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

1. 0:00 – 1:34

   Introduction

   1. GHGraham Hancock0:00

      ... the big question for me in that timeline is, why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago, to start seeing the beginnings of civilization?

   2. LFLex Fridman0:15

      The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who, for over 30 years, has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last Ice Age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed with the archeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archeologist, scholar, I love talking to on the podcast. Extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and respectful in disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.

2. 1:34 – 8:39

   Lost Ice Age civilization

   1. LFLex Fridman1:34

      Let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history, that there was a, an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seeded what people now call the six cradles of civilization: Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Andes, and Mesoamerica. So let's talk about this idea that you have.

   2. GHGraham Hancock1:54

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:54

      Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?

   4. GHGraham Hancock1:57

      It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness, uh, in the story that we are taught about our past, which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less a straightforward evolutionary progress. Uh, we start out as hunter-foragers then we become agriculturalists. The hunter-fother- forager phase could go back hundreds of thousands of years. Uh, I mean, this is where it's also, it's also important to mention that anatomically modern humans, um, were not the only humans. We, we had Neanderthals from, I don't know, 400,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. They were certainly human because anatomically modern humans interbred with them and we carry, we carry Neanderthal genes. There were the Denisovans, maybe 300,000 to perhaps even as recently as 30,000 years ago, and again, interbreeding took place. They're obviously a human species. So, you know, we've got this background of humans who didn't look quite like us, and then we have anatomically modern humans, and I think the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and date to about 310,000 years ago. So the question is, what were our ancestors doing after that? And I think we can include the Neanderthals and the Denisovans in that, in that general picture. And why did it take so long? This is one of the puzzles, one of the questions that bother me. Why did it take so long when we have creatures who are physically identical to us? We, we cannot actually weigh and measure their brains, but from the work that's been done on, on the crania, it looks like they had the same brains that we do with the same, the same wiring. So, so if we've been around, uh, for 300,000 plus years at least and if ultimately in our future, uh, was, uh, the, the, the process to create civilization or civilizations, why didn't it happen sooner? Why did it take so long? Why, why, why was it such a long time? Even the story of, of anatomically modern humans has kept on changing. Um, I, I remember a time when it was said that there hadn't been anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago and then it became 196,000 years ago with the findings in Ethiopia and then 310,000 years ago. Um, there, there's a lot of, a lot of missing pieces in the, in the puzzle there. Um, but the big question for me in that timeline is, why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why, why, why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago, to start seeing the beginnings, what are selected as the beginnings of civilization, uh, in, in places like, like Turkey, for example? And then there's a, a relatively slow process of adopting agriculture and, and by 6,000 years ago, we see ancient Sumer, uh, emerging as a civilization. And w- we're then in the Predynastic period in ancient Egypt as well, 6,000, 6,000 years ago, beginning to see definite signs of what will become the, the dynastic civilization of Egypt about, about 5,000 years ago. And interestingly, round about the same time, you have the Indus Valley civilization popping up out of nowhere, and, and by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization, uh, until the 1920s when, uh, railway workers accidentally stumbled across some, some ruins. I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, uh, and these are extraordinarily beautifully, centrally planned, uh, cities. These, th- clearly, they're the work of a, an already sophisticated, uh, civilization. One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley civilization is that we find a, a steatite seal, uh, of an individual seated in a, a recognizable yoga posture and that seal is 5,000 years old, uh, and the yoga posture is Mulabandhasana which involves-... a real contortion of the ankles and twisting the f- feet back. It's an advanced yoga posture, so there it is 5,000 years ago and that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga take to get to that place when it was already so advanced five, 5,000 years ago? What's the, what's the background to this? China, the Yellow, the Yellow River, uh, civilization, again, it's around about the same period. Five to 6,000 years ago you get these first signs of something happening. So it's very odd that, that all around the world, uh, we have this, this sudden upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a, a natural evolutionary process that would lead to a, to a civilization. Um, and yet certain ideas being, being carried down and manifested and expressed in, in many of these, in many of these different civilizations. I just find that, that whole idea very puzzling and, and very, and very disturbing, uh, especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the earth went through, uh, which was the Younger Dryas event. Uh, it was an extinction level event. Uh, that's when all the great mega fauna of the Ice Age went extinct. It's after that, it's, it's after that event that we start seeing this, what are, what are taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization. We come out of the Upper Paleolithic as it's defined, the old f- end of the old Stone Age and into the Neolithic, and that's when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But, but what happened before that and why did that, why did that suddenly happen then? And I can't help feeling, and I've felt this for a very (laughs) long while, that there are major missing pieces in our story. It's often said that I'm claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age, and I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I am putting forward, uh, to answer some of the questions that I have, uh, about, about pre-history. Um, and, and, um, I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the Younger Dryas event was, uh, a massive, uh, global cataclysm, whatever caused it, uh, and, and, um, it's strange that just after it we start seeing these, these first signs.

3. 8:39 – 20:43

   Göbekli Tepe

   1. GHGraham Hancock8:39

   2. LFLex Fridman8:39

      So the current understanding in mainstream archeology is that after the Younger Dryas is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently from one another.

   3. GHGraham Hancock8:54

      Yeah. Independently and, and, um, by coincidence, and by coincidence those, the, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, China, they all pop up at the, pretty much the same time. Um, that is, that i- that is the mainstream view, yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman9:10

      And they don't just pop up. They kind of build up gradually. First there's some settlements-

   5. GHGraham Hancock9:15

      Oh, definitely. Yes.

   6. LFLex Fridman9:16

      ... and then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the role d- the role of agriculture in that is, uh, also non-obvious, but it's just, there's a first, a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living, then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff.

