Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449

the big question for me in that timeline is why didn't we do it sooner why did it take so long why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing the beginnings of civilization the following is a conversation with Graham Hancock a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed A Lost Civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago he is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series ancient apocalypse the

second season of which has just been released and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas a topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist scholar I love talking to on the podcast extremely knowledgeable humble open-minded and respectful in disagreement I'll do many more podcasts on History including ancient history our distant past is full of mysteries and I find it truly exciting to explore those Mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved this is

Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Graham Hancock let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history that there was a an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seated what people now call the six cradles of civilization Mesopotamia Egypt India China Indies and meso America so let's talk about this idea that you have can you at the highest possible level describe it it would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness uh

in the story that we are taught about our past which envisages more or less there have been a few ups and downs but more or less uh straightforward evolutionary progress uh we start out as Hunter foragers then we become agriculturalists the hunter for forager phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years uh I mean this is where it's also it's also important to mention that anatomically modern humans and were not the only humans we we had neanderthals from I don't know 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago they were certainly human because anatomically

modern humans interbred with them and we carry we carry Neal genes there were the denisovans maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago and again interbreeding took place they're obviously a human species so you know we've got this background of humans who didn't look quite like us and then we have anatomically modern humans and I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jeb Hood in Morocco and date to about 310,000 years ago so the question is what were our ancestors doing after that and I think we can include the

Neanderthals and the denisovans that in that General picture and why did it take so long this is one of the puzzles one of the questions that bother me why did it take so long when we have creatures who are physically identical to us we we cannot actually weigh and measure their brains but from the work that's been done on on the crania it looks like they had the same brains that we do with the same the same wiring so so if we've been around uh for 300,000 plus years at least and if ultimately in our

fure future uh was uh the the process to create civilization or civilizations Why didn't it happen sooner why did it take so long why why why was it such a long time even the story of of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing I I remember a time when it was said that there hadn't been anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago and then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia and then 310,000 years ago um there there's a lot of a lot of missing pieces in the in the puzzle there um

but the big question for me in that timeline is why didn't we do it sooner why did it take so long why why why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing the beginnings what are selected as the beginnings of civilization uh in in places like like turkey for example and then there's a a relatively slow process of adopting Agriculture and and by 6,000 years ago we see ancient Sumer uh emerging as a civilization and we're then in the predynastic period in ancient Egypt as well 6,000 6,000

years ago beginning to see definite signs of what will become the the dynastic civilization of Egypt about about 5,000 years ago and interestingly round about the same time you have the indis valley civilization popping up out of nowhere and and by the way the IND valley civilization was A Lost Civilization uh until the 1920s when uh Railway workers accidentally stumbled across some some ruins I've been to haraa and madaro uh and these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally planned cities these clearly they're the work of an already sophisticated uh civilization one of the things that strikes me

about the indis valley civilization is that we find a a steti seal uh of an IND individual seated in a a recognizable yoga posture and that seal is 5,000 years old uh and the yoga posture is mulab bandana which involves a real contortion of the ankles and twisting the feet back it's an advanced yoga posture so there it is 5,000 years ago and that then raises the question well how long did yoga take to get to that place when it was already so Advanced five 5,000 years ago what's the what's the background to this China

the yellow the Yellow River civilization again it's around about the same period 5 to 6,000 years ago you get these first signs of something happening so it's very odd that that all around the world uh we have this this sudden upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago preceded by what seems like a a natural evolutionary process that would lead to a to a civilization um and yet certain ideas being being carried down and manifested and expressed in in many of these in many of these different civilizations I just find that that whole idea very puzzling

and and very and very disturbing uh especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story but the story of all life on Earth which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through uh which was the young Adas event uh it was an extinction level event uh that's when all the great of the Ice Age went extinct it's after that it's after that event that we start seeing this what what are taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization we come out of

the upper Paleolithic as it's defined the old end of the Old Stone Age and into the Neolithic and that's when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling but but what happened before that and why did that why did that suddenly happen then and I can't help feeling and I've felt this for a very long while that there are major missing pieces in our story it's often said that I'm claiming to have proved that there was an advanced Lost Civilization in the Ice Age and I am not claiming to have proved that

that is a hypothesis that I am putting forward uh to answer some of the questions that I have uh about about prehistory um and and um I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the younger dras event was uh a massive uh Global cataclysm whatever caused it uh and and um it's strange that just after it we start seeing these these first signs so the current understanding in mainstream Archaeology is that after the younger Drass is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities but they

popped up independently independently and and and by coincidence and by coincidence those those big civiliz ations that we all remember as the first civilizations Su Egypt the indis valley civilization China they all pop up at the pretty much the same time um that is that is that is the mainstream View and they don't just pop up they kind of build up gradually first there's some settlements oh definitely yes and then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the RO of the role of agriculture in that is uh also non obvious but it's just

there's a first a kind of settlement a stabilization of where the people are living then they start using agriculture then they start getting Urban centers and that kind of stuff it seems like an entirely reasonable argument everything everything about that makes sense there is no doubt that you're seeing uh evolutionary progress uh social Evolution taking taking place in those thousands of years before Sumer uh emerges but what's happening now really I spent much of the '90s and the late 1980s investigating this issue of A Lost Civilization I wrote a series of books about it but

by 2002 when I published a book called underworld which was the result most massive and most heavy book that I've ever written because I was writing very defensively at the time um by the time I finished that book my wife Santa and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world looking for structures underwater often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they had seen underwater by the time that book was finished I I thought actually I've done this story I've walked the walk I I really don't have much more to

say about it and I I I turned in another Direction and I I wrote a book called Supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind recently retitled uh Visionary and that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in in the evolution of human human culture and I didn't think that I would go back to the Lost Civilization issue but gobec Lee in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me the more and more discoveries there the 11,600 Year date from enclosure D which has the two largest megalithic pillars and I I reached

a point where I I realized I have to get back in I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again and and gockley tee was a game changer but I think it's a GameChanger for everything because gockley tee the uh extraordinary nature of it we're looking at a major megalithic site which is at least 5 and a half thousand years older than say gigantia in Malta which is was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world and uh this led of course to a huge amount of

interest and attention both from uh the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of of having the world's oldest megalithic site and and from archaeologists and this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region and what they're finding throughout that whole region around goeke uh and going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far far as Jericho uh and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus uh is what Turkish archaeologists are now calling the Tas civilization they're calling it a civilization the Stone Hills civilization uh

with uh very definite identifying characteristics semi- Subterranean circular structures the use of t-shaped megalithic pillars sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at gockley tee it's clear that gockley Tee now was not the beginning of this process it was actually in a way the end of this process it was the summation of everything that that ston Hills civilization had had achieved uh but what what is becoming clear is that this is a period between before the foundation of gocke as far as we know that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for

gck tee but of course there's a lot of gocke still underground so we we can't say for sure that that's the oldest but it's the oldest so far uh excavated what we're what we're seeing uh is that in that whole region around there there was something was in motion and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the younger drers and and this is where these two dates are really important the younger dras I'll round the figures off begins around 12,800 years ago and it ends around 11,600 years ago so gockley te's

construction date if it is 11,600 years ago if they don't find older materials marks the end of the younger dryers um but the beginning of the younger dryers we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form uh at gocke uh and and after the construction of GOC tee in fact even during the construction of gole teepe uh we see agriculture beginning to be adopted the the people who created gock teepe were all Hunter foragers at the beginning but by the time gockley was finished and it was definitely deliberately finished

closed off closed down deliberately buried covered with Earth covered with rubble uh and then topped off with a hill which is which is why gocke is called U what it is gocke means pot belli Hill or the hill of the naval for a long time gockley Tey was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly can you say how it was discovered I think I think this is one of the most fascinating things on earth period so maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered well

go gockley teepe is first of all the the oldest fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world it doesn't mean the older ones won't be found but it is the oldest so far found um the part of the site that's been excavated which is a tiny percentage of the whole site we do know my first visit to he was in 2013 and Dr Clash Smidt the late Dr Clash Smidt who was who who died a year later uh was very generous to me and showed me around the site over a period

of three days and he he explained to me that they've already used ground penetrating radar on the site and they know that there's much more gockley tee still underground um so anything is anything is possible in terms of the in terms of the dating of Quebec T but what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular but not quite circular enclosures which are which Are Walled with relatively small stones and then inside them you have pairs of megalithic pillars and the the archetypal part of that site is enclosure d uh which contains

the two largest upright megaliths about 18 ft tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons uh if I have my my memory correct they're they're substantial Hefty pieces of stone it isn't it isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20ft tall or 20 ton megalith uh nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it uh there's nothing there nothing magical or or really weird about that human beings can do that and always have besides the Quarry for the megalith is right there it's within 200 meters of the of of

the main enclosure so that's not a mystery but the mystery is the mystery is why suddenly this this new form of architecture this massive massive um megalithic pillars appear and the the pillars what one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment and there is good work that's been done which suggests that enclosure d uh aligns to the rising of the star serus and the rising points of the star serus appear to be mapped by the other enclosures which are all oriented in slightly different directions it was the work entirely of

