Graham Hancock challenges mainstream archaeology’s dismissal of ancient seafaring, flood myths, and advanced civilizations like the Dogon (30,000+ years) and pre-Atlantis Amazon cultures, citing submerged geoglyphs and LiDAR discoveries. He highlights Göbekli Tepe’s global iconography and the Younger Dryas cataclysm, contrasting with Robert Schock’s controversial Sphinx erosion theory (12,500-year-old water damage). Hancock argues lost civilizations may have mastered longitude, precessional cycles, and Orion alignments—knowledge Western science only rediscovered centuries later—while criticizing institutional resistance to alternative interpretations. Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 will expand on these mysteries in the Americas, with Hancock urging curiosity over dogma to prevent humanity’s self-destruction. [Automatically generated summary]
I watched episode one, and I'm into episode two of your new season.
Fantastic.
Looks fantastic.
Looks awesome.
Fantastic information.
But before we do anything, I think we should probably address what we know now about the debate that you had with Flint Dibble.
So that was the last time we were here.
I appreciate that he came on, and I thought it was going to be an interesting discussion, but It turned out he played fast and loose with the truth and distorted quite a bit of information that were some key points that you had discussed, one of them being the amount of shipwrecks that were discovered.
He greatly inflated the amount of shipwrecks that had been discovered.
You released a video today that went over a lot of this stuff.
And one of the things that went over is the oldest shipwreck that we are currently available.
But there's a more central point than that, which really needed to be brought up by the archaeologists in this, which is that archaeology universally accepts that human beings were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago.
And I put the evidence on this into the video.
It's not even in dispute.
Like the island of Cyprus.
The nearest Turkish coast is about 60 kilometers from there.
It's always been surrounded by huge deeps.
It's always been an island, even at the peak of the sea level, lowest sea level during the ice age.
Cyprus was always an island.
And yet there's evidence now that it was settled 14,000 years ago, certainly 14,000 to 12,500 years ago.
It was settled, in other words, during the ice age.
And these were large planned migrations.
When you're going to migrate to an island, you can't just go two or three people by accident because you'll become extinct.
You have to bring in quite a large population.
And they reckon that populations of a thousand or so were being brought across that water, across the ocean, across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus.
Near the end of the last ice age.
But not a single ship has survived to testify to that.
Same with Australia.
50,000 years ago human beings got there and even at the lowest sea level they would have had to cross about 90 kilometers of open water in large numbers.
And again, no ships have been found to testify to that, yet archaeologists accept that they got there by ship.
So to say that we haven't found any ships from the ice age is not really evidence about anything.
And if we're finding the oldest ships that we currently are aware of, which is, as you said, about 6,000 years ago, if you tack on another 6,000 years of decay on top of that, what are the odds you're going to find anything?
Another thing that was very fascinating that he discussed, I didn't watch your whole video, but it was about seeds.
I asked the question, there's a very distinct noticeable difference between domestic seeds and seeds that are wild.
And the difference is the seeds that are wild, they break off easier because it makes sense that it would help them prosper.
It would help them be able to spread the seed if it broke off the plant easier.
And so they can recognize that.
And then when...
When they start using large-scale agriculture, the seeds become more robust and stick to the plant because it makes sense that if you're going to harvest all of the plants and then take the seeds off of it, for the plant to prosper, you would want the seeds to be more robust.
So there's these changes.
Have they ever noticed a domesticated seed going back and having the characteristics of a wild seed?
I mean, to be honest, I felt beaten up after that debate.
But looking back in retrospect on the whole thing, I think it actually makes the point that we have a very arrogant, very controlling discipline in archaeology which has established a narrative about the past and which will fight tooth and nail to maintain that narrative.
I think instead of smearing people who talk about the possibility of a lost civilization or people who even talk about aliens, I think instead of smearing them, archaeology should understand why people are asking those questions.
People are asking those questions because they're not satisfied with what archaeology is offering.
It's not providing a nurturing, satisfying resolution to many of the problems that come from the past.
That's what drives me, is curiosity about anomalies in the past.
I'm often misrepresented as saying that somehow I've proved that a lost civilization existed, and I don't claim to have proved that.
What I do say is, join me on this journey.
There are mysteries in the past.
Let's see if they're explained by archaeology or if they're not explained.
And I found quite a number that are not explained by archaeology, and that's particularly to do with astronomical alignments with traditions that are shared all around the world.
It's to do with things that archaeologists by and large don't study.
Seriously though, if you're hooked on Call of Duty, this is your time to jump in.
Head over to CallOfDuty.com slash BlackOp6 to get in the game.
Call of Duty.
BlackOp6.
Pre-order now.
Well, it's also one of the things that's fascinating is just even with conventional archaeology, the dates keep getting pushed further and further back.
There's thousands of them and what's amazing when you actually see the footprints is you can see the interactions between the human beings and animals.
You can see that somebody is reacting to a giant sloth which has suddenly turned around and the person who's behind it suddenly turns around as well.
Mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints and then human footprints overlaying those.
And it goes down for meters under the ground.
So you have a very deep stratification of these impressions that have been left behind by our ancestors.
And by animals that are now completely extinct.
Mammoths and mastitons went extinct during the Younger Dryas, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings.
It's very intimate to see a footprint, to see those five toes, to see the heel mark.
To see sometimes a child walking beside a mother, that's there in the record as well.
It's quite something special.
And it opens the door.
Archaeology has been very reluctant to accept a much older peopling of the Americas than previously was held.
It was held for a long time, that it was about 13,000 years ago.
They've abandoned that now.
They did cling on tooth and nail for decades, but that's been abandoned.
It's accepted that human beings came here long before 13,000 years ago.
And White Sands is one of the places which provides just absolute definite irrefutable evidence of that, that they were here 23,000 years ago.
But we don't know yet how long before that they were here.
This is part of the problem.
I often remember a site called the Cerruti Mastodon site in San Diego.
I went to see it.
The exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum, and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Desmarais.
And they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there.
It was a butchering of a mastodon, but the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings.
It's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old.
And, you know, this opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they were in Europe.
That's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities which have been neglected.
I think that the prejudice that the Americas were only settled very late in the human story That led archaeology to not have their eye on the possibility of what happens if they were here earlier.
Well, what I was going to ask is as they're digging deeper and deeper and they're finding these footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, is there a possibility that they could dig deeper still and find things that are even older?
The first footprints were found completely by accident and they were found by indigenous local people who alerted the National Park Service to them.
And we have a number of indigenous spokespeople who speak to the White Sands Mystery and how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago.
The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind will reveal them again.
And they're fragile.
They can be easily destroyed and wiped off.
And in a way, it's a miracle that they've survived.
But to see the stride of a mammoth...
You see how far apart those huge footpads are.
And to realize this thing was alive.
This thing existed on this planet.
Human beings interacted with it.
It's very compelling evidence for an earlier settlement of the Americas.
And the way the evidence is looking, it's most likely that South America was settled first, before North America was settled.
And that raises all kinds of questions.
And we've gone into this in Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, primarily to do with the DNA evidence of a direct connection between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia.
And the peoples of certain tribes in South America, and that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America, but also to do with archaeological sites like Monte Verde.
I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillehay the last time we were on when Flint was here.
And Tom Dillehay, who found Monte Verde, who excavated Monte Verde in South America and realized that it was plus 14,000 years old and therefore a lot older, than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America.
When he put that idea forward, he was eviscerated by his colleagues in archaeology.
It took them a decade to come around to accepting that actually he was right.
There are many other sites in South America going back 30 plus thousand years.
They're all controversial because they conflict with an existing model.
But I think instead of clinging on to existing models, I think it's one of the problems with archaeology is this territoriality, this kind of control of the past.
I think instead of doing that, it would be nicer if archaeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to new and different ideas.
Unfortunately, that's just the thing when people are supposed experts in a subject and someone comes along that's also been studying it but from an untraditional perspective.
I've come to the point where I believe that some archaeologists, not all of them, most actually this problem is with a small number of archaeologists, but they're extremely vocal.
I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power.
Archaeologists have a power.
They are the official spokespeople for the past and they use that power to slap down any point of view that doesn't agree with theirs.
So I think that there's an abuse of power there and at the same time There's not a realization that that's happening because the mindset that drives it is the feeling that members of the general public are unable to decide things for themselves.
