#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History

31:17Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind, hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archaeological record, which await to be discovered. And of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archaeology. But the fact that the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archaeology is not on its own enough to suggest that we're missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300 ,000 year gap. It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world.

32:08And there are found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another, and that are also distant from one another in time. They don't necessarily occur at the same time. And this is where I think that archaeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas, as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story. So there are particular issues. For example, the notion of the afterlife destiny of the soul. What happens to us when we die? And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do. You do think about what happens.

32:52I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls.

33:29It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America through Mexico, through into North America. But it's also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we're looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world. And then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing is this sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes.

34:18At least, I think that's the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of George O 'Cyllana and Hearth of Undescend. George O 'Cyllana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you're based back in the 60s. And Hearth of Undescend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. And they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill. And Hamlet's Mill differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I'll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession.

35:10And the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2 ,300 years ago or so. Centiglana and Undescend are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that. Thousands of years older than that. And they do actually trace it. I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly to some almost unbelievable ancestor. Civilization. Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this mystery in the first place. Okay, now the precession of the equinoxes to give it its full name is results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars.

35:50And our planet of course is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis. And so if you imagine the extended north pole of the earth pointing up at the sky, in our time it's pointing at the star Polaris. And that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the earth. Other stars have occupied the pole position. And sometimes the extended north pole of the earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the earth's axis.

36:28The other one is that there are 12 well -known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The earth is orbiting the sun and we are seeing what's behind it, what's in direct line with the sun in our in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So at different times of the year the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today we live in the age of Pisces. And it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol.

37:08This is another area where I differ from archaeology. I think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose. Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the spring equinox. This was the question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox? Right now it's Pisces. In another 150 years or so, it'll be a quarryous. We do live in the dawning of the age of a quarryous. Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians, it was going back to the time of Ramesses or before.

37:51Before that it was Taurus and so on and so forth. It's backwards through the zodiac. Until 12 ,500 years ago you come to the age of Leo when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the spring equinox. Now this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly. It under the whole cycle and it is a cycle. It repeats itself roughly every 26 ,000 years, put a more exact figure on it, 25 ,920 years. That may be a convention. Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more, but you're talking fractions. It's in that area, 25 ,920 years. To observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years.

38:40The parallel that I often give is, hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger. It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it's difficult. You've got to pass it on. What seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santedana and Vondeshen call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of procession and selected the key numbers of procession, of which the most important number, the governing number is the number 72. But we also have numbers related to the number 72.

39:2372 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by 2 is 54. These numbers are found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who were involved in killing the God of Cyrus in an ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden coffin and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432 ,000 in the Rig Vesa. 432 ,000 is a multiple of 72. And at Angkor in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Tom. And on that bridge, you have figures on both sides sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vazuki. And what they're doing is they're churning the Milky Ocean. It's the same metaphor of churning and turning that's defined in the story of Hamlet's mill of Amlotti's mill.

40:26There are 54 on each side, 54 plus 104 is 108. 108 is 72 plus 36. It's a pre -sessional number, according to the work that Santidiana and Vandeshin did. And the fascination with this number system and its discovery all around the world is one of the puzzles that intrigue me and suggests to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very, very widely around the world. So one of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archaeologies, do you take this sort of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously?

41:19I do. As I believe the ancient's did. I think it's important to consider what humans would have thought about back then. Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube, whatever. But back then, especially before electricity, the stars is like the sexiest thing to talk about. There's no light pollution. There's no light pollution. So there's that in your majesty of the heavens. Every single night you're spending looking up at the stars and you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars and sort of the scientists of the day.

42:00And I'm sure there's going to be geniuses that emerge. They're able to do two things. One tell stories about the gods or whatever based on the stars. And then also as we'll probably talk about use the stars practically for navigation, for example. It makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations. It was an ever -present reality. Yes. And it was bright and it was brilliant. And it was full of lights. It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it. It was an overwhelming presence. And that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier.

42:52Because it's hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun over the course of the solar year is month by month rising against the background of different constellations. And then there's a much longer process, the process of procession, which takes that journey backwards. And where we have a period of 2 ,160 years for each sign of the zodiac. I think it would have been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek convention. But the constellations were there, I think was very clear that there were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky, which were not on the path of the sun, but that people paid attention to.

43:36Well, but detecting the procession of the Equal Access Hard, because especially they don't have any writing systems, they don't have any mathematical systems. So everything is told through words. Yeah. And they have, let's not underestimate oral traditions. Oral traditions, that's something we've lost in our culture today. One of the things that happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory. Actually, there's a nice story from from ancient Egypt about the god, the ghost, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself, because he has invented writing. Look at this gift, he says to a mythical Pharaoh of that time.

44:17Look at the gift that I am giving humanity writing. This is a wonderful thing. It'll enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose. And the Pharaoh in this story replies to him, no, you have not given us a wonderful gift. You have destroyed the art of memory. We will forget everything. Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context. And actually, that's a very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time. One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history, is human beings love stories.

44:58We love great stories. And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And so carefully done that actually it doesn't matter whether the story teller knows that they're passing on that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it's repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on. And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge. So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously. I take them very seriously. And the other many reasons, but I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm within human memory.

45:48I mean, we know that we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysm in the past going back millions of years. I mean, the best known one, of course, is the KPG event as it's now called that made the dinosaurs extinct. 65 million or 66 million years ago. But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Yeah, the Mount Tobar eruption about 70 ,000 years ago was pretty bad. But a global cataclysm, the young Andreas, really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the young Andreas.

46:32It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water. And I think it's an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm, of which one of, but not the only distinguished characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater. The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archaeological explanation is, look, people suffer local floods all the time.

47:09I mean, I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood. They know it's local. But that's the argument largely of archaeology dealing with the flood myths, or that some local population experienced a nasty local flooding event, and they decided to say that it was, that it affected the whole world. I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the younger Andreas, when flooding did occur and when the earth was subjected to events, cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the ice age. So there is the younger Andreas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change.

47:55So can you explain this hypothesis? Yes. The younger Andreas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory, as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It's the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archaeology and including oceanography as well. And they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the younger Andreas. And by the fact that it is a company 12 ,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the earth, you can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see it's about the width of a human hand, and there's a drawer there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time, and that drawer has revealed the sides of the drawer.

48:54And you can see the cross section, and in the cross section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the earth. And it contains evidence of wildfires, there's a lot of sutt in it. There are also nanodimons in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that's been melted at temperatures in excess of 2 ,200 degrees centigrade. There are carbon microspherules. All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact. I talked a moment ago about the extinction of dinosaurs. Lewis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies just as the younger dryers says, there was no crater.

49:38And for a long time, they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater. But when they finally did produce that deeply buried chicks clube crater, that's when people started to say, yeah, they have to be right. But they weren't relying on the crater. They were relying on the impact proxies, and they're the same impact proxies that we find in what's called the younger dryers boundary layer all around the world. So it's the fact that at the moment when the earth tips into a radical climate shift, it's been warming up for at least 2 ,000 years before 12 ,800 years ago. People at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief.

50:15We've been living through this really cold time, but it's getting better. Things are getting better. And then suddenly around 12 ,800 years ago, some might say 12 ,860 years ago, there's a massive global plunge in global temperatures. And the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age. And it's almost literally overnight. It's very, very, very rapid. Normally in an epoch when the earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise, but there is a sea level rise, a sudden one right at the beginning of the younger dryers. And then you have this long frozen period from 12 ,800 to 11 ,600 years ago.

50:57And then equally dramatically and equally suddenly, the younger dryers comes to an end. And the world very rapidly warms up. And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of a glaciers collapse into the sea, called meltwater pulse 1B, around about 11 ,600 years ago. So this is a period which is very tightly defined. It's a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed. That's when the so -called clovic culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the younger dryers. And it's the time when the mammoths and the labiatuth tigers vanished from the record as well.

51:38Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not, like what explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature? The abrupt cessation of the global maridinal overturning circulation of which the Gulf Stream is the best non -part. The main theory that's been put forward up to now, and I don't dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream, basically, which is part of the central heating system of our planet. So no wonder it became cold. But what's not really been addressed before is why that happened.

52:20Why the Gulf Stream was cut? Why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so called that actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. That's where the Younger Dryers Impact Hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem. Now, the hypothesis, of course, is broader than that. Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. They have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryers Impact event or events was what we now call the Torrid Meteor Stream, which the Earth still passes through twice a year.