Hunter foragers but by the time gobec tapy was completed uh agriculture was being introduced and and was was was taking place there now you asked how gockley was found the answer to that is that there was a survey of that potbellied hill in the 1960s by um some American archaeologists and they were looking absolutely looking for Stone Age material for material from the Paleolithic um and they had found some Paleolithic flints upper Paleolithic flints around there so it looked like a good place to look but then they noticed sticking out of the side of the

Hill some very finely cut uh Stone bits of very large and and very finely cut stone and looking at that the workmanship was so good that those archaeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age and they thought they were looking at perhaps some bantine uh remains and they abandoned the site and and never looked at it further and it wasn't until the German archaeological Institute got involved and particularly CLA smidth who I think was was a genius had real insight into this uh and and started to dig at gockley teepe

that they realized what they'd found that they that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world uh and they'd found it at a place where agriculture according to the established historical timeline that's where agriculture at any rate in in Europe and Western Asia begins it begins in Anatolia in turkey and then it gradually disseminates Westward from there and yet the understanding is it was created by hunter gatherers it was created by hunter gatherers yeah they were there there was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in goeke but by the time gocke was decommissioned and

I use that word deliberately was closed down uh and and buried uh agriculture was all around it uh and and and this was agriculture of of people who knew how to cultivate cultivate plants do we have an understanding when it was turned into a if I could say a time capsule so protected by forming a mound around it is it around that similar time it stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago to about 8,400 BC so around 12200 years it was there and it continued to be elaborated as a site and

while it was being elaborated as a site we see agriculture I'm going to use the word being introduced uh it had there had been no sign of it before for and suddenly it's there and to me that's another of the mysteries about Glee and then with the new work that that's being done we realize that it's part of a much wider phenomenon uh which it spreads across an enormous distance um and and um the puzzling thing is that after gocke there almost seems to be a decline things things fall down again and and then we

enter this long slow process of the Neolithic thousands of years uh gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and and and Mesopotamia but agriculture has taken a firm a firm route by then actually one of the thing I'll just say this in passing when when I talk about A Lost Civilization introducing ideas to people I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place so I do find it slightly hypocritical that Archaeology is fully accepts that the idea of Agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey

uh and that that the Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture it was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers who who who traveled West so the the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so um annoying to archaeologists as it is and perhaps we should also state if you look at the entirety of history of hominids humans or hominids have been explorers I I didn't even know this When I Was preparing for this yeah looking at homoerectus yeah 1.9 million years ago abely almost right away they spread out through the whole world and we Homo sapiens evolved

from them and we should also mention since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on as I understand there's still debates about the Dynamics of all that was going on there like we mentioned in Africa that it's the you know I think the current understanding we didn't come from one particular point of Africa that there's multiple locations this is the Out of Africa Theory I think it's more than a theory it's it's really strongly evidenced why because we're part of the great ape family and it's and it's an African family there's no doubt that

that human beings are deep Origins are in Africa but then there as you rightly say there were these very early migrations Out of Africa uh by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans including definitely Homo erectus and and and this astonishingly distant travels that they undertook yes I think I think there is an urge to explore in in in all of humanity I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner what's over the brow of the of the next Hill uh and I think that goes very deep into

human character and I think it was being manifested in those those Early Adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world uh I think a lot of a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well not not only in Africa so I guess the the general puzzlement the you're filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and uh try out different environments why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated Society settlements that's

the first big question why did it take so long and that raises in my mind a hypothesis a possibility May maybe it didn't take so long maybe maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archaeological record which which await to be discovered um 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 in it on its own enough to suggest that

we're missing a chapter in the human story uh the reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about 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 um and and uh they're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another uh 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 uh because an idea um Can can manifest again and again uh throughout the human story so that so there are particular there are particular issues uh for example the notion of the afterlife Destiny of the Soul uh what happens to us when we die um and believe me when you reach my age that's something you do you do think about what what what happens I to feel Immortal when I was in my 40s but now that I'm 74 I definitely know that I'm that that that I'm

not well it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same 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 the path of souls the Milky Way

is called the path of souls it's very strongly found in the Americas right from South America through Mexico through into North America but it's also found uh in ancient Egypt uh in Ancient India in ancient Mesopotamia the same the same idea uh and I don't feel that that can be a coincidence I feel 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 that 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 uh in the expression of these ideas the other thing very puzzling thing is um this sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes at least I think that's the best theory to explain them um here I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of Georgio to santiana and her of vend Geor Georgio de Santana was professor of History of Science actually at MIT where where you're based back in the 60s um and he vend was

professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University and they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill uh and and Hamlet's Mill uh differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession and I'll explain what pression is in a moment um generally it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the pression uh and the dating on that is put back not very far maybe 2,300 years ago or so santiana and vesan are pointing out that knowledge of procession is much much older than that thousands of years

older than that and 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 this mystery in the first place okay now the procession of the equinoxes to give it its full name is is uh results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the Stars uh and our planet of course is rotating on its own axis at roughly 1,000 M hour at the equator uh but what's

less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis and that it 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 uh 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 the 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 the path of the sun the Earth is orbiting the Sun uh and we are seeing what's behind it what's 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 uh Today We Live in the

age of Pisces uh and it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish uh as their symbol uh this is another area where I differ from archaeology I think I think the constellations of the zodiac were Recon recognized as such much earlier than we suppose anyway to get to the point uh the key marker of the Year certainly in the northern hemisphere was the Spring Equinox uh this was the question was what constellation is rising behind the sun what's what constellation is housing the Sun at dawn on the Spring Equinox uh right

now it's Pisces in another 150 years or so it'll be Aquarius we we do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius uh back in the time of um the late ancient Egyptians it was Aries going back to the time of rames or before before that it was Taurus and so on and so forth It's backwards through the Zodiac uh 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 un the whole

cycle and it is a cycle it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years put a put a more exact figure on it 25,920 years uh that may be a convention some Scholars would would say it was a bit less than that a bit more but you're talking fractions it's it's in that area 25,920 years um and and uh 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 and the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the

Horizon the distant Horizon the movement in one lifetime in in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger uh it's not impossible to notice in a lifetime but it's but it's difficult you got to pass it on um and and what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture the culture that santiana and vesan call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture worked out the entire process of procession and selected the key numbers of procession of which of which the most important number the governing number is the number 72 uh but but

we also have uh numbers related to the number 72 72 + 36 is 108 108 divided by 2 is 54 uh these these numbers are also found in mythology all around the world there were 72 conspirators uh who um were involved in killing the god OS ciris in in ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden Coffer and dumping him in the in the Nile um there are 432,000 in the rig basa 432,000 is a multiple of 72 uh and and um at Anor in Cambodia for example you have uh the bridge to Anor

