EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,002 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- GHGraham Hancock
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) Hello, Graham Hancock.
- GHGraham Hancock
Hello, Joe Rogan.
- JRJoe Rogan
Good to see you, my friend.
- GHGraham Hancock
Good to be back with you.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hey, congratulations on the success of your show. It's been, uh, it's very awesome to see, and it's been, uh, really awesome to hear from so many people about it that know that I'm really fascinated by the subject. And the reviews have all been super positive from my friends, so I'm real excited about it.
- GHGraham Hancock
Well, thank you for appearing on, on Ancient Apocalypse as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
My pleasure, my pleasure.
- GHGraham Hancock
Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a, a subject to me that is so unbelievably fascinating and so bizarre that it's controversial.
- GHGraham Hancock
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I do not understand. I mean, we, we were just talking about this, and I said, "Let's stop talking when we're about, when we're getting coffee."
- GHGraham Hancock
(laughs) Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, to me, it seems like there's things that are concrete, right? We know when Genghis Khan lived.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
We know when they built the Sistine Chapel. We know, we know a lot about the Parthenon, the Acropolis. We know about 2,000 years ago. We know... When you start going way, way, way, way, way back, things get real sketchy. And to not admit that-
- GHGraham Hancock
Hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... seems so crazy. When they find things when they're making apartment buildings sometimes-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... they're digging into the ground, they go, "Oh, hold on a second, what is this? D- doesn't it happen in Mexico City all the time?"
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, it does.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
And, and, and actually, that's how a lot of archaeology happens. Um, somebody's building a road or building a, uh, apartment buildings or building a dam, and they call in archaeologists to see if there's anything, any interesting archaeology there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
And this is, this is part of the problem I have with, with archaeology as a discipline. It likes to think of itself as scientific, but what I think it's primarily doing, and it is weird, is trying to control the narrative about the past.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates?
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a complicated (coughs) it's a complicated mixture, uh, of, of things. Fir- first of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo. You know, anything, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with, and then it c- takes the next step and, and, and really seeks to attack out-on-the-edge, uh, ideas. Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out-on-the-edge idea. Uh, we've had lost civilizations before. The Indus Valley civilization, uh, in, in, today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s. It was found by accident, and, you know, every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal new information. But, uh, their, their, their... The reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995. But with Ancient Apocalypse, much bigger platform, reaching a much wider audience, the, the reaction was just hysterical, and it went on for a very long time. And it appeared to be, it appeared to me... I don't think it's a conspiracy. I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy. I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying and they genuinely think I'm harmful. But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
How did they come up with that? How is it harmful to be speculating about ancient structures? It's interesting.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah. That's-
- 15:00 – 30:00
Hmm. …
- GHGraham Hancock
cause huge fires, and huge... And that's, uh, why you get enormous amounts of, of charcoal-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... uh, as a result. And then the larger objects, it's thought, hit the North American ice cap and caused a very large amount of meltwater to flow into the world ocean, and that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the, of, of the Younger Dryas. We can argue there, there are alternative theories. Maybe solar activity was involved. Robert Schoch prefers a change in solar activity and, and, you know, kudos to Robert. He's a, he's a brilliant scientist and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx. Any scientist these days in the field of (laughs) archeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archeological narrative is wrong immediately gets massively attacked, and I think that's- (clears throat) I think that's most unfortunate. A couple of points I'd like to make about this. First of all, we said at the beginning, most archeology, certainly in the industrialized countries, is a result of a dam or a road being built and archeologists being called in to see if there's anything there. It's not a targeted search. It's kind of random. Something's happening and archeologists go in there. Um, and then there's huge areas of the world that have had very little archeology done in them. Uh, those include the Amazon rainforest where I've just been. Uh, I've been three weeks in the Brazilian Amazon, another couple of weeks in, in, in Peru, and there are extraordinary revelations coming out of the Amazon rainforest. Now, the Amazon rainforest, up until very recently, had very little archeology done. You're talking about 6,000,000 square kilometers of the Earth's surface which has hardly been touched by archeology, and now it is being touched by archeology thanks to lidar, which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy. We're finding that we have to rewrite the whole story of the Amazon, that there were potentially populations of millions living in the Amazon, that there were cities that were joned- joined by roads hundreds of kilometers in length. All of these things are, are recent discoveries which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon. Same goes for the submerged continental shelves. 27,000,000 square kilometers of the best real estate on Earth that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now. Yes, there's been some marine archeology, but not enough, uh, to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
And the same with the Sahara Desert. 9,000,000 square kilometers, a little bit of archeology done but before archeologists say, "There, there was no lost civiliz-" This is what the Society for American Archeology said in their open letter to Netflix, uh, complaining about my show. Uh, they said, "We know that there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age." And my question to them is, how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the Earth? The picture is not complete. They should be saying, "We don't think there was a lost civilization during the Ice Age." Fine. But to say, "We know there wasn't"? That's, that's completely wrong.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's silly and it's also...... it becomes more and more of a problem the more things get discovered, and the more they push back harder-
- GHGraham Hancock
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and more emotionally, and more religiously.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's re- really kind of crazy the way they behave, that is, is if they have, like, an accurate map.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, the way they viewed some of the older hieroglyphs that depict civilizations that were 30,000 years ago-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... like kings and, and the lineage.