53:07It's now about 30 million kilometers wide. It takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit. It passed through it in June, and it passes through it at the end of October. The suggestion is that the Torrid Meteor Stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20 ,000 years ago. It came in from the Oort Cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the Sun, and went into orbit around the Sun, and orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, the likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small. But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments, because these chunks of rock held together by ice, and as they warm up, they split and disintegrate and break into pieces, as it passed through that its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider.

54:05The theory is that 12 ,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the Torrid Meteor Stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet. Certainly from the west of North America, as far east as Syria. We are by and large not talking about impacts that would have caused craters, although there certainly were some. We're talking about air bursts. When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter, and it's coming in very fast into the Earth's atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the Earth. It's going to blow up in the sky. The best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on the 30th of June, 1908.

54:57The Tunguska event was nobody disputes. It was definitely an air burst of a cometary fragment. The date is interesting because the 30th of June is the height of the beta torids. It's one of the two times when the Earth is going through the Torrid Meteor Stream. Well, luckily that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited, but 2 ,000 square miles of forest were destroyed. If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the Torrid Meteor Stream and about the risk of cosmic impact. The suggestion is that it wasn't one impact. It wasn't two impacts. It wasn't three impacts.

55:34It was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet, coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientist working on this, think hit the North American ice cap largely. Some of the males have hit the Northern European ice cap, resulting in that sudden, otherwise unexplained flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean and caused the cooling that then took place. But this was a disaster for life all over the planet. It's interesting that one of the sites where they find the Younger Dryers boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz, the carbon -microus variables, the nano -diamonds, the trinitite and so on and so forth, all of those impact proxies are found at Apple Herrera.

56:23That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Teppi and it was hit 12 ,800 years ago and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was re -inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time. It's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Apple Herrera. Now, this is a theory. The Younger Dryers impact is a hypothesis, actually. It's not even a theory. A theory is, I think, considered a higher level than a hypothesis.

57:04That's why it's the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis. Of course, it has many opponents and there are many who disagree with it. There have been a series of peer -reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis. One, I think, was in 2011. It was called a REC -WEM for the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis. There's one just been published a few months ago or a year called a complete refutation of the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title. It's a hypothesis that has its opponents. Even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view.

57:48Robert Schock from Boston University, the geologist, who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall. He doesn't go for the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis. He fully accepts that the Younger Dryers was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place, but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outbursts. So what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryers was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.

58:29How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations? So it's possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have erased most of an advanced civilization during this period. In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying. It's the Younger Dryers that's central to what I'm saying. And the Younger Dryers required a trigger, something caused it. I think the Younger Dryers impact hypothesis, the notion that we're looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there and we still pass through it twice a year is the best explanation.

59:12But I don't mind other explanations. It's good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryers is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet. And that word advanced civilization, this is another word that is easily misunderstood. And I've tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved certain things. So amongst the clues that intrigue me are those pre -sectional numbers that are found all around the world.

59:54And our category of ancient maps called Portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and Sact Constantinople, the Portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they're extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas. For example, on these Portolanos style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the map makers state that they base their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived.

1:00:34These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes. Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid -18th century with Harrison's chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea. So you could have the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time. And then you could work out your longitude. There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is these Portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them show the world to my eye. As it looked during the Ice Age, they show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula.

1:01:18And the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass. And that was the case during the Ice Age. That was the Sunda shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by archaeology, which says, oh, those map makers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it. So they put a fictional landmass there. I don't think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last Ice Age, but that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech.

1:01:53It means that they were following that exploration instinct that they knew how to navigate. They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before. They knew how to navigate, and they knew how to build sea going ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world. Those maps were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and re -copied. We don't know exactly what happened to the library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it's likely, this was during the period of the Roman Empire.

1:02:32I suggest it's likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople. And that's where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and re -copied. So from this perspective, when we talk about advanced Ice Age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of their scholars of the stars and their expert seafaring navigators. That's about as far as I would take it. And when I say that it, as I have said on a number of occasions that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I'm referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude.

1:03:15I'm not saying that they were building steam engines. I don't see any evidence for that. And perhaps some building tricks and skills of how to... Well, definitely. And this again is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in Egypt with the three great pyramids. And the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself. This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue. What can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and where you find most mysterious and interesting about them?

1:04:01Well, first of all the astronomy. And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwollard de Lubics, who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx. John West picked that up and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt and he was hugely versed in ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fishes, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwollard was right, maybe there was some kind of flooding here.

1:04:53And that's when he brought Robert Shock. Second person I'd like to recognize, Geologist at Boston University, he brought Shock to Geeser and Shock. It was the first Geologist to stick his neck out, risk the rire, the ire of Egyptologists, and say, well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least a thousand years of heavy rainfall. And as Shock's calculations have continued as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery, he's continuously pushed that back. And he's now again looking at the date of around 12 ,000, 12 ,500 years ago during the Angadrius for the creation of the Great Sphinx.

1:05:30And then, of course, this is the period of the Wetsahara, the Humid Sahara. The Sahara was a completely different place during the Ice Age. There were rivers in it, there were lakes in it, it was fertile, it was possibly densely populated. And there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Geeser today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx. The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Boval. Robert and I have co -authored a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years.

1:06:08He's got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius. And it does take a genius some time to make these connections because nobody noticed it before that the three pyramids of Geeser are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt. And skeptics will say, well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want. But Orion actually isn't any old constellation. Orion was the god of Cyrus in the sky. He was the ancient Egyptian called the Orion constellation Sahu.

1:06:49And they recognize it as the celestial image of the god of Cyrus. So what's being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity of a celestial deity. It's not just a random constellation. And then when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening. First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4 ,500 years ago. It's not precisely related to how Orion's belt looked at that time. There's a bit of a twist. They're not quite right. But as you process the stars backwards, as you go back and back and back and you come to around 10 ,500 BC, 12 ,000 years ago in the younger dryers, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly.

1:07:42They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground. And that's the same moment that the greats thinks an equinoxial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this through themselves. Just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind this thing and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of this thing. But the question is what constellation was behind this thing and 12 ,500 years ago it was the constellation of Leo. And actually the constellation of Leo has a very things like look. And I and my colleagues are pretty sure that this thing was originally a lion entirely.

1:08:24And that it over the thousands of years it became damaged. It became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when this thing was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out. By the time you come to the fourth dynasty when the great pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the fourth dynasty, the lion, original lion head would have been a complete mass. And we suggest that it was then re -carved into a pharaohonic head. Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh, Kaffrey, but there's no real strong resemblance. But it's definitely wearing the nemesh headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

1:09:07And we think that that's the result of a re -carving of what was originally not only a lion bodied, but also a lion -headed monument. It wouldn't make sense if you create an equinoxial marker in the time of Kaffrey, 4 ,500 years ago. And the Sphinx is an equinoxial marker. I mean it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then you would be better, you'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull because that was the age of Taurus when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion?

1:09:43And again we think that's because of that observation of the skies and putting on the ground as above so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now the fact that the geyser plateau, it's a fact of course that Egyptologists completely dispute. But the fact that the principal monuments of the geyser plateau, the three great pyramids and the great Sphinx all lock astronomically on the date of around 10 ,500 BC to me is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually if you look at computer software at the sky at that time you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the river Nile.

1:10:28I suggest that maybe one of the reasons amongst many why geyser was chosen as the site for this for this very special place. So the point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground which memorializes a very ancient date does not have to have been done 12 ,500 years ago. If from the ancient Egyptian point of view you're there 4 ,500 years ago and there's a time 8 ,000 years before that which is very very very important to you. You could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the geyser plateau which is what we think we're looking at except for one thing and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx.

1:11:16And we're pretty sure that the Sphinx at least does date back to 12 ,500 years ago. And with it the megalithic temples, the so -called valley temple which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx. And the Sphinx temple which stands directly in front of the Sphinx. The Sphinx temple is largely being destroyed but the valley temple attributed to Kafre on no good grounds whatsoever is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to a hundred tons each. And yet it has been remodeled, refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks.

1:12:04And those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there. So I think the geese is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the great pyramids. They were closely involved in the construction of the great pyramids as we see them today. But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the geese plateau that are much older and that when we look at the three great pyramids we're looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the geese plateau for a much longer period before that.

