Hello and welcome back.
Today we are going to take a journey
into one of the most controversial and fascinating
narratives of our time, the story of humanity's
true origin, as told by author and researcher
Graham Hancock.
And let me, before we start, apologize for
my pronunciations of different names, cities.
If you need the correct spelling, please look
at the transcripts.
Now, so, back to the podcast.
For more than 30 years, Hancock has been
asking one simple prerogative question.
What if everything we think we know about
the past is only a small part of
a much larger truth?
What if an advanced civilization existed long before
the first cities of Mesopotamia were built?
A civilization that was destroyed in a global
cataclysm, and what left behind traces of our
archaeologists either cannot see or refuse to acknowledge.
Hancock is often called a pseudoscientist, a pseudo
-archaeologist, a pseudo-historian, a man who presents
fascinating theories without evidence.
But here is the one interesting thing.
In his books, and he emphasizes again and
again, he footnotes everything.
He cites scientific articles, he references recognized researchers,
he points to geological and genetic studies.
His claim is not that he found the
lost civilization.
His claim is that mainstream archaeology has built
a house on cards that is about to
collapse because new discoveries keep showing that human
history is much older, much more complex, and
much more catastrophic than we have previously believed.
Today we are going to dive into Hancock's
extensive body of work based on a series
of lectures he has given in the recent
years.
We travel from the pyramids of Egypt to
the 12,000-year-old stone circles of
Turkey, from the earthworks of the Mississippi Valley
to the deepest secrets of the Amazon rainforest.
We will meet geologists, geneticists, and astronomers who
have all helped shake the foundation of how
we understand our past.
And in the end, we will ask ourselves,
why does this story matter to us today?
So settling, we are going to have a
talk about a species with amnesia.
So let's start where Hancock started in Egypt.
The year was 1989.
He was researching another book about the Ark
of the Covenant in Ethiopia, and for the
first time, he stood before the Great Pyramids
of Giza.
And he was, as he said, staggered.
For most of us, the pyramids is an
impressive monument, perhaps tools for pharaohs like Khufu
and Khafre.
For Hancock, they were something entirely different.
He seen them as a kind of three
-dimensional book, an astronomical clock that tells us
about the time long before the Egyptian dynasties.
It is a message carved in stone meant
to last for thousands of years.
Hancock's argument builds on the recognition that many
Egyptians, Egyptologists today accept that the ancient Egyptians
identified the god Osiris with the constellation of
Orion.
They believe that the souls of the dead
travel into a heavenly realm called the Dua,
which lay between the constellation of Leo and
Orion, with the Milky Way as the great
celestial river.
This is a cosmology deeply rooted in the
night sky.
But here, words get interesting.
Hancock's colleague, Robert Poval, pointed out many years
ago that the three large pyramids on the
Giza Plateau is positioned in a way that
exactly mirrors the three belt stars of the
Orion's belt.
This is remarkable itself.
But the cruer point is that the sky
of the pyramids are mirroring is not the
sky that would have been seen over Egypt
in 2000 BC.
When Egyptologists believed that the pyramids were built,
no.
The sky encoded in the pyramids placement on
the ground, correspondent to the sky that appears
between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
Why is that important?
Because the earth does not stand still.
It has a slow wobble on the sacks.
This phenomenon is called precession.
That means that the stars that rise behind
the sun at the spring equinox change over
time.
It takes 2,160 years for the sun
to move through one of the zodiac constellations.
And it takes 26,000 years to complete
a full circle.
This is a clock that ticks extremely slowly,
and Hancock argues that the pyramids are precisely
set to this clock.
The same story is told about the Sphinx.
The massive lion with the pharaoh's head stares
east.
Each year on the spring equinox, the sun
rises directly in front of it.
And at the same astronomical epoch, 12,800
years to 11,600 years ago, the constellation
of Leo rose behind the sun.
The Sphinx, in other words, is gazing at
its own celestial counterpart.
Hancock points out that the ancient Egyptians had
a name for this epoch.
They called it Settebi, which means the first
time.
It was the age of the gods, the
time when the foundations of the civilization were
laid.
The oldest pyramid text written inside the Pyramid
of Saqqara describes the journey through the Duat.
They speak about the winding waterway, the Milky
Way, as a central route for the soul.
It is as if the pyramids are magnificent
structures tells us.
This is where it all begins, and it
began more than 12,000 years ago.
