Human History is Stranger than You Think - Graham Hancock

yesterday was the anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America how fitting I guess it is but of course he didn't Discover it um in fact uh the Americas may have been discovered as early as 130,000 years ago uh which makes 1492 ad pale insignificance uh of course this is a matter that's disputed by archae olist nevertheless there's a highly professional team from the San Diego Natural History Museum uh who've excavated what is called the serti Mastadon site just south of San Diego um and I've been there into the museum and talked to the the leading expert Tom Demay and what they found was Mastadon bones that had been crushed systematically and in an organized way using some kind of stone tool to extract the marrow uh and the only interpretation they're able to put upon this is that this was human beings whether it was other kinds of human species like Dennis sovans perhaps even neanderthals or whether it was anatomically modern humans all of us were around 130,000 years ago but it's human behavior that we're looking at the systematic killing of an animal and then the fracturing of its bones to extract the the marrow now of course this is regarded as some kind of terrible heresy by archaeologists who've been wedded to the idea of a very recent settlement of the Americas for for a very very very long time um but gradually reluctantly Kicking and Screaming spitting Nails as they go along archaeologists have begun to accept that the peopling of the Americas uh happened a lot earlier than they had than they had thought and presently the kind of date that is being considered uh accepted in fact by by the majority of archaeologist is around 23,000 24,000 years ago that's White Sands New Mexico and the human Footprints there which we which we feature in uh episode one of uh season 2 of ancient apocalypse but uh there's a recognition that it could be older than that could be 30,000 years old and then there's sites in South America which may be even older 36,000 40,000 50,000 years old uh so the whole issue is very much up for grabs but the one guy who was really late to the party was Columbus is the Americas often overlooked when it comes to the history of human civilization yes because because there's been this this Prejudice that that uh the Americas could have had nothing to do with the origins of civilization because human beings supposedly weren't in America until it it was called the Clovis first model it was held until really about 10 years ago that that no humans had been in the Americas before 13,000 years ago uh so you can see that this routy masteron site multiplies that by 10 to to 130,000 years ago but but there's gradually been an acceptance of a of of an an earlier settlement than that and they're still fighting over the serti Mastadon site whether to accept that or not there's been a back and forth of papers in uh nature uh a reasonably respectful discussion going on between archaeologists who disagree over this but yes the the that model of a very late settlement of the Americans I mean the view is that anatomically modern humans came into Europe about 60,000 years ago maybe maybe 50,000 years ago uh we have anatomically modern humans in Australia between 50 and 60,000 years ago as well uh and of course anatomically modern humans were in Africa going back 300,000 years the the um the earliest known uh anatomically modern human remains are from Jebel Hood in Morocco and they date to 310,000 years ago uh and they're uh identical to pretty much identical to to to modern humans today and we can assume that their brains were pretty much identical as well it may be that earlier examples of anatomically modern humans will be found this is why one of my pet sayings is stuff just keeps on getting older because it's not that long ago when when uh the view was I mean back in the '90s when when the view was that there were no anatomically modern humans before 50,000 years ago and then new discoveries kept pushing that back and then it switched to about 110,000 years ago with a discovery in Ethiopia and now more than 300,000 years ago so who knows how far that timeline will go back um but but um the the the the general view has been we will not look for the origins of civilization in the Americas because they were recently settled uh and these new discoveries are have to change that picture Archaeology is very slow to change its paradigms but but this is one that is going to need to be changed and the result is that the Americans have not been seriously studied for the specific issue of the origins of civilization that thing that we call civilization what was or is the established history what what was the story that's been told by archaeologists up to now about how the Americans was settled when what mode Etc right well the the the story that stuck for a very long time like 30 or more years um was the notion that a people who archaeologists call the Clovis culture uh entered North America across the bearing land bridge we call it the bearing Straits today but during the Ice Age and 13,400 years ago was during the Ice Age sea level was much lower and it was possible to Cross by land from Siberia um into Alaska and thus to enter the Americans without making a a sea voyage and part of the Prejudice that archaeologists did have against our ancestors is they didn't think they were capable of making sea voyages uh and there for this seemed like the most likely way that that they came into the Americans and that stuck for a very long time and that was called the the Clover's first hypothesis and it became the subject if I can just complete it became the subject of a bitter battle amongst archaeologists because there was a a group of archaist very powerful very influential very widely published who clung on to this Clovis first doctrine that there was no culture here before the Clovis culture for a very long time and anybody who brought new evidence to the table suggesting an older human presence in the Americans were running the risk of having their careers destroyed and and this happened in several the case of several individuals were were running the risk of being of being humiliated of having funding withdrawn from their research and so on and so forth so that that Doctrine the Clovis first Doctrine stuck until the evidence became utterly overwhelming for example Tom D finally managed to to demonstrate even to the most skeptical of his colleagues that Monte Verde in South America uh had uh dat at least 14,000 years ago well before Clovis and maybe 15 and more thousand years ago um and and Jack sank Mar's this classic example brilliant man excavated Bluefish caves in the Yukon uh back in the 1970s uh and found evidence that humans had been there 24,000 years ago and he received the full machine gun fire of the entire archaeological profession and they literally destroyed his career but back in7 in 2017 he was finally proved to be right he was absolutely 100% right humans were in the Ukon is he still around he is still around but but but very very old now and retired and and and broken by by what happened to him it's interesting you talk about coming over the bearing landbridge into North the northest of North America yeah and then trickling down from there trickling down from there but if if you were to suggest that that happens around about 13,000 years ago let's say that the um markings that were in South America that you just mentioned were found shortly after that that is a long way it's a long journey to travel if you're starting at the top and coming down you would presume that the dispersement would be more centered at the top as opposed to at the bottom yes you would and and and archaeologists are are beginning now to open up to the idea that that our ancestors were seaf farers I mean they have to be open to that idea because even at the peak of the Ice Age when sea level was at its lowest it was not possible uh to get to Australia without a sea Voyage um you just couldn't do it and and particularly when you're settling a new land you can't just go by accident with two or three people you have to go with a substantial group who bring the means of survival with them at that point otherwise they'll become extinct very very rapidly and Australia was systematically settled about 50,000 maybe as much as 60,000 years ago and undoubtedly Bo boat Journeys were involved and and the same goes for Cyprus uh of course Cyprus is Island today but it was an island during the Ice Age too it's surrounded by colossal deeps at that end of the Mediterranean and it was never connected to the land and yet Cyprus was settled around 14,000 years ago and the evidence is it was a highly organized project uh which involved uh sophisticated shipping and large numbers of people carrying animals with them who who settled in Cyprus so there shouldn't be an argument that our ancestors could could you know could use ships and it's beginning to happen now now that Clovis first has finally died the death it long ago deserved archaeologists are beginning to accept that that maybe human beings did use ships to come to the Americans but they don't like the idea of them doing something like crossing the whole Pacific Ocean directly they prefer the idea that they kind of Island hopped from Siberia down the coast of Alaska and then into North America and finally into South America but this um raises one highly significant problem which is first of all that the South American sites by and large are older than the nor American sites and secondly and again we we feature this in season 2 of ancient apocalypse there's intriguing DNA evidence which which connects the peoples of um melanesia New Guinea and Australian Aborigines uh and certain peoples who are indigenous in Taiwan as well which connects them directly with three tribes uh in the Amazon rainforest in the west of the Amazon rainforest and that particular genetic IC signal is not found anywhere in North America at all and it should be if they got there by a land route coming through North America it's only found in South America and and the most parsimonious way to explain it even leading geneticists admit this although