This is the arrogance of archaeology, that they feel that they have to tell people what to think about the past and they underestimate the intelligence of the public and the ability of the public to discern, to make choices between different possibilities about the past.
They think that Archaeologists seem to think that only one possibility of the past must be considered by the general public, and that's their possibility.
And it reminds me a lot of the heresy hunters back in the 16th century.
You know, the people who disagreed with their point of view got burned at the stake.
Well, you don't get burned at the stake today, but you can get lynched by a mob of archaeologists online.
When you take esteemed professors and doctors and physicians and you cast them into this kook label because they disagree with the narrative that the medical establishment is pushing and then they turn out to be correct, which most of them did.
You see the same patterns.
It's just power.
It's just power and people that have their identity wrapped up in them being the ones that have access to the actual information.
They don't want it to be distributed by some guy on Netflix.
It's part of this desperate search to say we archaeologists know everything and we must discredit in any way we can anybody who has anything opposite to say.
I would like the pilot of my plane to be an expert pilot.
I don't want him to be an amateur.
But I don't think that archaeologists and aircraft pilots can be compared in that sense.
Archaeology is a much more interpretive discipline.
An aircraft pilot is not really interpreting situations that much.
He knows what to do in such situations.
Archaeologists are interpreting the past and yet they seem to get very upset by other interpretations of the past that are offered that don't agree with theirs.
And this is the problem of expertise in our society.
Yes, expertise is very important.
It's incredibly useful.
But we should not place all our faith and trust in experts.
We need to liberate our own consciousness and freely think about things and make our own decisions about things and resist Resist absolutely being told what to think.
Well, the problem is these experts are human beings.
And human beings have very distinct behavior traits that they exhibit, especially when they're in a position of power and prestige.
And they like to hold that and it feels good for them to be the person that looks down upon the people that don't know better and tell them what to do and tell them what to think.
And when you're doing that with something like...
Look, if you're doing that with something like mathematics, and someone's a mathematical expert, math is a very specific and precise science.
These fascinating technologies like LIDAR, where you have the ability, ground-penetrating radar, all these different things where you can look into the soil itself and find things that aren't visible on the surface.
Well, that was part of our adventure with Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, was working with a really professional team in Brazil, led by an archaeologist, Marty Parsons, from the University of Helsinki, and a geographer from Brazil, Oseo Ranzi.
I'll say you, years ago, was the first person who noticed that there are these huge geometrical structures emerging out of the Amazon jungle, and he noticed it on a flight on a commercial aircraft in an area that happened to have been cleared by local farmers for planting crops, that there was this massive geometrical earthwork there.
And that – he actually coined the term geoglyphs for these because he compared them in some ways with the Nazca lines, which again are really only visible from the air.
You get suddenly the massive scope and extent of these things and it's same with the geoglyphs in the Amazon.
And here's the thing.
The ones we know about up till now, we largely know about them because of these tragic clearances of the Amazon rainforest, which is maybe a short-term economic gain but is a long-term really not a very good idea.
But now with LiDAR, it's possible to find these things without damaging any rainforest at all.
And we found – I say we, it was actually the LiDAR expert who found – You can see the edge of the rainforest where the clearances stop and the rainforest hasn't yet been interfered with.
And then he flies over there.
And within a matter of hours, he's found multiple more of these structures.
Millions, cities, a whole different way of life, a whole different kind of civilization from the one that we have today, one that lived in a man-made garden, which is what the Amazon really and truly is, and lived in harmony with that.
We've talked about that before but for people who've never heard those other podcasts, they've determined that the Amazon rainforest is at least partially man-made.
They've determined that because of the preponderance of trees that serve human needs.
They call them hyper-dominant and things like Brazil nut trees which are providing food for human beings are in massive dominance in relation to trees that aren't useful to human beings.
And it's clear that this is the result of a long-term human project to make this jungle serve human needs.
I'm forgetting all of the details, but there's a bunch of...
Food plants.
Food plants, which are hyper-dominant in the Amazon rainforest.
And these food plants show that human beings have been nurturing, have been massaging this natural wonder and turning it into something that really serves human needs.
And there's the other thing that you've discussed in depth, the terra preta.
This man-made, incredibly rich nutrient-dense soil that they can grow incredible agriculture off of that we really to this day don't know how they created.
But those cities were just consumed by the jungle.
And much like Detroit, if you go to Detroit now, you can see there's a bunch of neighborhoods in Detroit that are essentially abandoned and trees are growing right through the houses.
And the houses are...
I mean, that's just a few decades ago.
And the houses are almost gone in some ways.
If you went back 200 years ago, there'd probably be nothing left of them.
This is probably exactly what happened in the Amazon, except the trees just consume the landscape because it's such an incredible dense rainforest that things grow so quickly there.
I mean, before The Lost City of Z, we have this very interesting report.
I have mentioned it to you before in a previous episode.
The expedition of Gaspar de Carvajal and his chronicler Francisco de Oriana Which was an accidental expedition.
They were just going hunting in a longboat, but the Amazon took them and wouldn't let them go back.
And they traveled 4,000 miles across South America and ended up in the Pacific side and ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.
And that's in the 1550s, 1560s.
And they report seeing enormous, thriving, prosperous cities, highly civilized with advanced arts and crafts.
And they were not believed because a hundred years later when other Spaniards made that voyage and went into the Amazon they couldn't find the cities and the reason they couldn't find them is precisely the reason that you give which is that the jungle had eaten those cities because the human population had been wiped out by disease brought by the Spaniards.
The Spaniards didn't have to have direct contact with those indigenous peoples in the middle of the Amazon.
The diseases just jumped from population to population and just killed everybody.
It may well be a rumor, but from what I've looked at from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, there was a realization that we can kill these people with smallpox.
It's just so terrible when you read Cabeza de Vaca's story about visiting the Maya civilization and you realize, like, you guys fucking killed everybody.
And again, the moment we start talking about people's facial features, then they jump in with you're being a racist, you're being a white supremacist or whatever, although the Olmec heads don't serve white supremacism.
So what people are trying to do by blanking out swear words and cutting out different words is that you can bypass algorithms that selectively remove or limit the distribution of those kind of posts with those keywords in it.
I think it's very unfortunate that in serious and interesting discussions about the past, That this issue of race immediately gets dumped into it because those who are dumping race into the issue know that that's a way to shut down a conversation.
To put it into perspective, I always use this quote.
I forget who came up with this, but it's a perfect analogy.
Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the construction of the pyramids.
Even if you use the conventional 2500 BC dating of the construction of the pyramids, which is also under debate.
It's under debate.
Even if that's true, even if it is 2,500 years ago, the most baffling thing is how did they do it?
There's no simple answers.
I don't give a fuck what anybody says.
There's no simple answers.
How did they do it?
How did they have such incredible sophistication in their construction methods?
How did they get those massive 80-plus ton stones 500 miles down from the mountains with no equipment, no heavy machinery?
Whatever they did, I think it's reasonable to say that in a different way, I don't think they had iPhones, I don't think they had email, but they were probably more sophisticated than us today in their ability to manipulate stone and make constructions.
The Great Pyramid remains to me an abiding mystery, which despite probably a hundred or more visits to the Great Pyramid and being inside it and spending the night in it and exploring every passage in every chamber.
Including the so-called relieving chambers above the king's chamber.
I still can't figure it out.
I don't understand how it was possible to do this.
And then the time span which Egyptology gives us because Egyptology is fixed on the idea that the Great Pyramid is a tomb and only a tomb.
Because if it's the tomb of Khufu, then it had to be built in 23 years because that was his reign.
He would start, in theory, building it at the beginning of his reign and it's finished by the end of his reign.
That's 23 years.
And in the broader span, if you look at the fourth dynasty pyramids and even go back to the end of the third dynasty, the pyramid of Zoser, the step pyramid, you find that this is a sudden emergence of incredible skills which lasts for about 100 years.
And then it goes away.
It stops.
The pyramids that follow the Great Pyramid of Giza, the three pyramids on the Giza plateau, the pyramids that follow them, the fifth dynasty pyramids, are really poor.
They're very, very poor quality workmanship.
They're falling to pieces.
You can hardly recognize from the outside that they're a pyramid at all.
When you get inside, you do find wonderful chambers and you do find what you don't find in any of the Great Pyramids, which is huge numbers of hieroglyphs and accounts of the person who was supposedly buried in that pyramid.
A theory which deserves to be taken seriously along with other theories as to what it is.
