Joe Rogan Experience #2051 - Graham Hancock

Narrator 0:00 (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Graham Hancock 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) Hello, Graham Hancock.

Graham Hancock 0:13 Hello, Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan 0:14 Good to see you, my friend.

Graham Hancock 0:15 Good to be back with you.

Joe Rogan 0:16 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.

Graham Hancock 0:30 Well, thank you for appearing on, on Ancient Apocalypse as well.

Joe Rogan 0:33 My pleasure, my pleasure.

Graham Hancock 0:34 Uh-

Joe Rogan 0:34 It's a, a subject to me that is so unbelievably fascinating and so bizarre that it's controversial.

Graham Hancock 0:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:41 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."

Graham Hancock 0:47 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:48 It's, to me, it seems like there's things that are concrete, right? We know when Genghis Khan lived.

Graham Hancock 0:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:55 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-

Graham Hancock 1:10 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10 ... seems so crazy. When they find things when they're making apartment buildings sometimes-

Graham Hancock 1:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16 ... 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?"

Graham Hancock 1:20 Yeah, it does.

Joe Rogan 1:21 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:21 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.

Joe Rogan 1:37 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:37 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.

Joe Rogan 1:54 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?

Graham Hancock 2:07 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)

Joe Rogan 3:35 How did they come up with that? How is it harmful to be speculating about ancient structures? It's interesting.

Graham Hancock 3:44 Yeah. That's-

Joe Rogan 3:45 And it's-

Graham Hancock 3:45 ... that's, that's what I don't get.

Joe Rogan 3:47 The, the other thing is the racist angle. Like, we're talking about the exact same people.

Graham Hancock 3:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:52 We're just talking about an older time. It does-

Graham Hancock 3:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:54 ... it doesn't make any sense at all.

Graham Hancock 3:56 No.

Joe Rogan 3:56 In fact, it, it kinda points to the superiority of the Egyptian race.

Graham Hancock 4:01 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 4:01 I mean, eh, whatever they did, however they did it-

Graham Hancock 4:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:05 ... is unbelievably extraordinary.

Graham Hancock 4:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:08 And I'd... I think pointing that out is amazing.

Graham Hancock 4:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:12 I mean, what, what you're discovering and what you're showing on that show is that there are a lot of mysteries when it comes to the history of human beings, and we should embrace those mysteries-

Graham Hancock 4:23 Definitely.

Joe Rogan 4:23 ... because there's concrete, irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of, like, Gobekli Tepe-

Graham Hancock 4:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:29 ... and some of the other structures. I mean, this is wild stuff.

Graham Hancock 4:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:33 The idea that human beings had an advanced civilization 10,000, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago. What happened?

Graham Hancock 4:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 4:41 That's the, that's what's really interesting.

Graham Hancock 4:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:43 Like, what happened?

Graham Hancock 4:44 And that's why it's Ancient Apocalypse, because-

Joe Rogan 4:46 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 4:47 ... because we know that there was a global cataclysm. Uh, a slow one, 1,200 years long, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago called the Younger Dryas. There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not, is not really, uh, not really disputed. The, the accusations that were put against me and the show of being... The accusations included the words racis- racist, white supremacist, uh, misogynist, and antisemitic.

Joe Rogan 5:19 They give you the full hand.

Graham Hancock 5:20 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 5:21 They didn't even do one card off.

Graham Hancock 5:22 The show doesn't, doesn't touch on any of these issues. Race is not, race is not mentioned in the show. So what the archaeologists were doing there, they were going back to Fingerprints of the Gods that I wrote in 1995, in which I reported indigenous traditions about the appearance of bearded foreigners bringing knowledge after a cataclysm to the shattered survivors of that cataclysm. And in some cases, in those traditions, those, uh, knowledge-bringers are described as white-skinned. And that is, uh, that is why the show was accused of racis- r- racism, because archaeology has since taken the view that all of those stories were made up by the Spanish. And that seems to me completely ridiculous. Uh, both in-... Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia we have traditions. We have them, uh, Viracocha, we have Quetzalcoatl, we have Bochica. This is a Pan-American myth, and actually it's, I think it's racist, racist of archeology, uh, to imagine that the magic powers of the Spaniards could impose a myth upon indigenous peoples-

Joe Rogan 6:25 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 6:26 ... all over the Americas, that they'd just be so stupid that they would fall for this story told by the Spaniards. Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions, and I was reporting them, uh, in, in that book, and I stand by them. And it turns out that there's actually a huge argument within academia about this, and my critics were just giving one, one side of that argument.

Joe Rogan 6:45 And what is the rest of the argument? What is the other side of it?

Graham Hancock 6:49 Well, the other side of the argument, that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards-

Joe Rogan 6:53 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 6:53 ... made up these stories. These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru. They were reported to them by indigenous peoples as indigenous myths, and the fact that they're right spread across the Americas, uh, makes it very unlikely (laughs) . I mean, if it was one story, but if it's a dozen stories and they're told over a huge geographical region, the notion that this is a, a Spanish conspiracy, it's an ultimate conspiracy theory.

Joe Rogan 7:19 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 7:19 Uh, I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who, who reported them, um, but, uh, it gave a very useful handle for people to, uh, a- attack this, this series on.

Joe Rogan 7:33 So, the theory is that it was an uneven destruction, right? And that some places fared better than other places in terms of the Younger Dryas impact theory, right?

Graham Hancock 7:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:45 And that those people might have, uh, reclaimed a modicum of civilization.

Graham Hancock 7:51 Yeah. That's, that's, that's the idea. And by the way, on that point, uh, I have never in anything that I've written, uh, or anything that I've broadcast, uh, ever s- ever myself suggested, uh, that, uh, white races were involved. Actually, it would be quite stupid to do so, 'cause if you look at Europe during the Ice Age, and I'm talking about a lost civilization of the Ice Age, Northern Europe and North America were absolutely inhospitable wildernesses during the Ice Age. They were frozen, they were dry, and they were dangerous, and they were not the places that people would go. People naturally gravitated south towards the equator, towards the tropics. That's where I would expect to find traces of a lost civilization, and that's where I do find traces-

Joe Rogan 8:34 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 8:34 ... of a lost civiliza- You don't really find... I've, I've never reported anything about the UK, for example, in my books. We have Stonehenge, we have Avebury, we have these stone circles, but they're not old enough. That was the time when the UK started (laughs) to get warmer, and it's the same with the rest of Northern Europe, and it's the same with the northern part of North America. You have to go down to s- the southern part of North America, you have to go into Mexico, you have to go into the, into South America to really find an environment during the Ice Age that would have nurtured a high civilization.

Joe Rogan 9:02 And there's a lot of speculation as to why they weren't able to cross the Bering Landmass too, right?

Graham Hancock 9:08 Well, the, the... Again, (laughs) , this is an area where there has been a narrative that archeology has sought to impose upon us, and this was, this was called the Clovis First idea-

Joe Rogan 9:18 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 9:18 ... that there was a people who archeologists called the Clovis people, we don't know what they called themselves, uh, in North America. And traces of their characteristic, uh, tools, particular sort of fluted points, arrowhead spear points, turn up from about 13,400 years ago, and end abruptly 12,800 years ago. And for a long time, with the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and for a long time, archeology maintained that this Clovis culture, so-called Clovis culture, we don't know what they called themselves, were the first Americans, and that there were no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago. And bit by bit, the new evidence has come in which has forced archeologists screaming and tearing out their hair to back away from the Clovis first paradigm and admit that actually, yes, there were people here before that. But even then, they're reluctant to go very far back. We've recently had these, uh, these footprints in, in White Sands in, in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so. That's largely being accepted now, but there are much earlier dates. There's 130,000 years ago from the Cerruti mastodon site near San Diego.

Joe Rogan 10:24 That's the one that's being disputed because they say it could have been rocks that crushed the bones-

Graham Hancock 10:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:28 ... and made them that way.

Graham Hancock 10:29 Yeah. What I, what I see again is a, is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by massives of evidence, and published in Nature, you know, Nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts, um, and, and then the critics look for any way to get rid of it.

Joe Rogan 10:47 Can I stop you here? Are you aware of the boneyard in Alaska?

Graham Hancock 10:50 I've heard of it, and it sounds fascinating.

Joe Rogan 10:52 Oh, my God.

Graham Hancock 10:52 I don't think he's r- uh, revealed much about that to the public yet.

Joe Rogan 10:55 Well, w- it's an amazing, amazing discovery. This guy's a gold miner-

Graham Hancock 10:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:59 ... and he has this large piece of land in Alaska. They're mining for gold and they start finding, like, tusks and bones.

Graham Hancock 11:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 11:05 And in one area that's only a few acres, they found thousands and thousands of woolly mammoth bones-

Graham Hancock 11:12 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:13 ... and tusks and, uh, l- and, um, a saber-toothed tiger. Was it saber-toothed tiger, or no? Uh, uh, uh, was short-faced bear.

Graham Hancock 11:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:20 They found all these like, r-

Graham Hancock 11:22 All the megafauna of the Ice Age.

Joe Rogan 11:23 Many animals that weren't even supposed to exist in Alaska.

Graham Hancock 11:27 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:28 And he's like, "Look, we have the bones of it."

Graham Hancock 11:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:30 And one of the things they found recently was bones that were sawed, clearly sawed.

Graham Hancock 11:36 Human workmanship.

Joe Rogan 11:37 But, like, a sophisticated tool.

Graham Hancock 11:39 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:39 Let me see, see, see if you can pull it up so you can see how it looked.

Graham Hancock 11:42 ... clearly cut, clearly so, yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:43 Isn't that amazing?