1:12:56Actually the great pyramid is built around a natural hill and that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians. So the idea is that this thinks was there long before the pyramids and the pyramids were built by the Egyptian to celebrate further an already holy place. Yeah. And there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today. But the the the bases, the base of those pyramids was already in place. So what's the case? What's the evidence that the Egyptologists use to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the sinks?

1:13:40Well, the three great pyramids of geese are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing. Is the the the story of pyramid building? When did it when did it really begin? And the timeline that we get from Egyptology is the the first pyramid is the pyramid of the pharaoh Zosar, the step pyramid at Sakara, about a hundred years or so before the geese of pyramids are built. And then we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to single pharaoh Snifru who built supposedly the pyramid at my doom and the two pyramids at Da Shua, the bent on the red pyramid.

1:14:30And then within that same hundred year span we have the geese of pyramids being built. This is according to the orthodox chronology. And then suddenly once the geese project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt. And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are frankly speaking a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place. Whereas the geese of pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever.

1:15:13What they do, what we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy. A basic statistics. It's a six million ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long. It's aligned almost perfectly to true north -south east and west within three sixtieths of a single degree. Sixtieths because degrees are divided into sixties. And it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing. Plus it's very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it. You know in the ninth century, the great pyramid still had its facing stones in place. But there was an Arab caliph, Caliph Al -Mamoon, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the north -face.

1:16:11Nobody knew where the entrance to the great pyramid was. But he figured it, there's an entrance to this thing. It's going to be in the north -face somewhere. So he put together a team of workers and they went in with sledge hammers and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. And they cut their way into the great pyramid for a distance of maybe a hundred feet. And then the hammering that they did dislodged something. They heard a little bit further away something big falling. And they realized there was a cavity there. And they started heading in that direction. And then they joined the internal passageway of the great pyramid, the descending and the ascending corridors that go up.

1:16:52When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal passageways in the in the great pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the great pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the great pyramid. If you go up the grand gallery, which is at the end of the so -called ascending corridor, and it's above the so -called Queen's Chamber, you go up the grand gallery, you're eventually going to come to what is known as the King's Chamber, in which there is a sarcophagus.

1:17:29And that sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway. It's almost as though the so -called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus already in place. Above the King's Chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the King's Chamber of the weight of the monument. But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down where more weight was involved, you have the Queen's Chamber and there are no such relieving chambers above that. In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Weiss, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place.

1:18:14Allegedly, well, he claims he found the graffiti, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang naming the Pharaoh Kufu. And it's true, I've been in that chamber and there is the Cartouche of Kufu there, quite recognizable. But the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the old kingdom or whether how advise actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Kufu.

1:18:54Another is what is called the Wadi El Jaf Papyrai, where on the red sea a diary, the diary of an individual com Meraire was found and he talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the great pyramid. And it's clear that what he's talking about is the facing stones of the great pyramid. He's not talking about the body of the great pyramid. He's talking about the facing stones of the great pyramid during the reign of Kufu. So that's another reason why the great pyramid is attributed to Kufu. But I think that where Kufu was undoubtedly involved in the great pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure and I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is a 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the great pyramid.

1:19:42Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You've got to go down a 26 degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet. It's 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you're going to walk a distance of about not walk. You're going to eight walk. You're almost going to have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because there are only three feet five inches high. You get down to the bottom. You have a short horizontal passage and then you get into the subterranean chamber.

1:20:18The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Kufu. But after cutting out that 300 foot long, 26 degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there and they built what's now known as the Queen's chamber as his burial chamber. But then they decided that wouldn't do either so they then built the King's chamber and that's where the Pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Khalif Mamoon didn't find anything in the great pyramid at all.

1:20:56So your idea is that this thinks in maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier. Why that's important is in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology for a much older civilization. The idea is that during the young Gurdrayas, most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged and they desperately scattered across the globe, seeking refuge, seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe one the importance of the stars. Their knowledge about the stars and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation. That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zeptepi, which is the first time, it means the first time.

1:21:56This is when the gods walked the earth. This is when Seven Sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt and that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists, by the ancient Egyptians themselves, there are king lists that go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30 ,000 years into the past and ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists, but nevertheless it's interesting that there's that reference to remote time. Now what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies. The followers of Horus are one of those, specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods.

1:22:43The souls of Pei and Neckon are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Angadrāya's cataclysm who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that they are referred to in the Edfu building Texas Seven Sages, because that repeats again and again. It's also in Mesopotamia, it's Seven Sages, Seven Apkālu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy.

1:23:27It's found all around the world, that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter forages who lived at Giza at that time and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter forages. But it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time, and that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years and finally it bursts into full form in the fourth dynasty in ancient Egypt. And you know the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn't be observed.

1:24:11We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much I think around 2000, 2000 BC, and knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can preserve knowledge for four thousand years, you can probably preserve it for eight. Now of course the air bars on us are quite large, but if an advanced ICH civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed? And how big do you think it might have been? Well this is where I'm often accused of presenting a god of the gaps argument that I think there was a lot of civilization because there's lots of the earth that archaeologists have never looked at.

1:24:53Of course I'm not thinking that. These are very special gaps that I'm interested in, and I'm interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before. It's not just because there are gaps in the archaeological record. It's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Isage, and they specifically include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the Isage and went through this warm wet period when it was very fertile. Certainly some archaeology has been done in the Sahara, but it's fractional, it's tiny.

1:25:30And I think if we want to get into the origins, true origins of ancient Egyptian civilization of the peoples of ancient Egypt, we need to be looking in the Sahara for that. And the Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers. The Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six. And then you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Isage. Now it's well established that sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight.

1:26:12It came in dribs and drabs. There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more, much more slowly. So that 400 foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10 ,000 years, but there are episodes within it like meltwater pulse 1b, like meltwater pulse 1a, when the flooding was really immense. How big do you think it might have been? And do you think it was across the spread across the globe? So if there were expert navigators, do you think they spread across the globe? Well, the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based.

1:26:55All I'm seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me, and which suggests to me that something is missing from our past. And I'm not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe. Because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the Isage. I mean, nobody smart would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12 ,000 years ago. It was a hideous frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the Isage. And that of course includes the coastlines that are now under water. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert, and of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well.

1:27:36All of these places, I think, are candidates for quote unquote my lost civilization. And because I think largely from those ancient maps that it was a navigating seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn't only in one place. It was probably in a number of places. And then I can only speculate. Maybe there was a cultural value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep their distance from them. Just as even today, there is a feeling that we shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest.

1:28:24Although interestingly, some of those tribes are now using cell phones. That possibility may have been there in the past. And only when we come to a global cataclysm, does it become essential to have outreach and actually to take refuge amongst those hunter forage or population? That is the hypothesis that I'm putting it forward. I'm not claiming that it's a fact. But for me, it helps to explain the evidence. So that speaks to one of the challenges that archaeologists provide to this idea is that there is a lot of evidence of humans in the Ice Age and they appear to be all hunter -gatherers. But like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been studied by archaeologists.

1:29:10That's right. Very tiny percent. And even a tiny percent of every archaeological site has been studied by archaeologists. Typically, one to five percent of any archaeological site is excavated. I mean, that's why I'm going back to the tip of fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing as a time capsule. It's almost certain that there is places on earth we haven't discovered that once we do, even if it's after the Ice Age, we'll change our view of human history. Do you think there is going to be a place like what, what will be your dream thing to discover? Like a Bechle Tepe that says a definitive like perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history.

1:29:53Some kind of archive, some kind of whole of records. There's both mystical associations with a whole of records at Giza from people like the Edecaecisia organization. There's also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt. It's quite present in ancient Egypt. So far as far as I know, nobody has dug down beneath the Sphinx. And of course, there's very good reasons for that. You don't want to damage the place too much, but let's call it the Hall of Records. I'd love to find that. But I think in a way, that's what Gilebeckley Tepe is.

1:30:37Gilebeckley Tepe is a Hall of Records. You know it's interesting that just as I've tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the three great pyramids of Giza, Macherine's belt in 10 ,500 BC, just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10 ,500 BC, 12 ,500 years ago. So Pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gilebeckley Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included regardless of an astronomical diagram. Martin Sweatman of Edinburgh University is brought forward the best work in this field, but it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Burley, who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today, and that above it is a vulture without stretched wings, which is in a posture very similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius, and on that outstretched wing is a circular object.