Tom and on that bridge you have figures on both sides sculpted figures which are holding the body of a serpent uh that serpent is vuki 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 aml's Mill uh there are 54 on each side 54 plus 54 is 108 108 is 72 + 36 it's a pressional number according to the work that santiana and vesan did and the fascination with these this number system and its Discovery all around the world

uh is one of the puzzles that that intrigue me and and suggest 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 I do as I believe the Ancients did I think

it's important to sort of uh 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 and whatever but back then especially before sort of electricity the stars is like yeah the sexiest thing to talk about there's no light pollution there's no light pollution so there's there it's 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 and I'm sure there's going to be these Geniuses that emerge yeah they're able to uh 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 oh yeah so like it makes sense that the Stars had a Primal importance for the ideas of the times for the status the for religious Explorations it was an everpresent reality yes and it was bright and it was brilliant and it

was full of Lights uh it it it's inconceivable that the Ancients would not have paid attention to it it was it was an overwhelming presence and that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier because 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 uh convention but that the constellations were there uh I think was very clear and that they were special constellations unlike other ones higher up in the sky uh which were not on the path of the sun that that people paid attention to well

but detecting the procession of the Equinox is hard because especially they don't have any writing systems they don't have any mathematical systems so everything is told through words yeah they well they have let's not underestimate oral Traditions uh the or oral Traditions that's something we've lost in our culture today one of the things that happens with the written word uh is that you gradually lose your memory um actually there's a nice story from from ancient Egypt about the God th the god of wisdom who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing look

at this gift he says to uh mythical pharaoh of that time look 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 and um the Pharaoh in this story replies to him no you have not given us a wonderful gift you have destroyed the art of memory uh 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 that's that's that's a very interesting point

and 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 in any time in any period of history is human beings love stories we we love great stories and and one way to preserve information uh is to encode it embed it in a great story uh and and so carefully done that that actually it doesn't matter whether the Storyteller knows that they're passing on that information or not uh the story itself is the vehicle uh and

as long as it's repeated Faithfully the information contained within it will be will be passed on and I I do think this is this is part of the the story of the pre preservation of knowledge so that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously I take them very seriously and and the other many reasons but but I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm within human memory I mean we know that we know scientifically that there have been many many cataclysms 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 or or 66 million years ago but has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species um yeah the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad uh but a global cataclysm the younger dras really ticks all the boxes as a as as a worldwide disaster which definitely involved sea level rise both at the beginning and at the end of the younger dras it

definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water uh and I think it's a an excellent candidate uh for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm of which one of but not the only distinguishing characteristics was a flood an enormous flood and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water uh underwater the fact that this story is found all around the world uh suggests to me that the archaeological explanation is look people suffer local floods all the time I I mean as we're talking there's there's there's flooding in Florida

uh but I I I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood they they know it's they know it's local um but that's the argument largely of archaeology dealing with the flood myths or that some local population experienced a a nasty local flooding event and they decided to say that it was that it affected the whole world I I'm not persuaded by that particularly since we know there was a nasty Epoch the younger dras when flooding did occur and when the Earth was subjected to events

cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the meapa of the Ice Age so there is the younger D impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during the period yeah that resulted in such rapid environmental change so can you explain this hypothesis yes um the the younger dras impact hypothesis yd for short uh is uh is not a lunatic fringe Theory as its opponents often attempt to write it off um it's the work of more than 60 major scientists uh working across many different disciplines including archaeology uh and and including oceanography as well um and and

uh they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the younger dryers and by the fact that is it is accompanied 12,800 Years Ago by a distinct lay in the earth uh you can see it most clearly at uh Murray Springs in Arizona for example you can you can see it's about the width of a human hand uh and there's a a drawer there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time and that draw has revealed the sides of the drawer and you can 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 wild fires there's a lot of soot in it uh there are also Nano diamonds in it there is shocked Quartz in it there is quartz that's been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 de Centigrade um there are carbon microspherules all of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs Lewis and Walter Alvarez who who made that incredible Discovery uh initially their their Discovery was based entirely on impact proxies just as

the younger druses there was no crater and for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater uh but when they finally did produce that deeply buried chicks Glo 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 dest boundary layer all around the world um so so it's the fact that at the moment when the earth tips into a radical climate shift

it it 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 you know we'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 and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the Ice Age and and it 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 and then equally dramatically and equally suddenly the angoras comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up and you have a a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea uh called meltwater pulse 1B round about 11,600 years

ago so so this is um this is a period uh which is very tightly defined uh it's a period when we know that human populations were were grievously Disturbed that's when the the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record uh during the younger dras and it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-tooth tigers vanished from the record as well is 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 meridianal overturning circulation of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part uh 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 because was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream basically uh 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 why the Gulf Stream was cut why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean and and

it was so much of it and it was so cold that actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks and that's where the yeras impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution uh to the problem now the hypothesis of course is broader than that uh amongst the scientists working on it are for example Bill Napier an astrophysicist and astronomer um they have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the younger dras impact event or events was what we now call the torrid meteor stream uh which the Earth still

passes through twice a year it's now about 30 million kilometers wide takes the earth a couple of days to 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 torid meteor dream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago came in from the or Cloud got trapped by the gravity of the Sun and went into orbit around the Sun an orbit that crossed the orbit of the earth

um 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 cuz these are chunks of rock held together by Ice uh 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 and the theory is that 12,800 years ago the earth passed through a particularly dense part of the torid meteor stream and was hit

by multiple impacts uh all around the planet certainly from the west of North America as far east as Syria uh and that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would that would have caused craters although there certainly were some uh we're talking about Air Bursts when an object is 100 or 150 m in diameter and it's coming in very fast uh into the Earth's atmosphere uh it is very unlikely to reach the Earth it's going to blow up in the sky and the best known recent example of that is the tongus event

in Siberia which took place on the 30th of June 198 the tunguska event was nobody disputes it was definitely an airburst of of of a cometary fragment and the date is interesting uh because the 30th of June is the height of the beta TDS it's one of the two times when the Earth is going through the torid meteor stream well luckily that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited uh but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed if that had happened over a major city would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the torid meteor

stream and about the risk of uh Cosmic impact so the suggestion is that it wasn't One impact it wasn't two impacts it wasn't three impacts it was it was hundreds of Air Bursts all around the planet coupled with coupled with a number of bigger objects which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap largely some of them may also have hit the northern European ice cap resulting in that sudden otherwise unexplained flood of melt water that went into the world ocean um and and uh caused the cooling that then that then

took place but this was a disaster for life all over the planet and and it's interesting that one of the sites where they find the younger dras boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz the carbon micros ferial the Nano Diamonds the trinitite and so on and so forth all um of of those impact proxies are found at Abu Herrera that was a a settlement within 150 miles of gockley teepe and it was hit 12,800 years ago and it was obliterated interestingly it was reinhabited

by human beings within probably 5 years but it was it was completely obliterated at that time uh and it it it's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed uh by what they saw Happening by the the these massive explosions in the sky and the the obliteration uh of of Abu hrera now this is a theory the younger dr's impact it's a hypothesis actually it's not even a theory a theory is I think considered a higher level than a hypothesis that's why it's the younger dras impact

hypothesis and of course it has many opponents and there are many who disagree with it uh and there there have been a series of of peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the younger dras impact hypothesis one I think was in 20 2011 it was called a a requim for the younger dras impact hypothesis and there's one just been published a few months ago a year ago you know called a a complete uh refutation of the younger dras impact hypothesis something something like that some lengthy title um so so it's it's a hypothesis that

has its opponents and even within within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history there are different points of view uh Robert shock 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 um he doesn't go for the younger dras impact hypothesis he think he he fully accepts that the younger dras was a global cataclysm uh and that the extinctions took place but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar Outburst

so there there what everybody's agreed on is the younger drus was bad um but there is dispute about what caused it I person have found the younger dras impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive uh which most effectively explains all the evidence how important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of um the Ice Age Advanced civilizations so is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have um 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 Young drus that's Central to what I'm saying and the younger drus required a trigger something something caused it uh I think the younger drus impact hypothesis the notion that 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 uh is is the best explanation but I don't mind other explanations it's good that there are other explanations the younger dras is a big mystery and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet and

that word Advan civilization this is another word that um that is easily misunderstood and I've tried to make clear many many times that when we 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 precession numbers that are found all around the world and are a category of ancient maps called Panos which suddenly started to appear

just after the Crusade that uh entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople the Panos 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 portolano style Maps 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 these 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 could have uh the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time on and then you could work out your longitude um there might be other ways of working out longitude as well but there it is the fact is these Panos 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 a much extended Indonesia uh and Malaysian Peninsula and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one land mass and that was the case during the Ice Age that was the that was the Sund 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 a fictional

land mass there um I I I don't think that makes sense I think somebody was mapping the world uh during the last ice AG but that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech uh it 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 seagoing ships uh and they explored the world and they mapped the world those Maps very very were made a very very long time ago some of

them I believe were lightly preserved in the Library of Alexandria I think even then they were being copied and recopied we don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria except that it was destroyed uh I I suggest it's likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire I suggest it's likely that some of those Maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople uh and uh that's where they were liberated during the Crusade and entered World culture again and started to be copied and recopied so from this perspective when uh