One thing I know for sure is that the theory that it was just a tomb and nothing else is bust.
That is not a satisfactory theory anymore.
So we should be open to a number of possibilities.
And Chris comes to this from a background of machine tool making.
He's a very precise guy.
He's an engineer.
He understands this kind of thing.
And when he looks at particularly at Saqqara, you have this thing called the Serapium, which is an underground labyrinth.
And it's got wide corridors through it and then off each side are rooms.
And in each room are these gigantic basalt buildings.
There are boxes which appear to have held the corpses of bulls.
They're like sarcophagi for human beings, but they're on an enormous, gigantic scale, weighing hundreds of tons and cut out of the hardest possible rock, precisely engineered.
Everything is exact.
And it's that, amongst other things, that is attracting Chris's attention to the A lost technology in ancient Egypt.
And then he asked himself the question, well, what was the Great Pyramid if it wasn't a tomb?
What might it have been?
And he's come to the solution that it was some kind of energy generator, some kind of power plant.
Well, perhaps in some cases we are, but certainly in others, including those in the great museums in Cairo.
They've now moved a lot of the content of the Cairo Museum out to a big museum at Giza, and some of it's in transition, but they have thousands of these things.
We don't know what modern technology exists that you could take an incredibly hard piece of stone and cut it into this unbelievably precise little vase with handles on it and some bizarre method that we don't know and hollowed out the inside of it and some of them with very thin necks and then hollowed out inside.
But those like Chris Dunn who are studying the technology of ancient Egypt are confident that we're looking at the traces of a lost technology.
We don't know how this was done.
Like so much else in ancient Egypt, like we don't know how the 70-ton blocks were raised to become the roof of the king's chamber either.
There's so much that we don't know and that's not explained and that is easily written off by abusively arrogant experts who say there's no mystery here.
But one of the things about wheel is you have to ask yourself in what circumstances, in what places, in what conditions are wheels useful?
There are some conditions in which a wheel is not a useful thing and which is going to get bogged down in the sand and which is not going to be helpful.
So the use of sleds was certainly part of how ancient Egyptians moved huge stones and I don't dispute that.
The problem is how they then get those stones 300 feet in the air.
I think this is part of the problem where I've been perhaps misunderstood by Egyptologists when I talk about an advanced civilization.
I keep trying to emphasize...
That we shouldn't look for ourselves in the past.
That if we're going to go back 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 years into the past and talk about a civilization, it's not going to be like us.
It's going to be very different.
It's going to have different priorities, different ways of looking at things.
But one of the things that the ancient Egyptians had, which I'm not aware that any other civilization has had, is the ability to sustain essentially a single culture with a single purpose.
Set of spiritual ideas and to sustain that for 3000 years and to keep people happy and fed and well looked after.
You know, this is an amazing achievement, amazing stability when you look at it.
What our civilization, how old is it really?
Can we trace it back to the Romans?
Probably not.
Maybe 500 years, the beginning of mechanization and so on and so forth in our civilization.
I think this is an area where I often get criticized.
But I think when we look at a civilization and what it is and what it's achieving and why it's so special...
When we look at our civilization today, we are fantastic at technology.
We are brilliant at science.
We can make the best possible machines.
And we're a society that is built around production and consumption and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own and what they possess and what they produce.
And it becomes a very materialistic society, a society that's focused on material things where we define ourselves by our material possessions.
Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus.
Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary.
Their main thing was...
What are we here for?
Why are we living this life?
What happens to us when we die?
They investigated that mystery more deeply than any other culture that I know of.
And they were doing so right from the beginning of records.
unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it.
It's one of the things that we point out in season two is that the ancient Egyptian notion of a leap to the sky after death, to the Milky Way, of a journey along the Milky Way, of encountering challenges and dangers and risks there, monsters that would block your path, gates that you had to know of encountering challenges and dangers and risks there, monsters that would block your path, gates That idea is found all over the world, the path of souls.
Well, I think first of all it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea.
When it's found amongst cultures all around the world that apparently had no contact with one another and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death.
The only reasonable explanation I can come up with Is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source.
And that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization.
That these spiritual ideas are found all around the world.
And they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens.
Sometimes it's called an underworld but really it's set in the sky.
And this journey that takes place where you are judged on what you've done with your life...
This is something else that we avoid in the world today is taking responsibility for our own lives.
The ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life.
And if you did not do so, the outcome after death would not be good.
You had to You had to celebrate the gift of life.
You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given.
And one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom.
And that's one of the things, hopefully, that we all do as we get older, is get a bit more wisdom and a bit more understanding.
But in the case of ancient Egypt, That idea is developed over 3,000 years.
And it's essentially the same at the beginning as it is at the end.
That the soul – that death is not the end.
This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem.
That death is not the end.
We may think it is.
Scientists may tell us it is.
But when a scientist says death is the end, there's nothing more.
We're just physical bodies and when the light goes out, it goes out forever.
That's actually not a scientific fact.
That's not something that's been investigated or can be investigated.
They're very perplexing questions, which actually are of great significance to every one of us.
Yeah, I mean, suppose death just is the end.
Then that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives, for the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused, or for the joy that we may have caused.
If death's the end, there's no up or downside to that, whatever we do.
But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end.
And you have been given the precious gift of life.
What did you do with it?
And there are moral aspects to that question.
There's these 42 assessors.
They're called the negative assessors who ask the soul of the deceased questions about what they did in life.
And those are all moral questions.
They bear some relationship actually to the Ten Commandments.
But there's another question which is called the weighing of words and that question is what did you do with the gift we gave you?
We gave you the gift of the human life.
We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate at your choice.
We gave you the gift to live in a human body, to have this incredible consciousness, to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres.
What did you do with it?
Did you leave the world a better place?
Or a worse place than when you came into it?
Did you hurt and damage and cause pain to others?
Consistently, out of wicked intent, not accidentally, but deliberately causing pain.
And there are human beings who do that.
For the ancient Egyptians, that kind of behavior meant an introduction to Amit, the eater of the dead.
And Amit is displayed in the judgment scene.
He's a creature, part hyena, part lion.
And he sits there and certain souls do not go on.
Their journey ends and it ends because of the choices they made during life and because they never took responsibility for what they did.
If there's natural selection of humans and natural selection of animals that allows them to prosper and to get better and to evolve, it makes sense that that would happen with the soul as well.
I'm just so confused as to what the environment was like that allowed these people to keep this insane civilization developing and innovating for so long.
That they were so more advanced than anyone else that was alive back then that we're aware of, at least as far as like what we've uncovered, what they left behind.
And it's that attitude towards the past which I think would be more helpful, is that we have this mysterious...
We human beings, as you said earlier, anatomically modern humans, we think that they first appeared about 300,000 years ago.
Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, 310,000 years ago.
Now I can remember a time not so long ago, back in the 1990s, when it was thought that the first anatomically modern humans were as recent as 50,000 years ago.
And then they shifted it, new finds were made to 110,000 years ago, now 310,000 years ago.
We don't really know how far into the past that goes.
And we don't know about the Neanderthals and the Denisovans who were also human beings.
Certainly they were human, the same species as us because they could interbreed with us.
You can't breed with another species.
And that takes the journey back even further and that's one of the reasons why I have a problem with the notion that civilization just emerges 6,000 years ago because we had the same kit, the same wiring, the same brains for at least 300,000 years and we weren't doing any of this stuff apparently.
This is one of the reasons why I kept on trying to talk about the Sahara during the debate.
This vast area, which frankly has not been studied properly by archaeology at all, hardly a fraction of it has been studied.
This vast area I'm often accused of creating what they call a God of the gaps argument.
I'm saying you haven't looked enough in the Sahara.
You haven't looked enough in the submerged continental shelves.
You haven't looked enough in the Amazon rainforest.
And the argument is that I'm trying to put my lost civilization into these gaps.
But these are very special gaps.
The submerged continental shelves were...
Prime real estate during the Ice Age.
That was the place to be, just as it is today, to be near coastlines.
The Amazon rainforest was a bountiful place, and the Sahara Desert was green and rich for thousands of years during the Ice Age, with lakes, with rivers.
It was the kind of place where a civilization might well have emerged.
So anybody who doesn't think there's a mystery in the Sahara Desert, and anybody who really tries to dismiss the notion that most of it hasn't been really excavated, but it really hasn't been.