Graham Hancock 11:44 Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 11:46 So they're trying to find out what the dates on these are. I don't-

Graham Hancock 11:49 That's, that was my next question. Have they da- have they dated it?

Joe Rogan 11:51 They just got these recently. This is fairly recent, so I, I believe... He's had some issues with, uh, universities, uh, not giving back his stuff and-

Graham Hancock 12:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:01 ... selling off his stuff.

Graham Hancock 12:03 Oh, dear.

Joe Rogan 12:03 Yeah. Well, he recently started a, a bone rush in the East River.

Graham Hancock 12:08 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:09 They... Because it turns out that during the, like, the... Was it, like, the 1920s or 1930s? Stuff that they had taken from his land before he owned it-

Graham Hancock 12:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:17 ... they had dumped some of it 'cause they had so much of it. They'd dumped it in the East River and, you know, they were balking at it but meanwhile these people have found it there.

Graham Hancock 12:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:25 So here it goes. I think many of you are intrigued by these Ice Age bones found in the Boneyard Alaska. "If you zoom in, you'll see that it's been sanded or somehow been worked down to a smooth finish on the end. I'm going to carbon date one of them and will post the results when I do." So this was pre- three weeks ago, so it's probably gonna take-

Graham Hancock 12:40 Oh, w-

Joe Rogan 12:40 ... a little longer. But look how smooth it is on that one bottom.

Graham Hancock 12:43 Well, it's per- perfectly cut. And we'll, we'll look forward to-

Joe Rogan 12:45 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 12:45 ... to seeing the dating results, but the fact that we're dealing with megafauna-

Joe Rogan 12:48 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 12:49 ... uh, that went extinct between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, uh, implies very strongly that it's at least that old.

Joe Rogan 12:56 Not only that, this area has a very thick layer of carbon-

Graham Hancock 13:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 13:01 ... that seems to indicate some sort of a mass burn or some sort of a horrible disaster.

Graham Hancock 13:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:06 So they're, they're going through these layers of things and they're finding an unbelievable amount of animal that died in this area.

Graham Hancock 13:13 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 13:13 Just a mass die-out.

Graham Hancock 13:15 Yes. And, and what would cause a mass die-out? Not human hunting.

Joe Rogan 13:19 Right.

Graham Hancock 13:19 This is... I'm, I'm strongly opposed to what they call the overkill hypothesis. This is one of the alternative explanations for why the megafauna went extinct at that time.

Joe Rogan 13:28 Right.

Graham Hancock 13:28 Is that hunter-gatherers literally wiped out all the megafauna. And to me, that, for a couple of reasons, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense, first of all, because hunter-gatherers we know in the world today do not wipe out their prey animals. They live in coexistence with them, they live in balance with them. They don't just destroy them all. It's our kinda culture that destroys animals completely.

Joe Rogan 13:50 Right, like what we did with the bison and-

Graham Hancock 13:51 What we did with the bison.

Joe Rogan 13:52 ... yeah.

Graham Hancock 13:53 Um, and, and therefore it seems very un-hunter-gatherer-like activity to completely destroy, uh, the, the, the megafauna. And the other thing is the simultaneous extinction of large numbers of creatures, that it's happening very, very, very quickly, suggests to me that we're looking at a disaster of some sort.

Joe Rogan 14:10 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 14:10 And that's why the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which is solid science although undoubtedly disputed, which suggests that multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet, uh, hit the Earth 12,800 years ago. Many of them didn't hit the Earth. Many of them exploded in the sky. They were not that big, maybe 100 meters in, in diameter, so they were air bursts but they leave these characteristic signatures in the ground and that-

Joe Rogan 14:34 Like Tunguska.

Graham Hancock 14:35 L- exactly like Tunguska. The, the, the Tunguska event is a recent example of that, 30th of June 1908, happens to be at the peak of the Beta Taurids and the Taurid meteor stream is identified as the likely culprit for what happened in the, in the Younger Dryas. Um, wildfires burning, you get these impacts smashing into, smashing into the Earth, bursting in the air over forests. They cause huge fires, and huge... And that's, uh, why you get enormous amounts of, of charcoal-

Joe Rogan 15:04 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 15:04 ... 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

Graham Hancock 15:35 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.

Joe Rogan 17:12 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 17:12 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.

Joe Rogan 17:47 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-

Graham Hancock 17:55 That's right.

Joe Rogan 17:55 ... and more emotionally, and more religiously.

Graham Hancock 17:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:57 It's re- really kind of crazy the way they behave, that is, is if they have, like, an accurate map.

Graham Hancock 18:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:03 Like, the way they viewed some of the older hieroglyphs that depict civilizations that were 30,000 years ago-

Graham Hancock 18:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:10 ... like kings and, and the lineage.

Graham Hancock 18:11 The king lists from-

Joe Rogan 18:12 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 18:12 ... ancient Egypt go back 30, 30-plus thousand years.

Joe Rogan 18:14 But they wanna pretend that those are myth.

Graham Hancock 18:16 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-

Joe Rogan 18:28 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 18:28 ... everything before those dates, they say, "Oh, they just made it up."

Joe Rogan 18:31 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."

Graham Hancock 18:40 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 18:40 "Maybe this thing really is 30, 40,000 years old."

Graham Hancock 18:44 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:44 "And maybe that explains a lot, and now we have to figure out how."

Graham Hancock 18:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:47 "How'd they do it?"

Graham Hancock 18:48 It would be a fascinating alternative.

Joe Rogan 18:50 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 18:50 But, but unfortunately, it's not the way that archaeology works at the moment. I repeat, I ... a lot of archaeologists have accused me of accusing them of a conspiracy against me, and trying to suppress my-

Joe Rogan 19:02 Well, they're just trying to make you look very kook.

Graham Hancock 19:04 Yeah. I don't see any conspiracy. I see people who do believe what they're saying, and, uh, who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present, that I must be neutralized in, in any way possible. And that's a sad state of affairs. Science should embrace and explore new and different ideas, uh, and particularly when it comes to the human past. Uh, there ... Y- look, I mean, if (laughs) if I get in an airplane, I, I do want the pilot to be a properly qualified pilot. I want him to have undergone all the training, and to be really good at what he does. But flying an airplane and studying the human past are two different things, and archaeologists often compare themselves to airline pilots. They say, "You wouldn't get in an airplane without a properly trained pilot, so why are you studying the past without a properly trained archaeologist?" And what I say is, "You've got blinkers on. You're very ... you, you've got a very narrow perspective on what the past could be, and you're defending and protecting that perspective, and imposing a narrative about the past on the public." And that's where we get into a kind of religious aspect of this, that they become the high priests of the past.

Joe Rogan 20:13 Well, like Zahi Hawass is an excellent example-

Graham Hancock 20:16 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:16 ... in Egypt.

Graham Hancock 20:17 Zahi is an excellent example. Um-

Joe Rogan 20:19 It's just, he does not want to even entertain the notion that there's-

Graham Hancock 20:23 No.

Joe Rogan 20:24 ... some sort of a gap in the knowledge of history.

Graham Hancock 20:27 If you, (laughs) if you just say the word Atlantis to Zahi Hawass, he goes berserk.

Joe Rogan 20:32 Ah. (laughs)

Graham Hancock 20:32 He absolutely goes nuts, um, and that's irrational, too, um, since we know that the Atlantis story comes from Plato. We know that Plato said the source of that story was in ancient Egypt, uh, in the Temple of Neith at Sais in the Delta, and Ancestor Solon visited that temple and was told the story, which he put into the word. Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word. That's one of the problems, but he called it Atlantis.

Joe Rogan 20:59 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 20:59 But, uh, at Edfu in Upper Egypt, there's, there's a whole story of a homeland of the primeval ones that was destroyed in a great cataclysm and flooded by the sea, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world seeking to restart civilization. It's told very clearly in the Edfu Building Texts, which fortunately have now been completely translated, sadly only into German. I hope we'll see the full English translation, uh, in due course. But the translations I was working from when I first studied them are very good, and they've been reinforced and supported by this new fuller translation.

Joe Rogan 21:34 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 21:35 So, I think the Atlantis story does have an ancient Egyptian origin, and I think the ancient Egyptians, e- Egyptians should be proud of it rather than throwing it away. And also, archaeologists should not seek to isolate the story of Atlantis from other flood myths and traditions all around the world. That, and that's a problem, too. I mean, we have hundreds of myths and traditions from countries all around the globe which speak of a great global cataclysm, a huge flood, often wildfires, uh, destruction of human beings and, and, and of animals, a few survivors who seek to restart civil... It's a global story, not a, not a single story told by Plato.

Joe Rogan 22:14 And, I mean, if you hear the same story from so many different cultures, at what point in time do you go, "Maybe there's something to this."

Graham Hancock 22:23 I-

Joe Rogan 22:23 I mean, it's just very strange to try to deny that.

Graham Hancock 22:26 Again, we have this-

Joe Rogan 22:27 Especially with the physical evidence.