we talk about Advanced ice AG civilization it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of their Scholars of the stars and their expert seaf fairing Navigators yes 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 I'm not saying that they were building steam engines um I don't see I don't see any evidence for that and perhaps some

building tricks and skills of how to well well def definitely and this this again is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza plateau in in in Egypt with the three great pyramids and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to uh on the Giza plateau and the Great Sphinx itself this is a an area of particular importance in understanding this issue well can you actually describe the Sphinx and the great params and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them well first

of all the astronomy uh 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 old older than it had been actually he got that idea from a from a philosopher called schalla dubik 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 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 um he began to think maybe SCH was right maybe there there was some s some sort of flooding here and that's when he brought Robert shock second person I'd like to recognize Geist at Boston University he brought shock to Giza and shock was the first geologist to stick his neck out risk the r the IR 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 a half thousand years ago during the younger dras for the creation of the Great Sphinx and then of course this is the period of the of the wet Sahara 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 densely populated and there was a lot of rain there's not no rain in Giza today but there's Rel ly 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 is Robert bval uh Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together unfortunately Robert has been very ill for the last seven years he's he's um uh got a very bad chest infection and I I think also that that Robert

became very demoralized by the attacks of egyptologists on his work uh but Robert is the genius and it does take a genius sometime to make these connections cuz nobody noticed it before that the three Pyramids of Giza 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 Osiris uh in the sky he was the ancient Egyptians called the irion constellation sahu

and they recognized it as the celestial image of the god Osiris 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 um and then when we take procession into account you find something else very intriguing happening first of all uh you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today and and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago uh it's it's not precisely related to how Orion's Belt looked at that time there's

a there's a bit of a a Twist is they're not they're not quite right but as you press the Stars backwards as you go back and back and back and you come to around 10,500 BC 12 a half thousand years ago in the younger dras you find that suddenly they lock perfectly they match perfectly with the three pids on the ground and that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx an noal Monument aligned perfectly to the Rising Sun on the Spring Equinox anybody cont test this for themselves just just go to Giza on the 21st

of March be there before Dawn stand behind the Sphinx and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the Gaze of the Sphinx um but the question is what constellation was behind the Sphinx and 12 and a half thousand years ago it was the constellation of Leo and actually the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx like look and I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely uh and that it over the thousands of years it became damaged it became eroded particularly the part of it that

that sticks out the head uh there were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand but still the head stuck out um by the time you come to to the fourth Dynasty when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built by the time you come to the fourth Dynasty the head of the the the lion original lion head would have been a complete mess and we suggest that it was then recarved into a fonic head egyptologists think it was the Pharaoh cafre uh but there's no real strong resemblance but it's definitely wearing the nemis headdress of

of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh uh and we think that that's a result of a recarving 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 caffra 4,500 years ago and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker I mean it's 270 ft long and 70 ft high and it's looking directly at the Rising Sun on the Equinox if you create it then uh 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 uh and and again we think that's because of that observation of the skies and and and putting on 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 Giza Plateau it's a fact of course that egyptologists completely dispute but the fact that the principal monuments of the Giza Plateau the three great pyramids and the Great Sphinx all

lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC uh 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 you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and and seems to be mirrored On The Ground by the River Nile I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen uh as the site for this for this very special place so the point I want to make is that that an astronomical um design on the ground

which memorializes a very ancient date does not have to have been done 12,00 500 years ago if if if from the ancient Egyptian point of view you're there 4,500 years ago uh and there's a Time 8,000 years before that which is very very very important to you you could me you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau which is what we think we're looking at except for one thing and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx uh and we're pretty sure that the Sphinx at least does date

back to 12 a half thousand years ago uh and with it the megalithic temples uh the so-called Valley Temple uh which stands uh just 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 has largely been destroyed but the valley Temple attributed to caffra on No Good Grounds whatsoever um is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each um and yet it has been remodeled refaced with granite there are Granite blocks that

are placed on top of the the core Limestone blocks and those core Limestone blocks were already eroded when the Gran 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 Giza 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 Giza Plateau that are much older and that the 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 Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that actually the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill uh and that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval Mound uh to to the to the ancient Egyptians so the idea is that the Sphinx 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 um but the the the bases the base of those pyramids uh was was already in place at that time so what's the case what's the evidence that the egyptologist used to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx well um the three Great Pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids this this is another problem that I have

with the whole thing um 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 Zoser uh the step pyramid at Sakara um about a hundred years or so before the Giza Pyramids are built uh and then we have this explosion in the fourth Dynasty uh of of true pyramids uh we have three of them attributed to a single pharaoh sneferu who built supposedly the pyramid at maum and the two pyramids at

dashur the bent and The Red Pyramid uh and then within that same 100-year span uh we have the Giza Pyramids being built this is according to the Orthodox chronology and then suddenly once the Giza project is finished pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt uh and the pyramids of the fifth Dynasty are Frankly Speaking a mess outside they're 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 uh and imagery repeating the name

of the king who was supposedly buried in that place whereas the Giza Pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever uh what they do what we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy uh basic statistics it's a 6 million ton structure um it each side is about 750 ft long yeah um it's aligned almost perfectly to True North Southeast and West uh within 360th of a single degrees the 60th because degrees are divided into 60s um and and um uh it's the Precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of

the thing uh plus it's very complicated internal passageways uh that that that that are involved in it you you know in the 9th century the Great Pyramid still had its facing tone stones in place but there were there was an Arab an Arab khif Khalif Al Mamon who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the North Face nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was but he figured if 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 sledgehammers and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance and they cut their way into the Great Pyramid uh for a distance of maybe 100 ft 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 S of of the Great Pyramid the descending the ascending corridors that go up when 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° 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 in in the creation of the Great Pyramid um if you go up the grand Gallery which is at the end of uh the So-Cal 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 and 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 uh already in place above the king's chamber are five other Chambers these are known as relieving Chambers uh 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 VI who who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place allegedly found well he claims he found the graffiti uh 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 cou of kufu there uh quite quite recognizable but the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of

graffiti dating from the Old Kingdom uh or whether howardv uh actually put it there himself U because he was in desperate need of money at the time um I'm not sure what the answer to that question is another reason why but it's one of the reasons that that egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of kufu um another is what is called the W aljaf papai uh where uh on the Red Sea uh a diary the Diary of an individual called merer was found and he talks about bringing um highly polished

Limestone uh 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 the the Great Pyramid is attributed to kufu um but I think I think that we're we 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 ft vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there you got to go down a 26° sloping Cor door uh until a distance of about 300 ft it's 100 ft vertically but the slope means you're going to walk at a distance of about not walk you're going to AP walk you're going to 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 uh if you go forward you keep bumping your head on them because they're only 3' 5 in high uh you get down to the bottom you have a short horizontal passage and then you get into the Subterranean chamber um the theory of Egypt egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of kufu but after cutting out that 300t long 26° sloping um passage 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 phoh was supposed to have been buried those Arab Raiders under khif Mamon didn't find anything in the Great Pyramid at all so your idea is that uh the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier and why that's important is in that case it would be evidence of some transfer of Technology yes from a much older civilization the idea is that during the younger

dras most of That civilization was uh either destroyed or damaged and they desperately scattered across the the globe seeking Refuge seeking refuge and telling stories of um maybe one the importance of the Stars MH their knowledge about the Stars yeah and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation MH that's that's that's that's roughly the idea uh so it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians uh have an a notion of an Epoch that they call zepe which is the first time it means the first time this is when the gods walked the Earth uh this is

when uh seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt uh and that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization there are King lists in by the ancient Egyptians themselves there are King lists that go go back way beyond the first dynasty go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt considered to be entirely mythical by egyptologists but nevertheless it's interesting that there's that that reference to to remote time now what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies uh the followers of Horus are one of those specifically

tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time uh into later periods uh The Souls of pay and Neen are another one of these um mysterious secret society group groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the Future and and what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the younger daas cataclysm who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number it's interesting that that they are referred to in the the edu building text as seven sages because that repeats again and again it it's it's also in Mesopotamia uh it's

seven sages seven apaloo Who come out of the Waters of the Persian Gulf and and teach people all the skills of Agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy it's found it'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 uh in the fourth Dynasty in in ancient Egypt and and you know the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years uh shouldn't be absurd uh we know for example in the case of ancient Israel it goes back to the time of Abraham which is pretty much I think around 2 2000 BC and and knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day so if you can