Nobody knows, because it's not been investigated properly.
It's a desert, and it's had relatively little attention.
We do know there's some amazing rock art from the Upper Paleolithic in Tassili, in Algeria, in the Sahara.
But not enough has been done.
This is the problem for me with saying archaeology has basically got the story of the human past nailed down, is that there's huge areas which have not been investigated.
And I reject the idea that that is a god of the gaps argument because that's not why I'm proposing there was a lost civilization.
And that's all I'm doing.
I'm not insisting.
I'm not demanding that people believe me.
I just want to inject this idea into the discussion so that it can be considered.
Taken out of context was a little clip where you asked me during the debate, is there any evidence for your lost civilization in what they've found?
And I said, in what they've found, no.
And then I went on to say, but that brings us to the point of what they've looked for and what they've not looked for, what they've found and what they've not found.
That has been taken again and again as me saying that there's no evidence for my lost civilization.
Whereas what I'm actually saying is there's no evidence in what archaeologists have studied for a lost civilization because I'm not studying what archaeologists study.
I am very happy to use material from archaeologists, and I could not do what I do if I didn't use material from archaeologists.
It's a very important basis to my work.
However, it's the astronomy.
It's the astronomical alignment.
It's the precision.
It's the precision of the Great Pyramid.
It's the myths of a global flood.
All around the world.
It's a universal story of a massive cataclysm with a few survivors who bring their knowledge to others.
This story, this is one of the reasons why I think the Atlantis story, which Flint-Dibble is so opposed to, deserves to be taken seriously.
Because it's part of a global tradition.
It's yet another flood myth, in fact.
It's the story.
It's just like those 150 or 200 other flood traditions that come from around the world.
And it's not enough for archaeologists to say, oh, people experienced a little local river flood or there was a tidal wave that day.
And so they decided that the whole world was submerged with water.
That doesn't satisfy me at all.
The fact that this is found all around the world, to me, is a memory of something that happened to our ancestors, something so traumatic, something so huge that it's been preserved better than almost anything else from our past.
I think the myths are the memory banks of our species, and I don't think archaeology takes them seriously enough.
There's a tendency to just dismiss them as fantasies, as things that were made up by the ancients for some bizarre reason of their own.
But they're the memories we have from the time before writing, from the time before documents were kept.
And they're a precious resource in understanding our past.
So it's things like that.
And then at the end of the day, to say – to twist what I said, that in what archaeologists have studied, there's no evidence from my lost civilization, is completely wrong.
Because I've written thousands of pages of books.
This is one of the issues.
Like in that debate, I was supposed to prove everything about a lost civilization.
I didn't even come here to prove it.
I came here to explain why I'm interested in it and why I want to share my interest and my curiosity about the past with others.
But if I'm asked to prove it, I would say don't refer to what I managed to say during a three hour debate.
I'd say refer to the eight or so major books that I've written with thousands of pages and thousands of documented footnotes.
That's where my argument is in place.
And you'll find that that argument is not based on what archaeologists have studied.
It's based precisely on what they've not studied about the past.
Well, regardless of the argument that Flint tried to put forth, that there's no evidence of what you're saying, the exaggeration of the shipwrecks, the stuff about seeds, the fact is this resonates with a lot of people.
This mystery is perplexing, it's confusing, and there's a lot of it out there.
When I look at that photograph, to me, that is a man-made structure.
But I realize now, in the environment in which I live, surrounded by archaeologists who are extremely hostile to my work, that it's not in my interest to leap to a conclusion about anything before I've studied it.
And I do intend to go to Sage Wall.
I was yesterday with Michael Collins, who's the guy who's done a lot of the videography on Sage Wall.
He doesn't know whether it's natural or man-made either.
More work needs to be done.
But it's an intriguing issue.
And it may be part of the lost history of the Americas.
There's so much that's been lost, particularly in North America, with the massive destruction that took place during the 19th and 18th and early 20th century.
It's reckoned that there were a million mound sites in North America.
If you go back to 1500, there's about 100,000 left, which is a lot actually.
But most of them are massively destroyed and the other 900,000 have gone, just plowed under, turned into farmland.
And how much else of the prehistory of North America has been lost as a result of a process where Where first of all, there was a conviction that the indigenous inhabitants had only been here for a very short time, whereas we now know they've been here for a very long time.
And secondly, there was a propagandistic desire not to give too much credit to them.
So let's get rid of some of their stuff.
I was very disappointed when we were shooting season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse that we were not allowed by the authorities to film in Cahokia, which is one of the great mounds that still survive, because they've been told that I'm a pseudo-archaeologist and that I'm going to mislead the public if I go there.
So the best way is just to stop me going there.
We tried to film in Moundville in Alabama as well, and again we were denied permission to film there.
There's no doubt that archaeology has joined ranks to do their best to prevent me doing what I do.
My eldest son, who is half Somali and half English, had his DNA done with 23andMe.
And what it showed was that he's 50% African and 49% British and 1% Spanish.
And we tried to figure that out.
And the answer is that my ancestors came from Cornwall in the southwest of England.
And that's where the Spanish Armada washed up.
And the survivors of the Spanish Armada washed up and then integrated with the local community and contributed their genes.
So, you know, there is an interest in the past.
There is an interest in our personal past, our personal origins, our ancestors, who we are.
And there's a much broader interest in the story of humanity that has brought us to where we are today.
And this haunting feeling that something's missing and that we...
But we have a civilization today.
I often would like to compare it to a sort of furious – in terms of the level of consciousness, our civilization today is like a furious, petulant teenager.
But in terms of what it can do, in terms of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, it's a god.
So we have godlike powers with the consciousness of an immature teenager.
That's what we're looking at in the world today.
And maybe by understanding our past better, by understanding our unity that comes down from the past, maybe we can learn something that would be helpful to us in not carrying on in this way.
Because we do live at an inflection point just now.
One thing I'm pretty sure that, quote unquote, my lost civilization didn't have, and that was nuclear weapons.
But we have nukes today and we have them in an enormous scale.
And behind each of those nukes is a fragile human being with his own or her own ego and complexes and fears and paranoia.
And we're reaching a point where those buttons are going to be pressed.
We are, as far as I know, the first human civilization that has the capacity to actually wipe itself out completely.
We don't need a comet impact.
We don't need a solar outburst.
We can do it to ourselves.
And that requires humanity to make a major step forward in consciousness.
And I think making that major step forward in consciousness will be helped by better understanding our own past.
I mean, it's just disturbing how many times we can travel to ancient places like Greece or any place where you go to Rome and realize, oh, there's a thriving civilization here at one point.
You know, I imagine that as people get older and wiser and realize the folly of their ways, particularly in their youth, maybe he would be more open to the idea that the civilization is just this civilization, same civilization, but older than you think it is.
I think people for a long time had this concept in their mind that changing the dates somehow negates the accomplishment of the people that lived in the prescribed date.
That's been said to me repeatedly, that I'm suggesting that all the achievements of certain indigenous cultures around the world should actually be handed to a lost civilization, that ideas were brought to them.
Yet weirdly, those same archaeologists recognize that agriculture was introduced to Europe by emigrants from precisely the Gobekli Tepe area.
That's where – agriculture wasn't present in Europe until 5,000 or 6,000 years ago.
It was brought in by other people.
People – this is part of the human nature that we share ideas.
Somebody has a great idea.
We look at that.
We think we'd like a bit of that too.
Teach me how to do it.
And this happens all the time.
And it doesn't mean that the person who's being taught is any less than the person who's doing the teaching.
The person who's being taught may have things to teach themselves.
I've always felt that there were – if there was a lost civilization at all, and I believe there was, but I can't absolutely prove it.
I think we're looking at a terrible cataclysm.
Part of it happened near Gobekli Tepe.
Abu Huraira in Syria was hit by one of those airbursts, absolutely incinerated at that time.
A terrible cataclysm with relatively few survivors and that those survivors, just as we would do today, took refuge amongst people who'd made it through the disaster better.
And those people who'd made it through would most likely have been hunter-gatherers.
Because hunter-gatherers are so resilient and so able to survive disasters, whereas people in a quote-unquote civilized condition are often not.
I understand that the hurricanes that are happening in the US at the moment are horrific, horrific natural events which are killing people.
But we're talking about something on a scale vastly larger than that.
And it's difficult for me to see.
We find it hard enough to make it through a hurricane.