Graham Hancock 22:28 Yeah, especially with the physical evidence, and, and it's interesting with the physical evidence, like, (clears throat) like Gobekli Tepe, which is 11,600 years old. I mean, it used to be argued, Robert Schoch and John Anthony West's work on the Great Sphinx suggesting that the Sphinx could be 12,000-plus years old, it used to be argued that was impossible because there was no other site anywhere in the world, no other megalithic site of the same age. And then we discovered Gobekli Tepe, and it's 11,600 years old. Now, if you can make, uh, Gobekli Tepe, with its 20-ton megaliths, beautifully carved representations of human and animal figures in those, in those pillars, if you can do that, you can cut the Great Sphinx out of bedrock as well. There's no reason th- to dismiss the geological evidence of the Great Sphinx anymore. But instead, what archaeology is doing is trying to finesse Gobekli Tepe. They're trying to say, "Oh, there was this gradual build-up to Gobekli Tepe." And they now talk about a people who they call the Natufians. Again, we don't know what they called themselves, uh, who were predecessors of Gobekli Tepe, around 14,000 years ago. Uh, and they show things that look like a tiny little stone wall that they built, the sort of thing that you can find, a dry stone wall that you can find anywhere in Wales to this day, you know? Uh, and this is supposed to be a prequel to Gobekli Tepe. You j- I'm sorry, you just don't start off making dry stone walls and then wake up one morning and create 20-ton megaliths and huge stone circles.

Joe Rogan 23:54 (laughs)

Graham Hancock 23:54 ... perfectly astronomically aligned, as we have at Gobekli Tepe.

Joe Rogan 23:57 Not only that, but how? Like, what did you, what did they do?

Graham Hancock 24:02 Well-

Joe Rogan 24:02 How are you even ... Where are you getting those 20-ton megaliths from? How far do they have to transport it?

Graham Hancock 24:07 In the case of Gobekli Tepe, not far.

Joe Rogan 24:09 How far?

Graham Hancock 24:10 Oh, hundreds of meters. I've stood on top of one, uh, megalith that they partially cut out of the bedrock, uh, with the T shape, but then they found a fault in it and they left it there.

Joe Rogan 24:20 Oh.

Graham Hancock 24:20 It would have been a 30-ton megalith. They clearly intended to release it from the bedrock, but it had a fault, so they, they left it alone. The quarries, the, th- the issue of the quarries for the rock at Gobekli Tepe is not too big a problem.

Joe Rogan 24:33 But the transportation of those?

Graham Hancock 24:34 Even the transportation, you get enough people working together and they can, and they can move, uh, large stones. There's, th- that's, that, that's not in dispute. But th- that's where the question comes, how do you get enough people together? How do you have the organizational skills? Where do you have the mindset that plans something like this at the beginning? And, and that is the problem that is not answered in the case of Gobekli Tepe, that happening suddenly.

Joe Rogan 24:57 And what were they using for tools?

Graham Hancock 24:59 They're supposed to have just been using stone. There's not supposed to have been any, any metals at, at, at that period.

Joe Rogan 25:04 Not even brass?

Graham Hancock 25:06 Not even brass, not even copper. I have, um, I have a, a complicated view on Gobekli Tepe. Let's say it's my hypothesis.

Joe Rogan 25:14 Hm.

Graham Hancock 25:14 It's not a fact. I don't claim this as a fact. I think that what we're looking at at Gobekli Tepe, there's no doubt that the population of, around Gobekli Tepe were all hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe started to be made. And that's the weirdest thing of all, because previously, archeology always used to say hunter-gatherer cultures did not have the manpower, did not have the organizational skills, could not generate the surpluses that would allow people to specialize in architecture and engineering and astronomy and so on. So it used to be said that hunter-gatherers couldn't do that. Now archeologists have backpedaled on that, and they're saying, "Well, yeah, clearly hunter-gatherers did it." The funny thing is, that, that during the 1,000 years that Gobekli Tepe functions, and it runs from roughly 11,600 years ago to, say, 9,600 years ago, uh, during, during the ... 10,600 years ago. During those 1,000 years, the population of Gobekli Tepe transitions from being hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists. So we see two new ideas suddenly appearing at Gobekli Tepe, enormous megalithic architecture and a shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture. And what Gobekli Tepe looks like to me is a transfer of technology, that people who already knew how to work megalithic architecture and align it precisely to the risings of particular stars, for example, Sirius, uh, came to Gobekli Tepe at a time of chaos and cataclysm in the world, and they sought to introduce a new way of thinking. I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together. And it's not an accident that during that 1,000 years, they transitioned from hunting- hunter-gathering to, to agriculture. Um, I don't, uh, see massive technical complications in, in creating Gobekli Tepe, except those very precise alignments. But what I do see, uh, is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there. And that, and that requires explanation.

Joe Rogan 27:11 How did they d- determine the emergence of agriculture versus agriculture that it existed in some areas and not others? Like it does now.

Graham Hancock 27:21 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 27:21 Like, uh, you can go to the Amazon and you could see hunter-gatherers, and then you can go to Sao Paolo and see a major metropolitan city.

Graham Hancock 27:29 I was just in Manaus, uh, and it's, it's fascinating, actually. They have a, a tower up there on the edge of the jungle. You can go up that tower 150 meters up, and on one side, extending endlessly, infinitely into the distance, is the Amazon rainforest.

Joe Rogan 27:44 Wow.

Graham Hancock 27:44 Turn the other way, and there's the city of Manaus-

Joe Rogan 27:47 Wow.

Graham Hancock 27:47 ... looking at you with its, with i- with its skyscrapers. And it's just-

Joe Rogan 27:50 That's gotta be wild.

Graham Hancock 27:51 It's a, it's a wild sight to see. Um, and, and, uh, actually there ... the interesting thing about the Amazon, Joe, is, uh, it's been grievously misunderstood over the years. And fortunately, archeology is beginning to come to terms with it. There was agriculture in the Amazon, going back a very long way, going back at least 10,000 years, maybe, maybe further. Um, and we, we may have discussed this before, but there's this-

Joe Rogan 28:16 Yeah, we did.

Graham Hancock 28:16 ... there's this curious soil that exists in the Amazon that they call Terra Preta, uh, or Amazonian dark earth. Recent, uh, investigations have shown without doubt that it's manmade, and deliberately manmade, not an accidental result of refuse tips, but a deliberate attempt to make the Amazon fertile.

Joe Rogan 28:35 And how do they know that it's deliberate?

Graham Hancock 28:37 Uh, because they find in it the same ingredients. And amongst th- amongst those ingredients are always broken bits of, um, ceramics. That's one of the odd things. They seem to be part of what makes it work.

Joe Rogan 28:48 Really?

Graham Hancock 28:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:48 Ceramics?

Graham Hancock 28:49 Ceramics. In, mixed in there with, with dung, with, with, um, human refuse, all deliberately put in there. Not an accidental dung heap, but a place that human beings said, "We're gonna make this ground fertile." 'Cause rainforest soils are not particularly fertile. The fertility of the Amazon comes entirely from the fall of leaves onto the soil. It re-fertilizes itself. But to grow crops on the Amazon is a very different prospect. And this is where Terra Preta, uh, really comes into its own. And I've, I've, I've been standing in a pit with an, with an archeologist there, a Terra Preta pit, and you can see this beautiful rich soil. And it is a mystery. It constantly replenishes itself. It never gets used up. Settlers seek it out, seek out areas of Terra Preta. And it fits with this notion that d- no longer a notion, it's a fact, that there, there was a population of millions in the Amazon 10,000 years ago. And, uh, they were living a, a highly productive, sophisticated life. They were using agriculture. They also gardened the Amazon. The, the hyperdominant tree, trees in the Amazon are all fruit-bearing trees. The Brazil nut tree, for example-... which, a huge, tall tree, um, is a food-bearing tree and 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.

Joe Rogan 31:30 Oh.

Graham Hancock 31:31 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.

Joe Rogan 32:07 How do they know that the terra preta replenishes itself? How does it do that?

Graham Hancock 32:12 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.

Joe Rogan 32:35 Is there a way to reproduce that in America?

Graham Hancock 32:38 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.

Joe Rogan 33:05 'Cause it's such an issue with modern farmlands, where they have to use these, uh, m- modern fertilizers.

Graham Hancock 33:11 Mm.

Joe Rogan 33:11 They have to use-

Graham Hancock 33:12 Which is, which are not helpful in many ways.

Joe Rogan 33:13 And they run off.

Graham Hancock 33:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:14 Like, the topsoil's worn out.

Graham Hancock 33:16 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:16 And so if they could figure out a way to reproduce terra preta.

Graham Hancock 33:20 This would be, uh, uh, one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures.

Joe Rogan 33:28 Mm.

Graham Hancock 33:28 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.

Joe Rogan 34:08 Mm.

Graham Hancock 34:09 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.

Joe Rogan 34:28 Mm. Now-

Graham Hancock 34:29 Can I show, can I show some pictures of these geoglyphs?

Joe Rogan 34:31 Please, please.

Graham Hancock 34:31 W- we have to hook up the magical-

Joe Rogan 34:34 HDMI?

Graham Hancock 34:36 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 34:49 Careful with the water.

Graham Hancock 34:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:53 Got it?

Graham Hancock 34:56 Okay. Are we, are we on screen?

Joe Rogan 35:01 Uh, yeah. We will be momentarily. Here we go.

Graham Hancock 35:04 Yeah, so, so this shows the Amazon, um, 6.7 million square kilometers. There's still five and a half million left covered by rainforest. That's bigger than the entire subcontinent of India and hardly any archeology has been done, and the archeology that is being done is fascinating. And it's particularly in the State of Acre, um, in, in the Southwest of Brazil, that we're seeing, uh, these extraordinary geoglyphs. Now, I'm here with, I'm on the, on, on the left there, that's Martti Parasinen from the University of Helsinki, uh, and that is Fabio Filho, who's the LiDAR expert, and that's Alceu Ranzi, uh, who's a Brazilian geographer and archeologist, and we're looking at the latest LiDAR discoveries, and there, I'm about to take off in a plane with these two guys. It was just incredible to fly over there. I've flown over the Nazca Lines many times, but to fly over this and to see these huge earthworks on a scale of hundreds of meters sitting there, often-... ent- e- e- encroached on by farms was very, very, very exciting.