if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years you can probably preserve it for right now of course the air bars on this are quite large but if uh an advanced ice civilization existed where do you think it was where do you think we might find it one day if it existed and uh how big do you think it might have been well this is where where I'm often accused of presenting a god of the gaps argument that I think there was A Lost Civilization because there's lots of the earth that archaeologists have never looked at

of course I'm not thinking that um these are very special gaps that I'm interested in uh and I'm interested in them because of all the Curiosities and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before it's it's not just because there are gaps in the archaeological record um it's it's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Ice Age and they specifically include the Sahara Desert uh which was not a desert during the ice and and and went through this warm wet period when it was very very fertile uh certainly

some archaeology has been done in the Sahara but it's fractional it's it's it's tiny and 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 uh for that um and and um uh the Amazon rainforest is another example of this I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilm the Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilm maybe closer to six um and then uh you have the Continental shelves uh

that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age now it's it's well established that sea level Rose by 400 feet but it didn't Rise by 400 feet overnight uh it came in dribs and drabs there were 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 400t 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 M meltwater pulse 1

a uh when the flooding was 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 they were expert Navigators do you think they spread across the globe well well the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based all I'm all I'm seeing are Clues and Mysteries and puzzles that that that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past uh 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 Ice Age I mean nobody smart would 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 and welcoming to human beings during the ice asan that of course includes the coastlines that are now underwater uh of course it includes the Sahara Desert and of course it includes the Amazon rainforest as well all of these places I think

are candidates uh for quote unquote my Lost Civilization um and because I think largely from those ancient maps that it was a navigating seafaring Civ civilization uh I suspect that it wasn't only in one place uh it was probably in a number of places and then I I can only speculate uh maybe maybe there was um there was a cultural value where it was felt it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of Hunter foragers at that time uh maybe it was felt that that they should keep their distance from

them Ju Just as even today uh there is a feeling that we shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest uh although in interestingly some of those some of those tribes are now using cell phones um that possibility may have been there in in the past and only when we come to a to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have Outreach and actually to take refuge amongst those Hunter forager populations 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 um studied by archaeologists that's right very tiny percent and even a tiny percent of every archaeological site has been studied by archaeologists too typically 1 to 5% of any archaeological side is excavated I mean that's why uh go back to

T it fills my mind with imagination especially seeing it as a time capsule you know it's almost certain that there is places on Earth we haven't discovered that once we do uh even if it's after the ice age will change our view of human history no uh do you think there's going to be a place like what what what would be your dream thing to discover like go back tape that says a definitive like perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history some kind of archive some kind of Hall of Records there's uh both mystical

associations with the Hall of Records at Giza from people like the Ed casei organization there's also ancient Egyptian Traditions which suggest that something was concealed uh beneath the sphin um this is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt it's it's quite present in ancient Egypt uh so far as far as I know nobody has um dug down beneath this things and of course there's very good reasons for that you don't want to damage the the place too much but I let's call it the Hall of Records I i' I'd love to find that

uh but I think in a way that's what gocke is gocke is a Hall of Records you know it's interesting that that just as I've I've tried to outline I hope reasonably clearly that the three Great Pyramids of Giza match Orion's Belt in 10,000 500 BC just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC 12,500 years ago or so pillar 43 in enclosure D at gockley tee uh contains what a number of researchers myself included regard as an astronomical diagram Martin swatman of Edinburgh University is is 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 uh uh very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today um 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 uh is uh a circular object and the suggestion is that it's marking the time when the sun was at the center of the dark rift in the Milky Way uh at the summer

solstice uh 12 a half thousand years ago that's that what it's marking uh and and um it's interesting that the same date can be deduced from pillar 4 of course it's controversial Martin sweatman's ideas are by no means accepted by by archaeology but he's done very very thorough detailed statistical work on this and I'm personally convinced so we have a a time capsule at gockley which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before gockley was built uh if that dating of 11,600 years years ago Pro proves to be absolutely the oldest date

uh as it is at as it is at present the date memorialized on pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago the beginning of the younger dryness the beginning of the impact event and then Giza does the same thing but in much larger scale it it it draws our it uses massive megalithic architecture which is very difficult to destroy and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encod 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 indis valley civilization or with the Easter Island script we don't have to have a script that can't be interpreted if 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 U and that star map is a is is part of a an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the 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 uh piece uh 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 uh a particular date quick pause bath and break sounds good 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 come out 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 that's super interesting and then uh if there's an ancient civilization advanc civilization that explains why uh there's so many similar types of ideas that spread that means that there's so much undiscovered yeah still about the sort of the spring of these ideas of civilization that come 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 um I don't I can't canot speak of all archaeologists but but some archaeologists feel very very territorial about their profession uh and they do not feel happy about Outsiders uh entering their realm uh especially if those Outsiders have a large platform um um and that's I found that the attacks on me by archaeologists have increased step by step with the increase of my exposure uh and 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 uh but when Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995 and became a a global bestseller then I started to attract their attention and and uh appeared to have been regarded as a as a threat to them and I I and that is the case today that is why uh ancient apocalypse season 1 was defined as the most dangerous Show on Netflix uh it's why the society for American archaeology wrote an open letter to Netflix uh

asking Netflix to reclassify the series as Science Fiction it's why they accused this they accused the series of anti-Semitism uh misogyny uh White supremacism uh and a whole I don't know a whole bunch of other other things I there have nothing to do with anything that's that's that's that's in the series it was it was it it was like we must shut this down this is so dangerous to us is certainly not a danger there are many more dangerous things in the world than a than a television series um going going on right now but

but maybe it was seen as a danger to archaeology that this non- archaeologist was in archaeological terrain and being uh viewed and seen by large and read by large numbers of people maybe maybe that was part of the problem and human nature being what it is I noticed that uh 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 in Wales in in the UK uh are both people who like to have media exposure um and uh John Hoops had just recently

started a YouTube channel Flint dible has had one for for quite a while uh pretty small number of followers I think that they they they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention and that it's not right that I am and and that the best way to stop that is to stop me uh to shut me down to get me cancelled and basically requiring Netflix to re relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest Netflix uh that would that

had gone through if Netflix had listened to them that would have effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series it would no longer have been ranked under under documentary so it was a deliberate attempt to shut me down and 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 I I hit back after 30 years of these attacks on my work uh I'm tired of it and and I'm I do defend myself and sometimes I'm perhaps over vigorous in that defense maybe I

was a little bit too strong in my critique of archaeology in the first season uh of ancient apocalyps maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit Kindler and I've tried to reflect that in the second season uh and and and to bring also many more indigenous uh voices into the second season as well as the voices of many more archaeologists yeah in general I got a chance to get a glimpse of the archaeology community and U in in Arch ology in science in general I don't have much patience for this kind of

arrogance or snark or dismissal of uh General human curiosity that I think your work conspires in people so that's why uh people like Ed barnhard who I recently had a conversation with you know he radiates sort of kindness and curiosity as well and it's like that kind of approach to ideas especially about human history it inspire people inspires millions of people to ask questions I mean that's why you had the KE Reeves on the on the new season he's basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity keano is is is genuinely curious

about the past and and very very interested in it and and and he's bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the Past he's he's speaking for every man uh in in in the series so given that can you maybe Steelman the case that uh 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 gatherers for a long time mhm and then there was a cataclysm a very difficult period in the human history with the young adras and that changed the

environment and then led to this the springing up of civilizations to different places on Earth can you sort of uh make the case for that oh no I completely understand why that is the position of archaeology because that's what they' found Archaeology is very much wishing to Define itself as a science uh and uh it uses the techniques of weighing and measuring and Counting are very key to to what Archaeology does and in what they've found and what they've studied around the world uh they don't see any traces of of A Lost Civilization and and

the idea that um besides the the we live in a very politically correct world today and the idea that that uh some kind of Lost Civilization brought knowledge to other cultures around the world is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some in some way it triggers it triggers that aspect as as as well but basically AR I think majority of archaeologists are in complete good faith on this I I I I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me I think that I think that what what we're hearing from most archaeologist 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 uh and to that I I must reply please look at the myths please consider the implications of the younger dras please look at the ancient astronomy please look at those ancient maps and don't just dismiss them and sneer at them and for God's sake please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable and attracted during the Ice Age and that have hardly been studied

by archaeology at all uh before you tell us that your theory is the only one that can possibly be correct in fact it's a very it's a very arrogant and silly position of archaeology because archaeolog archaeological theories are always being overthrown it can take years it can take decades it took decades in the cas case of the clov first hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas uh but sooner or later a bad idea uh will be kicked out by a prop of evidence that that idea does not explain if we can just look back at

your uh debate with Flint dible on Joe Rogan Experience what are some takeaways from that uh 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 uh what were you maybe bothered by first of all just very recently and it can be found on my YouTube channel channel and it's signaled on on my website I I have made a a video runs about an hour uh which looks at a series of statements that Flint

made during the debate which I was not prepared to answer um and it turns out that some of those statements are not correct uh the the notion for example that there were three million shipwrecks uh 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 I've put that clip into the video that I've brought out that is not a fact that is an estimate a UNESCO estimate um and 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 L 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 and 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 and maybe it's 250,000 uh still a large number uh but most of them from the last Thousand Years uh and 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 in the video is that there is uh indisputable evidence that human beings were seaf farers uh as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago the peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 km 100 km ocean