For Hancock, this is the first crucial clue,
that an ancient civilization possessed such advanced astronomical
knowledge that they could map the sky for
an epoch which lay more than 8,000
years before the Egyptian dynasties.
But if this was only about Egypt, the
skeptics would have a point.
It would have been a coincidence that makes
Hancock's arguments so powerful, is that he finds
the same patterns scattered across the globe.
He does not call this diffusion, which means
that Egypt taught Mexico or Mexico taught Egypt.
He calls it a shared inheritance from a
distant common ancestor.
And here I would like to add a
comment of my own.
What Hancock is doing is basically that he
is doing pattern recognition.
And today in our society pattern recognition is
everything, because that's the foundation of investment of
money, of searching of information, etc.
What happens in Google when you search for
something is actually that the system is looking
for similar patterns.
It's basically pattern recognition.
And the same goes with all kind of
investments on Wall Street and wherever you want
to place your money.
It is that what you are looking for
is a pattern of money.
So what Graham Hancock is actually doing is
that he is looking for a well-known
method of creating money.
He just used it on the history.
And despite what people that does not earn
their own money, they think that is actually
a well-known strategy, and it works very
well.
You can look at the founders of the
magnificent seven of the seven largest US companies.
They are all electronic.
It's Microsoft, it's Meta, it's yeah, you name
it.
They are all very rich.
Back to the text here.
If we take Mexico as an example, the
ancient Mayas is calling the underworld Xibalba.
And where was Xibalba located?
In a region of the sky in which
the Milky Way runs, just like in Egypt.
They also worship Orion.
In the ancient Mayan city of Uttalan in
Guatemala, the major temples were oriented to the
stars of Orion.
A researcher named Fernandez was able to prove
that all the city's main temples were aligned
with the point where Orion stars were set
in the horizon.
But it does not stop there.
Hancock took us to the Mount Will of
Alabama in the United States.
Mount Will is a large ceremonial center from
the so-called Mississippian culture, built by Native
Americans long before the Europeans arrived.
And everywhere at this site you will find
recurring symbols, the hand and the eye motif.
Hancock reads this as an informational sign at
Mount Will that stories passed down among various
tribes tell that the dead enter the afterlife
through an opening marked by the great warriors'
hands in the sky.
One account described that hand as the constellation
as we know as Orion's belt in the
wrist, its fingers pointing downward.
A faint cluster of stars in the center
of the palm is the portal to the
path of the soul or the path to
the land of the dead.
This is exactly the same concept as in
Egypt.
And just as in Egypt, the soul has
to make a leap to get through the
portal.
George Langford, a recognized authority in Native American
folklore, notes that the portal in the hand
must be entered by a leap in the
optimum time, precisely the leap of the soul
up to Orion that we see in Egypt.
And then there is the fearsome figure that
the archaeologist calls the brain smasher.
In Mount Will tradition, it's a female figure
whose task is to crush the brain of
the unworthy souls attempting to complete the journey.
She destroys them permanently.
In the judgment scene in the Book of
the Death, a being that devours the condemned.
And Hancock has even found a vignette from
an ancient Egyptian tomb showing that the goddess
who made a man chop opens his own
skull, his own brain skull.
The accompanying text says she lives from the
blood of the damned.
The pattern is so consistent that Hancock concludes
that there must have been a global religious
system focused on the soul's journey after death,
on judgment, on rebirth, and on becoming one
with the stars.
The system does not originate in Egypt or
in New Mexico.
It was inherited from a third party, a
lost civilization whose knowledge was spread across the
entire world.
If an advanced civilization existed for more than
12,000 years ago, then the natural question,
what happens to it?
Why haven't we found its cities, its roads,
its everyday objects?
Why are the traces so hard to see?
The answer Hancock says is that it is
a catastrophe of unprecedented scale.
And here he draws on the work of
a group of scientists who call themselves the
Comet Research Group.
This is a group of more than 60
geologists, physicians, marine biologists, and other specialists who
for years has been published in peer-reviewed
journals like Nature, Proceedings of the Natural Academy
of Science, and the Journal of Geology.
This is not pseudoscience.
These are mainstream researchers who have reached a
startling conclusion.
Around 4,800 years ago, they argued that
Earth was struck by multiple fragments of a
large disintegrating comet.
Some of these fragments were up to 2
kilometers in diameter.
They hit it at speeds of tens of
thousands of miles per hour, and they hit
especially the North American ice cap and the
Greenland science cap.
The evidence is found in a thin layer
of sediment that exists all over the planet.