I find it difficult to see how we could make it through another Younger Dryas impact event or how we could make it through a man-made cataclysm as a result of nuclear war, which is, I suspect and I fear, is much closer than we think.
I hate the idea.
That nuclear missiles may be flying in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children.
But I have to say, honestly, it's a possibility with the state of the world at the moment.
And the low state of consciousness of the people who lead us, the leaders and governments are behind this.
It's not human beings, individual people who are behind this hatred in the world today.
It's leaders and governments who are mobilizing that hatred to serve their own interests.
And it's very dangerous.
If we didn't have nukes, it would be less dangerous.
When you're talking about Gobekli Tepe, one of the things that Jimmy Corsetti has talked about recently in his YouTube show is that they have stopped excavation and they've planted trees above some of the areas, which is very strange.
It's often because of funds, but it's also because of the feeling that as technology improves, more may be learned from these sites in the future.
And that's a reasonable argument, because excavation is destruction.
To a certain extent, excavation destroys what's being excavated.
And therefore, when you interfere with a site and start excavating it, you may be I mean, go back 100 years from where we are at present and you didn't have carbon dating, you didn't have LiDAR, you didn't have...
All kinds of methods of dating objects, you know, luminescence, the luminescence from rocks is another way of dating.
We didn't have any of those technologies.
We do have them now.
And so I think the speculation is 100 years in the future, archaeologists may have technologies that would be able to extract more information than this.
That's the case that's made.
I get it.
But I think Gobekli Tepe is such an important site.
And we know...
I know for sure because I spent three days with Klaus Schmidt who was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe that underneath that place there are dozens of huge unexcavated stone circles with enormous megalithic pillars in them all under the ground waiting to be excavated and the decision appears to have been made not to excavate them.
And I do find that slightly suspicious.
I do find it odd.
I think the site has got such an important role.
It's such an iconic site that to just stop the excavation or to only continue it in a very small way isn't satisfactory.
I've noticed that it isn't just a tax on me that certain archaeologists are making.
It's also a tax on other specialists.
For example, Danny Hillman Natawajaja, who is the geologist who brought to the world's attention the mystery of Gunung Padang in Indonesia, which appeared in the first episode of season one of Ancient Apocalypse.
the possibility that this site is more than 27,000 years old, that we're looking at a pyramidial structure that has had several phases of work done on it and that the earliest phases go back deep into the last ice age.
He managed to publish a peer-reviewed paper on this, but unfortunately for Danny, he'd appeared on my show.
And that led archaeologists to dive in on him.
And there was a ganging up of archaeologists and complaints were made to the peer-reviewed journal that published it.
And finally, they retracted.
They retracted his paper without any good reasons.
I've got a major article by Danny on my website explaining what happened here.
It's like we don't want too much attention brought to this.
Let's crush it.
Let's crush it right now.
The same thing is happening with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
An enormous amount of attacks are being made on that hypothesis rather than considering it as an interesting explanation for the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age.
A lot of people are just focused on trying to destroy it in every way possible.
And I can't help wondering.
Maybe there's some truth, deep truth to this, that there was a cataclysm, that there was an ancient apocalypse, something really horrific that happened.
Maybe it's a cyclical disaster.
Maybe it's coming around again.
This is something that would lead any government to want to avoid panic, to suppress, to cover up these issues.
So that would be the conspiracy theory.
I'm not saying I buy it, but I'm saying that it's possible.
Would also a conspiracy be that they'd recognize that some of the area around Gobekli Tepe was older still and they decided just the archaeologists didn't want to confront it and they put a stop to it?
But in their favor and to their credit, the excavation of that whole area around – not Gobekli Tepe itself but other neighboring sites.
Karahan Tepe is the best known.
Turkish archaeologists, it's interesting, are calling this now a civilization.
They're calling it the Tas Tepler civilization, the Stone Hills civilization.
And they're finding that the same iconography, the same building techniques, not quite on the scale of Göbekli Tepe, are repeated all across the region.
They extend all the way down to the south of the Jordan Valley, to Jericho.
The ancient site of Jericho is part of that lost collection.
Or emerging civilization that appeared at the end of the Younger Dryas.
Cyprus is another example.
I was mentioning about how it was settled in what appeared to have been planned, organized settlement events near the end of the last ice age.
Again, you find that same iconography that you find at Gobekli Tepe turning up there.
The tendency to use T-shaped pillars, to use certain designs like a V-shaped necklace.
This kind of iconography and the structures, these circular structures, semi-subterranean structures that are so characteristic of Gobekli Tepe, they're found there as well.
They're found all across the region.
Jericho in the Jordan Valley is absolutely intriguing.
The massive tower there, which again dates back right to the end of the last ice age, a huge megalithic tower with the world's oldest known tower.
There's a megalithic stairway that runs up inside it.
So what's emerging as a result, if Gobekli Tepe hadn't been found, none of this would have happened.
But it's led to a widespread interest in the whole area.
So while excavation may have stopped at Gobekli Tepe or may have slowed down, it is continuing elsewhere across the region.
And to be fair to archaeologists, we need to recognize that.
So far, the ones that have been found, Gobekli Tepe is unique.
And I think it's clear now that Gobekli Tepe itself was the end of a process, not the beginning of a process.
It was something that marked – it was a marker.
It was something that brought together the best of everything that they'd accumulated and created it in one place.
And left it there finally at the end burying it, sealing it as a time capsule which then was untouched for more than 10,000 years before Klaus Schmidt opened it up in 1996. I can't help feeling that's precisely what Gobekli Tepe is.
It's a time capsule.
It's a memorial to a lost time.
And I think that what we're looking at in that whole area is the outcome of contact with an earlier largely lost civilization.
I think it passed on its cultural genes right there in that area of Turkey and down into the Jordan Valley and Cyprus.
And not only there, also the Indus Valley Civilization.
It's incredible iconography, which shows a man between two felines.
It's a very striking image.
You see a man and two tigers or leopards on either side of him, and he may be holding them apart, he may be gripping them in some way.
You can find it on the Gebel al-Arak knife handle from Egypt.
You can find it from Saybuk, S-A-Y-B-U-R-K, in Turkey, the man between two felines.
And you can find it in the Indus Valley civilization right across in Pakistan on these steatite seals that they used to make, where again you see that same icon of the man between two felines.
And it suggests that cultural ideas way back in the remote past were being spread around the world very, very rapidly.
And then the next one is from Tiwanaku in Bolivia.
That's a redrawing from Tiwanaku in Bolivia.
And again, it's a man between two felines.
So when I see this kind of complicated image turning up all around the world, I can't help feeling that there's a remote common source, which is sharing.
It's not each culture representing or influencing the other.
I absolutely have no idea, and I'm not sure if anybody else does, although I'm reminded in that one of the handbags that we see in some of the figures from ancient Sumer.
So what I'm saying is we're seeing a sudden emergence of something that is being recognized as a civilization in Turkey just immediately after Göbekli Tepe, around the time of Göbekli Tepe.
And we're seeing it in the Jordan Valley, and we're seeing it in the Indus Valley, and we're seeing it in South America as well.
The same iconography keeps on repeating, and I don't think it's a coincidence.
Villa Hermosa, the sort of central of the Olmec area, is a very highly populated area.
It's been heavily developed.
The areas where LIDAR has been used in Mexico and Central America and Guatemala has been finding thousands of Mayan ruins that nobody knew were there before.
Again, under the jungle canopy.
LIDAR has been used extensively in the Yucatan in Mexico and into Guatemala.
It's why I chose to focus season two of Ancient Apocalypse on the Americas.
Because I think in terms of the quest for the origins of civilization, the Americas are the most neglected area.
Archaeologists haven't looked there.
They define themselves as being in favor of indigenous peoples and against any kind of supremacy, but by and large they look to Europe and to the Middle East as the origins of civilization and don't consider that it might have been in the Americas.
And what we're trying to show is that the story in the Americas is much older than it's been and that there are mysteries here that have never been explained by archaeology.
I worked with the team who are doing this, and they're solely in the province of Acre in the southwest of Brazil.
They haven't worked in other areas.
What would be needed, I'm hoping some amazing philanthropist will come forward, and if such a philanthropist will come forward, I can connect him with the people who are doing the work in Acre, that we have a LiDAR survey of the whole of the Amazon.
That's what I'd like to see.
And it wouldn't be a billion dollar project because it can be done with drones now.
