaws open, almost as though it's about to swallow the sun. | ||
| And then we remember that there are other sites around the world which are also aligned to key moments of the solar year, aligned to the winter solstice, for example, the Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt. | ||
| That kilometer-long axis targets exactly the rising point of the sun on the winter solstice. | ||
| One of the interesting things about Serpent Mound, and I urge anybody listening to this, go visit Serpent Mound and especially go there on the summer solstice because that's the moment, that's the marriage of heaven and earth. | ||
| That's when sky and ground unite in majesty at that place. | ||
| But one of the mysteries of Serpent Mound concerns how old is this mound really? | ||
| How far back does it go? | ||
| And there have been arguments that there are a group of archaeologists who would like it to be just a thousand years old, and they attribute it to a culture called the Fort Ancient Culture. | ||
| There's another group of archaeologists, in my view, who've done much more thorough work, who attribute it to the Adina culture. | ||
| The thing about which goes back to 2,300 years ago or so, there's evidence for an earlier construction enterprise. | ||
| It looks like the site has been continuously reconstructed and remodeled, as we would do with any sacred site. | ||
| If it begins to wear down, you remodel it. | ||
| And then you get later organic material being introduced to the site that may give you the impression that the site is only that old. | ||
| What's intriguing about Serpent Mound is it stands on a natural ridge. | ||
| And that natural ridge, and this is entirely an accident of heaven and earth, that natural ridge, the head end of it, if you like, is naturally oriented to the summer solstice sunset. | ||
| Somebody, a long time ago, noticed that natural orientation, and they decided to monumentalize it. | ||
| Here was a place where Earth whispered to sky. | ||
| The Earth, in her own nature, looked directly at the place on the horizon where the sun was setting. | ||
| This was a highly significant place. | ||
| This place mattered. | ||
| So they then created Serpent Mound on top of it. | ||
| They memorialized it. | ||
| They turned it into a special, special place that human beings had had a hand in making to honor the marriage of heaven and earth. | ||
| And what I found researching this book is that Serpent Mound is not alone in that respect. | ||
| A lot of people are puzzled by Stonehenge in England. | ||
| Stonehenge is built on Salisbury Plain, and there are two kinds of big megaliths at Stonehenge. | ||
| One of them are called sarsens, and the other are called the bluestones. | ||
| The bluestones, we know for sure, were brought a long way. | ||
| They were brought from Wales to Stonehenge, a distance of about 150 miles. | ||
| The sarsens are found in abundance on a place called the Marlborough Downs, which is about 20 miles from Stonehenge. | ||
| But until very recently, it was thought there were no sarsens on Salisbury Plain at all. | ||
| And archaeologists couldn't understand why Stonehenge wasn't built on the Marlborough Downs, where the big sarsen stones, the 20 to 30 ton megaliths, were available locally and didn't have to be brought there. | ||
| Very recent research, 2018 research, has provided the answer that two of those sarsens were naturally in position all the time at Stonehenge, and they are Sarsenstone 16 and the Heelstone. | ||
| And if you stand behind Sarsenstone 16 and look at the Heelstone at dawn on the summer solstice, you see the sun rising in direct alignment with the view, and the Heelstone is like the sight on the barrel of a rifle targeting the sun, and that was there naturally. | ||
| Earth was speaking to sky. | ||
| The ancients saw that. | ||
| They decided this was sacred. | ||
| They went to huge lengths to bring the sarsens, the rest of the sarsens, from the Marlborough Downs to create the big stone circle at Stonehenge and then to put the blue stones inside it. | ||
| But initially, what they were celebrating was a natural union of heaven and earth. | ||
| And that brings us to the notion of as above earth. | ||
| So below, that we are connected to the cosmos, that it is part of our heritage. | ||
| We in modern cities forget the cosmos exists. | ||
| We have all kinds of tech that can look at astronomy, astronomy programs. | ||
| We can all do that, but actually looking at the stars is something that's very difficult for people who live in cities to do. | ||
| We're cut off from the cosmos. | ||
| We're cut off from the notion that it is sacred, that it matters to the human creature. | ||
| And what the ancients seem to have done is to realize how vital that connection is and to memorialize it and to celebrate it and to draw our attention to the intimate connection between ground and sky. | ||
| Yeah, light pollution sort of fuels our infantile existence in a lot of ways, right? | ||
| Because it doesn't constantly remind us that we're a part of this great thing. | ||
| Yeah, light pollution is a huge factor. | ||
| It's very easy to forget that we live in a universe. | ||
| Very easy to forget that. | ||
| Very easy to believe that it's just about these cities that we live in and the intimate concerns of our lives. | ||
| Of our daily lives. | ||
| But in fact, we're part of something much, much bigger. | ||
| And my God, I mean, it's a mystery enough to be born a human being at all. | ||
| Just to be alive is an extraordinary mystery. | ||
| To have the ability to love. | ||
| To feel emotions, to understand beauty, to be moved by a symphony. | ||
| All of these things we take for granted, but actually they're deeply mysterious. | ||
| We don't really know. | ||
| What we are or who we are. | ||
| Which is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Rick Strassman's work. | ||
| You presented his film, DMT, The Spirit Molecule. | ||
| And on my upcoming speaking tour, I'm going to be doing an event with Rick on the 14th or 15th of May in Sedona. | ||
| I think it'll be the first time that Rick has spoken publicly for quite a while. | ||
| Rick has a colleague called Andrew Gallimore. | ||