It's called the Younger Dryas Boundary Layer.
This layer is filled with materials that can
only be formed by a massive cosmic impact.
We're talking about nanodiamonds, iridium, platinum, carbon, melt
glass, etc.
These are exactly the same impact practices that
convinced the world of an asteroid killing the
dinosaur 65 million years ago.
Back then, the researchers Lewis and Walter Albers
were ridiculed for years until the six o
'clock crater was found in Mexico.
Only then did the science apologize.
The comet research group is in the same
situation now.
The effect of these impacts were catastrophic.
The North American ice cap, which was more
than a kilometer thick, melted suddenly and wildly.
The melt water created the massive floods that
forms what is now called the scrap lands
in the northwestern United States.
Hancock described it traveling through this area with
the geologist Randall Carlson.
They have seen dry waterfalls, you know, dry
falls that is 10 times larger than the
Niagara Falls.
They have seen enormous granite boulders that was
the size of a building that has been
carried hundreds of miles on icebergs during the
floods.
They have seen current ripples of the Carmel's
Prairie waves in the landscape that are 30
to 50 feet high and perhaps 300 feet
long created by retreating flood waters.
73% of the North American megafauna, mastodons,
saber-toothed tigers, solid sloths, woolly rhinos were
extinct.
This was a global extension event and it
was not just in America.
Hancock mentioned that findings from Belgium, from Syria,
from Chile, everywhere you find the same black
layer filled with evidence of extreme heat and
cosmic impact.
The climate collapsed.
The warming that has been underway since the
last ice age stopped abruptly.
The earth fell back into a 1,200
year deep freeze which geologists call the Yonker
Dries.
And then 11,600 years ago something else
happened.
The temperature rose dramatically, sea levels rose violently,
which is today called meltwater pools 1b, another
catastrophe.
For Hancock this is the story, this is
the historical backdrop for the story of the
lost civilization.
If advanced societies existed in the ice age
with coastal cities, trade routes, agriculture and so
on, they would have been crushed when this
cascade.
Coastal cities would have been flooded, farmland would
have been destroyed by tsunamis and wildfires, only
a few people would have survived.
And that brings us to the next part
of Hancock's argument, what happened to the survivors?
All over the world we find myths about
civilizing heroes that arrived after a great flood.
In Egypt it is Osiris and the seven
sages.
In Mexico it's Chrysalis, the feathered serpent.
In the Andes it's Viracocacha, the bearded figure
who walks on water.
In Mesopotamia it's Zoanth, which is the fish
god who rises from the water to teach
humanity writing, astronomy and architecture.
These figures are described as bearded men and
Hancock shows the image of Olmec heads from
Mexico with beards, something that is not typical
for Native Americans.
They are described as bringers of civilizations, fundamentations
like astronomy, agriculture, writing, laws, megalithic construction and
so on.
They arrived in a dark time after a
catastrophe.
They are not the originators of the civilization,
they are the restorers of civilizations.
Hancock's crucial archaeologists' evidence for this restoration are
found in Turkey on a plateau near the
Syrian border.
It's called Glubekli Tepei and that has changed
everything.
Glubekli Tepei is an enormous megalithic complex with
T-shaped stone pillars weighing up to 20
tons.
The pillars are caved with images of wild
animals like snakes, foxes, boars, birds, scorpions, etc.
Archaeologists from the German Archaeologist Institute have stated
it to 11,600 years ago.
This is precisely the end of the Younger
Trials.
This is precisely the date that Plato gives
for the destruction of Atlantis.
This is precisely the date of the meltwater
pulse 1b raised the sea levels dramatically.
But what marks Glubekli Tepei so revolutionary is
that it is who built it.
Before this discovery, archaeologists told us that agriculture
came first.
Only when you have a surplus of farming
output, you could free up people to become
specialists, architects, stonemasons, priests, etc.
And then you would build large monuments.
But at Glubekli Tepei, there was no agriculture.
When they started, it was hunter-gatherers who
built this enormous complex.
And after a thousand years, all of those
hunter-gatherers have become farmers.
This model turns upside down.
Hancock argues that Glubekli Tepei is the evidence
of civilization mission.
Survivors of the lost civilization have come to
the area.
They mobilize the local population with a large
secret building project.
The project requires organization, planning, leadership, etc.
It requires people to work together across generations.
And in the process, they taught the local
hunter-gatherers different techniques like agriculture, animal husbandry,
advanced stonemasonry, and astronomy.