And I think it's right and proper that we have curiosity about our past.
And I think it's unfortunate that people, including myself, who express that curiosity, Without any dogma, but simply are mystified by problems from the past, are so likely to get slapped down and face this abusive power grab by archaeology who are saying the past is ours.
You may not intrude here.
We will define you as a pseudoscientist.
We will call you a hoaxer and a liar.
I defy anyone out there to find a single statement I've made that is a lie.
And a lie is a knowing untruth.
As far as I know, I have never, ever told knowingly an untruth.
What a stupid thing to do that would be.
That would scupper my whole work.
I may have made some honest mistakes.
Everybody does, including the most godlike archaeologist.
But I have never knowingly told an untruth, and I never would.
I don't think that's working anymore because I think enough people have seen your work and enough people have heard you talk and they know that you're reasonable and intelligent and that there's something there.
And the more people look at these images, the more people hear.
People like Flint just out and out lie to try to dismiss these things.
And they think that somehow or another that exploring these ideas dismisses the legitimate work that archaeologists have already done, which I don't think it does at all.
Archaeologists have done some fantastic work, and it's really important work.
What I've realized is that there's almost two different mindsets at work here in looking at the past.
I think archaeology is very determined to demonstrate that it's a science, that it's a hard science, that it's completely rational, that it's all based on scientific method and anything that sounds unscientific, which include myths, must be avoided.
And also, I do find that archaeology, and it may be true in other sciences as well, is very reluctant to use the imagination.
The imagination is seen as a deadly threat.
Whereas I think imagination is a really important thing in interpreting the past.
We should be open to possibilities rather than coming into what we confront with a closed idea.
We should consider how it might have been, what might have happened.
Let's use our imagination and think about this.
Think what all this means.
Think what that common iconography all around the world means rather than just saying, oh, it's a coincidence.
Well, my concern with that line of thinking is that we've seen evidence of that sort of destruction of the real history of people in America with how they forced Native Americans onto reservations and forced them into speaking English and forced them into learning Christianity.
There was a concerted effort to erase their history and their culture.
And that the conquerors imposed that on the people that were there.
But this is a kind of conspiracy theory that's being proposed, that the Spanish Cortes and Pizarro and others who were involved in the conquest of the Americas, that they got together and they created a fiction and then they made the indigenous people believe that fiction.
While accepting everything else that the indigenous people believed, that was a fiction.
There's no document which says that Spaniards conspired to create these stories.
I believe that when we find them in Mexico, when we find them in Peru, when we find them in Colombia, when we find them in Bolivia, we are looking at indigenous traditions.
And I have no doubt that the Spanish saw those traditions and said, we can use this.
When you hear about things like the lost city of Z, when you hear about all the different times where European explorers did make it to the Americas and spread their diseases, like, well, you're going to have myths from those folks, too.
So who's to think that there wasn't multiple versions of that that happened all throughout history?
Especially small populations of them that are very remote and very difficult to get.
There are reports of sighting by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly, and I conclude the best way to explain that they told me what they told me is a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.
And let's not forget that there's an indigenous population of Old Testament Jews in Ethiopia, the Falashas, who have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant Got there.
Different from the Ethiopian national epic, which is called the Kebra Nagast, the glory of kings.
That's why I got into this field.
I was a current affairs guy, and Ethiopia was on my beat.
And I just kept on coming across this story.
And I realized it was central to Ethiopian culture.
And I decided to investigate it and explore it.
And it led to the sign and the seal, which was published in 1992. And that's what set me on the path to fingerprints of the gods and everything that followed that.
The place is Axum in the province of Tigray in northern Ethiopia.
It's a massively interesting place.
Axum has these huge granite stele.
They're very similar in many ways to ancient Egyptian obelisks.
They're a bit different in shape, but same sort of height, some of them going 110 feet high, cut out of solid granite right up there in the highlands of Ethiopia.
And then they have an ancient church, the Church of St. Mary, Cathedral actually of St. Mary of Zion, where the Ark apparently was kept for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Before that it was kept elsewhere.
And then now it's been moved into a chapel that stands next to St. Mary of Zion Cathedral.
And that chapel is guarded by armed men.
The whole town is an armed camp that is protecting what they believe to be the Ark of the Covenant, but it's guarded particularly by one guy.
official guardian of the ark and he's elected by other monks to be the guardian of the ark and and several of them have run away when they get that election because once you're elected as the guardian of the ark when the previous one has died you're going to be kept in that chapel forever you'll never you'll never be allowed to leave it so they're close to whatever this object is they're close to it and i met three of them over a succession of years because their mortality is once they're appointed
they die very soon and they all have these cataracts over their eyes and they all blame the object in that chapel whether or not it's the ark for for for causing their blindness wow so it's uh and no one is going in there and trying to get to the bottom of it They won't let you?
I think it's what is rightly described as an out of place artifact.
Because if you look at the description in the book of Exodus, the very precise dimensions of it, I think in modern terms we'd say three feet nine inches long by two feet three inches high and wide.
It's got a layer of gold.
It's got a layer of wood.
It's got another layer of gold.
It's very precisely specified like a blueprint in the book of Exodus.
And then it does all this stuff.
It shoots out jets of fire and kills completely innocent people.
It kills 50,000 Philistines in the city of Ashdod when they briefly capture it from the Israelites and make the mistake of...
Treating it like a tourist object and they open the Ark of the Covenant and look inside and suddenly everybody in that city is dying and what they're dying of is cancerous tumors.
This is described in the Old Testament.
So it's intriguing that this object is so precisely specified and is reported to have done these terrible things.
And, of course, gold is a very good insulator against radiation.
I don't want to go too far down this track.
To me, the fascinating thing is that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that actually claims to have the Ark of the Covenant.
That it's central to religion and culture in Ethiopia today.
That there's much to support that argument, particularly in the form of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews, and their very ancient traditions about how they got to Ethiopia in the first place.
In context to all of that, I think Ethiopia has a very good claim, very interesting claim, and that's why I wrote a book about it.
That one to me is so crazy that someone is keeping that information from the rest of the humans.
Because if we found out the Ark of the Covenant was in fact a real object and we know where it is and it does match the description of the Bible, that kind of changes everything.
Now all of a sudden the Bible is not just stories and myths.
Well, let's not forget that one of the world's best known flood myths also comes from the Bible, which is the flood of Noah, which again is part of this worldwide tradition of which I am absolutely convinced Atlantis should be understood as a part of that worldwide tradition of a global flood and the loss of a former civilization.
And again, it's one of the reasons why I've done the work I've done over these years.
I have learned from the criticisms of archaeologists and one of the first things that became very clear to me, and they're absolutely right, is we need more indigenous voices in this series.
And that's what we've made sure to do.
We have an amazing archaeologist, indigenous archaeologist from Easter Island.
We spent quite a bit of time filming in Easter Island and it's a strong...
This series doesn't do country by country episodes.
It's all merged together.
Different bits of the story come together in each episode.
But a good chunk of it is on Easter Island.
And there, Sonia Hoa Cardinale is an indigenous Easter Islander.
Her married name is Cardinale because she married an Italian guy.
And she gave us incredible material on Easter Island.
And she revealed that she and her team have found what are called banana phytoliths.
Now, phytoliths are a minute part of the banana plant.
They've excavated them from a crater in Easter Island, and they found that those are 3,000 years old.
Now, this is interesting for two reasons.
Firstly, bananas do not propagate naturally.
You can't get bananas to Easter Island without human beings bringing them there.
That's how they got there.
And secondly, the date that she's found 3,000-year-old banana phytoliths in Easter Island blows out of the water the notion that Easter Island was only settled 1,000 years ago or less, which is the current idea of archaeology.
Again and again, we've had indigenous...
Guests on the show who have brought real important information to it.
Amongst those geoglyphs in Brazil, we had a member of the Apurina people who is a caretaker for those geoglyphs.
And he talked to us about what is special to him about the geoglyphs, about how this is a sacred place to his tribe and how they still gather there today and how they...
Understand that it's somehow connected to the journey to the next world, to the journey of life after death.
And that then rings a bell in my mind of that whole idea of a journey to the afterlife and a portal through which we pass into that other realm.
Well, 3,000 years ago, you're still within the period of the Polynesian expansion.
This is not the Ice Age.
This is more recent.
It's early in the Polynesian expansion rather than late.