   7. GHGraham Hancock9:33

      It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Every- everything, everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you're seeing, uh, evolutionary progress, uh, social evolution taking, taking place in those thousands of years before Sumer, uh, e- emerges. But what's happening now, uh, r- really I spent much of the '90s and the late 1980s investigating this issue of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it, but by 2002 when I published a book called Underworld, which was the resul- m- most massive and most heavy book that I've ever written because I was writing very defensively at the time. Um, by the time I finished that book my wife Santa and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world looking for structures underwater often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they'd seen underwater. By the time that book was finished I, I thought, "Actually I've done this story. I've walked the walk. I, I really don't have much more to say about it." And I, I, I turned, uh, in another direction and I, I wrote a book called Supernatural Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, recently retitled, uh, Visionary. And that was about the role of... fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in, in the evolution of human, human culture. And I didn't think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue, but Gobekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me, the more and more discoveries there, the 11,600-year date from Enclosure D which has the two largest megalithic pillars. And I, I reached a point where I, I realized I have to get back in, I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again. And, and Gobekli Tepe was a game changer, but I think it's a game changer for everything because Gobekli Tepe, the, uh, extraordinary nature of it, we're looking at a major megalithic site which is at least 5,500 years older than, say, Ġgantija in Malta which is, was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world. And, uh, this led of course to a huge amount of interest and attention both from, uh, the Turkish government who see the potential, tourism potential of, of having the world's oldest m- megalithic site, and, and from archeologists, and this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region. And what they're finding throughout that whole region around Gobekli Tepe, uh, and going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho, uh, and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus, uh, is what Turkish archeologists are now calling the Taš Tepeler civilization, they're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills civilization. Uh, with, uh-... very definite identifying characteristics, semi-subterranean circular structures, the use of T-shaped, uh, megalithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It's clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process, it was actually in a way the end of this process, it was a, the summation of everything that that Stone Hills civilization had, had achieved. Uh, but what, what is becoming clear is that this is a period between, before the foundation of Göbekli Tepe, as far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Göbekli Tepe, but of course there's a lot of Göbekli Tepe still underground, so we, w- we can't say for sure that that's the oldest, but it's the oldest so far, uh, excavated. What we're, what we're seeing, uh, is that in that whole region around there, there was, something was in motion, and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And, and this is where these two dates are really important, the Younger Dryas, I'll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago. So Göbekli Tepe's construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don't find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas. Um, but the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form, uh, at Göbekli Tepe. Uh, and, and after the construction of Göbekli Tepe, in fact even during the construction of Göbekli Tepe, uh, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted. The, the people who created Göbekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, uh, and then topped off with a hill, which is, which is why Göbekli Tepe is called, um, what it is, Göbekli Tepe means potbellied hill, or the hill of the navel. For a long time, Göbekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.

   8. LFLex Fridman14:29

      Can you say how i- it was discovered? I think, I think this is one of the most fascinating-

   9. GHGraham Hancock14:32

      Well-

   10. LFLex Fridman14:32

       ... things on earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is?

   11. GHGraham Hancock14:35

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman14:35

       And how it was discovered? (laughs)

   13. GHGraham Hancock14:37

       Well, Göb- Göbekli Tepe is, uh, first of all, the, the oldest f- fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn't mean the older ones won't be found, but it is the oldest so far found. Um, the part of the site that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site, we do know, my first visit to Göbekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt who was, wh- who, who died a year later, uh, was very generous to me and showed me around the site f- over a period of three days, and he, he explained to me that they've already used ground penetrating radar on the site and they know that there's much more Göbekli Tepe still underground. Um, so anything is, anything is possible in terms of the, in terms of the dating of Göbekli Tepe. But what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular but not quite circular enclosures which are, which are walled with relatively small stones, and then inside them you have pairs of megalithic pillars. And the, the archetypal part of that site is Enclosure D, uh, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, uh, if I have my, my memory correct. They're, they're substantial, hefty pieces of stone. It isn't, it isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20-foot tall or 20-ton megalith, uh, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. Uh, there's nothing, there's nothing magical or, or really weird about that. Human beings can do that, and always have. Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It's within 200 meters of the, of, of the main enclosure, so that's not a mystery. But the mystery is, the mystery is why suddenly this, this new form of architecture, this massive, massive, um, megalithic pillars appear. And the, the pillars, one, one of the things that interests me about the pillars i- is their alignment, and there is good work that's been done which suggests that Enclosure D, uh, aligns to the rising of the star Sirius, and the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions. It was the work entirely of hunter f- foragers, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, uh, agriculture was being introduced, and, and was, was, was taking place there. Now you asked how Göbekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey of that potbellied hill in the 1960s by, um, some American archaeologists and they were looking, absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic, um, and they had found some Paleolithic flints, upper Paleolithic flints around there, so it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed, sticking out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut, uh, stone, bits of very large and, and very finely cut stone. And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archaeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age, and they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine, uh, r- remains, and they abandoned the site and, and never looked at it further, and it wasn't until the German Archaeological Institute got involved and p- particularly Klaus Schmidt who I think was a genius, had real insight into this, uh, and, and started to dig at Göbekli Tepe that they realized what they'd found, that they'd, that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world. Uh, and they'd found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical tr-... timeline. That's where agriculture, at any rate in, in Europe and Western Asia begins. It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.

   14. LFLex Fridman18:27

       And yet the understanding is, it was created by hunter gatherers.

   15. GHGraham Hancock18:32

       It was created by hunter gatherers, yeah. They were- there, there was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Gobekli Tepe. But by the time Gobekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down, uh, and, and buried, uh, agriculture was all around it, uh, and, and, and this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate, cultivate plants.

   16. LFLex Fridman18:54

       Do we have an under- understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say, a time capsule? So protected by forming a mound around it?

   17. GHGraham Hancock19:03

       Yes. It-

   18. LFLex Fridman19:03

       Is it around that similar time?

   19. GHGraham Hancock19:05

       It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago, to about 8400 BC. So, around 1200 years it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site. And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture... I'm gonna use the word being introduced. Uh, it had- there'd been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there, and to me that's another of the mysteries about Gobekli Tepe. And then with the new work that's being done, we realized that it's part of a much wider phenomenon, uh, which spreads across an enormous distance. Um, and, and, um, the puzzling thing is that after Gobekli Tepe, there almost seems to be a decline. Things, things fall down again, and, and then we enter this long slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, uh, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and, and, and Mesopotamia. But agriculture has taken a firm, a firm root by then. Actually one other thing, I'll just say this in passing. When, when I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archeology is- fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, uh, and that that- the Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture. It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers who, who traveled west. So the no- the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so, um, annoying to archeologists as it

4. 20:43 – 25:43

   Early humans

   1. GHGraham Hancock20:43

      is.

   2. LFLex Fridman20:43

      And perhaps we should also state, if we look at the entirety of history of hominids, humans or hominids have been explorers. I, I didn't even know this. When I was preparing for this-

   3. GHGraham Hancock20:57

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman20:57

      ...looking at Homo erectus-

   5. GHGraham Hancock20:58

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman20:59

      ... 1.9 million years ago-

   7. GHGraham Hancock21:01

      Absolutely.