Voyage but nevertheless it was an ocean voyage and it must have involved a large enough people uh 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 um and uh no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cypress either but that doesn't mean that that thing didn't happen I 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 peopling of Australia part that's my boggling 50,000 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 on to the ocean of an even harsher environment and deciding that you know what I'm going to go towards near certain death mhm and I don't know what's on the other side of that water you can't see 90 K humans did it yeah I love

again it's that urge to explore and I suggest that it it probably began with a few Pioneers who made the journey there and back they ventured into the water they definitely had boats uh and lo and behold after a 2 or three day Vo Voyage they ended up on a coastline you're an individual you've got my relatively straightforward island hopping with where each island is within sight of each other as far as timore and when you get to timore suddenly you can't Island toop 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 that first reconing of what lay beyond that straight would have undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals uh not enough to create a permanent population in Australia but when they came back with the good news that there's a whole land there that's the that's the land that was in it that that geographers call uh sahul which in just as Sunda was the

Ice Age Indonesian and Malaysian peninsula joined together into one land mass 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 uh we need to bring more people here uh and and that would have involved larger larger craft uh you you need to bring people uh with resources and you bring need to bring enough of them both men and women in order to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct and and it's the same in Cyprus

there the the detailed work that's been done suggests very strongly that we 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 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 Doos shipwreck of Greece which is around 5,000 years old if I recall correctly so everything that's makes a boat is lost to time yes boats can be preserved

under certain circumstances there's a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea almost 2 miles deep I I didn't know the Black Sea was that deep but there's a wreck and there's no Oxygen down there um that is that is more than 2,000 years old and is still in pretty much perfect condition um but in other conditions uh 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 the ship itself has gone uh

the fact is we know that our ancestors were seaf farers as much as 50,000 years ago and no ship has survived to testify to that yet we accept that they were do you think you think one day we'll find a ship that's 10 20 30 40 50,000 years old uh it's not impossible um I I think it's I think it's quite unlikely given that given the very thin survival of ships the further back you go in time uh with the oldest as I say being about 6,000 years old now and then the other the other

thing to take into account is the younger dras event itself and the the cataclysmic circumstances of that event and and and um the roiling of the Seas that would have taken place then H how much would have survived in a in a in a boat accident at that time would have survived for thousands of years afterwards I I I'm not sure but I I don't give up hope it's possible so okay so that's back to the 3 million shipwrecks yeah so what's your take away from that debate uh well my take away from that debate

is um that I should have been better prepared uh and and I should have been less angry uh I have to say that Flint had had had really um Disturbed me with the these this constant snide not quite exact references to racism and white supremacism in in in my work I I I detest such things uh 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 uh where he really hasn't successfully avoided it but 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 uh came to the conclusion that grahe hanock is a racist and a white supremacist and that really got under my skin and it really upset me and I felt I felt angry about it and I felt that I was there uh to defend ancient apocalypse season 1 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 at 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 uh is the one that can get under your skin and it's 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 when when a person has is the opposite

of racist very often it's kind of hilarious to watch but it can get under your skin especially when you have certain uh dynamics that happen on the internet where it seeps into a Wikipedia page page and then other people read that Wikipedia page and you get to hear it from like friends oh I didn't know your act whatever and you you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are is actually has a lot of power not by people that know you well but by people that just kind of are learning about you for the first

time definitely and they can really start to annoy you and get under your skin when people are kind of indirectly injecting they're writing articles about you they can then be by Wikipedia it can really bother a person who is 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 uh and I felt that I as a human being were being was was being insulted and wronged uh in in ways that are deeply hurtful um my wife and I have have six

children between us and we have nine grandchild and of those nine grandchildren seven are of mixed race um and 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 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 debator he's got a

very sharp mind he's a very clever man and he's very fast on his feet and I recognize that I I was definitely up against a superior debater uh 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 uh something else which is that he was willing to be there uh most archaeologists don't want to talk to me at all they want to insult me from the sidelines uh they want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me

a pseudo archaeologist or a p purveyor of pseudo archaeological theories they want to make sure that the hints of racism are there but they actually don't don't want to sit down and confront me at least Flint was willing to do that and I'm grateful to him for that and I I think in in that sense it is an important encounter between people with uh let's say an alternative view of history and those with the very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us and he's also a very determined character he he he he doesn't

give up so all of those things about him I I admire and and and respect um but um uh I think he fought dirty during the debate and I've said exactly why uh in this video that I now have up on YouTube to say a positive thing that I enjoyed I think towards the end in him speaking about agriculture was pretty interesting so the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting like where where you can get some insights through the fog of time about like 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 work that archaeologists do I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don't study what archaeologists study um 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 when I look at the Great Sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the Pharaoh caffra despite the absence of any single contemporary

inscription that ascribes it to caffra and in fact the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of kufu uh I I am not looking at what egyptologists study they just dismiss all of that and lock into the cafr uh connection at gocke I'm I'm not really looking at what archeologists look at I'm looking at the alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track procession of the star serus over a period of time archeologists aren't interested in in any of that so I 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 and also that that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds it's as though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view which they regard as quote unquote dangerous uh because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public and think the General Public 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 and 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 uh with a gentleman like

Ed Barnhart M was very much the case with uh archaeologist Marty paronan uh from the University of Helsinki and with geographer ala ranzi uh Brazilian geographer very very senior figure um who I worked with in 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 liar indeed we found some of them ourselves with lar while we were there yeah those was an incredible part of the show that I got a chance to preview that it's

like there's all this earthw works yeah the traces of things built on the ground that probably you can only really appreciate when you look from up above that's right so the idea that they buildt stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very kind of deep relationship with the the sky with the sky and and and a very good knowledge of geometry as well because these are geometrical structures and some of them even even seem to incorporate geometrical games almost of the kind like squaring the circle uh it's

not quite that but you have a lovely square earthw with a lovely Circle earthwork right in the middle of it uh whatever else they were they were geometers they they they they were not just Builders of fantastically huge Earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon uh not just Builders of cities that we now know existed in the Amazon but that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well everything we're talking about is so full of mystery 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 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 uh that uh that appear to be scientific I I think that's that's most unfortunate the past is deeply mysterious the whole the whole story of life on Earth is deeply mysterious I I mean we were talking about the timeline of of human beings but you know if you go

if you go back to the formation of the Earth itself if I've got the figures 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 uh for the next several hundred million years but it was actually Francis Crick who pointed out something odd that within a 100 million years of the Earth being cool enough to support life there's bacterial life all over the planet and and 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 that comets may carry bacteria which concede life on on planets but Crick actually in life itself was talking about directed pania he envisaged uh this is Crick not me he he envisaged an alien civilization uh far away across the Galaxy which faced uh Extinction perhaps a 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 so their second thought was let's preserve our DNA uh let's uh put bacteria genetically engineered bacteria into cryogenic Chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions and bottom line of cric'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 that is a one way to uh create backups of us elsewhere in the universe given the

space is to do a life gun and shoot it everywhere and it just plants yes and you kind of hope that whatever is the magic that that makes up human consciousness and if that magic is already there in the initial DNA uh of the bacteria the potential for that magic is there the potential is there and and evolutionary forces will will will work upon it in in different ways in different environments uh but that the potential is there yes it's something that we would do if we were facing a complete Extinction of Life on planet