- GHGraham Hancock
The king lists from-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
... ancient Egypt go back 30, 30-plus thousand years.
- JRJoe Rogan
But they wanna pretend that those are myth.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, and yet, for their chronology of ancient Egypt, they actually use the king lists. The moment those king lists start giving dates that fall within dates that archaeologists like, every-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- GHGraham Hancock
... everything before those dates, they say, "Oh, they just made it up."
- JRJoe Rogan
How crazy is that? W- wouldn't it be a fascinating alternative if you were an archaeologist, to go, "You know what? Maybe this kings list is legit."
- GHGraham Hancock
Hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
"Maybe this thing really is 30, 40,000 years old."
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"And maybe that explains a lot, and now we have to figure out how."
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"How'd they do it?"
- GHGraham Hancock
It would be a fascinating alternative.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Oh. …
- GHGraham Hancock
they exist in far greater numbers than they should do if they'd developed naturally. Humans manipulated the Amazon and made it serve human needs thousands and thousands of years ago. And then we have these enormous structures that are appearing in the Amazon, which are being referred to as geoglyphs. They call them geoglyphs after the Nazca Lines, actually. The Nazca Lines in Peru are, are huge ground images, sometimes geometrical in form, sometimes showing animals or birds or spiders, other creatures, often actually showing Amazonian an- animals. But in the Brazilian Amazon, in the State of Acre, uh, as a result of clearances of the Amazon that have been done for farming purposes, there's this rush to just cut the Amazon down and replace it with cattle ranches and soybean farms. Those clearances have revealed something that, again, according to the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't be there, which is gigantic earthworks, huge ones, a bit like the henges in, in Europe. Uh, enormous embankments, ditches, and in geometrical forms, so you get enormous squares, enormous circles. You get a circle within a square. Uh, they keep repeating these, these geometrical images, and they're thousands of years old. Uh, when, when we were down there just, just recently, we had a local LiDAR guy working with us. These days, you could, you don't have to even use an airplane to find things with LiDAR. You can fly LiDAR off a drone.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- GHGraham Hancock
And flying his drone within a mile of known structures that are outside the rainforest now, he found two more huge geoglyphs under the rainforest canopy, which will be, which will be investigated. And this is, uh, bizarre and, and puzzling. They reckon, the team working on this, that's Martti Parasinen of the University of Helsinki and Alceu Ranzi, who's a Brazilian archeologist and geologist, um, they reckon that there's thousands of these things still under the rainforest canopy, and there's a huge untold story. So one of the places I would look for a lost civilization is the Amazon rainforest.
- JRJoe Rogan
How do they know that the terra preta replenishes itself? How does it do that?
- GHGraham Hancock
It's something to do with microbes and bacteria that are in, that are in the soil, and they, they keep on regenerating. They don't get used up. It's a kind of, it's a kind of miracle. It's not fully understood. Nob- nobody can say they fully understand terra preta. But what is fully understood, and it's understood by settlers, is that if they plant on terra preta, they're gonna get rich crops coming out of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there a way to reproduce that in America?
- GHGraham Hancock
Attempts have been made to reproduce it, and biochar is one of the words that comes, that comes to mind. Um, there's even indications that some of the modern indigenous peoples of the Amazon, uh, are still creating terra preta. This is a whole mystery that needs to be investigated much further. We're looking at the oldest examples are more than 8,000 years old, and that's just in the areas that have been surveyed. Very likely, terra preta goes back much, much, much earlier than that.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause it's such an issue with modern farmlands, where they have to use these, uh, m- modern fertilizers.
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm.
- JRJoe Rogan
They have to use-
- GHGraham Hancock
Which is, which are not helpful in many ways.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they run off.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, the topsoil's worn out.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And so if they could figure out a way to reproduce terra preta.