1:31:38And the suggestion is that it's marking the time when the sun was at the center of the dark rift in the Milky Way at the Summer Solstice 12 and a half thousand years ago. That's what it's marking. And it's interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar 40. Of course, it's controversial, Martin Sweatman's ideas, by no means accepted by archaeology, but he's done very, very thorough detailed statistical work on this, and I'm personally convinced. So we have a time capsule at Gobekli Teppi, which is memorializing a date that is at least 1 ,200 years before Gobekli Teppi was built, if that dating of 11 ,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date, as it is at present.

1:32:24The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12 ,800 years ago, the beginning of the Ungadrārās, the beginning of the impact event. And then Giza does the same thing, but in much larger scale, it draws our, it uses massive megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and the profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture, which is sufficiently literate in astronomy, will be able to decode. We don't have to have a script that we can't read, like we do with the Indus Valley civilization, or with the Easter Island script. We don't have to have a script that can't be interpreted.

1:33:03If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date. The Hoover Dam has a star map built into it, and that star map is part of an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the Hoover Dam. And what it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion, and Oscar Hansen, the artist who created that piece, said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture would be able to know the time of the dam's construction. So you can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date. Quick pause, Beth and Brick?

1:33:48Sounds good. So to me, the story that we've been talking about, it is both exciting if the mainstream archaeology narrative is correct, and the one you're constructing is correct. Both are super interesting because the mainstream archaeology perspective means that there is something about the human mind from which the pyramids, the these ideas spring naturally. You place humans anywhere, you place them on Mars, it's going to that way. So that's an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve out of Africa with Homo sapiens, how they think about the world.

1:34:30That's super interesting. And then if there's an ancient civilization, advanced civilization that explains why there's so many similar types of ideas that spread, that means that there's so much undiscovered still about the spring of these ideas of civilization. So to me, they're both fascinating. So I don't know why there's so much sort of infighting, but I think it's partly territorial. I think that I think that I can't speak of all archaeologists, but some archaeologists feel very very territorial about their profession, and they do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders have a large platform.

1:35:19And that's, I found that the attacks on me by archaeologists have increased step -by -step with the increase of my exposure. I wasn't very interesting to them when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called The Sign and the Seal. But when fingerprints of the gods was published in 1995 and became a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention. And appeared to have been regarded as a threat to them. And that is the case today. That is why ancient apocalypse season one was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix. It's why the Society for American Archaeology wrote an open letter to Netflix, asking Netflix to reclassify the series of science fiction.

1:36:09It's why they accused the series of anti -Semitism, misogyny, white supremacism, and I don't know a whole bunch of other things. There's nothing to do with anything that's in the series. It was like, we must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us. Certainly not a dangerous thing in the world than a television series. Going on right now, but maybe it was seen as a danger to archaeology. This non -archeologist was in archaeological terrain and being viewed and seen by large and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem. And human nature being what it is, I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoops, from the University of Kansas and Flint Dibble, who's now teaching at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the UK, are both people who like to have media exposure.

1:37:11And John Hoops had just recently started a YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for quite a while. Pretty small number of followers. I think that they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention, and that it's not right that I am, and that the best way to stop that is to stop me, to shut me down, to get me cancelled. And basically requiring Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest in Netflix. If that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would have effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series.

1:37:54It would no longer have been ranked under documentaries. So it was a deliberate attempt to shut me down. And I see that going on again and again, and it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary. I've become very defensive towards archaeology. I hit back after 30 years of these attacks on my work. I'm tired of it. I do defend myself. And sometimes I'm perhaps overvigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archaeology in the first season of ancient apocalypse. Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder. And I've tried to reflect that in the second season and to bring also many more indigenous voices into the second season, as well as the voices of many more archaeologists.

1:38:41Yeah. In general, I got to get a glimpse of the archaeology community. And in archaeology in science in general, I don't have much patience for this kind of arrogance or snark or dismissal of general human curiosity that I think your work inspires in people. So that's why people like Ed Barnhart, who I recently had a conversation with, he radiates kindness and curiosity as well. And it's like that kind of approach to ideas, especially about human history, it inspires people. It inspires millions of people to ask questions. Exactly. I mean, that's why you had the Canarees on the new season. He's basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity.

1:39:29Yeah. Keanu is genuinely curious about the past. And very, very interested in it. And he's bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the past. He's speaking for every man in the series. So given that, can you maybe still man the case that archaeologists make about this period that we've been talking about? Can you make the case that that is indeed what happened is it was hunter gathered for a long time. And then there was a cataclysm, a very difficult period in human history with the Younger Dryas. And that changed the environment and then led to the springing up of civilizations at different places on Earth.

1:40:13Can you sort of make the case for that? No, I completely understand why that is the position of archaeology because that's what they've found. Archaeology is very much wishing to define itself as a science. And it uses the techniques of weighing and measuring and counting are very key to what archaeology does. And in what they've found and what they've studied around the world, they don't see any traces of a lost civilization. And the idea that, besides, we live in a very politically correct world today and the idea that some kind of lost civilization brought knowledge to other cultures around the world is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way.

1:41:01It triggers that aspect as well. But basically, I think majority of archaeologists are in complete good faith on this. I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me. I think that what we're hearing from most archaeologists, some much more vicious than others. But what we're hearing from most archaeologists is this is what we found and we don't see evidence for a lost civilization in it. And to that, I must reply, please look at the myths. Please consider the implications of the younger Dryas. Please look at the ancient astronomy. Please look at those ancient maps and don't dismiss them and sneer at them.

1:41:41And for God's sake, please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable and attractive during the Ice Age and that have hardly been studied by archaeology at all before you tell us that your theory is the only one that can possibly be correct. In fact, it's a very arrogant and silly position of archaeology because archaeological archaeological theories are always being overthrown. It can take years. It can take decades. It took decades in the case of the Clovis I hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. But sooner or later, a bad idea will be kicked out by a preponderance of evidence that that idea does not explain.

1:42:22If we can just look back at your debate with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan experience, what are some takeaways from that? What have you learned? Maybe what are some things you like about Flint? You said that he's one of your big critics. But what do you like about his ideas and what will you maybe bother by? First of all, just very recently, and it can be found on my YouTube channel and it signaled on my website. I have made a video, runs about an hour, which looks at a series of statements that Flint made during the debate, which I was not prepared to answer. And it turns out that some of those statements are not correct.

1:43:06The notion, for example, that there were 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped. Flint actually uses the word mapped 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped at one point in the debate. And I've put that clip into the video that I brought out. That is not a fact. That is an estimate, a UNESCO estimate. And actually in the small print on one of the slides that he has on the screen, you can see the word estimate. But he never expresses that word out loud. So those who are listening to the podcast rather than watching it wouldn't even have a chance to see that. And I sitting there in the studio didn't see that word estimate either.

1:43:44And I didn't know that. I thought, my God, Flint has a point here. If there have been 3 million shipwrecks found and mapped, if that's the case, the absence of any shipwreck from a lost civilization of the ice age is a problem. But then I discovered that it isn't 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It's much, much less than that. Maybe it's 250 ,000. Still a large number. But most of them from the last thousand years. And unfortunately, what Flint didn't go into and perhaps he should have shared with the audience. And again, I go into this in the video, is that there is indisputable evidence that human beings were seafarers as much as 50 or 60 ,000 years ago that people in Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, 100 kilometer ocean voyage.

1:44:32But nevertheless, it was an ocean voyage. And it must have involved a large enough people, a large enough number of people to create a permanent population that wouldn't go extinct. The settlement of Cyprus is the same thing. It was always an island, even during the ice age. And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia. And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either. But that doesn't mean that that thing didn't happen. I should just like linger on this because for me, it was the shipwrecks thing was convincing. And then looking back, first of all, watching your video, but also just realizing the people in Australia part, that's my apologies.

1:45:1050 ,000 years ago. Just imagine being the person standing on the shore, looking out into the ocean, standing on the shore of a harsh environment, looking out to the ocean of a harsh environment, and deciding that, you know what, I'm going to go towards near certain death. And it's on the other side of that water. You can't see 90 kilometers. Humans did it. Yeah. Again, it's that urge to explore. And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made the journey there and back. They ventured into the water. They definitely had boats. And lo and behold, after a two or three day voyage, they ended up on a coastline.

1:45:51You're an individual. You've got my relatively straightforward island hopping with where each island is with inside of each other as far as Timor. And when you get to Timor, suddenly you can't island hop anymore. There's an expansive ocean that you can't see across. But that urge to explore that curiosity that is central to the human condition would undoubtedly have led some adventurous individuals to want to find out more and even be willing to risk their lives. And that first recognitering of what lay beyond that straight would have undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals, not enough to create a permanent population in Australia.