Easter Island was seen as one of the last places that the Polynesians got to.
This new evidence is suggesting it may have been one of the first places that the Polynesians got to.
But the question that arises is, did they find the Moai already in place when they came there even 3,000 years ago?
And I think there's a lot of evidence for that.
I think that this is going to make archaeologists absolutely furious with me.
But I hope that I'm paying full respect to indigenous traditions.
We had an amazing Easter Island elder who told us the tradition of the lost land of Hiva.
Easter Island has its own flood myth.
They say that there was a huge land in the Pacific, far, far away, called Hiva, and that it was destroyed in a flood cataclysm.
And that there were survivors, specifically seven wise men.
That's another thing that is found all around the world.
It's found in ancient Sumer.
It's found in ancient Egypt.
It's found almost everywhere.
Specific seven wise men who came and settled Easter Island after this great cataclysm.
So it's great to have indigenous testimony on that.
And then you have the mystery of the Easter Island script.
How did that happen?
How come this tiny island, which only ever had a population of a few thousand, did something that is normally only done by big civilizations, which was create a written script?
But they have a script, the Easter Island script, and it's written on wooden boards.
And we learned that the boards we see today, none of which, by the way, are in Easter Island now.
They're all in museums around the world.
They themselves were copies of copies of copies of earlier wooden boards that wore out and these things go back far into the remote past as far as the indigenous people of Easter Island are concerned.
And to have a fully formed elaborate script which nobody can interpret today, you have to remember the tragic history of Easter Island.
There was a point where Easter Island's population was reduced to just 11 people.
And it was reduced to 11 people by Peruvian slave raids.
They came and slaved the people of Easter Island and they took them to work in Peru and put them elsewhere in the Pacific.
Eventually there was a movement to restore them to their homeland and gradually people came back.
But at one point, its population was reduced to 11.
All the elders were wiped out, those who were the memory carriers.
And so what's left now is just a hint of a memory of these things.
But they speak with awe of these tablets with the script on it.
And to me, that is a sign, again, that there's something wrong with our understanding of Easter Island.
How can we explain that this tiny little place produces its own written language?
Why would it even need a written language when you can walk across the island in three hours?
One of the things that's interesting about AI is that they believe that AI is going to be able to determine or decipher, rather, a bunch of different things that we currently can't.
The way it runs is you read from left to right along the top row, then you go from right to left along the next row, Then you go from left to right along the next door and so on and so forth, a sort of snake-like.
How do they know that?
Because that's one of the memories that's been preserved by the Easter Islanders and because of the way they all run on.
According to Leo, the elder who we talk to in Easter Island, it contains memories of the past.
It contains memories of the past in Easter Island, instructions on how to navigate the Information about the stars and information about how to live as a community.
All we have is an oral tradition which itself is very fragmented and very faint because of that reduction of Easter Island's population to just 11 people.
And the fact that the elders who were, within historical times, able to read these tablets were all wiped out.
Cuneiform, I think, because of its relationship to later languages, which were known.
I mean, cuneiform is a writing system.
You find the earliest version, I think, amongst the Sumerians and then in later Babylonian society as well.
But when you have a language and you have a language that it's related to that you can read or where you have a text in two different languages but it's the same text, then you're in a place where you can begin to translate it.
That's what the Rosetta Stone does in ancient Egypt because we have it in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs but we also have it in Greek.
And that's why suddenly the code of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was cracked because of the Rosetta Stone.
Well, there isn't a Rosetta Stone for the Easter Island script or for the Indus Fali script.
But I think in the case of the cuneiform, there was something similar, some context to place it in.
So the Easter Island, these enormous statues, one of the things they found, and I don't know when they started doing this, they dug deeper and deeper and deeper and found out that the heads that are above the surface are just a tiny part of it.
So do you think that it's just natural erosion that covered up everything else?
And what we're looking at with these Easter Island heads.
I was fortunate to know...
There we are.
And I was just going to say, I was fortunate to know Thor Hardal.
And there he is, in the blue safari suit, standing at the shoulder of the Easter Island Moai.
And you can see that the dark bit is the bit that was above ground.
And then they dig down and they find that it goes down 30 feet underground, this enormous thing.
And this is not as a result of being exposed by erosion.
This had to be...
Excavated in order to reveal it.
And the issue is, on this tiny island, if this thing is only 700 years old, which is something that archaeologists often say 700 or 1000 years old, if it's only that old, how do you get 30 feet of sedimentation on this tiny island in just 700 years?
It looks like a much longer period that would be required to create that depth of sedimentation.
Well, we're all nice guys, but we all have a dark side.
And sometimes I am very harsh and very unpleasant.
I don't think I was with Robert.
I don't understand what the problem is between us.
He and I disagree over the cause of the Younger Dryas cataclysm.
Robert Schock believes that it was a massive solar outburst that brought this catastrophe about, and he focuses on the end of the Younger Dryas, 11,600 years ago.
I'm more of the view that the Comet Research Group is right, and that we're looking at the effect of largely of airbursts of large cometary fragments right across the surface of the Earth.
What we both agree on is that the younger Dryas, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, was an extraordinary global cataclysm, which changed everything, which extinguished all the megafauna of the Ice Age, We agree on that, and we agree that it likely wiped out a lost civilization of the Ice Age as well.
We disagree on the mechanism, but I don't see why we shouldn't be friends for that.
So, Robert, if you're listening...
If you're listening, please, let's work together because we have many common enemies.
And that's one of the problems with the alternative side is that there's a lot of infighting in the alternative side and everybody's scrambling for their own bit of turf.
Whereas the archaeological side, they're very unified in terms of attacking what they call pseudo-archaeology.
They work as a team and that teamwork makes them very efficient.
Well, it's what it calls itself, the navel of the earth.
It calls itself the navel of the earth.
And it's not the only place.
Delphi in Greece calls itself the navel of the earth.
Heliopolis in Egypt close to Giza was a navel of the earth.
Angkor, what in Cambodia, is a navel of the earth.
Gobekli Tepe means...
the navel, the hill of the navel.
This notion of navels of the earth, I think it's connected to an ancient geodetic survey of the earth, that there were certain anchor points that lines of longitude were drawn from by a civilization that didn't have our tech, didn't have our iPhones, but did explore the world, did sail the oceans. but did explore the world, did sail the oceans.
And I'm not surprised that we haven't found their ships since we haven't found the ships from those who sailed to Australia or from those who sailed to Cyprus either.
But it had abilities that we do not attribute to period of that time and those abilities included the ability to calculate longitude, something that our civilization didn't crack until the 18th century.
And I suggest it's only a theory that these multiple navels of the earth around the world were fixed points on the earth where longitude connections were made.
They were established places.
So I do not think it's an accident.
That Angkor Wat is 72 degrees of longitude east of Giza, because that number 72 occurs in ancient myths all around the world and is strongly connected to this phenomenon called precession of the equinoxes, which, first of all, it changes the pole star.
At the moment, the Earth wobbles on its axis, but it's a very slow wobble over 26,000 years.
It changes the Polestar.
Now it's Polaris.
In the past it was Tuban.
In the past it was Draco.
But now it's Polaris.
Because the extended North Pole of the Earth is spiraling in the heavens and it's pointing at different bits of space over a roughly 26,000 year period.
25,920 years to be exact.
One degree of precession takes 72 years to unfold.
That's why the fact that the relationship of the Great Pyramid to the Earth being on the scale of 1 to 43,200 is interesting.
If it was on the scale of 1 to 57,000, I couldn't care less.
But 43,200 is one of those numbers that we find in mythology and traditions all around the world.
And there's very solid scholarly backing for this in a book I've mentioned to you before, which is called Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschen.
Giorgio was professor of history of science at MIT. They draw attention to this, that there appears to have been a very ancient knowledge of this obscure astronomical phenomenon.
Which our culture attributes to the Greeks and thinks only goes back a couple of thousand years.
Santillana and Vendetian were of the view that it goes back to what they called some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of the remote past.
Well, you may have to observe for hundreds of years.
To conclude that it's a wobble is another thing.
But to conclude that the skies are changing at a regular fixed rate, that's going to take observation over a few hundred years.
Seventy-two years is one human lifetime.
In that seventy-two years, the precessional shift would be the equivalent of the width of your finger held up to the horizon.
Very hard to note.
But if you extend it for several hundred years, it'll be very clear that something is going on.