   8. LFLex Fridman21:01

      ...almost right away they spread out through the whole world.

   9. GHGraham Hancock21:05

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman21:06

       And we homo sapiens evolved from them, and we should also mention since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand there's still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there, like we mentioned in Africa-

   11. GHGraham Hancock21:20

       Mm.

   12. LFLex Fridman21:20

       ...that it's the, you know, I think the current understanding we didn't come from one particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations.

   13. GHGraham Hancock21:28

       Mm-hmm. This is the Out of Africa theory.

   14. LFLex Fridman21:30

       Yes.

   15. GHGraham Hancock21:30

       I think it's more than a theory, it's- it's really strongly evidenced. Why, because we're part of the great ape family and it's- and it's a- an African family.

   16. LFLex Fridman21:39

       Yeah.

   17. GHGraham Hancock21:39

       There's no doubt that- that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa. But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa, uh, by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and- and- and the astonishingly distant travels that they undertook. Yes, I think- I think there is an urge to explore in- in- in all of humanity. I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the- of the next hill. Uh, and I think that goes very deep into human character, and I think it was being manifested in those- those early adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world. And then settling in different parts of the world, uh, I think a lot of- a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not- not only in Africa.

   18. LFLex Fridman22:33

       So I guess the- the general puzzlement that you're filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and, uh, try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop-

   19. GHGraham Hancock22:50

       Yes.

   20. LFLex Fridman22:50

       ...complicated society settlements?

   21. GHGraham Hancock22:51

       That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe- maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archeological record which- which await to be discovered. Um, and of course there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archeology. But the fact that- the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archeology is not in its- on its own enough to suggest that we're missing a chapter in the human story. Uh, the reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap. It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world. Um, and- and uh, they're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another, uh, and that are also distant from one another in time. They don't necessarily occur at the same time. And this is where I think that archeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Uh, because an idea, um, can- can manifest again and again, uh, throughout the human story. So that- so there are particular- there are particular issues, uh, for example the notion of the afterlife destiny of the soul. Uh, what happens to us when we die. Um, and believe me when you reach my age, that's something you do- you do think (laughs) about, what- what- what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm- that- that- that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same- that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all...... decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the, the Path of Souls, the Milky Way is called the Path of Souls, it's very strongly found in the Americas, right? From South America through Mexico, through into North America. But it's also found, uh, in ancient Egypt, uh, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same, the same idea. Uh, and I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel, I feel that what we're looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world. And th- and then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences, uh, in the expression of these ideas.

5. 25:43 – 37:11

   Astronomical symbolism

   1. GHGraham Hancock25:43

      The other thing, very puzzling thing, is, um, the sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes. At least I think that's the best theory to explain them. Um, here, I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend. Giorgio, Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where, where, where you're based, back in the '60s. Um, and Hertha von Deschend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. And they wrote, uh, an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill. Uh, and, and Hamlet's Mill, uh, differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession, and I'll explain what precession is in a moment. Um, generally, it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession. Uh, and the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so. Santillana and von Deschend are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that. And, and they do actually trace it, I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly, to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization. Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this, this mystery in the first place. Okay, now, the precession of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, is, is, uh, results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. Uh, and our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis at roughly 1,000 miles an hour at the equator. Uh, but what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis. And that e- so if you imagine the extended North Pole of the Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star, precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth. Uh, other stars have occupied the pole position. And sometimes the extended North Pole of the Earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred to as the, the path of the sun. The Earth is orbiting the sun, uh, and we're seeing what's behind it, what's, what's in direct line with the sun in our, in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So, at different times of the year, the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Uh, today we live in the age of Pisces, uh, and it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish, uh, as their symbol. Uh, this is another area where I differ from archeology. I think, I think the constellations of the zodiac were reckon- recognized as such much earlier than we suppose. Anyway, to get to the point, uh, the key marker of the year, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was the spring equinox. Uh, this was, the question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What's c- what constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox? Uh, right now, it's Pisces. In another 150 years or so, it'll be Aquarius. We, we do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Uh, back in the time of, um, the late ancient Egyptians, it was Aries, going back to the time of Ramesses or before. Before that, it was Taurus. And so on and so forth. It's backwards through the zodiac, uh, until 12,500 years ago, you come to the age of Leo when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the spring equinox. Now this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly. It un- th- the whole cycle, and it is a cycle, it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years. Put a r- put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years. Uh, that may be a convention. Some scholars would s- would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more. But you're talking fractions. It's, it's in that area, 25,920 years. Um, and, and, uh, to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly, at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime, in, in the period of 72 years, is about the width of your finger. Uh, it's not impossible to notice in a lifetime but it's, but it's difficult. You gotta pass it on. Um, and, and what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santillana and von Deschend call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of precession. And...... selected the key numbers of precession, of which, of which the most important number, the governing number is the number 72. Uh, but, but we also have, uh, numbers related to the number 72. 72 plus 36 is 108, 108 divided by two is 54. Uh, these, these numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators, uh, who, um, were involved in killing the God Osiris in, in ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the, in the Nile. Um, there are 432,000 in the Rig Veda. 432,000 is a multiple of 72, uh, and, and, um, at Angkor in Cambodia, for example, you have, uh, the bridge to Angkor Thom. And on that bridge, you have figures on both sides f- sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent. Uh, that serpent is Vasuki and what they're doing is, they're churning the milky ocean. It's the same metaphor of churning and turning that's defined in the story of Hamlet's mill or Omlodi's mill. Uh, there are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108, 108 is 72 plus 36. It's a precessional number according to the work that Santillana and von Deschen did. And the fascination with these, this number system and its discovery all around the world, uh, is one of the puzzles that, that intrigue me and, and, uh, suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very, very widely around the world.

   2. LFLex Fridman32:37

      So one of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archeology is you take this sort of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously.

   3. GHGraham Hancock32:55

      I do. Uh, as I believe the ancients did.

   4. LFLex Fridman32:57

      I think it's important to sort of, uh, consider what humans would have thought about back then. Now, we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube and whatever.

   5. GHGraham Hancock33:09

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman33:09

      But back then, especially before sort of electricity-

   7. GHGraham Hancock33:14

      Hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman33:14

      ... the stars is like (laughs) -

   9. GHGraham Hancock33:17

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman33:17

       ... the sexiest thing to talk about.