they know that it's not an idea that archaeologists are going to accept the easiest way to explain it is that there was a direct crossing of the Pacific Ocean by sea and since those those remains that have been found are already very old more than 10,000 years old uh we're we're looking at a sea Crossing that could have happened thousands of years before that it's just an accident of discovery that complete skeletal remains were found there are 10,000 years old which have this DNA signal which is still present in the modern populations pretty big ocean on either side of the Americas big ocean on either side if you're going to sail it it's not I mean Cyprus it's deep whatever in the Mediterranean but it's not a Pacific or an Atlantic Crossing you're talk in the case of Cyprus and Australia at the peak of the Ice Age a large part of the the Indonesian archipelago was all joined into a land mass called Sunda uh and that went down as far as timour and and um it was it was still necessary to have a crossing of open ocean of about 90 kilometers to get to New Guinea and which was then joined to Australia it was paleo continent it was about 90 kilm and in the case of Cyprus it was about 50 or 60 kilm but the notion of human beings actually crossing the Atlantic o the Pacific Ocean uh Crossing thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean more than 10,000 years ago is is still a very tough one for archaeologists to accept but at the same time they can't deny the genetic evidence and they must look for some explanation and there's been all kinds of of um hysterical wriggles to try to to try to explain that anomaly I still think the simplest explanation is the best you think Pacific not Atlantic Crossing well this was definitely a Pacific Crossing because the connection is between peoples who live on the east side of the Asian land mass down into Australia and people's on the west side of the South American land mass so that's just for the genetic component though there's other uh people that were there there's more evidence that's there how did those people get there earlier than well that's that's an unanswered question yes um that's a that's a completely unanswered question there there there are a number of sites all of which are strongly disputed uh in in South America which are which are much much older and how did they get there we we we don't know the what has to what has to be seriously questioned is the notion that the entry was only through North America and that they kind only 13,000 years ago or even 23,000 years ago and that they had to find their way through North America down to South America and the reason that South America is not being considered as the possible first place of human habitation in the Americas is precisely because of that prejudice that of course our ancestors couldn't have sailed the entire Pacific Ocean what's interesting about the Amazon from uh everything is interesting about the Amazon um I I love the Amazon it's it's a God or I would prefer to say a goddess uh the Amazon is a a force it's an amazing and extraordinary thing it's very tough uh the Heat and the humidity are intense the insects the snakes uh the creatures that will eat you up the piranhas in the river uh it sounds pretty inhospitable as a place that you're going to at the same time it's a it's a garden in which humans can flourish and which humans did flourish so what's interesting about the Amazon first and foremost this is one of those areas of the world that is massively under researched by archaeology and I don't say that that's an act of irresponsibility on the part of archaeology that's because it's incredibly expensive to go and search in the Amazon and when you are of the opinion that you're not going to find much there then then uh undertaking that research has never seemed worthwhile but new information keeps on coming in which is which is changing that I mean statistically we we're looking about 5 to six million square kilometers that are still under dense canopy rainforest and uh as a and again this is this is an issue that we've gone into in season 2 of ancient apocalypse because I think everybody knows that the Amazon is under attack at the moment that large parts of the Amazon are being cut down uh and turned into soyer Bean farms and cattle ranches and the soyer beans are primarily to feed the cattle um as a result of these clearances uh strange things have begun to emerge into Plain Sight uh and these include gigantic perfectly geometrical Earthworks now if we talk about the Earthworks in the UK when when I mean everybody's heard of Stonehenge or or or or Avery a henge actually is an earthwork it's the it's the ditch that surrounds the Stone Circle it's not particularly prominent in the case of Stonehenge but it's massively prominent in the case of a aury a big deep ditch with an embankment on on either side these these Earthworks in the Amazon they don't have the standing stones in the middle of them because there is no stone in that part of the Amazon but they do have the these huge Earthworks which can take very intriguing geometrical forms for example a perfect square with a perfect circle inside it but on a scale of hundreds of meters uh rectangles um Square enclosures with sort of scallops cut out of one corner of them uh the the whole thing and lots and lots of circles uh many of these these structures appear to be aligned to the cardinal directions um and and what's the Cardinal Direct North Southeast and West and it's very important to be clear on that northsouth east and west on a compass are not the same as true north Southeast and West uh there's an error of 10 or 11 degrees in comp which is a magnetic reading True North is defined by astronomy and which one does this follow uh this follows True North yeah yeah true north Southeast and West the true cardinal directions so anyway um as a result of the clearances we've started to see these puzzling Earthworks appearing and and that has led a team who we cooperated with in ancient apocalypse uh the lead archaeologist is Marty paronen from the University of Helsinki uh and his partner in the project is ala ranzi who's a very distinguished geographer uh from Brazil um and it was actually Alo who was the first to spot these geoglyphs uh that's what he called them by because it it struck him that there was a similarity to the nasar lines these are things are so big that you can only really see what they are when you're up in the air and he was on a flight over and suddenly thought saw this he thought what the hell is that and that led him to begin to investigate and find it wasn't just one there were dozens of them that had already been produced by the clearances and now what Alo and Marty are doing is a detailed liar study uh in the areas touching on those parts that have already been cleared they're going deeper into the jungle and while we were there they they found half a dozen new structures under the canopy rainforest you see liar will allow you to see through the rainforest canopy and to see relief features underneath it without destroying anything and then you can go in very very low Tech you can just go in not destroy anything and begin to investigate what the liar has picked up and what the liar picked up is these just extraordinary geometrical structures extending into the jungle as far as the range of the drone on that day and and um both Marty and Alo are of the opinion that there are thousands of these things still waiting to be discovered and indigenous people um I I spent time with with an elder of the app Arina people who who for whom these geoglyphs are sacred um they they they say that there are thousands of them throughout the jungle and they still venerate them and value them today and that they are places that shamans use um to work healing medicine on the people how old are they the ones that have been found up till now uh go back about 2,000 to 3,000 years years and that's based on dating of organic material found in the Earthworks it's a it's a rough guess uh however what they've what they've found that those prec precise areas on which the Earthworks now stand once you go down once you excavate Down Deeper Than about 2 or 3 MERS you find that they have been intensely used by human beings and there's enormous amount of of charcoal and carbon down there and those those dates so what they're saying is that these sites actually appear to have been selected and appear to have been sacred to people for at least 10,000 years uh and we see the latest incarnation of them uh in the earthquakes that that have survived uh to this day so there's a big project now going on in the Amazon to open it up and to find out I don't mean to open it up by destroying the rainforest I mean to use liar to find out what's going on there and and and other results of this have have included absolute information that there were huge cities in the Amazon that the Amazon did have a population before the Spanish conquest of tens of millions this was this was a completely different place from the place that we imagin this kind of pristine rainforest inhabited by a few tribes of Hunter forages now uh there were large scale permanent settlements in the Amazon uh and they were joined by perfectly straight roadways that run in some cases for hundreds of kilometers uh we are seeing the traces literally of A Lost Civilization in the Amazon and the work is just beginning to get to grips with the with the dates on these and this is just tiny bits of the Amazon that have been looked at thus far so I'm of the opinion that the Amazon has a great deal more to tell us uh and uh I've done my best to to bring the case for that to the viewers in in ancient apocalypse and besides what a privilege to spend time in the Amazon over the span of about a year I tried pretty much every Green shrink that I could find trying to work out which one was best I came across ag1 and have stuck with it for 3 years now because it's the best it's the most rigorously formulated highly tested and comprehensive green strink that I've ever found and that's why I put it into my body and I've got my mom to take it and my dad to take it and a ton of my friends as well and if I