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

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

The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who, for over 30 years, has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last Ice Age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed with the 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. 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.

Mm-hmm.

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

It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness, uh, in the story that we are taught about our past, which envisages more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less 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.