- GHGraham Hancock
This would be, uh, uh, one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- GHGraham Hancock
We could, we could learn a lot from them about living in harmony with the environment and, uh, about clever things, uh, like terra preta, clever things like curare, you know, which is another Amazonian invention, which is the basis of modern anesthesiology. How did they do that? There's 11 (laughs) in- 11 ingredients in curare, uh, and those ingredients are not active on their own. You have to cook them all together to get this poison, uh, whi- which is a muscle relaxant. Why a muscle relaxant? Because if you're going to shoot a monkey 200 feet up a tree with your arrow, you don't want it coiling its tail around the tree when it dies. You want it to drop to the, drop to the ground.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- GHGraham Hancock
Ayahuasca is another Amazonian invention, and again, it consists of several ingredients, two in, two in particular, neither of which are active on their own, but which only work when cooked together. So, uh, what I see in the Amazon is traces of a lost science, a scientific, uh, a scientific mindset.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Now-
- GHGraham Hancock
Can I show, can I show some pictures of these geoglyphs?
- JRJoe Rogan
Please, please.
- GHGraham Hancock
W- we have to hook up the magical-
- JRJoe Rogan
HDMI?
- GHGraham Hancock
... HDMI. Um, and, uh, I'll just show, I'll just show a few slides of them. Um, I forget which side the HDMI is in. I think it's in that side.
- JRJoe Rogan
Careful with the water.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Got it?
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
12,000 plus. …
- JRJoe Rogan
how old?
- GHGraham Hancock
12,000 plus.
- JRJoe Rogan
12,000 plus?
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah. Yeah, 12,000 plus years old.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's interesting because if you see the paintings that they found in that cave in France.
- GHGraham Hancock
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Those are 30 plus thousand years old, right?
- GHGraham Hancock
Oh yeah, there's paint- there's paintings in, in France if you go to Chauvet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
Uh, you're looking 36,000 years old.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can you go to those, Jamie?
- GHGraham Hancock
Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's that amazing Werner Herzog documentary.
- GHGraham Hancock
They often have, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
I think it's, was The Cave of Dreams? It w-
- GHGraham Hancock
Cave of Dreams, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah. They, they, they often have-
- JRJoe Rogan
Look at that.
- GHGraham Hancock
Uh, we're looking at Lascaux... Hang on, on the, yeah, we're looking at Lascaux there. The, the bull painting there is interesting.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, they were better artists.
- GHGraham Hancock
They were.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) They were.
- GHGraham Hancock
I have to confess there-
- JRJoe Rogan
They were quite a bit better.
- GHGraham Hancock
... th- this artis- this art is very good. If you go, Jamie, if you go to the NPR, the, the painting of a bull one, one step left from where you are, that one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- GHGraham Hancock
Um, this is, this is very interesting. Um, there has been an argument made by, uh, a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus, and that, uh, in itself is heresy because archeologists who want to give everything to the Greeks say that it was the Greeks who invented the constellations of the zodiac.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- GHGraham Hancock
Um, and, um, not showing any-
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
There's a little cough…
- GHGraham Hancock
, excuse me, frog in my throat.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a little cough button if you want to hit that.
- GHGraham Hancock
Oh.
- JRJoe Rogan
If you ever wanna hit it.
- GHGraham Hancock
Do I have a cough button?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, you got a little red button there.
- GHGraham Hancock
Is that this red button here?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, if you feel it coming on, just-
- GHGraham Hancock
Okay. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... press it a little stronger.
- GHGraham Hancock
Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll do that. Where were we, Joe?
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, the Sphinx's face-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... much younger.
- GHGraham Hancock
The first, the first problem is, the, the ancient Egyptians were masters of proportion. The, the, the ancient Egyptian art is rightly world-famous for its, for its quality, and they didn't get things out of proportion. Uh, they, they wouldn't make that elementary error when they create this giant statue, carving it out of solid bedrock, but the head of the Sphinx is way too small-... in relation to the body. It just, it looks like, like the head of a pin. It doesn't, it doesn't fit with that 270-foot long, 70-foot high body. Uh, it looks very much as though the Sphinx once had a much larger head.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can you m- show us a photo of it, Jamie?
- GHGraham Hancock
(clears throat)
- JRJoe Rogan
It's also much less weathered, right?