found anything better I would change but I haven't which is why I still use it since 2010 they've improved their formula 52 times in the pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible through high quality ingredients and rigorous standards best of all there is a 90-day moneyback guarantee so you can buy it and try it every single day for three full months and if you do not like it for any reason they'll give you your money back so you can try ag1 completely risk-free for 3 months plus get a Year's free Supply vitamin D3 K2 and five free ag1 travel packs with your first subscription at the link in the description below or by going to drink a1.com slod wisdom that's drink a1.com modern wisdom my first visit to the Amazon was in 2003 I was working on a book uh that I published in 2005 called Supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind it's it's recently been retitled as as Visionary uh it's still out there but but um I was interested in the notion uh for which credit must be given to the late great Terren McKenna uh that uh sampling psychedelics uh played a key role in the evolution of of human consciousness um and that we can see the evidence for the use of psychedelics and here I want to pay tribute to the work of Professor David Lewis Williams of the University of witw Rand in South Africa we can see evidence for the use of psychedelics in cave art all around the world and in rock art all around the world and we can see that evidence in the Amazon very very strongly and furthermore shamans in the Amazon who are drinking iasa drinking the powerful Visionary Brew iwasa after their Visionary experiences if they have painting skills and quite a number of them do they paint their visions and those paintings of those Visions are astonishingly similar to the paintings that you see on Ancient Rock faces such as in Colombia in the Amazon going back more than 12,000 years and paintings that you see even in Europe in caves like Lasco where the same geomet geometric patterns and the same strange beings that a part mixture of mixture of part animal part human appear it's as though the Visionary realm is being manifested in art um and I wanted to investigate that and and I had not experienced iasa before but I didn't feel I could write about it authentically without drinking iwasa so went to the Amazon first of all in 2003 to drink iasa with an indigenous Shaman um and and whose name is Francisco Montes shuna uh and I had my first 11 sessions with with 11 sessions first 11 first 11 yeah i' I've had subsequently had about another 70 um but that was the first 11 were for research purposes the the the other the other 70 is because iasa has helped me to uh get to grips with issues in my life that uh I didn't even know I needed to get to grips with but it's it's it's it's helped me to do that so I I I still feel I think they're right in the Amazon to refer to iasa as a teacher uh and I have I have learned many useful and important lessons to it so the from it so the last time I had an iron WKA session was actually while we were filming um uh in Peru in the Peruvian Amazon for season two of ancient apocalypse um and it was heeled off from a day of shooting to go and and yeah and it was the the same Shaman Francisco Mones shuna who I had drunk with 20 years before so it was fascinating to to be back there and to be in the midst of that majesty and surrounded by that that wildness this this of course you can drink iasa pretty well anywhere in the world today but uh it's better to do so uh in the hands of a shaman who really knows what he or she is doing I'm not saying that there can't be Western shamans there can and there are some uh but they need to sit down at the feet of shamans in the Amazon and learn techniques from them because people can get into a very bad place on an Iowaska trip and that needs to be handled uh Shaman see it as keeping dark Forces at bed that's that's what their role is primarily in this so it was very very interesting to have uh to have another session there and I was I was joined by my good friend Lis Eduardo Luna uh who's a Colombian Anthropologist who is now based in Brazil he's an one of the world experts on on iasa and we had some very interesting discussions about the mysteries of this brew and the mysteries of the iwasa Brew also touch upon the question of civilization in the Amazon how so well because iasa is a very complicated thing to make uh it it is um a mixture of two ingredients the best known form which is actually called iasa and that's not even an Amazonian word that's a qua word it's an in Inca word the Incas were also using iasa and they named it and that name they there are many local names for it but they the Inca name stuck and everybody calls it iasa now which means the vine of souls or the vine of the Dead the vine itself um has almost no Visionary properties uh if you were to drink a tea made of the Brewing up smashed up portions of the vine and and you could drink gallons of it and you wouldn't have any Visions whatsoever the other ingredient is a leaf from a bush and that bush is botanically cotri vidis in the Amazon they call it shakuna and those leaves contain substantial qualities quantities of of arguably the world's most powerful psychedelic which is D dthy tryptamine DMT the type of DMT that's called NN DMT and this is where this gets complicated because because DMT is not normally uh accessible orally to the brain in other words you could eat Munch several kilos of those leaves or cook them up in a tea and drink them it wouldn't have any effect on you um and this is because of the the an enzyme called Mono Amin oxidase that we have in our gut uh it destroys DMT on contact uh that's why people who want to have the straight DMT experience today have to smoke it or vape it smoke it in a pipe or or or or or vape it and then it gets right through the blood brain barrier and into the brain but through the gut you can't absorb it uh orally uh so how do you conquer that problem what you need in scientific terms is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor you need something that will shut down that enzyme in the gut and that's precisely what the iasa vine provides it provides a mono Amin oxidase inhibitor that shuts down the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT in the leaves that are part of the Brew uh to be active and then instead of having the usual 10 or 12 minute or even less trip to the other side of reality which is what happens with with smoked to vape DMT you have a 4-Hour joury Journey to the other side of reality um and it's much slower paced and you have time to get to grips with what is happening and to investigate the visions that you're experiencing and and and the teachings that you're receiving sometimes you receive nothing sometimes all you do is just vomit and have have diarrhea that's I mean that is that is one of the physical consequences of iasa I can say as as a result I've been working with iasa for more than 20 years now I can say that as a result of long-term exposure to iasa the the vomiting and diarrhea side of it have got less and less as time has as time has gone on um but the the Visionary experiences continue to be extremely powerful however sometimes you don't get anything and they they they call it a NADA uh in in in Peru where you have a nothing but that they the view of shamas in Peru is the nothing is the really most important one that you're downloading stuff subconsciously that you're not getting consciously it's really they celebrate these nadas they're good things to have what's the implication of having the similar cave paintings from potential psychedelic cave paintings in the Amazon in Europe elsewhere in the world what what are you sort of The Story You're drawing from the implication is that psychedelics were involved in in every case different psychedelics uh but they they were involved in every case just to finish on the case of aasa there the the other form of iasa um is called yah which is spelled y a j e with an accent over the e yahi um and and a lot of people think that is iwasa and indeed it does include the iasa vine that that is common element to these two versions of the Brew um however the dthy tryptamine element is not is provided actually from another Vine from the leaves that grow off that vine and they contribute not only n ndmt but also 5 Meo DMT both of them are in the Brew uh with the monam you tried this yah yes I have okay can you compare the two uh I would say it's significantly more powerful uh than than iasa on its own and uh really in intense overwhelming uh visions and and the sense of contact with with an intelligence and I know that skeptical uh nuts and bolts scientists will say of course you're not having contact with any intelligence it's just it's just your fantasies it's just just a hallucination but I suggest they go and have a dozen sessions of iasa first and see if that is still their view there's something very mysterious about it and this is a result of literally Amazonian technology go figure how they how they choose out of more than a 100,000 different species of plants and trees they find the bush with the leaves that contain DMT and they find the vine uh which contains the monoamine oxidos inhibitor and they put them together what are you suggesting do that by trial and error is no easy task it's no easy task but also given enough time and not much else to do it could be done it could be done and when I observe shamans in the Amazon today what I notice is that they are constantly sampling plants and that they're constantly sampling ad mixtures of plants um Francisco and on this this latest Journey that I had was dropping little bits of different flowers into into the plant as well God knows what that's going to do yeah well all I can say is that I I did have an extraordinary night um and and it was and it was very very interesting and you know nobody in their right mind is going to drink iasa for kicks it's not some kind of it's not some kind of light-hearted heart Recreation it's I would say it's definitely not recreational uh especially with the physical effects that it but it's also but it's also a powerful emotional Journey