Joe Rogan 36:05 And what's the conventional explanation for these things?

Graham Hancock 36:07 There is no conventional explanation, because really it's, it's only begun to be studied.

Joe Rogan 36:12 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 36:13 Azaillou first noticed them on an overflight more than 20 years ago, but it's only relatively recently that they've started to get the funding, and I want to pay tribute to Eugene Zhong, uh, who is a philanthropist, uh, who has provided funding for these guys to continue their work, and who's also provided funding to the Comet Research Group, and who's also provided funding for the DMT research that's being done at UCSD.

Joe Rogan 36:35 Who's, what's his name?

Graham Hancock 36:36 Eugene Zhong.

Joe Rogan 36:37 Eug-

Graham Hancock 36:37 He's a brilliant, brilliant guy.

Joe Rogan 36:39 Eugene Zhong, way to go, dude.

Graham Hancock 36:39 Z-H-O-N-G. He's a brilliant philanthropist, and he's so open-minded, and he's looking to support research in areas that the mainstream just won't touch.

Joe Rogan 36:48 That's amazing. Good for him.

Graham Hancock 36:49 So we're looking at Fazenda Cipoal here, uh, where we have a, an, an octagon with rounded corners, um, and then this is Santa's shot of the same place, and you can see what's going on. You see the smoke in the background there?

Joe Rogan 37:00 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 37:00 That's the Amazon burning. That settler's clearing the Amazon to create more farms, uh, but in the foreground we have this, uh, this enormous geometrical event, which is a huge oval surrounding a square.

Joe Rogan 37:14 And did they find this once they started clearing? Is that when this-

Graham Hancock 37:17 This was found as a result of the clearances.

Joe Rogan 37:19 Okay.

Graham Hancock 37:19 That's how, that's how it became... Archaeologists became aware that these things exist.

Joe Rogan 37:24 So before that, this was completely covered with trees?

Graham Hancock 37:26 Completely covered with rainforest. It was only the, th- i- it's a sort of mixed blessing or mixed curse, if you like-

Joe Rogan 37:31 Right.

Graham Hancock 37:31 ... because the clearances made it possible for us to know that these things exist, but the fl- clearances ultimately will destroy the entire Amazon if they're allowed to continue. Jacosá, on the left, uh, a square surrounding a circle, um, and here's a couple-

Joe Rogan 37:46 Ah.

Graham Hancock 37:46 ... of Santa's shots of Jacosá. You, you can see there's a large square earthwork in a circle in it. That's almost, not quite, but almost like the Greek exercise of squaring the circle. It's like geometrical exercises are taking place here in the Amazon, um, and, and, uh, again, a square with these curious scallops cut into the side of it and, and, and, and, and a circle. There's, there's just so much of this, uh, of, of this stuff.Tokino, absolutely giant, giant geoglyph, and these things really, on the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't exist. They involve enormous expenditure of effort. Creating these earthworks is, is a huge job. If there were sto- if there was a lot of stone in the Amazon, I think we'd see stone circles on them as well. There's one place further north called Rego Grande where there is an earthwork with a stone circle in it because stone is locally available. Um, and, and-

Joe Rogan 38:38 So do you think this was the base of a structure? Like, what is the speculation?

Graham Hancock 38:42 N- no, I don't think so. I've talked to indigenous people there who still respect and revere them, um, and they say that they were for shamanic journeying, that the, that the population would gather within them, that there would be certain areas that might be reserved for the, for the shamans. For example, the square on the left, those two cut out areas, top left and, and, and right of that square-

Joe Rogan 39:04 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 39:04 It's suggested that shamans were in there and the rest of the population were in the other area, and they were, they were undertaking visionary journeys, uh, perhaps using ayahuasca. Uh, of course, the a- the Amazonian peoples are experts in the properties of indigenous plants, um-

Joe Rogan 39:22 So this is their folklore, or this is their, their story? That-

Graham Hancock 39:26 Yes, this is the story of indigenous, uh, indigenous people.

Joe Rogan 39:29 So that's what they say is-

Graham Hancock 39:29 I, I, I, I talked to a- an Apurina, um, elder, uh, and he said, "We don't know exactly why these places were made. They were made so long ago, but we respect them, we revere them, and we think that they were used by shamans in the distant, in the distant past."

Joe Rogan 39:45 So they were aware of them before the clearing and everything?

Graham Hancock 39:47 Yeah, they were aware of them before the clearing, and they-

Joe Rogan 39:49 Did-

Graham Hancock 39:49 ... and they revered them.

Joe Rogan 39:50 Did they use them? They just-

Graham Hancock 39:50 Yes, they used them, and they still have community gatherings in them.

Joe Rogan 39:54 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 39:54 No, they weren't, they weren't a base for, for structures. I'm drawing attention here to Severino Calazans, this large square on the left there, which has coincidentally the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It just shows you the size of that, uh, that enormous earthwork, um, but it's a mystery. More work, more work needs to be done, and much more needs to be surveyed, and thanks to LiDAR, that can be done non-invasively. Uh, we can spot these things. Very small teams can go in and do a bit of excavation there and figure out what was going on. I think the story is gonna go back further and further into the past.

Joe Rogan 40:27 Is there any evidence of s- of wood structures? Like, did they make buildings out of wood back then?

Graham Hancock 40:34 Um, not that I'm, not that I'm aware of.

Joe Rogan 40:36 When did people start using wood as a structure?

Graham Hancock 40:38 Oh, I think you can, I think you can trace wood back as a structure hundreds of thousands of years, yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:42 But, but they, when did they start using it in, like, i- if you, if you see, like, the ancient Mayan civilizations, the, the, what you find in the Amazon, you don't find ancient wood structures, do you?

Graham Hancock 40:54 I think that's largely an artifact of the fact that w- that wood doesn't preserve very well, yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:57 Right. So how do we know that there weren't wood structures-

Graham Hancock 41:00 There may well have been.

Joe Rogan 41:01 ... over these-

Graham Hancock 41:01 There may well have been-

Joe Rogan 41:02 Right.

Graham Hancock 41:02 ... which have, which have just rotted away-

Joe Rogan 41:04 Right.

Graham Hancock 41:05 ... and, and, and, and gone. There may, there may well have been wooden structures there.

Joe Rogan 41:08 'Cause it kind of looks like foundations.

Graham Hancock 41:10 It does, it does look like foundations, and it's, it's just, it's just a very weird thing, but I think the main point is we n-

Joe Rogan 41:16 Someone made it.

Graham Hancock 41:17 Someone made it-

Joe Rogan 41:18 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 41:18 ... and it involved a very large amount of organized labor in order to make it. There had to be the will and the intent in order to do that. It's, it's interesting that the patterns are geometrical.

Joe Rogan 41:28 And are they geometrical, like, with perfect length, and, like, they're-

Graham Hancock 41:32 Yes, yes, they're very, they're, th- th- th-

Joe Rogan 41:33 ... they match up with each other?

Graham Hancock 41:33 They're, they're very, very good. Uh, Fazenda Pirana and Severino Cala- Calazans are both aligned to true astronomical north. That's different from compass north.

Joe Rogan 41:43 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 41:43 That requires astronomy. You can't, you can't get true north without using astronomy. So this tells us not only was there a culture that was capable of creating large scale public projects, but also they had astronomers amongst them.

Joe Rogan 41:56 Hmm. Wow.

Graham Hancock 41:58 It's, uh, i- i- it's, it's, it's a good, it's a good mystery. The other thing is the geometrical patterns are very common, uh-... experience in Ayahuasca visions, in, in altered states of consciousness. Our culture tends to despise altered states of consciousness, although fortunately that's changing. But in the Amazon and, and many indigenous cultures, they're regarded as extremely important, uh, that we can't confine ourself to the, the everyday wide-awake state of consciousness that requires us to interface with the physical world. There are other states of consciousness which are also valuable and which bring teachings. And it's just one of those facts that most people who drink Ayahuasca, most of the time, some point will experience geometrical visions. So there's a, there's a question, is there, is there a connection here between the use of Ayahuasca and the geometrical patterns?

Joe Rogan 42:45 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 42:46 Um, there, there's, um, a huge, uh, rock wall, uh, has been found in the Colombian Amazon, Serra da la La- Lindosa, which I'm hoping to get to this year. Eight kilometers long, covered in rock paintings. The rock paintings are dated more than 12,000 years old. They show, uh, extinct mega fauna, they show giant sloths which went extinct during the Younger Dryas, for example, and they also s- show the kind of entities that are seen in Ayahuasca visions. They show the same sort of patterns, the same geometric patterns that are seen in Ayahuasca. So there's a sense that-

Joe Rogan 43:21 Do, do you have any images of this place?

Graham Hancock 43:23 Um, Serra da la, da La Lindosa, just to-

Joe Rogan 43:25 You're connected to the-

Graham Hancock 43:27 Yeah, I don't have images of La Lindosa on here.

Joe Rogan 43:29 Oh, maybe you could Google it.

Graham Hancock 43:30 Um, but if, if, uh-

Joe Rogan 43:32 Or give the plug back to Jamie.

Narrator 43:33 Yeah, I'll give the plug back. I was trying to Google it and I didn't find anything. And I might have s- spelled or guessed wrong on Serra-

Joe Rogan 43:39 How do you spell it?

Narrator 43:40 ... da la Lindosa.

Graham Hancock 43:42 La Lindosa.

Narrator 43:43 La Lindosa?

Graham Hancock 43:43 Yeah. Let me just, uh ...