Earth uh a major Global effort would be made uh to preserve it somehow uh and and that might well include firing off cryogenic Chambers uh into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable and uh as you were mentioning there's just so many interesting Mysteries along the way here for example I mean it's like I think like three billion years it was single cell organisms so it seems like life is pretty good for single cell organisms that there was no need for multicellularity that 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 more complic organism it took a really long time to take that leap is it because it's really hard to do and what was the uh uh what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap and the same I mean for us to be selfish and self-obsessed for us humans like what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens from the other hominids and why did Homo sapiens win out against the Andals and the other competitors why are they not

around uh anymore so those are all fascinating Mysteries and it feels like the more we propose sort of radical ideas about our past and take it seriously and explore uh the more we'll be able to sort of uh figure out that puzzle that go leads all the way back to Homo sapiens and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on Earth yeah 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 and

probably long before actually because this planet is part of the universe and God knows what else is out there in the in in the universe why do you think Homo sapiens uh evolved why like what 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 and tell great stories and that is somehow an evolutionary Advantage do you have any like favorite conceptions of um

it's interesting there's no doubt that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for at least 10,000 years probably more than that and yet one of the the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals that we we killed them off um but at the same time we were into breeding with the Neanderthals in a sense the Neals are not not gone they they are still within us today we are part part part neanda there's another theory that I've read about what there is some evidence that neanderthals were cannibals that there was

ritual cannibalism took place amongst neanderthals and particularly the eating of human brains uh and this uh can cause a Kuru uh which can kill off whole populations that's what another suggestion of why then the anals died out there's lots of possibilities that been put forward maybe we just outc competed them you know maybe maybe anatomically modern humans had some brain connections that they didn't have even though the Neal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings as the old saying goes size isn't everything uh maybe we just had a more compact more

efficient brain the fact of the matter is uh that uh neanda 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 this the fact that homoerectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago uh is Testament to that uh and I I do think that exploration urge is is fundamental humanity and I I would like to say that's what I think I'm doing I'm I'm exercising my urge to explore the

past in in my own way making my own path and defining defining my own route that's the leap from non-human to human uh 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 um Shamanism is the origin of of of everything of value uh in humanity uh I think it was the earliest form of science when I spend time with uh shamans

in the Amazon I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way uh they're always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms for example of the iasa Brew to see if it enhances it or makes it makes it different in in in any way uh the invention of curari is a remarkable scientific feat which is entirely down to shamans in the in the Amazon they are the the scientists of the hunter forager uh state of society um and they were the ancient um leaders of human

civilization so I think all all civilization arises out of shamanism uh and Shamanism is a naturally scientific Endeavor where experimentation is undertaken and exploration and investigation of the environment around us and what I'm suggesting is that that one group perhaps more than one group uh went a bit further than other groups did and and used that study of the skies and developed navigational techniques and and were able to sail and explore the Earth uh but that ultimately what lies behind it is the same curiosity and investigative skill that shamans are still using uh in the

Amazon to this day uh and and I do see them as as as scientists in a very proper use of the word but do you think something like iasa was a part of that process yes iasa is the result of shamanistic Investigation of what's available in the Amazon of course iasa is All The Fad in Western industrialized societies today and and some people see it as a miracle cure for all kind of ailments and problems and perhaps it is perhaps it can be uh in in certain ways iasa itself is not an Amazonian word it

it comes from the qua language and it means the vine of souls or the vine of the Dead uh but the iwasa vine is only one of two principal ingredients in the iasa brew and the other ingredient are leaves that contain dimethy tryptamine and there are two sources of that one is a bush called cotri veridus that's its botanical name they call it shakuna in the Amazon and its leaves are rich in dthy tryptamine DMT which is arguably the most powerful psychedelic uh known to science um and and uh the other source comes from another

Vine diopter Cabana uh which the leaves of that vine also contain DMT so the iasa 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 diopter or whether they come from shakuna 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 mono Amin oxidase in the gut that shuts down DMT when absorbed orally basically DMT is not accessible orally unless you combine it with a

monoamine oxidase 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 thousands of different species of plants and trees in the Amazon and they've gone around and they found just two or three of them that put together can produce these extraordinary Visionary experience just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten yeah it consumed and smoked or all kinds of combinations to arrive at that exactly exactly to realize that this is something this is something very special and then and then to

use the principles there to to find another form of it so iwasa is the form that is made with the awasa vine and the leaves of the shakuna plant uh but yahi uh is made from the awasa vine and the leaves of another Vine deis Cabana uh which contain not only n n DMT which is the DMT that everybody's pretty much familiar with these days but also five Meo DMT uh and the yahi experience which I have I have also had uh in my view is more intense uh and more powerful almost to the point

of being overwhelming uh than the than the iasa experience but but what the result of this uh sophisticated chemistry that we find taking place here uh is is uh a brew which is hideous to drink it the taste I find it quite repulsive um I almost wretch just just smelling it in the in the cup um but then unleashes these extraordinary experiences and it isn't just pretty visual 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 iasa breu and certain other psychedelics like like some cyan mushrooms in a high enough dose can do it as well LSD can do it but aasa is the master in this of of lowering the veil to what appears to be a seamlessly convincing ing other realm other world and of course the Hardline rational scientists will say that's just all fantasies of your brain um 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 uh 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 um and and um that if that if that is the case then we locked into the Physical Realm we need our everyday Alert problemsolving state of consciousness and that's the State of Consciousness that Western Civilization values and and and and and highly encourages uh but these other states of Consciousness that allow us to access alternative

realities are possibly more important it may be apocryphal uh but it was reported uh after Francis crick's role and his Nobel prize for the discovery of the double helix that he finally got it under the influence of LSD there's the classic example of krie Mullis and the polymeres Chain Reaction he said he got that under the influence of LSD so the notion that the alert problemsolving State of Consciousness is the only valuable State of Consciousness is disproved by valuable experiences that people have had in in a Visionary State and but the question that remains unresolved

is those entities that we encounter in the and not everybody encounters them and you're certainly not going to encounter them on every iasa trip there are iasa journeys where nothing seems to happen um 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 you're learning it anyway um these sentient others that are encountered what are they you know are

they just figments of our brain on drugs or are we actually gaining access to a parallel reality where which is inhabited by Consciousness which is in non a non-physical form uh and and I'm equally open to that idea I I think that may be maybe what is going on here with with aaska but the other thing is that there is a presence within the awasa brew and she is present both present both in aasa and in yahi and that's one of the reasons why the shamans say that that actually the master of the process is

the awasa vine not the leaves it's as though the vine has harness the leaves to gain access to human consciousness and there if you have sufficient exposure to iasa or yahi you drink it enough times I've had maybe 75 or 80 Journeys with with aasa uh you 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 they call her mother iasa there are some tribes in the Amazon who interpret the spirit of awasa as male uh but in

all cases that spirit is seen as a teacher uh that's fundamentally what iwasa 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 a powerful wish not to repeat that negative behavior again in the future uh you the more baggage you carry in your life the harder the beating that aasa is going to give you until it Force you to confront and take responsibility

for your own Behavior Uh and and that is a that is an extraordinary thing to come from a from a a plant Brew in that way and I think in in yes I I think iwaska is the most powerful of all the plant medicines uh for accessing these mysterious Realms but there's no doubt you can access them they're all tryptamines they're all related to one another in in one way you can access them through LSD and you certainly can access them through through side side mushrooms as well in large enough dose both possibilities as you

describe are interesting and to me they're kind of akin to each other uh just I wonder what the 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 uh up with those entities so it's almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit it is um and the Curious Thing is that the same iconography people paint their Visions after iasa sessions people were painting in Europe in the cave

of Lasco for example and of course they had access to silicide mushrooms uh in prehistoric Europe uh then a remarkable commonality in the imagery that is that is painted I I 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 Terren 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 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 WWEs Rand in South Africa fabulous book called The Mind in the cave uh where where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in 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 inm attempting to remember their visions and document them uh on permanent media like the like the wall of a cave

so typically you get a lot of geometric patterns but you also got entities and those entities often are theanthropos part animal part human in form might have the head of a wolf and the body of a human being uh 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 woow 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 there's a new technology uh dmtx uh where the DMT is fed directly into the bloodstream by drip and it's possible to keep the individual in the peak DMT State uh which normally when you smoke a vape d M to you 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 um but uh 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 to DMT it always hits you with the same power even if you took it yesterday and the day before and you're taking it tomorrow as well it's still going to have that same power there's no tolerance there so that's how they can they can use that lack of tolerance to 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 are now exchanging their experiences they didn't do they weren't allowed to do so at the beginning of the experiment but now that most of them left it they're exchanging their experiences and it's all about encounters with insentient others who wish to teach them moral lessons now to me that's wild what what is going on here uh what what what what