which will which will reveal to you things that you may have suppressed from yourself and you know the point I I often make on this is it's very easy to be harsh and cruel with words to another human being especially when you're pretty good at Words which which I am and I've often that's my only skill actually I have no other skills I can't even you know put a a screwdriver into a screw thread without it breaking off um but I can I I I have words and I and I've realized that I've that I've said things in moments of anger that were very harsh and very cruel and really hurt other people and and and IAS has shown me that side of myself it's interesting on that point I I often think about how people that are physically strong there a meme uh there is a culture around physically strong people protect physically weaker people or at the very least a big hulking MMA fighter doesn't try and fight a Granddad for instance because there's an imbalance but we don't have the same sense because outwardly it's not as obvious we don't have the same sense for somebody lexically who is linguistically very capable no and you can use Ben Shapiro talked to me about this about how he's a professional debater very quick with his words so on and so forth and he can use that to win when arguing with his wife but he says do you want to be right or do you want to be loved and uh exactly he has to temper it's like being the real strong guy up against the the Granddad AB absolutely I I I would say the the most important lessons I've had from from my iasa Journeys has has been that I do have a problem with anger and I need to deal with it and I have been dealing with it it's it's one thing to get the Revelation it's another thing to actually integrate it into your life I me that's where the hard work begins but and but I'm I'm working on this and I hope that I'm a Kinder and more nurturing person than I was I want to get I want to talk about that because I'm I'm particularly fascinated about the psychology of somebody that's had to deal with such consistent criticism for a long period of time disposition for anger but then also evidently this sort of transcendent desire to include and transcend as as Ken Wilbur would say um but it's partly to do with with being 74 years old I I you know we're all mortal and and the thing is when we're in our 30s and 40s we don't really take that into account but believe me when you get to my age the clock is ticking and and and you know that whatever happens it's not going to be that long before your time is up and and um I'm completely resigned and accepting to the the notion of death and it can come at at any time but when it comes uh I I would like it I would like to be able to look back on my life and say that it was a worthwhile life and that I did more good than I did harm at the very least anger's a young man's game in that regard yeah yeah what's this rumor meme that I've heard about the Amazon being a man-made jungle oh it is it is it is a man-made jungle what does that mean well what it what it means is that when you analyze the millions of trees in the Amazon and you find that they boil down to about 16,000 different species that species like the brazilnut tree which are incredibly helpful to human beings which are food producing trees are hyperd dominant in the Amazon and they shouldn't be if it were just the result of natural selection in the Amazon it's clear that human beings have been involved in turning the Amazon to their purpose and making it an environment that is useful to them uh that can feed them that can nurture them uh and for that reason just as the clearly a brilliant kind of shamanic science went in to the creation of aasa an equally brilliant kind of shamanic science went into the creation of curari which involves 11 different plants can you know what curar is curar is a nerve poison um which is used to tip arrows uh if you're hunting a monkey and that monkey is 100 foot up a tree uh and you want it for dinner um what you don't want to do is for it to as it as you shoot an arrow into it its natural instinct will be to wrap its tail around the tree and suddenly the monkey that you want for dinner is hanging by its tail 100 fet above you in the tree you don't want that so you want something that paralyzes its muscles and that's what curari is uh that's why you know curari was later used in in anesthesia as well they they uh shoot the monkey with a curari tipped Arrow its muscles go limp and it falls from the tree and dinner is dinner is ready but to create curari you need 11 different ingredients all put together and if you don't have even one of them it won't work anymore so that's a that's a scientific project again from a people who have lived in their environment for thousands I believe tens of thousands of years and are so familiar with it and so comfortable with it they know what to do with it um but I I would add to that one other Amazonian science which again we go into in the in in season two which is which is called teraa which is patches of astonishingly fertile soil that have found dotted throughout the Amazon and which are still sought out by modern settlers today um because the rest of the rainforest isn't particularly fertile that's why it's also such a tragic waste to cut the rainforest down it's doing much better things for the World by being left as a rainforest than it is being turned into a cattle ranch um but teraa has allowed bits of the Amazon to be incredibly fer and that also is an Amazonian invention people in the Amazon are still making teroa today but the oldest examples so far found go back more than 8,000 years and it's a it's it's almost a it's almost a miracle soil um it regenerates its own fertility it's full of bacteria uh it's full of biochar it's been deliberately created by human beings they they they put a lot of a lot of refu in it as well and it just works and multiplies and it keeps on rejuvenating its own fertility so patches that are 8,000 years old are still fertile today the thing that I keep coming back to is I I I understand that there is uh the technology or the trial and error that's happened in order to make the Amazon very useful to hum in a way that other areas on the planet wouldn't have been also understand that you can uh curate the jungle Brazil nut trees becoming more prevalent Etc it's still to me thinking about what were sort of anthropologically modern humans built for persistence hunting open planes it just seem so inhospitable I wonder why why would you decide to I I don't know what America was like well that's where you have that's where you have to ask yourself what was the Amazon that we're now looking at what was it like during the Ice Age what was it like 12 13 14,000 years ago and what it was like was more like uh the savanas uh of East Africa uh than it looks today uh it became a rainforest later after human beings were in it and I suspect human beings were of course climate change was involved as well but I suspect the human beings were involved in the creation of the Amazon right from the beginning trans to transforming a savannah extending over millions of square kilometers into a giant rainforest the rainforest isn't itself is probably not much older than 14,000 years because how would you have been able to make thousands and thousands of circles inside of squares if every two feet there's another tree exactly exactly that's that's that's right uh certainly at the very least you'd have to clear the area that you wanted to build your earth work in so it's it's just one of those great unexamined areas uh where where the human story has not been followed through enough and when we do follow it through we find we find intriguing hints of great sophistication in the past and and and of finding a way of life we shouldn't imagine that everything that we would call a quote unquote Advanced civilization has to look like us uh you know with iPhones and cars and rocket ships and things like that does have to look like that there lots of other ways to be to be being Advanced and I would say an advanced civilization actually should not be defined by its possessions by by its material wealth it should be it it it should be defined by its spiritual wealth and its ability to live in harmony with the environment in which it is surrounded and our civilization despite all its Tech achievements is not living in harmony with the environment at all whereas Amazonian civilization for thousands of years was and still and still is I I I get what you mean there I'm hesitant sometimes of sort of laying at the feet of modern humans this uh disregard for the world around us I think it would be difficult if you were to give people of 13,000 14,000 years ago the convenience and the opportunity and the availability of all of the things that everybody has in the modern world I I'm not I'm not convinced by the idea that humans are being uh callous in their usage of most things in the modern world oh no I don't think so either had they have had the opportunity to it would have been difficult in the past to have not become fat because of the beautiful cheesecake and all of the the chip no I don't think I don't think individual humans are being colors at all um we operate the scale of a hive mind a very large scale organism that's what humanity is in in the world and and and um the plain fact is we we we aren't looking after the world well enough uh this is our this is our home we're very detached from it and and and yes they're very detached from it and and there's no sense of spiritual value in it this is one of the problems with modern science and it's in its desperate desire to separate itself off from Superstition um it's become it's become um totally focused on weighing and measuring and counting on on on a so-called rational approach to reality whereas reality itself is not really very rational um and and um I think that I think that this is what's missing in our society today is is the spiritual element the sense of connection to this beautiful garden of a planet that the Universe has gifted us with and a connection to the to the wider universe and and that's why things happen in the way they do but it it can change I don't think any