And what's going on is the constellation that rises behind the sun, particularly notable at key moments of the year, the summer and winter solstice and the spring and autumn equinox and the age in which we live.
Of course, astrology is another one of those things that archaeologists despise.
But as anybody who follows astrology will know, we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
And that's because the sun on the spring equinox is, within the next 150 years, is going to move entirely out of Pisces, where it sits at the moment, and is going to move into Aquarius.
The age of Pisces, with Pisces housing the sun on the spring equinox, began around the time of Christ, just over 2,000 years ago.
And before that, it was the age of Aries.
We have all this ram symbolism in ancient Egypt at that time.
Before that, it was the age of Taurus, constellation of Taurus housing the sun.
All of this is a process that unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years.
So when I find that the Great Pyramid models the Earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200, which is 72 times 600, I wake up and I think this is interesting.
And when I find that Angkor, one navel of the earth, is separated from Giza, another navel of the earth, by 72 degrees of longitude, that rings another bell.
And I think that's something curious and worthy of exploration.
Because I think it makes us disconnected from the idea that we're connected totally to the universe and that feeling of awe that you get when you see a completely star-filled night.
I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again.
I was in the observatory in the Big Island in Hawaii.
And when you go up to the Keck Observatory, the sky, you go through the clouds.
And when you get up to the top and you look, you can't believe that you could see it.
You can't believe it.
I've been there Three, four times?
Only once did we really catch it.
The last time was pretty good, but one time we caught it perfectly where there was no moon in the sky and the sky was completely clear and it was astounding.
We're in a convertible spaceship flying through the universe.
That's really what it is.
And you don't see it every day because of light pollution.
And I think it's one of the most...
It's one of the saddest things about our culture.
It's incredible that you can go out at night and you can see and drive and go to your favorite restaurant and go to the movies and all kinds of nice stuff.
But what we're trading off is literally our connection to this insanely beautiful thing.
That hypnotizes you with its awe.
If you get to go camping on a night where you see everything, it's incredible.
It's one of the greatest things you could ever see.
It used to be there for everybody, and it used to be how they lived their life.
That is why it's so crazy to say that the phenomenon like precession wasn't discovered until the Greeks about 2,200 years ago because the ancients were living with those skies for thousands and thousands of years before and they were paying very close attention to them.
There's strong evidence that the constellations of the zodiac We're not inventions of the Greeks either.
I mean, in a sense, the constellations aren't inventions because they happen to be on the path of the sun.
The zodiac are the constellations which roughly are in the place in the sky that the sun occupies through the course of the year.
That's why we see them.
But there's increasing evidence that the Greeks inherited that and that the knowledge was very early and it may well go back into the Upper Paleolithic.
There's this incredible figure of Taurus.
In the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux Cave in France, one of those cave paintings which shows the stars of the Pleiades above the shoulder of the bull exactly where they should be.
Well, the official position is that it's something that developed during the time of the late Mesopotamians and the Greeks.
This notion that somehow there was a connection between the events in the sky and what happens to us.
But I think it's much older than that.
I think the idea that the sky in some way determines our destinies is a very ancient idea, not a recent idea.
And it kind of makes sense.
I mean, it's weird to think this.
I don't mean to be selfish to the human race, but we would not be here.
No human beings would be here if it were not for that whole vast universe out there.
It would be wrong to say that the universe exists so that we can be, but the fact is we would not be.
We're part of that huge cosmos, and you're right.
It's forgetting that we're part of the cosmos, or regarding the cosmos as something that we must conquer, which is the modern mindset, which is most unhelpful.
I've always been fascinated by astrology, not like the newspaper astrology, like, you're a Cancer, so that means this.
But the idea that the time you were born, the place on Earth you were born, where you were conceived, all these play a factor in your personality, and that this was somehow or another mapped out by people thousands and thousands of years ago.
I know a lot of people like to dismiss it as myth, and I've been one of those people, but part of me wonders if there is some sort of an impact that, look, we know that the gravity from the moon affects the tides.
We know that we're mostly water.
We know that there's some sort of an effect that planets and gravity and stars must have on the entirety of the universe.
And the idea that these very bizarre biological entities, that their personalities and their existence is in some way motivated, shaped, or at least influenced by the position in the stars in which they were born is very interesting.
Because people studied that shit for a long time.
If there was nothing to it, Why have so many generations of people studied it?
Not the way we look at it at the moment as sort of something out there that doesn't mean much to us, except that we're going to conquer it with spaceships.
And so is it generally agreed that there is a connection between the methods or the design of the construction and the correlation between star systems?
Is it agreed by archaeologists that the reason why these things are constructed in a very specific direction and in a very specific design, that it is mirroring the cosmos?
I think that archaeologists are very reluctant to accept the broader idea.
They are willing, they can hardly deny that some structures are specifically aligned to the equinoctial rising point of the sun, in other words, due east.
And other structures are aligned to the rising or the setting of the sun on the summer or the winter solstice.
That cannot be denied.
Serpent Mound in Ohio is a classic example of that, which is oriented precisely to the setting sun on the winter solstice.
But the broader idea that, for example, positions of stars in the sky might be replicated on the ground, that's an idea that archaeology completely rejects.
And that's where I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend Robert Boval, who's been very ill for the last many years.
But Robert Boval brought us the Orion correlation.
And my god, did archaeology descend upon him like a ton of bricks.
For just noticing that the three great pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt.
And then when we work precession into the equation, we find that they're not laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt as it looked in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built.
They're laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago.
So it's like a marker on the Giza Plateau speaking to that age, just as Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe speaks to that age in the astronomical diagram on that pillar.
That's the really important matter that Robert Shock has brought to the table, which no other person has dared to do.
Now, John Anthony West started that process.
He was aware of a problem in the weathering of the Sphinx, but he wasn't quite sure what the problem was.
He was following up some writings by a scholar called Schwaller de Lubix back in the 1920s or 1930s who said something about water weathering on the Sphinx.
And so John brought Robert Schock there to Giza and Robert Schock immediately recognized...
The weathering patterns on the Sphinx as the result of heavy rainfall, exposure to heavy rainfall for thousands of years.
And you have to go back to the younger dryers to get that kind of heavy rainfall in Giza.
Hence the notion that the Sphinx geologically, whatever else we may say about it, is 12,000 plus years old.
And it was courageous of Robert to do that.
He put his own career in jeopardy, just like anybody who sticks their neck out in this field does.
He put his own career in jeopardy by standing up for a much older Sphinx.
First of all, thank you to the viewers of Season 1 of Ancient Apocalypse.
And I hope you'll enjoy Season 2. I hope we're bringing really important new information to the table.
And a special request, if you do like it, please give it a thumbs up on Netflix.
Season two is all about the Americas.
Secondly, I will be doing a speaking event in the US. It'll be the only speaking event that I do in 2025. And that's going to be in Sedona, 19th and 20th of April 2025. That's a good place for it, all those freaks.
Yeah.
19th and 20th of April, 2025. And it's going to be called The Fight for the Past because I believe that's what's going on here.
So I hope that people will enjoy the show and express that enjoyment.
And the final thing I want to say is thank you to Keanu Reeves.
Thank you to Keanu Reeves for joining me on the show.
Keanu reached out to me some years ago because he's making this incredible comic book series called Berserker, B-R-Z-R-K-R, about an immortal warrior who's born 80,000 years ago but has the power of a god and cannot be killed.
And back, I think, at least two years ago, Keanu reached out to me for some advice, some historical advice on where in the world could such an individual have been born 80,000 years ago.
And we talked about that and we exchanged emails and then we had some nice Zoom conversations together.
And I sensed that this is a very open-minded, very curious, very interesting person.
So when we were doing season two, I did ask him, would you join me and speak about this and speak about your curiosity of the past?
And he knew what he was up against.
Actually, just before Keanu and I spent a day together filming for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, he'd watched the debate between me and Flint Dibble.
He knew what he was facing, getting into this, but he had, again, the courage and the integrity to stand up, to stand by me in that story.
And I'm enormously grateful to him for doing that.
And I found along the way, I suspected it when we knew each other just by Zoom and by email, I found along the way what an incredible gentleman Keanu Reeves is, how kind-hearted he is, how humble he is, how he turned up for the shoot carrying his own baggage.
He's just a gem of a human being and he radiates kindness and decency and care and love towards others and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know him and I hope our paths will continue to cross in the future.