   11. GHGraham Hancock33:18

       There's no light pollution.

   12. LFLex Fridman33:19

       There's no light pollution so there's th- that's, and you're spending s-

   13. GHGraham Hancock33:22

       That's the majesty of the heavens.

   14. LFLex Fridman33:23

       Every single night you're spending looking up at the stars and you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars.

   15. GHGraham Hancock33:33

       Yeah. Yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman33:33

       And sort of the scientists of the day-

   17. GHGraham Hancock33:35

       Yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman33:35

       ... and I'm sure there's going to be these geniuses that emerge-

   19. GHGraham Hancock33:38

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman33:39

       ... that are able to, uh, do two things. One, tell stories about the gods or whatever-

   21. GHGraham Hancock33:45

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LFLex Fridman33:45

       ... based on the stars. And then also as we'll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example.

   23. GHGraham Hancock33:52

       Oh yeah, definitely.

   24. LFLex Fridman33:52

       And s- and so like, it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, the, for religious explorations.

   25. GHGraham Hancock34:07

       It was an ever-present reality.

   26. LFLex Fridman34:08

       Yes.

   27. GHGraham Hancock34:09

       And it was bright and it was brilliant.

   28. LFLex Fridman34:11

       Yeah.

   29. GHGraham Hancock34:11

       Uh, and it was full of lights. Uh, it, it, it, it's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it. It was, it was an overwhelming presence. And that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the, the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it's hard to miss when you pay attention to the sky that the sun over the course of the solar year is month by month rising against the background of different constellations. And then there's a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac. I think it would have been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today, that may well be a Babylonian or Greek, uh, convention, but that the constellations were there, uh, I think was very clear. And that they were special constellations unlike other ones higher up in the sky, uh, which were not on the path of the sun, that, that people paid attention to.

   30. LFLex Fridman35:11

       Well, but detecting the precession of the equinox is hard, because especially they don't have any writing systems, they don't have any mathematical systems, so everything is told through words.
6. 37:11 – 55:31

   Younger Dryas impact hypothesis

   1. GHGraham Hancock37:11

      but I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm within human memory. I mean, we know that, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years. I mean, the best-known one, of course, is the K-Pg event, as it's now called, that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million or, or, or 66 million years ago. But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Um, yeah, the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad, uh, but a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really ticks all the boxes as a, as a, as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water, uh, and I think it's a- an excellent candidate, uh, for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm of which one of, but not the only distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, uh, under water. The fact that this story is found all around the world, uh, suggests to me that the archeological explanation is, look, people suffer local floods all the time. I'm, I mean, as we're talking, there's, there's, there's flooding in Florida, uh, but I, I, I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood. They, they know it's, they know it's local, um, but that's the argument largely of archeology dealing with the flood myths or that some local population experienced a, a nasty local flooding event and they decided to say that it was, that it affected the whole world. I, I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur and when the earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the Ice Age.

   2. LFLex Fridman39:20

      So there is the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period-

   3. GHGraham Hancock39:28

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman39:28

      ... that resulted in such rapid environmental change, so can you explain this hypothesis?

   5. GHGraham Hancock39:32

      Yes. Um, the y- the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, YDIH for short, uh, is, uh, is not a lunatic fringe theory, as its opponents often attempt to write it off. Um, it's the work of more than 60 major scientists, uh, working across many different disciplines, including archeology, uh, and, and including oceanography as well. Um, uh, and, and, uh, they are collectively puzzled by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas, and by the fact that is- it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the earth. Uh, you can see it most clearly at, uh, Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can, you can see, it's about the width of a human hand, uh, and there's a, uh, a draw there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time, and that draw has revealed the sides of the draw and you can, uh, you can see the cross-section, and in the cross-section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the earth, and it contains evidence of wildfires, fires. There's a lot of soot in it. Uh, there are also nanodiamonds in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that's been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade, um, there are carbon microspherules. All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact. I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs, Luis and Walter Alvarez who, who made that incredible discovery, uh, initially their, their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater, and for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater, uh, but when they finally did produce that deeply buried Chicxulub crater, that's when people started to say, "Yeah, they have to be right." But they weren't relying on the crater, they were relying on the impact proxies, and they're the same impact proxies that we find in what's called the Younger Dryas boundary layer all around the world. Um, so, so it's the fact that at the moment when the earth tips into a radical climate shift, it, it, it's been warming up for at least 2,000 years before 12,800 years ago. People at the time must've been feeling a great sense of relief, you know, "We've been living through this really cold time, but it's getting better. Things are getting better." And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12,860 years ago, there's a massive global plunge in global temperatures, and, and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the Ice Age, and, and it, it's almost literally overnight. It's very, very, very rapid. Normally in an epoch when the earth is going into a freeze you would not expect sea levels to rise, but there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago, and then equally dramatically and equally suddenly, the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up and you have a, a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea, uh, called Meltwater Pulse 1B, round about 11,600 years ago. So, so this is, um...This is a period, uh, which is very tightly defined. Uh, it's a period when we know that human populations were, were grievously disturbed. That's when the, the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record, uh, during the Younger Dryas and it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.

   6. LFLex Fridman43:13

      Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? Like, what explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?