of the mainstream religions in the world today are helpful in this respect uh I I I I I realize that that some people do get profound spiritual experiences within the mainstream religions but I I think what's what's happening today is people are beginning to seek spiritual directions in in in other ways and perhaps that's one of the reasons why iwasa has has become so well known uh and so popular uh in in the west because it does seem to open a doorway to other dimensions and other Realms it's probably a more reliable route to a Transcendent experience than going to the Vatican for instance I would say so yeah far far VA is pretty and and also and also the key difference is that it's direct experience it's what you're it's what you're experiencing and what you're experiencing is not this world it's un undeniable in that whatever it is it's not this you're experiencing if our brains are concocting it all and some sort sort of elaborate novel um then it's astonishing in itself that itself is a mystery um but many many of us who've worked with iasa and DMT uh can't rid ourselves of this sense that we're getting brief temporary access to some other level of reality and fortunately a number of scientists are now looking into this uh in in a serious organized experimental way and that is being done at Imperial College in London uh and it's being done at um the University of California in San Diego where's that place that's found the way to do IV DMT that's that's Imperial College yeah so they can keep you at the state that you would have smoked but Perpetual the state the peak state that you would be in 5 minutes after you've had the third puff on the pipe the the peak state that you would be in there they can keep you there for an hour or longer which presumably feels like three and a half million years well subjectively I've tried to volunteer for this um but I they won't let me because I have epilepsy um but one of the projects that's taking place in America may allow me to to volunteer I I don't believe it would have any you're a brave man in that regard I don't believe it would have any negative interaction with my with my epilepsy because I've had quite a lot of experience of DMT and and I've had no problems uh on the contrary I find it I find it helpful but I would like to I would like to try that extended thing because have you done the pipe oh yeah y I've I've I've smoked DMT and I Vaped DMT both are both are both drank it through the and then drunk it through the through through the iasa Brew the the the nice thing about going straight to the DMT is you don't have the negative physical consequences um and that you know you can be in the middle of a of an extraordinary Vision where Revelations are just piling in on you and suddenly your stomach says no get me to do get me out of here immediately you know and that often involves in the jungle squatting behind behind a tree and confronting whatever creatures are living in that tree in other news this episode is brought to you by function I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body function has been an absolute Game Changer they run lab tests twice a year that monitor everything from your heart health and your hormone levels to nutrient deficiency and stuff like thyroid function they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one which is five times more data than you get on a typical annual physical testosterone levels play a massive role in your energy and performance and being able to see them charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better lab testing like this would usually cost thousands but with function it is only $500 function has a 300,000 person waiting list but every Monday they open a few spots for modern wisdom listeners and you can get your expert blood work analysis and bypass that 300,000 person weight list by heading to the link in the description below or going to function health.com slod wisdom that's function health.com slod wisdom what you learn about the Mayans well this is another extraordinary civilization of the ancient world which um I think has much more ancient Origins than are given to it we have to trace the origins of Mayan civilization back through the people who were called the alch uh and then we have to look at the incredible sophistication and complication of Mayan mathematics and Mayan astronomy and the enormous numbers that they used and how they were recording dates on Steely that go back 30 million years into the past where are they modern on a modern map where do you point to where the mines were the Yucatan Peninsula primarily but then going on into Guatemala as as as well that's that's that's the M area and and for for season two of H apocalypse we filmed specifically in pelen which is down at the bottom of the Yucatan the the nearest large large town is vosa uh pelen is a a magnificent Mayan site dating back to the 8th or 9th century ad um and uh it's got a a series of pyramids built around a beautiful Plaza with what appears to be an astronomical observation tower in the middle of a structure that is probably wrongly referred to as the palace uh and um uh I was able to discuss the site at length with an with an archaeologist not all archaeologists hate me uh quite quite a number of arch olist are are are interested in what I do and are willing to work with me don't necessarily agree with me um but are willing at least to have a civil conversation with me and and I was so lucky to have Ed barard as as as a guest when we were in Pinki he seems cool I watched him on Lex's show he's a brilliant guy and he and he's fun and he's he's just so enjoyable to be around and just a mine of information about the Mayan calendar and about Mayan astronomy and about Mayan mathematics he can read Mayan he can yes he can read the Mind glyphs and he he he did a bit of that for us he's he's he's just really good at it but also you know interpreting what what mindan culture was was all about and and one of the things we touched on uh was the the fact that there's a very specific idea about what happens to the soul after death and that idea is found all around the world it's found very powerfully in the Americas South America Mexico Central America and North America uh but it's also found in Egypt and it's found in Mesopotamia and it's found in Ancient India and the idea is that upon death the soul makes a a leap to the heavens and where it specifically leaps to is the Milky Way and this is referred to in many cultures as the path of Souls and it's the deceased individual then or the soul of the deceased individual then makes a journey along the path of Souls and there will be confronted with all the errors and mistakes and also all the good that that person like a judgment D It's like a judgment scene and and and that judgment is represented by by monstrous beings and locked Gates that you have to be able to confront and and this idea is just found all around the world and it's one of the reasons one of the reasons I find very persuasive to the notion that we've lost an episode of the human story I don't think this is a coincidence that this I I think we're looking at the remnant of a very ancient spiritual system which was passed down in many different parts of the globe and and subsequently reinterpreted and developed by the people it was passed saying that because it sounds like there's Echoes of that in some Modern religions that you don't think they've independently Arisen separately you think that it's a single lineage I I think it's a single lineage yeah I think when we come to specific ideas like that uh plus the um availability and the focus upon and the sacred nature of specific numbers uh in many different cultures around the the world uh is what like well um there's a there's a phenomenon which has been very important in my work over the last 30 years called the the precession of the equinoxes um and uh it it it's not a phenomenon that that everybody knows about so I I'll try to explain it it's actually an observable effect but it's hardly observable within a human lifetime um if you the best way to observe it if you could extend your life by a few hundred years and just stay just be at the same spot every spring equinox when the Sun rises perfectly due easterly be there before Dawn a good hour before Dawn a constellation of the zodiac is going to be lying on the horizon in the place where the sun rises and that constellation was seen by ancient cultures as as housing the sun uh on the equinox and it defined the character of an age um but if you could be there for several hundred years you would notice that it's gradually shifting along the horizon and eventually another constellation will slip into place behind the sun on that same key day and what's happening there from an astronomical well what's happen what's happening is the Earth is our viewing platform from which we observe the stars and not only is it rotating on its own axis as we know but it's also wobbling and that and that wobble uh one of the most noticeable effects over long periods of time is it changes the pole star so because the what is the pole star except the star that the extended North Pole of the earth points most directly at uh and at the moment it's Polaris but it's been thuban it's been Draco it's been many other stars in the in in thuban is in the constellation of Draco in the past what's the cycle how long does it take for you to get back 25,920 years um I'm glad that you know it 25,920 years and uh the process unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years uh so that is it's going to be tough to track in the space of a 72-year lifetime it is it is so you need you need long-term observation you need recordkeeping and you need the information being passed on from from generation to generation but sooner or later you're going to notice if you're an avid watcher of the heavens and if these things matter to you as they did to Anan cultur you're going to notice that this is Shifting along the horizon whether you've going to figure out exactly why that observable is happening that's another matter which I can't give you a definite answer on but that the that the the observable was observed going