- GHGraham Hancock
And it's much less weathered and, and this is, again, where Egyptology tries to attach the Sphinx to a particular period. Egyptology claims that's the face of Khafre, who was the successor to Khufu. Uh, it doesn't look like any statues, known statues of Khafre that I can see, but let's not, let's, let's, let's not worry about that. Uh, it, it, it wears, um, uh, the, the headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left, or, or the Quora picture, uh, that, that, that headdress, uh, is called the Nemes headdress. It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. Uh, not, in my view, Khafre, uh, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body. And bo- and both, uh, Schoch and I and John Anthony West, Manou Seifzadeh, who's another excellent researcher in this field, we all feel that the Sphinx was almost certainly a complete lion at one point. It was a lion with a huge mane, uh, and that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded. And by the time the ancient Egyptians inherited it, they decided to improve it a little bit, to cut down that heavily eroded head and put the head of a pharaoh on it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Does it have the same sort of sophisticated proportions where they're perfect left and right as some of the other statues do? Which is another incredible mystery.
- GHGraham Hancock
It d-
- JRJoe Rogan
That when they look at the measurements of these immense statues, somehow or another, they're completely symmetrical on both left and right side.
- GHGraham Hancock
Com- completely symmetrical. Um, I'm, I'm actually not sure whether that's the case with the Sphinx. Uh, but I wouldn't be surprised because I have no doubt whatsoever that the head of the Great Sphinx was carved by the ancient Egyptians who made those, who made those statues, but the question is, what was it carved from? What was it cut down from?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- GHGraham Hancock
Uh, so the geology, the, the precipitation-induced weathering is one of the evidence, pieces of evidence for a much older Sphinx. But the other thing is the astronomy. The, the fact that the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker. You know, if you stand looking due east at Giza or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, uh, on the spring equinox, uh, there's three key moments of the year, four actually. There's the winter and summer solstice, and there's the equinoxes, the spring and fall equinoxes. On the summer solstice, the sun rises far to the north of east. On the winter solstice, it rises far to the south of east. But on the equinoxes, it aligns perfectly due east, and that's what the Sphinx is. It's aligned perfectly to due east, and it's gazing at the horizon. And then we come to this contentious issue of who discovered the Zodiacal constellations. Because the Sphinx, 12,500 years ago, was gazing at dawn on the spring equinox at the constellation of Leo. In other words, this lion-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- GHGraham Hancock
... monument on the ground was looking at its own celestial counterpart in the sky. Egyptologists dismiss that. They say the, that nobody had any idea of the constellations until the Greeks. I just think they're, I think they're wrong. So astronomy and geology together combine to invite us to consider the possibility that the Sphinx may be much older than 4,500 years old.
- JRJoe Rogan
And didn't the, the Greeks learn from the Egyptians as well?
- GHGraham Hancock
Not only did they learn, but they said they learned.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, so-
- 1:15:00 – 1:18:04
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And,…
- JRJoe Rogan
depicts the sun.
- GHGraham Hancock
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and it's also depicted as a star as well as the sun.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
The circular disc of the sun, and, and the sun is a star. So there's-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's such a strange image.
- GHGraham Hancock
... a suggestion is much greater knowledge of the universe than is supposed to have existed at that time. And this is Sumer. Sumer is the supposedly the, the first civilization, the oldest civilization on Earth.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- GHGraham Hancock
Goes back about 6,000 years. Um, but then what about the prequels to Sumer? And let's take Gobeklitepe into account because it's so close to Sumer.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
And by the way, just within a few hundred kilometers of Gobe- Gobeklitepe is Abu Hureyra, where there is compelling evidence of a massive a- airburst 12,800 years ago and a complete wipe out of the local population. I don't think it's an accident that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ooh.
- GHGraham Hancock
... Gobeklitepe is where it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there, um, images of this, uh, explosion in the sky?
- GHGraham Hancock
There's an artist's impression of the ex- ex- explosion in the sky.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, but do they have e- e- evidence-
- GHGraham Hancock
Ancient images.
- JRJoe Rogan
... on the ground like you can see-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... with Tunguska-
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... where it's all flattened?
- GHGraham Hancock
Yes. Ancient... Th- the massive amount of evidence on the ground, uh, particularly what, what is called shocked quartz, where the quartz has been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade. This is not caused by village fires. This is, this is the characteristic fingerprint of a cosmic impact.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- GHGraham Hancock
Platinum, iridium, carbon microspherules. All of these impact proxies are found in abundance at Abu Hureyra, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there a cleared area that's similar to what looks like in Tunguska where it doesn't-
- GHGraham Hancock
The problem with Abu Hureyra is that it's now underwater.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- GHGraham Hancock
The Aswan High Dam flooded it. But before it was submerged, an enormous amount of material was taken from it, and it's that soil that was taken from Hab- Abu Hureyra to preserve it which is producing the evidence of a Younger Dryas impact there 12,800 years ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. So when was this dam? When did this take place?
- GHGraham Hancock
'60s, something like that.
Episode duration: 3:14:25
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