| Who teaches at the University of Okinawa in Japan and Rick and Andrew have together developed a technology for releasing DMT into human volunteers in a very slow drip that will keep them in the DMT state, if they wish, for hours on end. | ||
| And the intention is to use this technology to explore and map the DMT realm. | ||
| When do I sign up? | ||
| As soon as possible. | ||
|
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Where do I go? | |
| It's very close. | ||
| Because Imperial College, it looks like Imperial College London is going to deploy this technology in further research into DMT. | ||
| And that that research is not going to be purely and simply into the therapeutic potential of a psychedelic, which is very important research to do. | ||
| It's going to be an investigation into the nature of reality using a psychedelic, the mysterious nature of reality. | ||
| And it is odd. | ||
| And you know this from personal experience that when you get plunged into that DMT realm, it is so different from the realm of our daily daily world filled filled with geometry filled with these sprightly intelligences, completely internally coherent. | ||
| How can that be generated by the brain or are we dealing with some other level of reality that we haven't encountered yet? | ||
| I think that ancient cultures, and in particular my lost civilization, were deeply involved in exploring the mysterious nature of reality and used the plant medicines as part of that process. | ||
| When it comes to the serpent mound, where the head points in the summer solstice, does that take into account the procession of the equinoxes in terms of like trying to… The position of the summer solstice sun on the horizon is not affected by the procession. | ||
| However, it is affected by another factor, which is a slight nod on the axis of the earth. | ||
| A nod, but not a wobble? | ||
| Not a wobble. | ||
| What is the nod? | ||
| A nod, and it's called mutation. | ||
| And the axis of the Earth nods back and forward over a cycle of about 41,000 years. | ||
| And that does adjust the position of sunrise on the horizon over a very long period of time. | ||
| And it would in theory, if this idea can be taken seriously enough, it would in theory be possible to use very precise observations using the latest modern tech, not simply being up there in a drone and seeing the general connection between the position of the sun on the horizon and the head of Serpent Mound. | ||
| It would be possible to refine that and actually say astronomically the precise date on which Serpent Mound must have been first created to precisely target the rising sun on the equinox. | ||
| On that note, we just did three hours. | ||
| Did we? | ||
| Flew by! | ||
| I would ask your listeners and viewers, while we're talking about Ohio, don't forget about Newark and High Bank. | ||
| What are those? | ||
| These are two incredible, amazing, absolutely stunning, gorgeous geometrical sites. | ||
| It's sad, but one of them is preserved within a private golf course. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| However, it's not so sad, because if it hadn't been preserved within a private golf course, it would be gone completely. | ||
| More than 90% of the Native American earthworks that were documented in the 19th century are gone now. | ||
| They've been plowed under for agriculture. | ||
| That's another part of our missing story. | ||
| There we're looking at Newark. | ||
| See that octagon and circle combination? | ||
| That's repeated at another site called High Bank, which is 60 miles away. | ||
| And the octagon circle… Go back to that, Jamie. | ||
| Give me a large image of that. | ||
| So is this an overlay, or is that what it actually looks like? | ||
| That's what it actually looks like. | ||
| To this day? | ||
| That's a graphic based on it. | ||
| Well, the octagon circle combination in the top left of the image are best preserved. | ||
| The other bits are not so well preserved. | ||
| And the reason the octagon circle are best preserved is because they're in a private golf club. | ||
| Otherwise, they would have been plowed under. | ||
| The interesting thing is that that octagon circle combination is 60 miles from High Bank, but there's another octagon circle combination there, and it is oriented at precisely 90 degrees to that one. | ||
| That speaks of high science in the Mississippi Valley a very, very, very long time ago. | ||
| There's so much to explore and so much to investigate and so much to inquire into in America. | ||
| It's just an incredible land, and its mysteries have been hidden from us. | ||
| With this book that I have managed to pull the veil back a little bit on those mysteries. | ||
| And if we're really coming to the end of our – is it really three hours? | ||
| If we're really coming to the end of our three hours, can I repeat, I would love to see readers of my books at my events. | ||
| I'm doing three events in Canada, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. | ||
| And I'm doing something like 17 or 18 events in the United States. | ||
| I'm just speaking continuously right the way across the US. I wish I could visit every state in the US, but my goodness, this is an enormous country. | ||
| Every state in the US is as big as the entire British Isles, you know. | ||
| But I'm visiting as many as I am. | ||
| I'm going to be giving illustrated presentations. | ||
| I'll be signing books afterwards. | ||
| I'll be taking pictures. | ||
| I would like to meet my readers. | ||
| And please check out my website, grahamhancock.com. | ||
| Look at the Talks and Events page and you'll see where all these events are occurring over the next seven weeks. | ||
| We're on the 22nd of April today. | ||
| I will not leave North America until the 5th of June. | ||
| Well, I hope I see you again then. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Listen, thank you so much. | ||
| You're a treasure. | ||
| And this book, I can't wait to get into it. | ||
| America Before, and the audiobook is available now as well. | ||
| Yeah, the audiobook's available. | ||
| I read it. | ||
| Thank you so much, Graham. | ||
| It's always a pleasure having you here. | ||
| I really, really appreciate you. | ||
| Thanks for having me back on, Joe. | ||
| Graham Hancock, ladies and gentlemen. |
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