Narrator 43:46 I got it. I got it.

Graham Hancock 43:47 You got it?

Narrator 43:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:49 You're gonna have to give him the cord real quick and then he'll give it back to you.

Graham Hancock 43:52 Okay. There you go. Um, it's, uh, l- literally an, an eight kilometer Sistine Chapel, uh, in the, in the Colombian Amazon. That's the other thing. I mentioned there's not a lot of rock in the Amazon. Where there is rock, they used it. There's rock paintings, uh, all over, uh, the Amazon where rock is available. These kind of things, yeah, that's it.

Joe Rogan 44:14 Wow.

Graham Hancock 44:15 Um, these, these are characteristic of Ayahuasca visions, but in this case they're more than 12,000 years old. Now, does that prove they were using Ayahuasca 12,000 years ago? No. But it's def-

Joe Rogan 44:25 That's, uh, very similar to like a tryptamine vision, though.

Graham Hancock 44:27 Totally, totally. It does suggest that some tryptamine was being accessed at that time and resulting in these, in these, uh, vision- visionary images.

Joe Rogan 44:37 Boy, they had shitty drawers, weren't there?

Graham Hancock 44:39 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:40 D- their drawing was terrible (laughs) .

Graham Hancock 44:41 But bear in mind that, uh, they're, they're clambering a, a hundred feet up a sheer cliff in order to, uh, in order to-

Joe Rogan 44:48 Still guys, do a better job.

Graham Hancock 44:49 ... create (laughs) create-

Joe Rogan 44:50 Ridiculous.

Graham Hancock 44:50 ... these paintings.

Joe Rogan 44:51 Those, the people were so fat. Are those people or sea turtles? What are those things?

Graham Hancock 44:55 Uh, which one is which?

Joe Rogan 44:56 It's really interesting to see. So this is, uh, 11,000 how old?

Graham Hancock 45:00 12,000 plus.

Joe Rogan 45:02 12,000 plus?

Graham Hancock 45:02 Yeah. Yeah, 12,000 plus years old.

Joe Rogan 45:04 It's interesting because if you see the paintings that they found in that cave in France.

Graham Hancock 45:08 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:09 Those are 30 plus thousand years old, right?

Graham Hancock 45:10 Oh yeah, there's paint- there's paintings in, in France if you go to Chauvet.

Joe Rogan 45:15 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 45:15 Uh, you're looking 36,000 years old.

Joe Rogan 45:17 Can you go to those, Jamie?

Graham Hancock 45:17 Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, uh-

Joe Rogan 45:20 That's that amazing Werner Herzog documentary.

Graham Hancock 45:22 They often have, uh-

Joe Rogan 45:24 I think it's, was The Cave of Dreams? It w-

Graham Hancock 45:26 Cave of Dreams, yes.

Joe Rogan 45:27 Yes.

Graham Hancock 45:27 Yeah. They, they, they often have-

Joe Rogan 45:28 Look at that.

Graham Hancock 45:29 Uh, we're looking at Lascaux... Hang on, on the, yeah, we're looking at Lascaux there. The, the bull painting there is interesting.

Joe Rogan 45:36 Well, they were better artists.

Graham Hancock 45:37 They were.

Joe Rogan 45:38 (laughs) They were.

Graham Hancock 45:39 I have to confess there-

Joe Rogan 45:40 They were quite a bit better.

Graham Hancock 45:41 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 45:49 Mm.

Graham Hancock 45:49 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.

Joe Rogan 46:09 Mm.

Graham Hancock 46:10 Um, and, um, not showing any-

Joe Rogan 46:12 Why do they think that that represents the constellation?

Graham Hancock 46:14 Because of the six little dots which are not, I think, on the head. I think they're somewhere behind, not in this picture, uh, which is often how the Pleiades are seen. They're seen th- actually, there are seven Pleiades, um, but often to the naked eye you see six, uh, and the positioning of the Pleiades in relation to the constellation of Taurus is-

Joe Rogan 46:35 Is that it right there?

Graham Hancock 46:35 ... is, is the basis for that argument. Y- it could be. I'm, I'm not sure, it's so long since I've looked at this, but I know that there are six, six dots there. Uh, so this cave art was going on all around the world. It's found, the, some of the oldest art has been found in Indonesia, you know, like-

Joe Rogan 46:50 Oh, here it is. Here's the...

Graham Hancock 46:52 Yeah. There's the, there's the, there's the Pleiades, the whole argument about the Pleiades.

Joe Rogan 46:55 Mm.

Graham Hancock 46:56 Um, it's those dots, exactly, the ones-

Joe Rogan 46:58 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 46:58 ... the ones you pointed to above, above the back of the bull.

Joe Rogan 47:01 Wow.

Graham Hancock 47:01 One, two, three, four, five, six. Uh, that is how the Pleiades are often seen with the naked eye.

Joe Rogan 47:06 Can you go back to the other im- yeah, there. Wow.

Graham Hancock 47:10 You know, that's, that's, that, that... It's an argument, it's not accepted by, by mainstream archeology because of their narrative, which is that these, the, the discovery of the constellations of the zodiac is given to the Greeks or perhaps to the Mesopotamians before the Greeks. It's not thought that any human culture could have noticed the constellations of the zodiac before that, and that's really absurd, because the constellations of the zodiac are on the path of the sun. The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month. Uh, and, and how would the ancients have missed that? Especially since the skies were an ever present phenomenon to them in a way that they are not to us.

Joe Rogan 47:47 Right.

Graham Hancock 47:47 We're cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not.

Joe Rogan 47:51 What a fascinating concept that they knew about the constellations 30 plus thousand years ago.

Graham Hancock 47:56 Yeah, and I believe they did, and th- and we see that again in, in Gobekli Tepe in pillar 43 in enclosure D. Uh, you see a constellation that we recognize as Sagittarius.

Joe Rogan 48:06 Brian and I were talking about, uh, one of the ancient versions of human beings and I ju- I sent him this the other day-

Graham Hancock 48:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 48:14 ... because I read this article (clears throat) that I thought was amazing where it was talking about, um, they, they found sto- wooden structures-... that were half a million years old.

Graham Hancock 48:26 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that's right.

Joe Rogan 48:27 Yeah, so I'll send you this chain link.

Graham Hancock 48:28 You- you sent that to me as well.

Joe Rogan 48:30 Yes, I did, yeah. This is, uh, very wild, right? Because that's, uh, what is that-

Graham Hancock 48:35 Well, half a million-

Joe Rogan 48:36 ... species?

Graham Hancock 48:36 (clears throat) Half a million years ago is pre-anatomically modern humans.

Joe Rogan 48:41 Right.

Graham Hancock 48:42 Uh, the earliest example of anatomically modern humans so far found is about 300,000 years, and that's from, uh, Morocco. Uh, but there's a new- new thinking going on now. What about the Neanderthals, who we know that anatomically modern humans interbred with? Maybe the Neanderthals are just another anatomically modern human form. Maybe they're not... Th- th-

Joe Rogan 49:04 Right.

Graham Hancock 49:04 They're not a different species. They're homo- ho- homo neanderthalensis as opposed to homo sap- sapiens, but maybe it was all one and there were different forms of human beings at that time.

Joe Rogan 49:14 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 49:14 If... In that case, these wooden structures would fit within the Neanderthal timeframe.

Joe Rogan 49:19 This is that same culture, Jamie, that, uh, Brian was telling us buried their dead in a very sophisticated way, where they had to crawl through these cave pat- cave systems?

Graham Hancock 49:27 No, Brian was- Brian was talking about Homo naledi.

Joe Rogan 49:30 I think this is Homo naledi.

Graham Hancock 49:31 And this is from- this is from South Africa?

Joe Rogan 49:32 I think that's what they're talking about. I- I believe that's what they were talking about.

Graham Hancock 49:37 Uh, wooden structure from Zambia. It's from Zambia. Ho- ho- ho- homo ho- Homo naledi is in South Africa, and it is fascinating, and Lee Berger, uh, who I mentioned to you-

Joe Rogan 49:47 Here it is, Homo na- a s- species similar to Homo naledi.

Graham Hancock 49:50 Yeah, uh, might-

Joe Rogan 49:51 See, homo... How do you say that word?

Graham Hancock 49:53 Homo naledi.

Joe Rogan 49:54 Hi- hi- no, the other one. Homo heidelberg-

Graham Hancock 49:55 Heidelbergensis. Heidelberg something, some remains found near Heidelberg in Germany, basically.

Joe Rogan 50:00 So this is what it says, "We don't know exactly what species made the structure, but Homo..." How do you say it again? Homo hei-

Graham Hancock 50:06 Heidelbergensis.

Joe Rogan 50:07 ... heidelbergensis or a species similar to Homo naledi-

Graham Hancock 50:11 Might be candidates.

Joe Rogan 50:12 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 50:12 Yes.

Joe Rogan 50:13 Interesting.

Graham Hancock 50:13 So, Homo naledi is- is interesting. That's the result of a- uh, of a National Geographic explorer and resid- residence called Lee Berger. Uh, and he, as you discussed with Brian, we won't go over it again.

Joe Rogan 50:24 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 50:24 But he found evidence of- of deliberate burial-

Joe Rogan 50:27 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 50:27 ... uh, in a very complicated, difficult cave system-

Joe Rogan 50:30 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 50:30 ... which you can hardly access.

Joe Rogan 50:32 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 50:33 Um, and- and, uh, of course, i- immediately this was published, and it was published in a Netflix documentary, the archaeological establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks and- and tried to find all kinds of reasons why it couldn't possibly be, uh, deliberate burial, whereas I think it would be much more interesting if archaeology tried to, first of all, look at all kinds of reasons why it could be deliberate burial because that opens many doors, whereas saying, "No, it's impossible," just closes- closes all the doors.