what how do we account for this yeah I get the notion of hallucinations and brightly colored visuals but the moral lessons that come with it th those are very odd yeah and would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization is it because the 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 yeah more contributing members of our community more

caring more nurturing members of our community that's got to be good for for for any Community I'm I'm I've said this a dozen times but uh I'll say it again if 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 iwasa ordeal first they have to have 10 or 12 sessions of iasa uh as a condition for applying for the

job uh I suspect that most who had had those experiences wouldn't want to apply for the job anymore they 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 would be a much better world if most

of Congress and most politicians would take some form of psychedelic at the very least I have no doubt that but it would be a better world I mean this raises an interesting point which is the role of government in controlling our Consciousness uh and in my opinion the the the so-called War on Drugs is one of the fundamental abuses of human rights that have been undertaken in the past in the past 60 years uh 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 uh and particularly the freedom to make choices over their own bodies uh but in the case of even cannabis I know this one of the great things that's happening in America it's it's happening state by state where cannabis is being is being legalized and that Draconian hand of government is being taken off the back of people who are who are consuming a medicine that is far less harmful than alcohol which is glorified uh in in our society um we cannot say that 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 and may or may not experience in the inner sanctum of our own Consciousness I think it's a fundamental violation of adult sovereignty uh 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 but 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 it's exciting some of these uh substances like Cy are are being integrated to Scientific studies

large skilles it's really interesting we've seen a revolution in in the way science looks at psychedelics in the last 20 25 years um they they 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 syas ibin and other psychedelics are very helpful in a range of conditions from which people people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder uh the fear of death when you're when you're suffering from terminal cancer can be overwhelming and it's been found that that that uh psybin can

can remove that uh deep depressions can be evaporated with one single massive silos cybin Journey they just go away there's really good science on this and and they are being integrated into conventional medicine more and more we'll see it 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 is going to happen yeah I actually uh just recently found out that you had a TED Talk war on Consciousness yes that was taken down yeah and that was just part of just

the the general resistance cuz it was it was a pretty it wasn't a radical it wasn't I I was talking about iasa and I was talking about the view that I hold very strongly that as long as We Do no harm to others Sovereign adults should be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies and not face a jail sentence or or shaming as a result but 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 um and uh I I

gave this I gave this talk about the war on Consciousness and it was immediately pulled down from Ted's main channel uh 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 their Banning of it made it go viral uh 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 uh are simply

dismissed and shut down uh or at least attempts are made to to do so in general just along that line of thinking I'm pretty sure that what we understand about Consciousness today will seem silly uh to humans from 100 years from now you bet it will uh especially if we harness psychedelics to investigate Consciousness and and uh you know that is that is what is happening at uh at Imperial College right now is is the investigation of the experience they're not looking there are other trials that are looking for the therapeutic potential of DNT 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 gender in different parts of the world are all having the same experiences and for me from an engineer perspective it's interesting if it's possible to engineer Consciousness in artificial beings yeah it's it's it's another way to approach the question of how special is conscious human consciousness how from where does it arise uh is it 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 uh that that evolve 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 yeah but why not we're a vehicle for Consciousness in my view uh I think Consciousness is present in all life on Earth uh 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 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 um and and I think I think Consciousness is everywhere I think it's the basis of everything and 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 that's

a guess that'd be a fascinating because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the Consciousness and see if Consciousness enters if they become conscious is isn't 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's other things that could be special is uh is scary well look how other people make us uncomfortable too I mean look at the state of the world today uh all the conflicts

that are that that that are raging uh that's that's because we're afraid when I say we I'm speaking Nation by Nation the we 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 it's the root of many many conflicts this 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 here is a useful thing but it can also be destructive well it can be destructive and 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 that we'll find well I'd really like to know how the Great Pyramid was built uh and and we now have with new tech with with scanning technology it's now become apparent that there are many major voids within the Great Pyramid right above the grand G

there's what looks like a second Grand gallery that has been identified with remote scanning uh and and um new Chambers one of them has even been opened up uh already are being found as a result of this so so it may be that the SE that the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its Secrets I often think that the Great Pyramid is 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 uh 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 question 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 why 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 find them after about 160 ft blocked by

a door with metal handles why when we drill through that door to see what's beyond it 3 or 4 feet away we see another door uh it's like very frustrating but it's it's saying to us keep on exploring if you if you're persistent enough we'll eventually give you the answer so I'm hoping that that answer will come as to how this most mysterious of monuments was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it certainly I'm sure it was never a tomb or a tomb only uh the later pyramids might have been actually no fonic

burial has been discovered in any pyramid but but nevertheless it's pretty clear that the later pyramids with the pyramid texts written on the walls like the Pyramid of unas fifth Dynasty pyramid at Sakara uh were were tombs um but but uh the Great Pyramid to go to that length to create a tomb to make it a scale model of the Earth uh to orient it perfectly to True North to make it 6 million tons this is not a tomb uh this is something else this is a curiosity device this is something that is asking us

to understand it and I hope we will understand it and I hope I hope egyptologists will be willing to set aside that prejudice that they're only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities and as 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 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 uh

you know which is which is an idea in the hermetica uh the God Hermes for the Greeks was the Greek version of th 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 so you think there's something interesting to be discovered about the how it was built you mean beyond the sort of the the ideas of the using ramps and what yeah ramps won't do it ramps won't do it nor will wet

sand uh it's true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand uh there are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the Sledge pouring water down to to lubricate the sand underneath and and that's a perfectly respectable way to move a 200 ton block of stone uh 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 ft in the air uh 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 wet sand never got those objects up there somehow they were lifted up there now uh yeah ramps are proposed osed as the solution but but where are the remains of those ramps if you're going to carry uh 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° slope and it's calculated that a 10° slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp um and that ramp can't just be compacted sand since heavy objects are being hauled up it's going to have to be made of very solid material almost as solid as the pyramid itself where is it we don't see any any trace of those so-called Rams that are supposed to have 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 gray pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved yeah by later peoples I mean this is I don't know if you're aware of the uh 10,000 year clock that was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in uh Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas so they're building a clock that takes once a

year for 10,000 years oh wow so it's talking about and it's supposed to sort of run you know if there's a nuclear apocalypse it just runs and it's it's an example of modern humans thinking like okay if 10,000 years from now and Beyond yeah if something goes wrong or or the future humans they're way different come back and they they analyze what happened here how can we create monuments that they can then analyze yeah and in that way be curious about in in their curiosity discover some deep truths about this current time it's an interesting

kind of notion of like what can we build now that would last and the answer is that the majority of we build now wouldn't last wouldn't uh it would be it would be gone uh within a few thousand years um but what would last is massive megalithic structures uh like the Great Pyramid that would that would last uh and and it could be it could be used to send a message to the Future uh I think gockley Tey serves a similar function I mean there it was it was buried uh 10,400 years ago and then

for the next 10,000 years nobody touched it nobody knew it was there it it it took the genius of CLA SMI the original excavator to realize what he'd found and what it and what it was but the great thing about the sealing of gockley tee the deliberate burial of gockley 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 result of us humans 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're connected in one way or another to the notion of death uh and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife and and 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 uh every one of us all 8 billion or 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 the soul but 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 there's such a thing as a soul or not yeah it's the great mystery it's a great mystery that we all share and those cultures that have investigated it and ancient EG ancient Egypt is the best example uh 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 uh that notion is found right around the

world and it and it even manifests into the three monotheistic face that are still present in the world today well you're one such human uh and you said you contemplate your own death yeah are you afraid of it no I'm not afraid of death at all uh I'm curious about death I think it could be very interesting uh I think it's the beginning of the next great adventure um so I don't fear it and and um I would like to live as as long as I'm my my body is is is healthy enough to make

living worthwhile um but I don't fear death what I do fear is pain uh 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 but 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 uh that there's something Beyond this life uh 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 uh who who found that children up to the age of seven often have memories of past lives and 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 those those details so if if cons ious 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 all the investment that the Universe has put into creating this home for Life uh may

have a much bigger purpose than 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 PR pretend otherwise we're deluding ourselves and 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 to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and 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 thank you for listening and hope to see you next time