This is not a chance invasion.
This is technological transfer.
Hancock empathized that Glubekli Tepei was not alone.
Karen Tepei is another complex in the same
region.
It is just beginning in the excavation.
There they have found a sanctuary carved directly
out of bedrock with pillars that is caught
from the living rock.
It is a system that spreads across the
southeastern Turkey.
And Hancock sees the same T-shaped pillars,
the same animal carving, the same man bags,
small bags.
Those are carried by the Mesopotamians, reappearing thousands
of miles away in Peru and Malta on
the East Island.
For him, this is a fingerprint of tracing
pointing to a common origin.
You would think that the Amazon rainforest is
one of the last places you will expect
to find traces of an ancient civilization.
It is one of the most inaccessible and
hostile environments on the Earth.
But Hancock takes us out into the jungle
where the mysteries pile up.
First, there is a genetic mystery.
In 2018, two independent research teams, one led
by Cosimo Posch and David Reich, the other
by Eske Willersloh, published studies in the journals
called Cell and Science.
They have found a strong genetic signal in
certain isolated Amazonian tribes.
There's Suri, the Katerinian, and the Savant that
links them to the Papuvans and the Austrian
aboriginals.
This signal is not found anywhere in North
America population.
It is not found in Siberia where, according
to the standard model, all Native Americans are
supposed to have come from.
So how did this signal get to Amazon?
Hancock quotes Eske Willersloh, which is one of
the world's leading geneticists.
Willersloh says that, based purely on the genetic
data, the most pernicious explanation is that somebody
is carrying this signal to the Americans, not
through the Bering Strait, but by crossing the
ocean directly into South America.
Yet, however, it does not make practical sense.
Hancock asks why not.
Because archaeologists did not believe that people for
perhaps 10 or 20,000 years ago were
capable of such a long ocean voyage.
But Hancock points to ancient maps, like the
Piri Reis map, that shows coastlines that existed
only during the Ice Age, where the sea
level was 400 feet lower.
Some of the mapped coastlines.
So the question is, who?
Second, there is Ayahuasca.
Hancock describes the incredible science behind this sacred
brew.
Ayahuasca consists of two plants.
One, Chacruna, contains DMT, which is one of
the most powerful psychedelics known to science.
But DMT is not normally orally active.
It is destroyed by the enzyme that, in
our guts, is called monamine oxidase.
The second plant, the Ayahuasca wine, contains precisely
the substance that inherits this enzyme.
The monamine oxidase inhibitor.
So when the two plants are cooked together,
the DMT becomes orally active.
Hancock points out that you could not accidentally
find these two plants in a jungle with
more than 150 plant specimens that together creates
this chemical key.
The evidence of systematic experimentation, of scientific thinking,
it is no different from inventing cura.
The muscle relaxing poison that the Amazonian people
also produced by combining several plants and boiling
them for 72 hours while avoiding them deadly
fumes.
These are not primitive people.
These are advanced chemists.
Hancock mentioned that the evidence of the Ayahuasca
has been found going back more than 4
,000 years in the Amazon.
He himself is convinced that it goes much
further back.
Third, there are the Gyrglyphs.
The recent clearings of the rainforest, which is
a tragedy of itself, has revealed that something
is not expected.
Enormous earthworks, geometric patterns in the forms of
squares, circles, octagons, and U-shaped structures stretching
over large distances.
Some of these structures are aligned to true
north.
One of them, Cerino-Casaliens, is exactly at
the same footprints as the Great Pyramids of
Giza, 230 meters on each side, precisely oriented
north.
Hancock sees these Gyrglyphs as a part of
the same cosmological system that we saw in
Egypt and in the Mount Will.
They represent the underworld and he connects them
to the shamanic journeys where the Ayahuasca is
used to ascend the Milky Way.
The Amazon is not a pristine wilderness.
It was a place where the ancient knowledge
were practiced, cultivated, and passed down for thousands
of years.
Hancock also spends considerable time criticizing the archaeologist
establishment's reluctance to change its models.
He tells the stories of Jacques Sigmars, a
Canadian archaeologist that in the 1970s, 1980s, found
evidence of human presence at bluefish caves in
the Yukon dating 24,000 years back.
At the time, the dominant theory was clues
first, that the first people in the Americas
were the clue's culture, appearing in around 13
,400 years ago.
Sigmars was ridiculed.
His research funding was withdrawn.
He was called a pseudoscientist.