Joe Rogan 51:02 Well, what are the alternative explanations for why they had mass burial sites inside of a cave?

Graham Hancock 51:07 They fell there, something like that.

Joe Rogan 51:10 A- all of 'em?

Graham Hancock 51:10 Yeah, all of them.

Joe Rogan 51:11 Over many, many, many years?

Graham Hancock 51:12 And- and- and somehow buried themselves-

Joe Rogan 51:14 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 51:14 ... uh, under the topsoil, uh, and- and- and then left engravings on the cave walls-

Joe Rogan 51:19 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 51:19 ... which are- which are very- very similar to en- engravings that we find in- in the caves of France, for example.

Joe Rogan 51:25 Well, it does make sense though that ancient human species would slowly learn the things that we learned. They would slowly pick up tool-making, they would slowly pick up the ability to harness fire.

Graham Hancock 51:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:36 And that, as time went on, as the species became more sophisticated and more advanced as it evolved, it would just refine those methods.

Graham Hancock 51:45 Yeah, that- that- that- that does make sense. The- the question is when did it happen? This is why-

Joe Rogan 51:49 Right.

Graham Hancock 51:49 ... this is why I sometimes wear a T-shirt, and I did on the last show with you, th- which says, "Things Just Keep, Stuff Just Keeps On Getting Older."

Joe Rogan 51:55 Yes.

Graham Hancock 51:56 Uh, and a lot of people don't understand what I mean by that, but what I mean by it is that archaeological discoveries are constantly pushing horizons back, but not considering the implications of that. It wasn't so long ago that anatomically modern humans were thought to be just 50,000 years old. Now, if- if anatomically modern humans with the modern brain, with our capacities and abilities have only existed for 50,000 years, that doesn't leave a lot of room for a lost civilization to come and go. But then we find 196,000 years ago from Ethiopia, and then more recently, 300,000 years ago from Morocco, and suddenly the expanses of time that have not been investigated in which a civilization could have risen and fallen become much greater.

Joe Rogan 52:38 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 52:38 And that's why it's important that stuff just keeps on getting older.

Joe Rogan 52:41 D- very fascinating also that the oldest known ones are from Africa.

Graham Hancock 52:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:46 And obviously that's where Egypt is.

Graham Hancock 52:48 Yes.

Joe Rogan 52:49 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 52:49 That's (laughs) that's exactly where Egypt is.

Joe Rogan 52:50 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 52:50 And- and- and, uh, you know, we must- we must recognize Egypt as an African culture.

Joe Rogan 52:54 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 52:55 Uh, that is what the, that is what the ancient Egyptians were. Uh, I believe their language was, uh, belonged to the Hamitic language family, which is closely related to the Somali language, for example, in- in- in- in East Africa. African culture, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly advanced, doing stuff that we just don't know how to do today.

Joe Rogan 53:15 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 53:15 Archeologists will tell you they could build a Great Pyramid, but I defy them to do that. The Great Pyramid is literally impossible. It's something that doesn't make any sense. It certainly doesn't make sense as the tomb of a megalomaniac pharaoh, uh, which is what we're told it was.

Joe Rogan 53:29 Well, it's also sort of the ultimate... I- if you wanted to leave behind evidence of your culture, something that, if there was a cataclysm and people did have to sort of rethink the history of the world, that would be the best thing to leave.

Graham Hancock 53:45 Time capsule, yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:46 'Cause it's so insanely sophisticated-

Graham Hancock 53:49 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 53:49 ... that you're forced to sort of reckon with this idea that something might've existed before us.

Graham Hancock 53:53 Yeah, definitely, and it incorporates all kinds of interesting math. It incorporates pi, which again is supposed to have been discovered by the Greeks. Uh, it incorporates the dimensions of the Earth on a particular scale.

Joe Rogan 54:03 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 54:04 There- there- there's a lot about the Great Pyramid which suggests that it was intended to transmit information to the future, and that's one of the reasons why it's so big and so enormous, and why we keep on finding new chambers and passageways inside the Great Pyramid. There's a thing called ScanPyramids which is now going on.... which is using the latest tech, and they've identified a second Grand Gallery above the Grand Gallery. The, the Grand Gallery is one of the wonderful features of the Great Pyramid. It's 30 feet high, 120 feet long, rising up through the center of the pyramid, but now we know there's a second one above it that hasn't been explored yet.

Joe Rogan 54:42 Wow.

Graham Hancock 54:43 And that's, that's a result of ScanPyramids. There's corridors and passageways that we didn't know were there. So the Great Pyramid is gradually, bit by bit, revealing its secrets, and it's almost as though it was waiting for a time when human beings were ready to receive those s- secrets, and ha- and had the ability to decode them.

Joe Rogan 55:02 How do they access the second Grand Gallery?

Graham Hancock 55:06 Scanning. It's all remo-

Joe Rogan 55:07 I mean humans, how can humans get into it?

Graham Hancock 55:09 Well, it could, it could... That's a gre- a very good question. It's there. The question is, at what point was it made? Was it, was it part... It should have been part of the original construction of the Great Pyramid. As they were building the Great Pyramid, they created one Grand Gallery and they created another, and I-

Joe Rogan 55:25 Is it the same size?

Graham Hancock 55:27 It looks to be the same size, yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:28 Wow.

Graham Hancock 55:28 From the, from the scanning, which the scanning just shows a, a, a void.

Joe Rogan 55:32 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 55:32 But I'm informed reliably that the, the recent investigation has identified that void as another Grand Gallery, which is inside the Great Pyramid, and the Grand Gallery is one of the wonders of the world.

Joe Rogan 55:42 So it could have artifacts in it? It c-

Graham Hancock 55:44 It could have artifacts in it. Same goes for those shafts that cut through the walls of the Queen's Ch- so-called Queen's Chamber and King's Chamber, right? I resist these names that archaeologists have applied to the Great Pyramid. I resist the notion that it was the tomb of Khufu. Uh, I resist the notion that the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet v- vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid was intended to be Khufu's tomb chamber, but then they just changed their minds and abandoned it, and then they built the one that's now called the Queen's Chamber, that was intended to be for Khufu, but they abandoned that as well. Then they went up the Grand Gallery and they created (laughs) the so-called King's Chamber, and because it has a sarcophagus in it, and for no other reason, that is said to have been the original burial place of Khufu. It's not enough evidence, in my view.

Joe Rogan 56:29 And the connections to Khufu are from hieroglyphs depicting his vision, that if he uncovered the Sphinx he would become the Pharaoh of Egypt? Isn't there something along those lines?

Graham Hancock 56:40 There is a, there is something along those lines, and it's Thutmose the Fourth or the Third, if I remember correctly. In other words, he's a later pharaoh from the time of, uh, of the Old Kingdom, uh, and, and he put between the paws of the Sphinx, a stela, which is called the Dream Stela, and in it he records a dream that he had, that, at that time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand, and the dream was that, uh, that he should clear the Sphinx. The Sphinx requested him or ordered him to free it of sand, uh, and reveal it again in i- in its true form. This was at least, uh, 1,200 years after the Sphinx is supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago.

Joe Rogan 57:21 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 57:22 But as you know, Robert Schoch and I and, and many others are convinced the Sphinx is much, much older than that, that it goes back 12,000 plus years.

Joe Rogan 57:29 And this is based on geological evidence of heavy rainfall, which is another-

Graham Hancock 57:33 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 57:33 ... interesting thing about the climate and the environment of that area, that we think of it as being desert, but at one point in time it wasn't.

Graham Hancock 57:42 Well, this is, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frustrated by archaeologists claiming that they can know there was no lost civilization when they've done (coughs) so little work in the Sahara. When the Sahara was, in a number of occasions during the Ice Age, incredibly fertile, very, very nurturing environment with huge river systems running through it, and lakes. It's not disputed that that was the case, it was a kind of environment that would have nurtured human civilization, uh, and we really can't write off the possibility of a lost civilization until we take a much closer, much more detailed look at the Sahara. Of course, that's expensive. And then Egypt itself is in the Sahara.

Joe Rogan 58:20 Didn't they find fossilized whale bones in the Sahara?

Graham Hancock 58:24 Yeah, that would go back a lot further. That would go back to, to millions of years, to, to a time when the oceans were different, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years.

Joe Rogan 58:32 So Sahara, at one point in time was an ocean?

Graham Hancock 58:35 (clears throat) As many places were.

Joe Rogan 58:36 Wow.

Graham Hancock 58:37 Pr- pretty much anywhere where you find, you find limestone was once, was once covered by, by ocean. The world has changed, the world is constantly changing.

Joe Rogan 58:44 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 58:44 It's like, it's like one of those magic kids toys that where you pull, pull a lever and it wipes out the diagram you just made, you know?

Joe Rogan 58:50 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 58:50 Um, it just keeps on... The world keeps on recreating itself, and we human beings make our journey through this, through this changing world, and we, we try to fix it and say, "This is how things were. This is how things will be," and it never cooperates with us on that.

Joe Rogan 59:05 Well, it's just incredibly fascinating that the timeline, when you go beyond the traditional timeline and you get back into where you and Robert Schoch have speculated, the age of the s- the Sphinx. Now you're talking about a completely different environment of lush rainforest-

Graham Hancock 59:20 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:20 ... and many, many, many resources.

Graham Hancock 59:22 Absolutely. We're talking about a completely different Sahara.