1:46:31But when they came back with the good news that there's a whole land there. That's the land that was in it that geographies call Sahul, which in just as Sunda was the Ice Age, Indonesian and Malaysian peninsula all joined together into one land mass. So Sahul was New Guinea joined to Australia. So they would have made landfall in New Guinea. And then they think, well, here is this vast, open, incredible land. We need to bring more people here. And that would have involved larger craft. You need to bring people with resources and you need to bring enough of them, both men and women in order to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct.

1:47:19And it's the same in Cyprus there, the detailed work that's been done suggests very strongly that we're looking at planned migrations of groups of people in excess of a thousand at a time, bringing animals with them. And this certainly would have involved multiple boats and boats of a significant size. And there's no archaeological evidence of those boats. None whatsoever. The oldest boat that's ever been found in the world is the Dockos Shipwreck off Greece, which is around 5 ,000 years old, if I recall correctly. So everything that makes a boat is lost to time? Yes, boats can be preserved under certain circumstances.

1:47:58There's a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea, almost two miles deep. I didn't know the Black Sea was that deep. But there's a wreck and there's no oxygen down there. That is more than 2000 years old and it's still in pretty much perfect condition. But in other conditions, the structure of the ship evaporates. Sometimes what you left with is the cargo of the ship. And you could say there was a ship that sank here, but the ship itself has gone. The fact is we know that our ancestors were sea fairers as much as 50 ,000 years ago. And no ship has survived to testify to that, yet we accept that they were.

1:48:34Do you think one day we'll find a ship that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 ,000 years old? It's not impossible. I think it's quite unlikely given the very thin survival of ships, the further back you go in time, with the oldest, as I say, being about 6 ,000 years old now. And then the other thing to take into account is the Younger Dryer's event itself and the the cataclysmic circumstances of that event and the roiling of the seas that would have taken place then, how much would have survived in a boat accident at that time would have survived for thousands of years afterwards? I'm not sure, but I don't give up hope.

1:49:18It's possible. It's okay. So that's back to the 3 million shipwrecks. Yeah. So what's your take away from that debate? Well, my take away from that debate is that I should have been better prepared. I should have been less angry. I have to say that Flint had really disturbed me with these constant snide, not quite exact references to racism and white supremacism in my work. I did test such things. And to have those labels stuck on me, he's always avoided taking direct responsibility. Pretty much always avoided. There's one example that I include in the video I've made where he really hasn't successfully avoided it.

1:50:05But in most cases, he's trying to say that I rely on sources that were racist, but that he's not saying that I myself am a racist. But the end result of those statements is that people all around the world came to the conclusion that Graham Hancock is a racist and a white supremacist. And that really got under my skin. And it really upset me. And I felt angry about it. And I felt that I was there to defend ancient apocalypse season one. Whereas in fact, what I was there to do was to listen to a series of lectures where an archaeologist tells me what archaeologists have found. And that somehow I'm to deduce that from what they have found, they're not going to find anything else.

1:50:45At least not anything to do with the lost civilization. Listen, I feel you. I've seen the intensity of the attacks and the whole racism label is the one that can get under your skin. And it's a toolbox that's been prevalent over the past, let's say decade, maybe a little bit more as a method of cancellation. And the one a person has, is the opposite of racist very often. It's but it can't get under your skin, especially when you have certain dynamics that happen on the internet, where it seeps into a Wikipedia page. And then other people read that Wikipedia page. And you get to hear it from like friends, oh, I didn't know you're at whatever.

1:51:25And then you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are is actually has a lot of power, not by people that know you well, but people that just kind of learning about you for the first time. Definitely. And they can really start to annoy you and get under your skin. Tonic people are kind of indirectly injecting, they're writing articles about you. They can then be cited by Wikipedia. It's can really bother a person who's actually trying to do good science and or just trying to inspire people with different ideas. I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented. And I felt that I as a human being were being was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful.

1:52:06My wife and I have six children between us and we have nine grandchildren. And of those nine grandchildren seven are of mixed race. And this is my family. And these are kids who are going to grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that grandpa was some kind of racist. You know, this is a personal issue for me. And I'm afraid I carried that personal anger into the debate and it made me less effective than I should have been. But ultimately I do want to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He's got a very sharp mind. He's a very clever man and he's very fast on his feet.

1:52:45And I recognize that I was definitely up against a superior debater in that debate. I'm not sure that I have those debating skills and I certainly didn't have them on on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else which is that he was willing to be there. Most archaeologists don't want to talk to me at all. They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudo -archeologist or a purveyor of pseudo -archeological theories. They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there. But they actually don't want to sit down and confront me.

1:53:19At least Flint was willing to do that. And I'm grateful to him for that. And I think in that sense it is an important encounter between people with a say an alternative view of history and those with a very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us. And he's also a very determined character. He doesn't give up. So all of those things about him I admire and respect. But I think he fought dirty during the debate and I've said exactly why in this video that I now have on YouTube. To say a positive thing that I enjoyed I think towards the end and him speaking about agriculture was pretty interesting.

1:53:58So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting. Where you can get some insights through the fog of time about what people were doing. How they were living. That's pretty interesting. It's very interesting. It's a very important discipline. And I've said many times before publicly I couldn't do any of my work without the way that archaeologists do. I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don't study what archaeologists study. But nevertheless the data that archaeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do. But when I look at the Great Sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the Pharaoh Kaffrey, despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription that describes it to Kaffrey.

1:54:47And in fact the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of Kufu. I am not looking at what Egyptologist study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Kaffrey connection. At Quebec the Tepe, I'm not really looking at what archaeologists look at. I'm looking at the alignments of the Megaliths and how they seem to track procession of the star serious over a period of time. Archaeologists aren't interested in any of that. So I value and respect archaeology. I think it's an incredible tool for investigating our past. But I wish archaeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it and a slightly opener perspective.

1:55:26And also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds. It's though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as quote unquote dangerous, because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public. I think the general public are just going to accept that much. Actually by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today.

1:56:01And behaving in a snobbish, arrogant way, we archaeologists are the only people who are really qualified to speak about the past. And anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship. And I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart was very much the case with archaeologist Marty Passenen from the University of Helsinki and with Geographer Assoir Ranzi, Brazilian Geographer, very, very senior figure, who I worked with in the Amazon for season two of ancient apocalypse, looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the Amazon jungle and which more and more are now being found with Lidar.

1:56:47Indeed, we found some of them ourselves with Lidar, while we were there. Yeah, those are an incredible part of the show that I got a chance to preview. It's like there's all this earthworks. Yeah, the traces of things built on the ground that probably you can only really appreciate when you look from up above. So the idea that they build stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very kind of deep relationship with the sky. With the sky. Yeah. And a very good knowledge of geometry as well, because these are geometrical structures. And some of them even seem to incorporate geometrical games almost like squaring the circle.

1:57:31It's not quite that, but you have a lovely square earthwork with a lovely circle of earthwork right in the middle of it. Whatever else they were, they were geometers. They were not just builders of fantastically huge earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon. Not just builders of cities that now exist in the Amazon, but that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well. Everything we're talking about is so full of mysteries. It's just fascinating, especially the farther back we go. That's what I love about the past is the mystery that's there. And that's another thing that I regret about some archaeologists is that their mission seems to be to drain all mystery out of the past, to suck it dry like some kind of vampire, sucking the blood out of the past and to reduce it to a series of numbers that appear to be scientific.

1:58:24I think that's most unfortunate. The past is deeply mysterious. The whole story of life on earth is deeply mysterious. I mean, we were talking about the timeline of human beings, but if you go back to the formation of the earth itself, if I've got the figure's right, it's about four and a half billion years ago that the earth supposedly formed. It was then incredibly hot and inhospitable to life for the next several hundred million years. But it was actually Francis Crick, who pointed out something odd that within a hundred million years of the earth being cool enough to support life, there's bacterial life all over the planet.

1:59:08And Crick wrote a book called Life itself that was published in 1981. And he suggested that life had been brought here by a process of panspermia. Now, that's an idea that's around in circulation that comets may carry bacteria which can seed life on on planets. But Crick actually in life itself was talking about directed panspermia. He envisaged, this is Crick, not me. He envisaged an alien civilization far away across the galaxy, which faced extinction. Perhaps the supernova was going to go off in the neighborhood. They were highly advanced. Their first thought might have been, let's get ourselves off the planet and go and populate some other planet, but the distances of interstellar space were so great.