back a very long way into the past is is clear and and uh I can't touch on this subject without paying tribute to the work of Georgio de santiana and her vend uh Georgio was the professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1960s and a time when I think people were more open-minded than they are today and hether was a professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University and they published this um astonishing groundbreaking book called Hamlet's Mill um and Hamlet's Mill uh is about the ancient recognition of procession they completely dis these are leading academic figures they completely dismiss the notion that the Greeks discovered procession just 2,000 or 2,300 years ago they're confident that it goes back thousands of years before that and they trace it back to what they call some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization uh the fact that this is found all around the world in many many different cultures classic example the uh bridge between the bridge over the the moat leading to Anor Tom in the Anor complex has 54 statues on either side and each of those is pulling on the uh the body of a serpent uh and and if you add 54 to 54 you get 108 uh 108 is 72 + 36 half of 72 72 is the heartbeat of the processional cycle uh and then there's processional imagery what they're doing by pulling on that serpent is they're churning the Milky ocean uh there's also reliefs in Anor wat which show the same scene but in on Anor Tom it's actually in three dimensions they're churning the Milky ocean uh and and as a result they're producing the Amrita the elixir of immortality but that churning motion that's why the book is called Hamlet's Mill aml's Mill that same idea of something whirling and turning and changing is locked symbolically into this number system uh or all around the world what are some of the other numbers you mentioned 108 they they're all multiples of 72 or additions to 72 which are related to the number 72 like 72 plus 36 being 108 is a processional number it's a very widely respected number found in sacred Traditions all around the world uh 43 43,200 uh is another processional number that's 72 * 600 um and and uh that is a number that's found every where there are 432,000 syllables in the rig Vader uh it's the same number again and again the same based on the same system of ideas that that keeps on coming up what were the numbers that the Mayans were obsessed by the Mayans were very much involved in the equinoxes and in precessional numbers but they were also going far beyond that they were Plumbing the depths of time they I can't think of any other ancient culture which which had focus on periods that were millions of years 5 million years it's a it's a really quite remarkable thing and and and they could tell you they could tell you they could tell you what the phase of the moon was on a particular day five or 10 million years ago why do you think they were so preoccupied with deep history Long numbers numerology not numerology well numerology is a fair a fair fair word for it in the sense that numbers are are thought to have a sacred or magical quality why do you think think that the Mayans what is it that's well I've always seen this as a and again of course I'm going to be criticized by archaeologists for this as though I'm taking something away from the Mayans um but I see the Mayan calendar and the mathematics associated with it as an out-of-place artifact I see it as I see it as something which is the need for it is hard to explain uh within the general circumstances of Myan culture to have that precise mathematical calculation and this ability to think back millions of years into the past and into the future um it's hard to see the need for it it feels like it feels like something that would have been needed in a in a much bigger culture a much bigger civilization which had you were able to put huge numbers of Specialists to work and I do regard it as an inheritance I think I think the Maya inherited this system from an earlier Lost Civilization that's my view and then they did their own work on it and and developed it and and and it's a very extraordinary thing if that was the case if the mays inherited it it was passed down somehow from a previous more advanced civilization why would they have needed it uh well um I think that look at our so-called civilization today I mean we have no problem with big numbers they're they're quite useful to us we have no problem with with complex sophisticated mathematics we are quite capable of peering back millions of years in the past I mean our our present uh creation story is that uh that the Earth formed 4,500 million years ago 4.5 billion years ago um and all the evidence seems to suggest that that that it did but you know that can also be viewed as a creation myth in a way a scientific creation myth the big ban is Big Bang that's another it's it's it's a theory it's a speculation but did it did it happen was it was it that way um there's evidence suggesting that it was but I the point I making is that uh creation myths Foundation myths myths about the nature of the universe are not limited to uh Hunter forager peoples in the ancient world they're also found in the scientific world today how much do you think of this focus on astronomy and numbers is from a functional perspective something logistically operationally useful and how much do you think is uh symbolic uh and sort of sacred I think it's I I don't think it's primarily functional most archaeologists will tell you that they they they say of course the Ancients wanted to know when spring began uh when how to navigate yeah but but not only that for planting crops you know for for for agriculture you want to know the season to plant the season to to to reap uh so you want to be aware of the Spring Equinox you want to know the longest day of the year the shortest day of the year the solstices uh these are these are useful in an agricultural calendar and that's the the argument that's given by by archaeologists but in my opinion um any self-respecting farmer anywhere in the world is really well aware of when he should plant or she should plant and and and when they should sew uh they don't need um devices that tell them when the Equinox is there there is such a device uh in really magical one uh at chichin uh in the Yucatan and uh this is on the the Pyramid of culan which is another name for qual Cole The Feathered Serpent uh this pyramid at chichin its northern stairway the bottom of the stairway in fact the bottom of all its stairways is um on each side there's the head of an enormous serpent uh but the ballustrade up the side of the stairway is just completely plain uh but on the Spring Equinox towards Sunset between about 5:00 in the evening and 5:45 in the evening this magical effect occurs and the Shadows of the corner of the pyramid are cast on the balestrate of that stairway and they create the shadow form of a serpent of an undulating serpent which joins with that serpent head that only happens on the equinox and not at any other time so they pinpointed it precisely they oriented their pyramid precisely so that one part could cast a shadow on another on that on that special day I I think that's going over the top if your interest is only agricultural I think I think that's I think that's that's paying homage to remembering giving credit to this memory of The Feathered Serpent of kukan of qu I'm going to say so let's just Linger on that for a second because you know I've heard you on Joe's show talking about this for a long time and I always think about that's magical like it sounds to me like it's it's so cool that's so beautiful it's evidently something sacred it's taken this sort of lovely blend of Art and astronomy and archaeology and architecture and all of this together but can you just think for a second about what the psychology of those humans was like like what what's their relationship to this as above so below uh it's as simple as that the the um there was an ancient system in the old world uh developed out of ancient Egypt called the the the Hermetic tradition the god the Greek figure Hermes is a Greek version of the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom th uh and in the hertica texts attributed to Hermes th uh there is this phrase As Above So Below and that what that phrase is saying is that it is our burden and our responsibility to replicate upon the Earth the Perfection and beauty and magnificence of the heavens uh that if we fall out of harmony with the heavens if we disconnect from the heavens uh we fall to pieces uh and and and we must constantly maintain and reinforce and honor and respect our connection to the wider universe that's what As Above So Below is about that's why I and and the brilliant genius discoverer of the Orion correlation Theory Robert baval uh are uh reject completely the uh skeptical attitude of egyptologists what Robert baval discovered was that the three great pyramids on the ground at Giza replicate the three stars of the belt of a constellation of Orion uh in the sky um but that they don't do so precisely in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built the perfect match is uh in 10,500 because of wobble because of the procession orble exactly that's right they're they're building procession and they're using procession they're using the language of astronomy and massive architecture to memorialize a particular date does that mean that the whole Giza complex was built 12 and a half thousand years ago no uh but it does mean that it's memorializing a date that's 12 and a half thousand just like any Western Cathedral uh may be memorializing events that took place in the time of Abraham you know it doesn't mean that they were built in the time of Abraham but I do think the the Great Sphinx uh does date back 12 and a half thousand years I think we're we're looking at a a complex that's been developed and uh uh increasingly refined over very very long period of time why that site in Egypt uh well it there there are multiple sites around the world that are referred to as navels of the earth and and Giza is one of them uh I would suggest that it was the ancient prime meridian