Joe Rogan 59:25 Which kind of-

Graham Hancock 59:25 And Schoch's evidence is of a thousand years of heavy rainfall.

Joe Rogan 59:28 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 59:28 That's what the Sphinx bears witness to, that it was already there when the rains of the Younger Dryas, and the Younger Dryas affected the Sahara with heavy rainfall. Just as further north it changed the climate and made it much colder, in the Sahara it became much wetter, uh, and it's that period of rains that, uh, that are the most likely culprit for weathering the Sphinx in the way it is. But it could have stood there f- thousands of years before that, you know?

Joe Rogan 59:51 There's also very clear evidence that the face on the Sphinx is much younger, right?

Graham Hancock 59:55 No doubt about that whatsoever. The, the (coughs) evidence takes (clears throat) , excuse me, frog in my throat.

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 There's a little cough button if you want to hit that.

Graham Hancock 1:00:04 Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:00:04 If you ever wanna hit it.

Graham Hancock 1:00:05 Do I have a cough button?

Joe Rogan 1:00:05 Yeah, you got a little red button there.

Graham Hancock 1:00:07 Is that this red button here?

Joe Rogan 1:00:08 Yeah, if you feel it coming on, just-

Graham Hancock 1:00:09 Okay. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:00:09 ... press it a little stronger.

Graham Hancock 1:00:10 Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll do that. Where were we, Joe?

Joe Rogan 1:00:13 Um, the Sphinx's face-

Graham Hancock 1:00:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:14 ... much younger.

Graham Hancock 1:00:15 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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:48 Can you m- show us a photo of it, Jamie?

Graham Hancock 1:00:50 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:00:51 It's also much less weathered, right?

Graham Hancock 1:00:53 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:06 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.

Graham Hancock 1:02:16 It d-

Joe Rogan 1:02:16 That when they look at the measurements of these immense statues, somehow or another, they're completely symmetrical on both left and right side.

Graham Hancock 1:02:23 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?

Joe Rogan 1:02:39 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:02:39 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-

Joe Rogan 1:03:37 Mm.

Graham Hancock 1:03:37 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:03:59 And didn't the, the Greeks learn from the Egyptians as well?

Graham Hancock 1:04:04 Not only did they learn, but they said they learned.

Joe Rogan 1:04:06 Yeah, so-

Graham Hancock 1:04:07 The, the Greeks were very honest about it.

Joe Rogan 1:04:08 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:04:09 They, they, they sat at the feet of the ancient Egyptians. They said they learned everything they knew from the ancient Egyptians, but somehow, archeology has rewritten the narrative and, and gives far too much to the Greeks. Uh, ancient Greek was a wonderful culture, magical culture, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful work, but a relatively recent culture, and, and it was channeling knowledge from much earlier times.

Joe Rogan 1:04:31 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:04:31 In a way, uh, ancient Greece is the, is the meeting point between the lost ancient world and the modern world in which we live. And that's why the Greeks and the Greek texts are so useful to us. And that's why (laughs) I think the Atlantis story is a very important story.

Joe Rogan 1:04:46 Well, it's also we do that today. If you look at the Lincoln Monument-

Graham Hancock 1:04:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:51 ... and you look at the Parthenon, I mean, we mimic ancient Greek architecture today.

Graham Hancock 1:04:58 Absolutely, yeah, yeah. We're still, we're still copying it. And what were the ancient Greeks copying? Uh, they were copying-

Joe Rogan 1:05:03 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:05:03 ... the Egyptians. They-

Joe Rogan 1:05:04 It just completely makes sense that-

Graham Hancock 1:05:05 Yeah. Go to, go to the temple of Karnak, go to the temple of Luxor. You're looking at the model for the later Greek temples.

Joe Rogan 1:05:12 Mm.

Graham Hancock 1:05:13 They, they, they followed that example, and they were honest about it. It's, it's modern archeology that has kind of rewritten the story and given way too much to the Greeks.

Joe Rogan 1:05:20 When you say that, uh, in Gobekli Tepe, the speculation is that they used stone tools.

Graham Hancock 1:05:25 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:05:25 Um, is there any evidence of, uh, bizarre cutting like they find in Egypt where it looks like they're using some sort of a cylindrical drill or whether it looks like the stone is somehow scooped out in some method that we don't understand?

Graham Hancock 1:05:41 I've not seen evidence of a c- cylindrical drill at Gobekli Tepe, but what you do see (clears throat) , I'm gonna press that red button.

Joe Rogan 1:05:51 Ah, there it is (laughs) .

Graham Hancock 1:05:51 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:05:51 There you go.

Graham Hancock 1:05:53 (coughs) What you do see at Gobekli Tepe, uh, is pillars with carvings in relief on them. Uh, pillar-

Joe Rogan 1:06:00 Three-dimensional.

Graham Hancock 1:06:00 Three-dimensional carvings which stand out. That means that all of the stone around the carving had to be cut away. It wasn't a matter of incising the carving into the stone. You had to remove the stone around it to leave it standing, standing proud.

Joe Rogan 1:06:13 Much more sophisticated.

Graham Hancock 1:06:14 And it's much more sophisticated, and it's on the oldest so far identified pillar in Gobekli Tepe, which maybe Jamie can call up. It's Pillar 43, uh, in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe, uh, which is... Any chance of getting that up?

Narrator 1:06:28 Yeah, one second.

Graham Hancock 1:06:30 It's, uh, i- i- i- it's a remarkable piece of ancient art. It's definitely 11,600 years old.... so often, uh, yeah, the, the Tepe telegrams, for example, will show it. That's an- uh, uh, on the right there, another wonderful piece of relief carving. Uh, but there, pillar 43, uh, this, this vulture, uh, is in exactly the position of the constellation of Sagittarius, uh, and the disc over its wing suggests the sun against the background of the constellation of Sagittarius. Below it, we have a scorpion, so like the constellation of Scorpio, and roughly in the right place. Above it, we have a serpent, uh, descending, a bit like Ophiuchus. Uh, it seems to speak to a knowledge of astronomy at an ancient time. Again, it's controversial, but a lot of work has been, has been done on this. But the point is, the carving of that is highly sophisticated, uh, at 11,600 years old.

Joe Rogan 1:07:28 That creature, whatever it is, Jamie, that one that's sort of black and white, that image, uh, in the center, it says Visual Arts Cork. Yeah, click on that one.

Graham Hancock 1:07:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:36 That one's amazing.

Graham Hancock 1:07:37 It's amazing. They cut away the whole pillar to leave, to leave that creature there, which itself is, is, is hard to identify. Is it a crocodile? Um, we found something very similar in, in Peru, as a matter of fact.

Joe Rogan 1:07:49 Well, the proportions are off for a crocodile. It looks more like a cat.

Graham Hancock 1:07:52 Yeah, I th- I think it looks more like some kind of feline, but, uh, exactly what creature it is is hard-

Joe Rogan 1:07:57 Something with a tail.

Graham Hancock 1:07:58 Yeah, it's hard to identify.

Joe Rogan 1:08:00 When, you know, th- this is all so interesting to me, and when these, uh, p- people are trying to date this to 11,800 years ago, and say that people only had stone tools, how do they speculate that these people did this stuff?

Graham Hancock 1:08:19 Um, you can, you can do stuff with stone tools.

Joe Rogan 1:08:22 So they used harder stone to-

Graham Hancock 1:08:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:23 ... carve this stone.

Graham Hancock 1:08:25 That's the argument.

Joe Rogan 1:08:25 And they ma- th- is there evidence of these stones?

Graham Hancock 1:08:29 No, not that I'm aware of. There are, there are, there are some so-called pounding stones.

Joe Rogan 1:08:33 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:08:33 But I find it difficult to see how pounding stones, how pounding away could have created this very fine result.

Joe Rogan 1:08:40 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:08:40 Uh, it doesn't make a whole, a whole lot of sense to me. It's the same with, um, uh, with, with the incredible work that you find at Cusco and Sacsayhuaman in Peru. Again, they're not supposed to have had ... This is supposedly recent. I think it's much older, the Incas, not supposed to have had, uh, metal tools. They're supposed to have done all the work with stone tools. I think it's a reach. I think we're, I think we're looking at a technology we don't understand.

Joe Rogan 1:09:04 So one of them looks like a wild boar, that one to the left.

Graham Hancock 1:09:07 Looks like-

Joe Rogan 1:09:07 Pinterest. Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:09:08 Yeah, definitely a wild boar.

Joe Rogan 1:09:08 It looks like some sort of wild boar. Yeah, definitely.

Graham Hancock 1:09:10 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:11 So that's identifiable, which is interesting when you look at the other ones that aren't that identifiable.

Graham Hancock 1:09:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of them are identifiable.

Joe Rogan 1:09:17 Yeah. I don't know what that-

Graham Hancock 1:09:19 (clears throat)

Joe Rogan 1:09:19 What's that one supposed to be?

Graham Hancock 1:09:20 That's a fox.

Joe Rogan 1:09:21 A fox?

Graham Hancock 1:09:21 Uh, but, but interestingly, coming out of it are these streamers.

Joe Rogan 1:09:25 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:09:25 Uh, and my colleague, uh, Martin Sweatman from the University of Edinburgh has, has suggested that that is, uh, representing meteors, uh, coming down from the sky.

Joe Rogan 1:09:36 W-

Graham Hancock 1:09:36 Those streamers out of the tail of the fox, and that the fox was a constellation.

Joe Rogan 1:09:39 What's that little fella right there, Jamie? It says, uh, in Turkey, r- right to the left of your cursor. Yeah, right there. What's that?

Graham Hancock 1:09:46 A human form.

Joe Rogan 1:09:50 Is that another one from somewhere else?