1:59:56So their second thought was, let's preserve our DNA. Let's put bacteria, genetically engineered bacteria into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions. And bottom line of Crick's theory in life itself is one of those cryogenic containers containing bacterial life from another solar system crashed into the early earth. And that's why life began so suddenly here on Earth. If we as a human civilization continue, I think there is a one way to create backups of us, elsewhere in the universe, given the space as to do a life -gun and shoot it everywhere. And then it's just plants.

2:00:38And you kind of hope that whatever is the magic that makes up human consciousness. And if that magic was already there in the initial DNA of the bacteria, the potential for that magic is there. The potential is there. And evolutionary forces will work upon it in different ways and different environments. But the potential is there. Yes, it's something that we would do. If we were facing a complete extinction of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be made to preserve it somehow. And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable.

2:01:20And as you were mentioning, there's just so many interesting mysteries along the way here. For example, I mean, it's like three billion years, it was single -cell organisms. So it seems like life was pretty good. Yes, single -cell organisms that there's no need for multicellularity, like for animals, for any of this kind of stuff. So why is that? It seems like you could adapt much better if you're a more complicated organism. It took a really long time to take that leap. Is it because it's really hard to do? And what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap? And the same, I mean, for us to be selfish and self -obsessed.

2:02:01For us humans, like what was the magic leap to homo sapiens from the other hominids? And why did homo sapiens win out against the Andrithals and the other competitors? Why aren't they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries. And it feels like the more we propose sort of radical ideas about our past, take it seriously and explore, the more we'll be able to sort of figure out that puzzle that leads all the way back to homo sapiens and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on Earth. Yeah. I think that homo sapiens is the tail end of a very long, deep series of mysteries that goes back right to the beginning of life on this planet and probably long before actually, because this planet is part of the universe and God knows what else is out there in the universe.

2:02:55What do you think homo sapiens evolved? What was the magic things? There's a bunch of theories about fire leading to meat, to cooking, which can fuel the brain. That's one. The other is like social interaction. We're able to use our imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas until great stories. And that is somehow an evolutionary advantage. Do you have any like favorite conceptions? Well, it's interesting. There's no doubt that anatomically modern humans and the Andrithals coexisted in Europe for at least 10 ,000 years, probably more than that. And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals that we killed them off.

2:03:41But at the same time, we were into breeding within the Andrithals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone. They are still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There's another theory that I've read about. There is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals, that there was ritual cannibalism took place amongst Neanderthals. And particularly the eating of human brains. And this can cause a kuru, which can kill off whole populations. That's another suggestion of whether Neanderthals died out. There's lots of possibilities that have been put forward. Maybe we just out -competed them. Maybe anatomically modern humans had some brain connections that they didn't have.

2:04:25Even though the Neanderthal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings, as the old saying goes, sizes and everything. Maybe we just had a more compact, more efficient brain. The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the rise of homo sapiens. For our discussion, though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers. Yes. They spread. I mean, I didn't know the fact that homo erectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say that's what I think I'm doing.

2:05:08I'm exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way, making my own path and defining my own route. That's the leap from non -human to human. One of the things you've discussed is your idea of what was the leap to human civilization. What is the driver? What is the inspiration for humans to form civilizations? And for you, that's shamanism. Definitely. Can you explain what that means? I think that shamanism is the origin of everything, of value, in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science. When I spend time with shaman's in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way.

2:06:01They're always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms. For example, the Iwaska brew to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way. The invention of curari is a remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down to shaman's in the Amazon. They are the scientists of the Hunter for a Jure state of society. They were the ancient leaders of human civilization. I think all civilization arises out of shamanism. Shamanism is a naturally scientific endeavor where experimentation is undertaken, and exploration, and investigation of the environment around us. What I'm suggesting is that one group, perhaps more than one group, went a bit further than other groups did, and used that study of the skies, and developed navigational techniques, and were able to sail and explore the earth.

2:07:05But that ultimately, what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shaman's are still using in the Amazon to this day. I do see them as scientists in a very proper use of the word. But do you think something like Iwaska was a part of their process? Yes. Iwaska is the result of shamanistic investigation of what's available in the Amazon. Of course, Iwaska is all the fad in Western industrialized societies today, and some people see it as a miracle cure for all kinds of ailments and problems. And perhaps it is, perhaps it can be in certain ways. Iwaska itself is not an Amazonian word.

2:07:51It comes from the queshua language, and it means the vine of souls, or the vine of the dead. But the Iwaska vine is only one of two principal ingredients in the Iwaska brew, and the other ingredients are leaves that contain dimethyl tryptamine. And there are two sources of that. One is a bush called Sycotry of Viridis, that's his botanical name. They call it Shakruna in the Amazon. And its leaves are rich in dimethyl tryptamine DMT, which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic none to science. And the other source comes from another vine, deplopteris cabreraana, which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT.

2:08:37So the Iwaska vine on its own is not going to give you a visionary journey. And the leaves that contain DMT on their own, whether they come from deplopteris or whether they come from Shakruna, are not going to give you a visionary journey. And the reason they're not going to give you the visionary journey is because of the enzyme monoaminoxidase in the gut that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally. Basically DMT is not accessible orally. Unless you combine it with a monoaminoxidase inhibitor. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about science in the Amazon. Because there's so many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands different species of plants and trees in the Amazon.

2:09:16And they've gone around and they've found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary, visionary species. Imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten. Yeah, it consumed and smoked. All kinds of combinations to arrive at that. Exactly. Exactly. To realize that this is something, this is something very special. And then to use the principles there to find another form of it. So Iwaska is the form that is made with the Iwaska vine and the leaves of the Shakruna plants. But Yahe is made from the Iwaska vine and the leaves of another vine deplopteris Kebrirana, which contain not only NNDMT, which is the DMT that everybody's pretty much familiar with these days, but also 5MEO DMT.

2:10:04And the Yahe experience, which I have also had in my view, is more intense and more powerful, almost to the point of being overwhelming than the Iwaska experience.

2:10:23But is a brew which is hideous to drink. The taste, I find it quite repulsive. I almost wretch just smelling it in the cup. But then unleashes these extraordinary experiences. And it isn't just pretty visuals. It's the sense of encounters with sentient others, that there are sentient beings that somehow we're surrounded by a realm of sentience that is not normally accessible to us. And that what the Iwaska brew and certain other psychedelics like some cytosybin mushrooms in the high enough dose can do it as well. LSD can do it. But Iwaska is the master in this of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing other realm, other world.

2:11:18And of course, the hardline rational scientists will say that's just all fantasies of your brain. But I don't think we fully understand or even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is. And I remain open to two possibilities. That consciousness is generated by the brain, is made by the brain in the way that a factory makes cars. But I also am open to the possibility that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals. And that if that is the case, then we locked into the physical realm. We need our every day alert problem solving state of consciousness.

2:12:03And that's the state of consciousness that Western civilization values and highly encourages. But these other states of consciousness that allow us to access alternative realities are possibly more important. It may be apocryphal, but it was reported after Francis Cricks' role and his Nobel Prize for the discovery of the influence of LSD. There's the classic example of Kerry Mullis and the Polymera's chain reaction. He said he got that under the influence of LSD. So the notion that the alert problem solving state of consciousness is the only valuable state of consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in a visionary state.

2:12:54But the question that remains unresolved is those entities that we encounter. And not everybody encounters them and you're certainly not going to encounter them on every eye, a wasca trip. There are eye, eye, eye, eye journeys where nothing seems to happen. I suspect something does happen, but it happens at a subconscious level. I know that shamans in the Amazon regard those trips where actually you don't see visions as amongst the most valuable. And they say you are learning stuff that you're not remembering, but you're learning it anyway. These sentient others that are encountered, what are they?

2:13:30Are they just figments of our brain on drugs? Or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality, which is inhabited by consciousness, which is in a non -physical form? And I'm equally open to that idea. I think that maybe what is going on here with eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. But the other thing is that there is a presence within the eye or wasca brew. And she is present both present, both in eye or wasca and in yaya. And that's one of the reasons why the shamans say that actually the master of the process is the eye or wasca vine, not the leaves. This is though the vine has harnessed the leaves to gain access to human consciousness.