   7. GHGraham Hancock43:24

      The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part. Uh, the main theory that's been put forward up to now, and I don't dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was becau- was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream, basically, uh, which is part of the central heating system of our planet so n- no wonder it became c- c- cold. But what's not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean and, and it was s- so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks, and that's where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution, uh, to the problem. Now, the hypothesis of course is broader than that. Uh, amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. Um, they have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact event or events was what we now call the torrid meteor stream, uh, which the earth still passes through twice a year. It's now about 30 million kilometers wide. It takes the earth a couple of days to, to pass through it on its orbit. It passed through it in June and it passes through it at the end of October. The suggestion is that the torrid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago, came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the sun, and went into orbit around the sun, an orbit that crossed the orbit of the earth. Um, however when it was one object, the likelihood of a collision with the earth was extremely small, but as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments, 'cause these are chunks of rock held together by ice, uh, and as they warm up they split and disintegrate and break into pieces. As it passed through that, its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider, and the theory is that 12,800 years ago the earth passed through a particularly dense part of the torrid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts, uh, all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America as far east as Syria. Uh, and that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would have- that would have caused craters although there certainly were some. Uh, we're talking about air bursts. When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter and it's coming in very fast, uh, into the earth's atmosphere, uh, it is very unlikely to reach the earth. It's going to blow up in the sky and the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia which took place on the 30th of June 1908. The Tunguska event was, nobody disputes, it was definitely an air burst of- of- of a cometary fragment. And the date is interesting, uh, because the 30th of June is the height of the beta toroids, it's one of the two times when the earth is going through the torrid meteor stream. Well, luckily that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited, uh, but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed. If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the torrid meteor stream and about the risk of, uh, cosmic impact. So the suggestion is that it wasn't one impact, it wasn't two impacts, it wasn't three impacts, it was- it was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet coupled with- coupled with a number of bigger objects which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap largely. Some of them may also have hit the Northern European ice cap resulting in that sudden otherwise unexplained flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean, um, and- and, uh, caused the cooling that then- that then took place. But this was a disaster for life all over the planet. And- and it's interesting that one of the sites where they find the Younger Dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz, the carbon microspherules, the nanodiamonds, the trinitite and so on and so forth. All, um, o- of- of those impact proxies are found at Abu Hureyra. That was, uh, a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was reinhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was- it was completely obliterated at that time. Uh, and it- it- it's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed, uh, by what they saw happening by the- the- these massive explosions in the sky and the, uh, the obliteration, uh, of- of Abu Hureyra. Now this is a theory, the Younger Dryas impact, it's a hypothesis actually, it's not even a theory. A theory is I think considered a higher level than a hypothesis. That's why it's the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, and of course it has many opponents and there are many who disagree with it, uh, and there- there- there have been a series of- of-... peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. One, I think, was in 2011. It was called a, A Requiem for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. And there's one just been published a few months ago or a year ago c- you know, called a, A Complete, uh, Refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, something, something like that. Some lengthy title. Um, th- so, so it's, it's a hypothesis that has its opponents. And even within, within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view. Uh, Robert Schoch from Boston University, uh, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall, um, he doesn't go for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. He thi- he, he fully accepts that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm, uh, and that the extinctions took place. But he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst. So there, there... what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, um, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis to be the most persuasive, uh, which most effectively explains all the evidence.

   8. LFLex Fridman50:05

      How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of, um, the Ice Age advanced civilizations? So is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could've, um, erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?

   9. GHGraham Hancock50:21

      In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying. It's the Younger Dryas that's central to what I'm saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger. Something, something caused it. Uh, I think the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the notion that, that we're looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there and we still pass through it twice a year, uh, is, is the best explanation. But I don't mind other explanations. I... it's good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet. And that word advanced civilization, this is another word that, um, uh, that is easily misunderstood. And I've tried to make clear many, many times that when we, when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved certain things. So amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world and our... a category of ancient maps called portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that, uh, entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople. The portolanos suddenly start to appear, and they're extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas. For example, on these portolano style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the map makers state that they based their maps on multiple older source maps which have not survived. These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes. Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison's chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea. So you could have, uh, the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time on... and then you could work out your longitude. Um, there might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is these portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them showed the world to my eye as it looked during the Ice Age. They show a much, a much extended Indonesia, uh, and Malaysian peninsula, and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one land mass. And that was the case during the Ice Age. That was the, that was the Sunda Shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained, in my view, by archeology, which says, "Oh, those map makers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it, so they put, uh, uh, a fictional land mass there." Um, I, I, I don't think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world, uh, during the last Ice Age, but that doesn't mean that they had our kind of tech. Uh, it means that they were following that exploration instinct, that they knew how to navigate. They'd been watching the stars for thousands of years before. They knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. Uh, and they explored the world and they mapped the world. Those maps, very, very... were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then, they were being copied and recopied. We don't know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria except that it was destroyed. Uh, I th- I suggest it's likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire. I suggest it's likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, uh, and, uh, that's where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.

   10. LFLex Fridman54:23

       So from this perspective, when, uh, we talk about advanced Ice Age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of they're scholars of the stars and they're expert seafaring navigators.

   11. GHGraham Hancock54:38

       Yes. That's about as far as I would take it. And when I say that it, uh... as I have said on a number of occasions that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I'm referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude.

   12. LFLex Fridman54:51

       Yeah.

   13. GHGraham Hancock54:51

       I'm not saying that they were building steam engines. Um, I don't see, I don't see any evidence for that.

   14. LFLex Fridman54:57

       And perhaps some...... building tricks and skills of how to, uh-

   15. GHGraham Hancock55:02

       Well, def- well, definitely. And this, again, is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in, in, in Egypt with the three great pyramids and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to, uh, on the Giza Plateau, and the Great Sphinx itself. This is, uh, an area of particular importance in understanding this issue.

7. 55:31 – 1:16:04

   The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx of Giza

   1. GHGraham Hancock55:31

   2. LFLex Fridman55:31

      Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids-

   3. GHGraham Hancock55:34

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman55:34

      ... and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them?