Graham Hancock 1:09:51 No, no, that's, that's ... I'm, I'm not sure which site that is from. It could be from Gobekli Tepe, judging by the feline figures beside it. Let's find out.

Joe Rogan 1:10:00 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:10:04 Oh, ad blocker. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:10:06 Oh, you got us. You gotta subscribe.

Graham Hancock 1:10:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:10 Oh, is the ad blocker?

Graham Hancock 1:10:18 Too complicated.

Joe Rogan 1:10:19 Is it letting you go back?

Narrator 1:10:20 It'll just ... Move on. I'll find it.

Joe Rogan 1:10:21 Okay.

Graham Hancock 1:10:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:23 How do they, uh, we, we have those images from ancient Sumer, which are 6,000 years old or so-

Graham Hancock 1:10:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:31 ... that show what appears to be the solar system. So how do they-

Graham Hancock 1:10:36 Well, first of all, let's remember ancient Sumer was in Mesopotamia.

Joe Rogan 1:10:41 Yes.

Graham Hancock 1:10:41 And Mesopotamia is a Greek word, means between the rivers. And the rivers referred to are the Tigris and the Euphrates. And where is Gobekli Tepe? Right between the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Joe Rogan 1:10:53 Here it is. Hard to grasp relief in, of man holding his phallus, found in Turkey.

Graham Hancock 1:10:57 (laughs) Uh, which site? Which site? (inaudible) is the big city nearby. That's where you need to go if you want to go to Gobekli Tepe. They're not saying which site it was.

Joe Rogan 1:11:07 Can I see that image again?

Graham Hancock 1:11:08 It could, it could be Karahan Tepe, uh, where I've been, but I haven't seen that figure. That's, that's ...

Joe Rogan 1:11:14 It looks like he's covering his phallus, like he's embarrassed.

Graham Hancock 1:11:16 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:11:17 Or maybe he's pregnant.

Graham Hancock 1:11:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:18 Look. Maybe he's the first pregnant man.

Graham Hancock 1:11:20 We don't know. Uh, we don't know. (laughs) We don't know what it means.

Joe Rogan 1:11:23 I don't what it- what does that mean?

Graham Hancock 1:11:23 But he's definitely holding his dick. That's for sure.

Joe Rogan 1:11:27 It seems like it. It seems like maybe he's peeing?

Graham Hancock 1:11:29 No, te- (laughs) It's something else.

Joe Rogan 1:11:30 I mean, what is he doing?

Graham Hancock 1:11:31 (clears throat) What is he doing?

Joe Rogan 1:11:32 Uh.

Graham Hancock 1:11:32 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 1:11:33 Interesting.

Graham Hancock 1:11:33 And we don't know. The, the, the problem is no written texts have come down to us from that time.

Joe Rogan 1:11:38 Right.

Graham Hancock 1:11:38 So everything, in a sense, is speculation. What isn't speculation is the dating. Uh, I have grave doubts about carbon dating in many cases. Uh, because carbon dating doesn't date stone. It dates organic materials. Uh, so the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away. But what tends to be done is that you look for a piece of organic material that is so associated with the megalith you want to date that you can say or propose that they come from the same period of time.

Joe Rogan 1:12:12 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:12:12 I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island. They're not carbon dated. What's carbon dated is the platforms they stand on, and there's a lot to suggest that those platforms are much later than the original statues, and the statues were re-erected on those, on, on those platforms. In the case of Gobekli Tepe ...... one of the very special things about it is that it was deliberately buried. They ran that site for about a thousand years, from 11,600 to, say, 10,600 years ago, and then they closed it down. And they went to great effort to fill up all the enclosures with rubble and to create a hill over the top of it. Uh, and that's why Gobeklitepe then remained untouched for the next 10,000 years. There's no danger of contamination with younger carbon from a later culture.

Joe Rogan 1:12:59 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:13:00 The fact that they found carbon in enclosure 40, i- i- in, in enclosure D, right by, uh, pillar 43, dated to 11,600 years ago does firmly connect that, that place to 11,600 years ago. There are later dates from Gobeklitepe. It wasn't all built in one go, but it stopped around a thousand or maybe 1,200 years after it started, as though they'd, as though they'd achieved what they wanted to achieve. The population had all become agriculturalists. We move on into the Holocene, into the modern age, and it's that moment of transition following an enormous cataclysm that really fascinates me.

Joe Rogan 1:13:38 So if they attribute the constellations to ancient Greece, what do they say about the clay tablets from Sumer?

Graham Hancock 1:13:48 Um, I've not seen any archeologist who attributes knowledge of the constellations to, to the ancient Sumerians.

Joe Rogan 1:13:53 But, but if we c-

Graham Hancock 1:13:54 That's a bit too late.

Joe Rogan 1:13:54 Can you pull that image up?

Graham Hancock 1:13:54 The Babylonians maybe.

Joe Rogan 1:13:56 Pull that image up because tha- that, this image has always been wild to me.

Graham Hancock 1:13:59 Let's have a look.

Joe Rogan 1:13:59 Because it kind of shows a s- a sun in the center, and then it shows all of the planets in our solar system in relatively the correct sizes.

Graham Hancock 1:14:11 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:14:12 Relatively.

Graham Hancock 1:14:13 I wouldn't be surprised by that. I th-

Joe Rogan 1:14:14 In terms of what's the bigger one, what's the smaller one.

Graham Hancock 1:14:17 I think the ancients had, uh, or certain peoples amongst the ancients did have a very good idea about our solar system, and about the dimensions of the Earth, uh, and about the other planets, uh, in our solar system. Again, this is something that archeology has dismissed, but I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry.

Joe Rogan 1:14:35 It's not this one, right? Um, no, it's not that one. That's, that's a different one.

Graham Hancock 1:14:39 Is it?

Joe Rogan 1:14:39 It's the... Yeah, that's it. That's it.

Graham Hancock 1:14:41 There we go.

Joe Rogan 1:14:41 There it is.

Graham Hancock 1:14:42 There we go. The sun-

Joe Rogan 1:14:42 So there's the sun, and it's surrounded by the planets that we're aware of.

Graham Hancock 1:14:47 Yeah, it's k- kind of hard to interpret that any other way, isn't it? Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:14:50 I mean, it seems, it seems like that's what it is.

Graham Hancock 1:14:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:54 It seems like the solar system.

Graham Hancock 1:14:55 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:14:55 I mean, even the way the sun is depicted is the way a little kid depicts the sun.

Graham Hancock 1:15:01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and it's also depicted as a star as well as the sun.

Joe Rogan 1:15:05 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:15:05 The circular disc of the sun, and, and the sun is a star. So there's-

Joe Rogan 1:15:08 It's such a strange image.

Graham Hancock 1:15:09 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15:21 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:15:22 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.

Joe Rogan 1:15:30 Mm-hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:15:30 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-

Joe Rogan 1:15:47 Ooh.

Graham Hancock 1:15:47 ... Gobeklitepe is where it is.

Joe Rogan 1:15:48 Is there, um, images of this, uh, explosion in the sky?

Graham Hancock 1:15:53 There's an artist's impression of the ex- ex- explosion in the sky.

Joe Rogan 1:15:56 Right, but do they have e- e- evidence-

Graham Hancock 1:15:57 Ancient images.

Joe Rogan 1:15:58 ... on the ground like you can see-

Graham Hancock 1:15:59 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:15:59 ... with Tunguska-

Graham Hancock 1:16:00 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:16:00 ... where it's all flattened?

Graham Hancock 1:16:01 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.

Joe Rogan 1:16:18 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:16:19 Platinum, iridium, carbon microspherules. All of these impact proxies are found in abundance at Abu Hureyra, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:27 Is there a cleared area that's similar to what looks like in Tunguska where it doesn't-

Graham Hancock 1:16:31 The problem with Abu Hureyra is that it's now underwater.

Joe Rogan 1:16:34 Ah.

Graham Hancock 1:16:35 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.

Joe Rogan 1:16:51 Hmm. So when was this dam? When did this take place?

Graham Hancock 1:16:55 '60s, something like that.

Joe Rogan 1:16:57 Oh, no.

Graham Hancock 1:16:57 Something like that. I think Abu Hureyra has been underwater since, since the '60s or certainly the '70s.

Joe Rogan 1:17:02 Oh.

Graham Hancock 1:17:02 Maybe the '70s.

Joe Rogan 1:17:03 What a bummer.

Graham Hancock 1:17:04 What a bummer.

Joe Rogan 1:17:05 (laughs) Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:17:05 Um, but, but, but, th- i- in this case, thank you archeology for, for, for preserving-

Joe Rogan 1:17:10 Yeah.

Graham Hancock 1:17:10 ... soil and materials from that site-

Joe Rogan 1:17:12 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:17:13 ... uh, which allow this, allow this work to be done. There's no doubt that a cataclysmic event took place there. There's just a whole bunch of new papers published in the last two or three weeks on Abu Hureyra, uh, which are, which are further consolidating this, this evidence that it was subject to a very large airburst.

Joe Rogan 1:17:28 Hmm.

Graham Hancock 1:17:28 And that after that, within the thousand to 2,000 years after that, just as at Gobeklitepe, the local population transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.

Joe Rogan 1:17:39 It's fascinating to me how when you go to these sites and you see these, uh, the, where, where these ancient structures existed and imagine the climate and what a major factor that plays in what human beings do-

Graham Hancock 1:17:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:55 ... and what they're able to do, whether they're able to thrive-

Graham Hancock 1:17:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:17:57 ... because there's a, an abundance of resources. And then it seems those are the places where they create these incredible