2:14:13And there, if you have sufficient exposure to ayahuasca or yahe, you drink it enough times, I've had maybe 75 or 80 journeys with ayahuasca. You definitely start to feel an intelligent presence with a definite personality, which I interpret as feminine and which most people in the West interpreted as feminine and the call her mother ayahuasca. There are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit of ayahuasca as male, but in all cases that spirit is seen as a teacher. That's fundamentally what ayahuasca is, it's a teacher and it teaches moral lessons. And that's fascinating that a mixture of two plants should cause us to reflect on our own behavior and how it may have hurt and damaged and affected others and fill us with a powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future.

2:15:08The more baggage you carry in your life, the harder the beating the ayahuasca is going to give you until it forces you to confront and take responsibility for your own behavior. And that is an extraordinary thing to come from a plant brew in that way. And I think in yes, I think ayahuasca is the most powerful of all the plant medicines for accessing these mysterious realms. But there's no doubt you can access them. They're all tripdermines. They're all related to one another in one way. You can access them through LSD and you certainly can access them through silicide mushrooms as well in large enough dose.

2:15:49Both possibilities as you describe are interesting and to me they're kind of akin to each other. I wonder what the limit of the brain's capacity is to create imaginary worlds and treat them seriously and make them real. And in those worlds, explore and have real sort of moral deep brainstorming sessions with those entities. It's almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit. It is. And the curious thing is that the same iconography, people paint their visions after ayahuasca sessions. People were painting in Europe in the cave of Lasco, for example, and of course they had access to silicide mushrooms in prehistoric Europe.

2:16:45There's a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is painted. I like to give credit to where credit is due. And there are two names that need to be mentioned here. One is the late great Terence McKenna and his book Food of the Gods, where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human. That's what switched on the modern human mind. And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis Williams at the University of Wood Waters Rant in South Africa, fabulous book called Mind in the Cave, where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock art all around the world can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered states of consciousness attempting to remember when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave.

2:17:47So typically you get a lot of geometric patterns, but you also got entities and those entities often are Therianthropes. Part animal, part human inform might have the head of a wolf and the body of a human being, might have the head of a bird and the body of a human being and so on and so forth, and that they communicate with us in the visionary state. Interestingly, although this sounds like woo, and it is an area that most scientists would steer clear of at risk of their careers, there is very serious work now being done at Imperial College in London and at the University of California at San Diego, where volunteers are being given extended DMT.

2:18:31There's a new technology DMTX, where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip and it's possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT state, which normally when you smoke or vape DMT you're looking if you're lucky at 10 minutes or if you're unlucky if it's a bad journey because those 10 minutes can seem like forever. But with DMTX with the drip feeding of DMT into the bloodstream, these volunteers actually could be kept in the peak state for hours. And unlike LSD where you rapidly build up tolerance, nobody ever builds up tolerance DMT, it always hits you with the same power even if you took it yesterday on the day before and you're taking it tomorrow as well, it's still going to have that same power.

2:19:17There's no tolerance there. So that's how they can they can use that lack of tolerance to keep volunteers in this state. And then when they debrief those volunteers, they're also putting them in MRI scanners and looking at what's happening in the brain. But when they debrief them, they're all talking about encounters with sentient others. There's even a group now called sentient others where people are exchanging volunteers are now exchanging their experiences. They didn't do so. They weren't allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment. But now that most of them have left it, they're exchanging their experiences.

2:19:47And it's all about encounters with incentient others who wish to teach their moral lessons. Now, to me, that's wild. What is going on here? What do we account for this? Yeah, I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals, but the moral lessons that come with it, those are very hard. Yeah. And would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization is it because such visions can help create myths, and especially like religious myths, that would be a cohesive thing for a large group of people to get around. Yeah. And can help us to be better members of our own community with moral lessons.

2:20:30Yeah. More contributing members of our community, more caring, more nurturing members of our community. That's got to be good for any community. I've said this a dozen times, but I'll say it again. If I had the power to do so, I would make it a law, an absolute law, that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position is president or head of state in any kind of way, that that person has to undergo the ayahuasca or deal first. They have to have 10 or 12 sessions of ayahuasca as a condition for applying for the job. I suspect that most who had had those experiences wouldn't want to apply for the job anymore.

2:21:18They would want to live a different kind of life. And those who did want to carry on being a leader of a nation would be very different people from the people who are leading the nations of the earth into chaos and destruction today. Yeah, they'll be doing it for the right reasons. I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump and actually brought up this same same idea that it will be a much better world if most of Congress and most politicians would take some form of psychedelics, very at least. I have no doubt that it would be a better world. I mean, this raises an interesting point, which is the role of government in controlling our consciousness.

2:21:54In my opinion, the so -called war on drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past 60 years. It should be a Republican issue. If I understand the Republican Party correctly, the Republican Party believes in individual freedom for adults as much as possible. And particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies. But in the case of even cannabis, I know there's one of the great things that's happening in America. It's happening state by state where cannabis is being legalized on that draconian hand of government has been taken off the back of people who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol, which is glorified in our society.

2:22:43We cannot say that we are free. If we allow a government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness while doing no harm to others. And the point there is we already have a whole raft of laws that deal with us when we do harm to others. Do we really need laws that tell us what we may or may not experience in the inner sanctum of our own consciousness? I think it's a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty. And we would have much less drug problems if these drugs were all legalized and made available to people without shaming them, without without punishing them in any way.

2:23:26But just part of normal social life. And then you could be sure that you were getting good product rather than really shitty product, which has been cut with all sorts of other things. Ultimately, the way forward is for adults to take responsibility for their own behavior and for society to allow that to happen and not to have big government taking responsibility for decisions that should be in the hands of individuals. And for me also is exciting. Some of these substances like cell side better are being integrated just scientific studies large girls. It's really interesting. We've seen a revolution in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20, 25 years.

2:24:04They were in that highly demonized category. But again, it's one of those paradigms which gets overwhelmed by new evidence and it began to be realized that that psilocybin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people suffer post -traumatic stress disorder. The fear of death when you're suffering from terminal cancer can be overwhelming. And it's been found that psilocybin can remove that. Deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive psilocybin journey. They just go away. There's really good science on this. And they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more.

2:24:47With sea of happening, I'm not sure if it'll happen as much as as fast as I would like to see it happen in my lifetime, but it's going to happen. Yeah, actually just recently found out that you had a TED Talk or unconsciousness that I was taken down. And that was just part of just the general resistance. Because it was a pretty, it wasn't a radical, it wasn't really radical. I was talking about ayahuasca and I was talking about the view that I hold very strongly that as long as we do know harm to others, suffering adults should be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies and not face a jail sentence or or shaming as a result.

2:25:24But this, so it was a TED X Talk, not a TED Talk, organized by a local TED TED group. They call them TED X Talks. And I gave this, I gave this talk about the war on consciousness. And it was immediately pulled down from Ted's main channel with all kinds of bizarre reasons being given. But unfortunately, it was too late because a number of people had already downloaded the talk and then uploaded it onto other YouTube channels. And actually, they're banning of it, made it go viral in a way that would not have, would not have happened otherwise. But again, it's a sign that that points of view that are not acceptable to those in positions of power are simply dismissed and shut down or at least attempts are made to do so.

2:26:07In general, just along that line of thinking, I'm pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today will seem silly to humans from a hundred years from now. You bet it will. Especially if we harness psychedelics to investigate consciousness. And you know, that is what is happening at Imperial College right now is the investigation of the experience. They're not looking, there are other trials that are looking for the therapeutic potential of DMT. But in this case, they're looking entirely at the experiences that people have and why they're so similar from people from different age groups and different genders and different parts of the world are having the same experiences.

2:26:48And for me, from an engineer perspective, it's interesting if it's possible to engineer consciousness in artificial beings. Yeah. It's another way to approach the question of how special is consciousness, human consciousness. From where does it arise, is it something that permeates all of life? And then in that case, what is the thing that makes life special? Like what is life? What is these living organisms that we have here and that evolved to create humans? And what is truly special about humans? And it's both scary and exciting to consider the possibility that we can create something like this.

2:27:26Yeah. But why not? We're a vehicle for consciousness, in my view. I think consciousness is present in all life on earth. I don't think it's limited to human beings. We have the equipment to manifest and express that consciousness in the way that a dog, for example, doesn't have or a snail doesn't have or a pigeon doesn't have. But when I look at two pigeons sitting on my garden fence and rubbing up close to each other and enjoying each other's company and taking off together and hanging out together, I think they're conscious beings. And I think consciousness is everywhere. I think it's the basis of everything.