just as the prime meridian in our time for just reasons of the British Empire passes through Greenwich uh I think in ancient times it passed it passed through Giza now um other benefits of the Giza plateau uh it is situated at 30° north latitude give or take a tiny fraction and 30° north latitude is onethird of the way between the Equator and the North Pole uh so it's not a random location and furthermore if you go into the um into the uh broad expanse of Giza in in its place on the earth as a whole uh you find that it's dead center of the largest area of exposed land uh on on Earth uh so so it's it's it's it's interesting for that respect and then and then you build upon it an enormous pyramid weighing 6 million tons with uh precise orientation to True astronomical North true astronomical South true astronomical East and true astronomical West um that uh that is saying whatever this thing is it is speaking to the earth the earth the Earth's its focus uh it is locked in to the cardinal directions of our planet and then we find and again of course my opponents in archaeology scoff at this they accept that it's the case even Flint Dibble who I debated with on The Joe Rogan Experience in April 2024 even he accepted this but he mocked it and thought that it was just a coincidence but it is a fact that if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by guess what 43,200 it's one of those precessional numbers it's not a random number if it was you know 64 thou 1 to 64,000 I wouldn't think much of it but it's 1 to 43,200 if you take the height of the Great Pyramid the original height it's lost about 30 ft from its top if you take the height and multiply it by 43,200 you get the polar radius of the Earth and if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200 you get the equatorial circumference of the earth so uh here we have a monument that is speaking to the earth that is locked into the Earth's astronomical cardinal directions and then models the Earth on a scale defined by a motion of the Earth itself you know that is as above so below that and and that is what I think governs these uh Arrangements all around the world uh a wish and a desire to lock Humanity into the cosmos and and to make us realize that that uh we're part of something much larger than ourselves staying hydrated can be boring but it doesn't need to be the problem is that most hydration beverages are filled with sugar and loads of ingredients that you can't pronounce which is why I'm such a massive fan of element it contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium pottassium and magnesium with no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other BS drinking element every single morning is how I've started my day for over 3 years now the reason that I keep talking about element is that it makes a massive difference to the way that I feel to my energy levels it helps me to regulate my appetite it curbs cravings and it improves my brain function and there is a no BS no questions asked refund policy so if you're not sure if you're thinking God Chris won't shut up about this I might give it a try you can do that and if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box so it is completely risk- free you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Dr LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com slod wisdom I was in uh South Florida about a month ago recording some episodes and there was this spectacular lightning storm going on pitch black at night when we were driving back from dinner or whatever uh South Florida obviously recently had some pretty intense weather but being British we it's just gray you know I'm used to I'm used to Fierce gray uh a very mild sort of damp uh climate and uh just driving back it's one of those storms where the moon is full and is rising and these lightning storms and it's off over on the on the coast on the ocean and I remember thinking imagine that you were a prehistoric human tribe individual whatever looking out it you would be so certain that the gods were mad at you that you had done something you're like I knew I shouldn't have touched myself last night when I went to I knew that I shouldn't have told that lie I knew that I shouldn't have stolen that fig whatever it is that you you know maybe something awful is going to whatever it might be um and you begin to personify and you create the stories and narratives because that's the way that you know without stats and and books that's the way that you pass down information I just remember thinking like the all all of your relationship as a human prehistoric human to everything is done through that kind of a story that that is a god or goddess having a war it looked like a battle it looked like you know two Gods off in the distance throwing throwing lightning at each other and then most recently with the Hurricanes that have come through Florida yeah that's I think about a one in Thousand Year event in terms of the uh rainfall and some of the speed of the Winds so it's rare but not unheard of uh and maybe 10 times since perhaps the Americans were settled something like that would have happened can you imagine what a tribe that saw that Ur would think yeah but but but supposing they saw something even much bigger than that uh supposing they saw something that uh affected the whole world their whole world however however far they could go uh it was devastated it was destroyed they themselves might have been destroyed by it can you imagine how that would be recorded and could that be why we have 200 myths of a global flood that destroyed a prehistoric civilization found all around the world uh a global cataclysm these myths mix up a number of different effects they they they they mix up um bolts of fire from the sky they they they they mix up volcanoes suddenly erupting they they they include earthquakes and they include flood Global flood a flood that floods everything that is capable of submerging lands and uh this is why I'm very interested in the epoch called the younger dras which unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago it's why we call our series ancient apocalypse it's going to say what's the apocalypse bit well the apocalypse bit is that the younger dras it's a it's a CL that that's a name given by climatologists to an episode of really weird climate that took place at the end of the last ice age they call it the younger dras after a species of Alpine flower that flourishes in extremely cold weather uh what happened to cut a long story short is that down to about 12,800 years ago give or take a century the because you can't be that precise with these definitions the uh the Earth was definitely emerging from the Ice Age it was it was getting warm um and and things were looking good uh it was felt like that 100,000 years of Frozen world was coming to an end and then suddenly it flipped completely uh and and uh you have sudden sea level rise you have a Plunge in global temperature so that suddenly almost overnight it is as cold as it was as the absolute peak of the last ice age this happens suddenly and it happens right around the world worse of course in Northern and deep southern latitudes and much less vicious in its effects in tropical and equatorial zones but but a massive massive event this is the time precisely that window when all the big megap fora of the Ice Age go extinct they saber-tooth tigers mastadons mammoths when we were at White Sands by the way it was just amazing to see these Mammoth Footprints still in the sand there are they big they're very big these things have got a huge stride have you been following the work of Ben lamit colossal have you seen this no I haven't okay so they are bringing back Wally mammoths uh I've seen that yes I have so Ben was Ben was on the show I'm maybe talking about actually being involved with the project a little bit um just to tangent off before you tell us more about younger ders the reason you know one of the reasons that they're looking at bringing them back that they can they think that by putting them in the higher latitudes these animals will be able to compact down the snow and reflect back more sun interesting so they'll be able to use a extinct species to help combat modern global warming that's a very fancy idea it's amaz I it's the they Farmers they farm animals in a way that they will eat seeds from here and poop them over there which will help to spread things around so the other two I asked him what else are you working on so he's got this the way they're doing it it's the Asian elephant so they've taken um all of these Frozen samples of uh genetic material they're then using AI to splice in the gaps so there will be at some point there will be an Asian elephant that gives birth to a Wally Mammoth when they're ready because it's the closest genetic relative that they can get but the other one and this is so cool I I I really love this idea from Ben he said that I was like what what else do you want to bring back like you know saber-tooth tiger that's pretty cool uh and he said dodo bird I'm like I mean it's a meme why would you bring back the it's useless a doo precisely why would you do that and he said well it was because it was the reason that it was dead was because of environmental destruction so he's using the all of the effort being very about the effort that they have to go to in order to bring this bird back to say see how much we had to do see the labor that we had to jump through MH in order to be able to bring back this thing that we could have just avoided destroying its habitat in the first place so it's like a PR bird so it may end up being actually way more useful than you ever thought but kind of uh only as a public relations Tool uh but I thought that was uh that was really cool it is very cool yeah colossal colossals awesome people should go and check them out it would it would be nice to see how it all ends up is it's a real thing it's going to happen it's happening I mean the the Asian elephant thing they're ready to pull a pin on it I think it'll happen within the next few years fascinating it's awesome so younger dras yeah so the the younger the younger dras within almost the living memory of the