   5. GHGraham Hancock55:37

      Well, first of all, the astronomy, uh, and here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that idea from a, from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubicz who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx. John West picked that up and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself, he spent most of his life in Egypt and he, he was hugely versed in ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, um, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right, maybe there's- there was some sign of some sort of flooding here. And that's when he brought Robert Schoch, second person I'd- I'd like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Schoch to Giza, and Schoch was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the rire- the ire of Egyptologists and say, "Well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least 1,000 years of heavy rainfall." And as Schoch's calculations have continued as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery, he's continuously pushed that back, and he's now again looking at the date of around 12,000, 12 and a half thousand years ago during the Younger Dryas for the creation of the Great Sphinx. And then, of course, this is the period of the- o- o- of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara was a completely different place during the Ice Age, there were rivers in it, there were lakes in it, it was fertile, it was possibly densely, densely populated and there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person- not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx. And the next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is, is Robert Bauval. Uh, Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together. Unfortunately Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He's- he's, um, uh, got a very bad chest infection, and I- I think also that- that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. Uh, but Robert is the genius, and it does take a genius sometime to make these connections 'cause nobody noticed it before, that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's Belt. And skeptics will say, "Well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want." But Orion actually isn't any old constellation, Orion was the god Osiris, uh, in the sky. Uh, he was- the ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu, and they recognized it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. So what's been copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity, it's not just a random constellation. Um, and then when we take precession into account you find something else very intriguing happening. First of all, uh, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today, and- and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago, uh, it's- it's not precisely related to how Orion's Belt looked at that time. There's- there's a bit of a- a twist, is they're not- they're not quite right, but as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back, and back, and back, and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12 and a half thousand years ago in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly, they match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground. And that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx, an equinoctial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox... Anybody can test this for themselves, just- just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. Um, but the question is what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12 and a half thousand years ago it was the constellation of Leo, and actually the constellation of Leo has a very sphinx-like look. And I- I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely, uh, and that it- over the thousands of years it became damaged, it became eroded, particularly the part of it that- that sticks out, the head, uh, there were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand but still the head stuck out. Um, by the time you come to- to the fourth dynasty when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the fourth dynasty the head of the- the- the lion, original lion head would have been a complete mess, and we suggest that it was then recarved into a pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it was the Pharaoh Khafre, uh, but there's no real strong resemblance, but it's definitely wearing the nemes headdress of- of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Uh, and we think that that's a result of a recarving of what was originally not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument. It wouldn't make sense if you create an equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre 4,500 years ago and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker, I mean it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, uh, you would be better-... you'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull because that was the Age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion? Uh, and, and again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies and, and, and putting on the ground as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau, it's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute, but the fact that the principal monuments of the Giza Plateau, the three great pyramids and the Great Sphinx all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, uh, to me is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually if you look at computer software at the sky at that time, you'll see, you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and, and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the River Nile. I, I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen, uh, as the site for this, for this very special place. So the point I want to make is that, that an astronomical, um, design on the ground which memorializes a very ancient date does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago. If, if, if from the ancient Egyptian point of view you're there 4,500 years ago, uh, and there's a time 8,000 years before that which is very, very, very important to you, you could mem- you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we're looking at except for one thing, and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx. Uh, and we're pretty sure that the Sphinx at least does date back to 12 and a half thousand years ago. Uh, and with it, the megalithic temples, uh, the so-called Valley Temple, uh, which stands, uh, just, just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx temple which stands directly in front of the Sphinx. The Sphinx temple has largely been destroyed, but the Valley Temple attributed to Khafre on no good grounds whatsoever, um, is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each. Um, and yet it has been remodeled, refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the, the core limestone blocks. And those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the glanite- granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there. So I think Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the great pyramids. They were closely involved in the construction of the great pyramids as we see them today. But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older and that the, when we look at the three great pyramids, we're looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill, uh, and that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound, uh, to the, to the, to the ancient Egyptians.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:04:44

      So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptian to celebrate further a- an already holy place.

   7. GHGraham Hancock1:04:55

      Yeah. And there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today, um, but the, the, the bases, the base of those pyramids, uh, was, was already in place at that time.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:05:07

      So what's the case, what's the evidence that the Egyptologists use to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?

   9. GHGraham Hancock1:05:16

      Well, um, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This, this is another problem that I have with (laughs) the whole thing, um, is the, the, the story of pyramid building. When did it, when did it really begin? And the timeline that we get from Egyptology is the, the first pyramid is the pyramid of the Pharaoh Djoser, uh, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, um, about a hundred years or so before the Giza pyramids are built. Uh, and then we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty, uh, of, of true pyramids. Uh, we have three of them attributed to a single pharaoh, Sneferu, who built supposedly the pyramid at Mai Dum and the two pyramids at Dahshur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid. Uh, and then within that same 100-year span, uh, we have the Giza pyramids being built. This is according to the orthodox chronology. And then suddenly once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt. Uh, and the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're, they're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs, uh, and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place, whereas the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. Uh, what they do, what we do have is one piece of graffiti w- about which there is some controversy. Uh, basic statistics, it, it's a six million ton-... structure. Um, e- each side is about 750 feet long.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:07:04

       Yeah.

   11. GHGraham Hancock1:07:04

       Um, it's aligned almost perfectly to true north, south, east, and west, uh, within three-sixtieths of a single degree. Th- sixtieths because degrees are divided into 60s. Um, and- and- um, uh, it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing, uh, plus its very complicated internal passageways, uh, that- that- that- that are involved in it, you... You know, in the ninth century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing tone- stones in place, but there were, there was an Arab- uh, an Arab caliph, Caliph Al-Ma'mun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the north face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:07:49

       Mm-hmm.

   13. GHGraham Hancock1:07:49

       He figured if there's an entrance to this thing, it's going to be in the north face somewhere. So he put together a team of workers, and they went in with sledgehammers, and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance, and they cut their way into the Great Pyramid, uh, for a distance of maybe 100 feet, and then the hammering that they did dislodged something. They heard a little bit further away something big falling, and they realized there was a cavity there, and they sa- started heading in that direction, and then they joined the internal passageway of the sys- uh, of- of the Great Pyramid, the descending and the ascending corridors that go up. When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal passageways in the- in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the- in- in the creation of the Great Pyramid. Um, if you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of, uh, the, uh, so-called Ascending Corridor, and it's above the so-called Queen's Chamber, you go up the Grand Gallery, you're eventually going to come to what is known as the King's Chamber, in which there is a sarcophagus, and that sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway. It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus, uh, already in place. Above the King's Chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. Uh, the theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the King's Chamber of the weight of the monument, but I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down where more weight was involved, you have the Queen's Chamber, and there are no such relieving chambers above that. In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vyse, who- who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place, allegedly found, well, he claims he found the graffiti, uh, uh, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang naming the Pharaoh Khufu, and it's true. I've been in that chamber, and there is the cartouche of Khufu there, uh, quite- quite recognizable, but the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the Old Kingdom, uh, or whether Howard Vyse, uh, actually put it there himself, uh, because he was in desperate need of money at the time. Um, I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that- that, uh, Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu. Um, another is what is called the Wadi el-Jarf papyri, uh, where, uh, on the Red Sea, uh, a- a diary, the diary of an individual called Merer was found, and he talks about bringing, um, highly polished limestone, uh, to the Great Pyramid, and it's clear that what he's talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He's not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid. He's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason why the- the- the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. Um, but I think, I think that we're- we're- uh, Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure, and I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is, uh, 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You gotta go down a 26-degree sloping corridor, uh, until, uh, uh, a distance of about 300 feet. It's 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you're gonna walk a- a distance of about- not walk, you're gonna ape walk. You're gonna- you're almost gonna have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. Uh, if you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because they're only three feet five inches high. Uh, you get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. Um, the theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu, but after cutting out that 300-foot-long, 26-degree sloping, um, passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there, and they built what's now known as the Queen's Chamber as his burial chamber, but then they decided that wouldn't do either, so they then built the King's Chamber, and that's where the Pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Caliph Mamun didn't find anything in the Great Pyramid at all.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:12:31

       So your idea is that, uh, the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier.