2:28:03And I suspect that fundamentally consciousness is non -physical and that it can manifest in physical forms where it can then have experiences that would not be available in the non -physical state. That's a guess. That'd be a fascinating, because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness. See if consciousness enters if they become consciousness. Is there some suggestion that artificial intelligence is already becoming conscious? That makes humans really uncomfortable. Yeah. Because we are at the top of the food chain. We consider ourselves truly special and to consider that there are other things that can be special is scary.

2:28:41Well, look how other people make us uncomfortable too. I mean, look at the state of the world today. All the conflicts that are raging. That's because we're afraid. When I say we, I'm speaking nation by nation, we are afraid of other people. We fear that they're going to hurt us or damage us in some way. And so we seek to stop that. It's the root of many, many conflicts, this fear. And so fear of AI may not be such a good idea after all. It might be very interesting to go down that route and see where it comes. Certainly, in terms of exploring consciousness, it is very interesting. Yeah. Fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive.

2:29:19Well, it can be destructive and it can shut you down completely. If you look into the into the future, maybe the next 100 years, what do you hope are the interesting discoveries in archaeology that we'll find? Well, I'd really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built. We now have with new tech, with scanning technology, it's now become apparent that there are many major voids within the Great Pyramid. Right above the Grand Gallery, there's what looks like a second Grand Gallery that has been identified with remote scanning. And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up already, are being found as a result of this.

2:29:58So it may be that the the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its secrets. I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It's designed to invite its own initiates. Some people aren't interested in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it and they're drawn towards it. And when they're drawn towards it, it immediately starts raising questions in their minds and they seek answers to their questions. So it's like saying, here I stand, investigate me, find out about me, figure out what I am. Why have I got these two shafts cut into the side of the so -called Queen's Chamber?

2:30:36Why do they slope up through the body of the Great Pyramid? Why do they not exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid? Why when we send a robot up those shafts, do we find them after about 160 feet blocked by a door with metal handles? Why when we drill through that door to see what's beyond it, three or four feet away, we see another door. It's like very frustrating, but it's saying to us, keep on exploring. If you're persistent enough, we'll eventually give you the answers. So I'm hoping that that answer will come as to how this most mysterious monuments was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it.

2:31:14Certainly, I'm sure it was never a tomb or a tomb only. The later pyramids might have been, actually no pharonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid, but nevertheless it's pretty clear that the later pyramids with the pyramid text written on the walls, like the pyramid of Unaz, Fifth Dynasty pyramid at Sacara, were tombs. But the Great Pyramid to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it six million tons, this is not a tomb. This is something else, this is a curiosity device, this is something that is asking us to understand it.

2:31:55And I hope we will understand it, and I hope Egyptologists will be willing to set aside that prejudice that they're only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities, and has new tech is revealing these previously unknown inner spaces within the Great Pyramid. I think that's going to become more and more likely. So not just the how it was built, but the why. But the why. And to you, it seems obvious that there would be a cosmic motivation. Yeah, very, very much so, as above, so below. Which is an idea in the hermetica, the God Hermes for the Greeks was the Greek version of Thoth, the wisdom God of Ancient Egypt, and that's where that saying comes from, it comes from the hermetica, but it's expressing an ancient Egyptian idea to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.

2:32:44So you think there's something interesting to be discovered about the how it was built. You mean beyond the sort of the ideas of using ramps and what's that? Yeah, ramps won't do it, ramps won't do it, nor will wet sand. It's true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand. There are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the sledge pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath. And that's a perfectly respectable way to move a 200 ton block of stone across sand, if you flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks, 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the king's chamber and the floor of the chamber above it and the roof of that chamber and the floor of the chamber above that and so on and so forth.

2:33:38Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there. Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps? If you're going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the great pyramid to complete your work, you're going to need a ramp that's going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10 degree slope. And it's calculated that a 10 degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp. And that ramp can't just be compacted sand since heavy objects are being hauled up.

2:34:16It's going to have to be made a very solid material, almost a solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don't see any trace of those so -called ramps that are supposed to have been involved in the construction of the pyramid. I think we don't know. I think we have no idea it's built. That's why there's so many different theories. We haven't got the answer yet. But the how of it is one of the big mysteries from our past. I love the great pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved by later peoples. I mean, this is I don't know if you're aware of the 10 ,000 year clock.

2:34:49I know. No, that was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo Mountains in Texas. So they're building a clock that takes once a year for 10 ,000 years. So it's talking about it's supposed to sort of run, you know, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs. And it's an example of modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10 ,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong or the future humans that are way different from back and they analyze what happened here, how can we create monuments that they could then analyze? Yeah. And in that way, be curious about in their curiosity, discover some deep truths about this current time.

2:35:38It's an interesting kind of notion of like, what can we build now? That would last. And the answer is that the majority of what we build now wouldn't last, would be it would be gone within a few thousand years. But what would last is massive megalithic structures like the great pyramid that would that would last. And it could be it could be used to send a message to the future. I think Rebecca Teppi serves a similar function. I mean, there it was. It was buried 10 ,400 years ago. And then for the next 10 ,000 years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there. It took the genius of Clash Smith, the original excavator, to realize what he'd found and what it and what it was.

2:36:25But the great thing about the sealing of Rebecca Teppi, the deliberate burial of Rebecca Teppi, is it means that no later culture trot over it and imposed their organic materials on it and messed up the dating sequences and so on and so forth or vandalized it or used it as a quarry. It's all there intact. So you mentioned that the pyramids and some of the other amazing things that humans have built has was the results of us human struggling with our mortality. That's the that's the ultimate the ultimate goal. That seems to me what's at the heart of many pyramids around the world is that they connected in one way or another to the notion of death and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife.

2:37:08And this is of course the fundamental mystery that all human beings face. We may we may wish to ignore it. We may wish to pretend that it's not going to happen but we are of course all mortal. Every one of us, all eight billion are however many of us that are on the planet right now. We're all going to face death sooner or later and the question is what happens and there are a few cultures that really intensely deeply studied that mystery. We are not one of them. The general view of science I think is that we're accidents of evolution. When we die the light blinks out. There's no more of us. There's no such thing as a soul.

2:37:48But that's not a proven point. There's no experiment that proves that's the case. We know we die but we don't know whether this such a thing as a soul or not. Yes, the great mystery. It's the great mystery that we all share and those cultures that have investigated it and ancient Egypt is the best example. Have investigated it thoroughly and map out the journey that we make after death. But that notion of a journey after death and of hazards and challenges along the way and ultimately of a judgment. That notion is found right around the world and it even manifests into the three monotheistic face that are still present in the world today.

2:38:25Well, you're one such human and you said you can't complete your own death. Are you afraid of it? No. I'm not afraid of death at all. I'm curious about death. I think it could be very interesting. I think it's the beginning of the next great adventure. So I don't fear it and I would like to live as long as my body is healthy enough to make living worthwhile. But I don't fear death. What I do fear is pain. I do fear the humiliation that old age and the collapse of the faculties can bring. I do fear the cancers that can strike us down and riddle us with pain and agony. That I fear very, very much indeed.

2:39:11But death is going to come to all of us. I accept it. It's going to come to me and I'm not going to say I'm looking forward to it. But when it happens, I'm going to approach it. I hope with a sense of curiosity and a sense of adventure that there's something beyond this life. It isn't heaven, it isn't hell. But there's something the soul goes on. I think reincarnation is a very plausible idea. Again, modern science would reject that. But there's the excellent work of Ian Stevenson, children who remember past lives, who found that children up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives.

2:39:50And in cultures where memories of past lives are discouraged, they tend not to express that much. But in cultures where memories of past lives are encouraged, like India, they do express it. And he found several subjects, children under the age of seven in India, who were able to remember specific details of a past life. And he was able to go to the place where that past life unfolded and validate those details. So if consciousness is the basis of everything, if it's the essence of everything and consciousness benefits in some way from being incarnated in physical form, then reincarnation makes a lot of sense.

2:40:24The all the investment that the universe has put into creating this home for life may have a much bigger purpose than just accident. What a beautiful mystery this whole thing is. Yeah, we are immersed in mystery. We live in the midst of mystery. We're surrounded by mystery. And if we pretend otherwise, we're deluding ourselves. And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world to explore that mystery. Thank you for talking today. Thank you, Lex. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Graham Hancock. The support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

2:40:59And now, let me leave you some words from Charles Darwin. It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.