His career was destroyed.
In 2017, a team of researchers led by
a PhD student published a newly study of
the bluefish cave.
They confirmed that humans were there 24,000
years ago.
Sigmars was vindicated, but as Hancock points out,
it took nearly 40 years and this is
not an isolated incident.
He mentioned a Goodyear who found evidence of
humans in North America from 50,000 years
ago at a site called Tupper and South
Carolina.
He mentioned Tom Demeer, who at the Cerruti
Mastodon site at California has found evidence of
human activity from 130,000 years ago.
Bones broken to extract marrow, stone used as
tools.
That does not mean that there was an
advanced civilization 130,000 years ago.
It meant that there were humans, perhaps Homo
erectus or an early form of Homo sapiens
in America 130,000 years ago, which again
challenged the established timeline.
Hancock points out that the archaeology does not
behave like a science.
A science changes its theories when new evidence
emerges.
Archaeology, as he says, behaves like a religion.
It relies on authority rather than evidence.
It protects its doma and it persecutes dissidents.
He quotes that the Native American author Wayne
Deloria Jr. says that the problem is in
getting advocates of orthodoxy to admit that there
is a problem and that the solution that
they have suggested is not really convincing.
So what does Hancock want us to take
away from his journey?
Why does it matter today to believe in
a lost civilization from the Ice Age?
For Hancock, it's not about the past, it's
about the present and the future.
His fundamental claim is that we suffer from
collective amnesia.
We have forgotten who we are, where we
came from, and what force shapes us.
And this amnesia makes us vulnerable.
First, we have forgotten that civilization can fall.
We live in a culture believing in endless
progress.
We believe that we are the goal of
the history, the inheritance of culmination of evolution.
But if an advanced civilization existed 12,000
years ago and was destroyed in a single
day, then our own civilization is now immortal.
That is a humbling recognition that our society
refuses to make.
Second, we have forgotten that there are other
states of consciousness than the one we live
in.
Hancock calls this our normal state, the attentive,
problem-solving consciousness.
It's good for trade, for war, technology, and
consumption.
But it's also brought us to the brink
of an environment collapse, to a brink of
nuclear war and global problems.
The ancient cultures that he studies has access
to the other states of consciousness through plants
like ayahuasca.
They used the state to prepare for death,
to confront their own life, to gain vision,
wisdom, and healing.
Why are these plants criminalized today?
Hancock argues that it is because they challenge
the established order.
A person who has a deep ayahuasca experience
begins to ask the big questions.
What are the meaning of life?
How do I treat other people?
What is my responsibility to the planet?
These are dangerous questions for a society built
on consumption, on submission, and fear.
Psychedelics, Hancock says, threatens the structure, the dark
forces that wish to keep humanity in ignorance
and control.
And then there is the threat in the
sky.
The comet that struck the Earth 12,800
years ago is not necessarily a one-time
event.
The fragment object that caused the Young Earth
Rise is still there.
It lies in the Taurid-Meteor stream through
which the Earth passes every year.
Scientists like Bill Napier and Victor Klube have
warned for decades that within this stream there
are large, blue, dark objects several kilometers in
diameter that has not yet been discovered.
NASA has only identified less than one percent
of the potential dangerous asteroids.
But Hancock is not a doomsday prophet.
We have the technology to detect and deflect
a new catastrophe.
It simply requires that we choose to spend
resources rather than on war and destruction.
It requires that we take the responsibility.
It requires we wake up.
So Hancock often ends his lectures with a
passage from the heretic text written more than
2,000 years ago.
It speaks of a time when Egypt is
forsaken, when the gods have returned to heaven,
and when men no longer find the universe
worthy of reverent wonder.
But it also speaks of rebirth, a time
when God looks up and what happens and
stops the disorder.
He cleansed the world of evil with water
and fire and then the cosmos again became
worthy of worship.
Perhaps that is the rebirth Hancock sees taking
shape in our time.
Perhaps we are virgin from our amnesia.
Perhaps we are ready to listen to the
history as it is really lived in all
of its complexity, its catastrophes, its lost wisdom,
and its great overwhelming wonders.
If there is one thing I hope you
take away from this podcast, that is this,
the questions are more important than the answers.
And are we really the first civilization on
the earth?
What happened 12,800 years ago?
Why do we find the same myth all
over the globe?
Why is our history so full of gaps
and contradictions?
These are the questions we all can ask,
and these are the questions we all have
the right to investigate.
Thank you for listening.