   15. GHGraham Hancock1:12:39

       Yes.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:12:40

       And why that's important is i- in that case it would be evidence of some transfer of technology-

   17. GHGraham Hancock1:12:47

       Yes.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:12:47

       ... from a much older civilization.

   19. GHGraham Hancock1:12:50

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:12:50

       The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, most of that civilization was, uh, either destroyed or damaged, and they desperately scattered across the w- the globe.

   21. GHGraham Hancock1:13:01

       Seeking refuge.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:13:02

       Seeking refuge and telling stories of, um-... maybe, one, the importance of the stars.

   23. GHGraham Hancock1:13:08

       Mm-hmm.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:13:09

       Their knowledge about the stars-

   25. GHGraham Hancock1:13:11

       Yeah.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:13:11

       ... and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.

   27. GHGraham Hancock1:13:15

       Mm-hmm. That's, that's, that's roughly the idea. Uh, so it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians, uh, have an a- a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is "the first time". It means "the first time". This is when the gods walked the earth. Uh, this is when, uh, seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt, uh, and that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists in... By the ancient Egyptians themselves, there are king lists that go wa- go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists. But nevertheless, it's interesting that there's that, that reference to, to remote time. Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies. Uh, the Followers of Horus are one of those specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time, uh, into later periods. Uh, The Souls of Pe and Nekhen are another one of these, um, mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And, and what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Younger Dryas cataclysm who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that, that they are referred to in the The Edfu Building Texts as Seven Sages because that repeats again and again. It, it's, it's also in Mesopotamia, uh, it's Seven Sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and, and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy. It's found, it's found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter-foragers who lived at Giza at that time, and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter-foragers. But it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time, and that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years, and finally it bursts into full form, uh, in the fourth dynasty in, in ancient Egypt. And, and, you know, the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years, uh, shouldn't be absurd. Uh, we know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000, 2000 BC, and, and knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can... If you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve

8. 1:16:04 – 1:25:25

   Sahara Desert and the Amazon rainforest

   1. GHGraham Hancock1:16:04

      it for eight.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:16:05

      Now, of course, the error bars on this are quite large, but if, uh, an advanced ice age civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed? And, uh, how big do you think it might have been?

   3. GHGraham Hancock1:16:19

      Well, this is where, where I'm often accused of presenting a god of the gaps argument, that I think there was a lost civilization because there's lots of the earth that archeologists have never looked at. Of course I'm not thinking that. Um, these are very special gaps that I'm interested in, uh, and I'm interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before. All right, so it's not just because there are gaps in the archeological record. Um, it's, it's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the Ice Age, and they specifically include the Sahara Desert, uh, which was not a desert during the Ice Age, and, and, and went through this warm, wet period when it was very, very fertile. Uh, certainly some archeology has been done in the Sahara, but it's fractional. It's, it's, it's tiny, and I think if we want to get into the origins, true origins of ancient Egyptian civilization, of the peoples of ancient Egypt, we'd need to be looking in the Sahara, uh, for that. Um, and, and, um, uh, the Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about nine million square kilometers. The Amazon that's left under dense conop- canopy rainforest is about five million square kilometers, m- maybe closer to six. Um, and then, uh, you have the continental shelves, uh, that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age. Now, it's, it's well-established that sea level rose by 400 feet, but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight. Uh, it, it came in dribs and drabs. There were... There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more, much more slowly. So that 400-foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years, but there are episodes within it, like meltwater pulse 1B, like mel- well, meltwater pulse 1A, uh, when the flooding was, was really immense.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:18:12

      How big do you think it might have been? And do you think it was across the... spread across the globe? So if there were expert navigators, uh, do you think they spread across the globe?

   5. GHGraham Hancock1:18:23

      Well, well, the reason I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based. All I'm... All I'm seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that, that, that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. Uh, and I'm not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe, because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the Ice Age. I mean, nobody smart would, would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and, and welcoming to human beings during the Ice Age, and that, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater, uh, of course, it includes the Sahara Desert, and of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well. All of these places, I think, are candidates, uh, for...... quote unquote "my lost civilization." Um, and because I think largely from those ancient maps that it was a navigating, seafaring civilization, uh, I suspect that it wasn't only in one place. Uh, it was probably in a number of places. And then I- I could only speculate. Uh, maybe- maybe there was, um, there was a cultural value where it was felt- it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter-foragers at that time. Uh, maybe it was felt that- that they should keep their distance from them. Just- just as even today, uh, there is a feeling that we shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Uh, although in- interestingly, some of those- some of those tribes are now using cell phones.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:20:04

      (laughs) Yeah.

   7. GHGraham Hancock1:20:05

      Um, that possibility may have been there in- in the past, and only when we come to a- to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have outreach and actually to take refuge amongst those hunter-forager populations. That is the hypothesis that I'm putting forward. I'm not claiming that it's a fact, but for me it helps to explain the evidence.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:20:24

      So that speaks to one of the challenges that archeologists provide to this idea, is that there is a lot of evidence-

   9. GHGraham Hancock1:20:30

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:20:31

       ... of humans in the Ice Age, and they appear to be all hunter-gatherers.

   11. GHGraham Hancock1:20:36

       Mm-hmm.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:20:37

       But like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been, um, studied by archeologists.

   13. GHGraham Hancock1:20:46

       That's right, very tiny percent, and even a- a tiny percent of every archeological site has been studied by archeologists too. Typically, 1 to 5% of any archeological site is excavated.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:20:56

       I mean, that's why, uh, Gobekli Tepe fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing as a time capsule. You know, it's almost certain that there is places on Earth we haven't discovered, that once we do, uh, even if it's after the Ice Age, will change our view of human history.

   15. GHGraham Hancock1:21:14

       Yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:21:15

       Uh, do you think there is going to be a place... Like, what- what- what would be your dream thing to discover, like Gobekli Tepe, that says a definitive, like, perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history?

   17. GHGraham Hancock1:21:29

       Some kind of archive, some kind of hall of records. There's, uh, both mystical associations with the hall of records at Giza from people like the Edgar Cayce Organization. There's also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed, uh, beneath the Sphinx. Um, this is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt. It's- it's quite present in ancient Egypt. Uh, so far, as far as I know, nobody has, um, dug down beneath the Sphinx. And of course, there's very good reasons for that. You don't want to damage the- the- the place too much. But I, uh... Let's call it the Hall of Records. I- I'd- I'd love to find that. Uh, but I think in a way that's what Gobekli Tepe is. Gobekli Tepe is a hall of records. You know, it's interesting that- that just as I- I've tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly, that the three great pyramids of Giza match Orion's Belt in 10,500 BC just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago or so. Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe, uh, contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram. Martin Sweatman of Edinburgh University has- is- is brought forward the best work in this field, but it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Birley who noticed that one of the figures on Pillar 43 is a scorpion, uh, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today, um, and that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings which is in a posture very similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius, and on that outstretched wing, uh, is a- a circular object. And the suggestion is that it's marking the time when the sun was at the center of the Dark Rift in the Milky Way, uh, at the summer solstice, uh, 12 and a half thousand years ago. That's- that's what it's marking. Uh, and- and, um, it's interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar 40... Of course it's controversial. Martin Sweatman's ideas are (laughs) by no means accepted by- by archeology, but he's done very, very thorough detailed statistical work on this, and I'm personally convinced. So we have a- a time capsule at Gobekli Tepe which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before Gobekli Tepe was built, uh, if that dating of 11,600 years ago pro- proves to be absolutely the oldest date, uh, as it is at- as it is at present. The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the impact event. And then Giza does the same thing, but in much larger scale. It- it- it draws our... It uses massive megalithic architecture which is very difficult to destroy and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture which is sufficiently literate in astronomy will be able to decode. We don't have to have a script that we can't read, like we do with the Indus Valley civilization or with the Easter Island script. We don't have to have a script that can't be interpreted. If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date. The Hoover Dam has a star map built into it, um, and that star map is, uh, is- is part of a- a- a- an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the- of the Hoover Dam, and what it does is it freezes the sky above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion. And Oscar Hanson, the artist who created that, uh, piece, uh, said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture would be able to know the time of the dam's construction. So you can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize, uh, a particular date.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:25:22

       Quick pause. Bathroom break?

   19. GHGraham Hancock1:25:24

       Sounds good.

9. 1:25:25 – 1:49:31

   Response to critics

   1. LFLex Fridman1:25:25

      So to me, the story that w- we've been talking about, it is both exciting if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct-

   2. GHGraham Hancock1:25:36

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:25:36

      ... and the one you're constructing is correct.

   4. GHGraham Hancock1:25:39

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:25:39

      Both are super interesting because the mainstream archeology perspective means that there is something about the human mind from which the pyramids, the- these ideas spring naturally.

   6. GHGraham Hancock1:25:51

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:25:51

      You place humans anywhere, you place them on Mars, it's gonna come out that way.

   8. GHGraham Hancock1:25:55

      Yeah.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:25:55

      So that's an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve out of Africa with homo sapiens, how they think about the world.

   10. GHGraham Hancock1:26:05

       Yeah. Yeah.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:26:05

       That's super interesting. And then, uh, if there's an ancient civilization, uh, advanced civilization that explains why, uh, there's so many similar types of ideas that spread, that means that there's so much undiscovered-

   12. GHGraham Hancock1:26:19

       Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:26:19

       ... still-

   14. GHGraham Hancock1:26:20

       Yeah.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:26:20

       ... about the- the sort of the spring of these ideas of civilization that come. So, to me, they're both fascinating, so I don't know why there's so much sort of infighting but-

   16. GHGraham Hancock1:26:29

       I think it's partly territorial. I think that- I think that, um... I don't- I can't- can't speak of all archeologists, but- but some archeologists feel very ter- very territorial about their profession, uh, and they do not feel happy about outsiders, uh, entering their realm, uh, especially if those outsiders have a large platform. Um, and that's w- I've found that the attacks on me by archeologists have increased step by step with the increase of my exposure. Uh, I wasn't very interesting to them when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called The Sign and the Seal. Uh, but when Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995 and became a- a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention, and- and, uh, appear to have been regarded as a- as a threat to them, and I- I ... and that is the case today. That is why, uh, Ancient Apocalypse season one was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix, uh, it's why the Society for American Archeology wrote an open letter to Netflix, uh, asking Netflix to reclassify the series as science fiction, it's why they accused the s- they (laughs) accused the series of antisemitism, uh, misogyny, uh, white supremacism, uh, and a whole, I don't know, a whole bunch of other- other things like that, it has nothing to do with anything that's- that's- that's- that's in the series. It was- it was- it- it was like, "We must shut this down! This is so dangerous to us!" It is certainly not a danger to... there are many more dangerous things (laughs) in the world than a- than a television series, um, going- going on right now but- but maybe it was seen as a danger to archeology, that this non-archeologist was in archeological terrain and being, uh, viewed and seen by large, and read by large numbers of people. Maybe- maybe that was part of the problem, and- and human nature being what it is, I noticed that, uh, two of my principal cl- uh, critics, uh, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas and Flint Dibble who's now teaching at the University of Cardiff in- in- Wales in- in the UK, uh, are both people who like to have media exposure, um, and, uh, John Hoopes has just recently started his, uh, YouTube channel, Flint Dibble has had one for- for quite a while, um, v- pretty small number of followers. I think that they- they- they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention, and that it's not right that I am, and- and that the best way to stop that is to stop me, uh, to shut me down, to get me canceled, and basically requiring Netflix to re- relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest to Netflix. Uh, that would... if that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would have effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series, it would no longer have been ranked under- under documentary, so it was a deliberate attempt to shut me down and- and I see that going on again and again and it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary. I've become very defensive towards archeology. I- I- I hit back w- after 30 years of these attacks on my work. Uh, I'm tired of it and- and I'm- I- I do defend myself and sometimes I'm perhaps over vigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archeology in the first season, uh, of Ancient Apocalypse, maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder and I've tried to reflect that in the second season, uh, and- and- and to bring also many more indigenous, uh, voices into the second season as well as the voices of many more archeologists.

Episode duration: 2:33:01