human species you know we know that there have been huge cataclysms on the earth before we the best known example is chicks Glo crater in in deeply buried off the Gulf of Mexico the the the so-called KT dinosaurs extinct 65 or 66 million years ago there' been a number of events like that caused by Cosmic impacts from by objects from I'm sure that you've looked at this as well but the uh I I really loved learning about the fact that that uh asteroid had it have hit in a slightly different area of the Earth it wasn't to do with even the impact it was to do with the toxic dust that was kicked up from some particular type of rock that's very deep down underneath and you're talking about seconds later yeah that the entire future of the earth maybe 10 seconds later cuz these things are traveling at tens of thousands of we're spinning pretty quick as well yeah and it would have been completely it was about as bad of a place for the dinosaurs pretty good for us uh that it could have hit and I I always I always think about that when you think about conting in convergence and thin chance interesting interesting maybe the dinosaurs annoyed the universe perhap they weren't that's how they weren't tracking their procession sufficiently well they didn't know their wobble uh anyway sorry young I keep distracting yeah it's not a distraction it's it's it's it's relevant the point is that that there have been a number of extinction level events uh on our planet uh and what is not being properly taken into account is that although it was very recent in geological terms just 12 ,800 years ago the younger dras was also an extinction level event and it led to the extinction as I said of all the great megap forer of the Ice Age and it ushered in the hollene the the Modern Age that we that we live in today um the team who are working on what is called the younger Drass impact hypothesis deserve to be taken seriously their opponents in science try to paint them as some sort of Lunatic Fringe but actually we're dealing with a number more than 60 highly credential scientists who are just following the evidence where it leads them and what the evidence leads them to uh and I've I've given all the data on this in in my books particularly in magicians of the gods that was published in 2015 what the evidence leads to is the conclusion that the earth 12,800 years ago passed through the debris stream of a disintegrating Comet all comets disintegrate sooner or later um and uh for those who would wish to see an example of this it's Jupiter uh in it it's the it's it's the Shoemaker Levy n hitting hitting Jupiter uh and breaking up into 21 fragments before it did so um comets break up into multiple fragments every single meteor shower that we see and we pass through dozens of them every year every single one of those is the debris stream of a disintegrated com that's what they all are every single shooting star is a bit of a comet that we're that we're looking ATF sometimes bigger yeah sometimes those bits are really large uh sometimes they can be kilometers in diameter and what is called the torrid meteor stream because it appears to emanate in our time from the constellation of Taurus of course it's not coming from the constellation of Taurus it's a visual effect that bit of the sky that the constellation of Taurus is in the torid the torid meteor stream um is full of large and dangerous objects uh and it's also full of smaller objects when I say smaller there might be 100 or 200 meters in diameter instead of 2 or three kilometers in diameter um the view of the of the Comet research group who are behind the younger dras impact hypothesis is that 12,800 years ago the earth entered a swarm of cometary De debris that swarm did include some large objects and they reckon that's why the North American ice cap went into a sudden meltdown 12,800 years ago unleashing floods on an enormous scale and raising sea levels very oddly at a time when global temperatures were sinking normally you get sea level rise when global temperatures are rising but they they plunged during the younger D and yet you have sea level rise they think that that some large objects hit the North American ice cap and some hit the northern European multiple not single large impact no no but but they do think that there were some large objects that the ice caps but they think primarily what it was was Air Bursts of objects that were about 100 to 200 m in diameter um uh air Air Bursts like the tunguska event in 198 June the 30th 198 nobody disputes that that was a bit of a comet it almost certainly was a comet that fell out of the torid meteor stream because that is the peak of What's called the beta TDS uh in precisely 30th of June um and and um it didn't leave any crater because it blew up in the sky the Earth's atmosphere destroyed it in the sky but that air burst uh flattened the rough calculation is 2,000 square miles of Siberian Forest uh and when investigators went into the area uh a few years later they just found the whole Forest flattened over an enormous area uh by this by this air burst it was a cataclysmic airburst now if you take that fortunately it was an uninhabited area of Siberia but if you you take that over population areas and you multiply it by 100 it's not just one air burst it's 100 air burst and as you say the Earth is spinning pretty fast it's rotating at a th000 miles hour of the Equator so you can see how the trajectory of these bits coming in would actually spatter the Earth across a huge range of the Earth's circumference um and and the evidence from for for the younger dras impact is that these Air Bursts were taking place from as far west as the west coast of North America and as far east as Syria as as far south as Antarctica and southern Chile as far north as Belgium so this this was a very large event um and the fact that no massive craters have been found yet is partly explained by the sense that the larger objects hit the North American ice cap and partly explained by the fact that airbursts don't leave craters but they do decimate communities like Abu hrera in Syria uh which um is within 150 mil of the extraordinary site of Quebec Lee and which was white out 12,800 years ago Abu Herrera was it was completely flattened by something uh I mean by flattened I I mean that everybody there was killed and that the whole place was destroyed it was rapidly reoccupied within two or 3 years it was reoccupied and repopulated but something really bad happened there and the traces on the ground the Iridium the Nano Diamonds the shocked quartz uh the melt glass like trinitite all of these things speak to precisely what the comet research group thinks when happened that this was that this was an air burst of an object of roughly tunguska size that happened happened to happen over an ancient settlement in other news this episode is brought to you by nomatic traveling should be about the journey not the chaos of packing that is why I'm such a massive fan of nomatic they make the best backpacks and luggage in the world the difference in the quality of your life when you have a proper well-designed backpack is immeasurable they've got compartments for everything your laptop your shoes your sunglasses it's so well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important it is literally like the Marie condo of luggage everything has its place which makes traveling more enjoyable it makes you less late it makes you more organized best of all their products will literally last you a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee so this is the last backpack that you ever need to buy and you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason so you can buy it completely risk free you can get a 20% discount off your first purchase when you go to the link in the show notes below or head to nomatic tocom wisdom and use the code mw20 at checkout get yourself a new backpack that will change your life at nomatic docomond wisdom and the code mw20 at checkout if you throw a couple of hundred 200 M sized airburst comments the Earth what happens is it lots of water lots of fire lots of what well what happens first of all and and this is this is a key part of why did the temperature fall and the answer to that is is that's that's why the view is that some large objects hit the North American ice cap and the European ice cap see the North American ice cap at that time was more than a mile deep so when you where did that go from and to uh well you you can start you can start up right up in Northern Canada and you can come down uh into Montana and you still have ice cap and it's uh and it it's it's a mile deep at that time so even a kilometer wide object hitting that is not going to leave a crater under the ground the crater is going to be in the ice and then meltwater is going to be released from the ice into the world ocean it's going to flood off the land and into the ocean both the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean and that's what appears to have been what brought the climate down is a huge flood of icy meltwater pouring into the world ocean and stopping the Gulf Stream in its tracks uh if we were to stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks today global warming would not be a problem any longer we'd be in global cooling very very very rapidly and that appears to be what happened and that up till now is the explanation that is given for the sudden plung and climates at the beginning of the younger dras the explanation is that there was a flood of meltwater icy meltwater into the world ocean cut the glob What's called the global meridianal overturning circulation of which the Gulf Stream is a part uh and and led to this this sudden uh cooling but they don't ask themselves why did that icy water get into the world ocean in the first place and that is what the the younger D impact hypothesis explains what's the alternative hypothesis for how the Gulf Stream got switched off the established well there there is no real hypothesis for it it's just said there is a hypothesis I I just don't think it's a very good one um the they they say that what happened was that glacial glacial lakes formed in North America uh glacial Lake Missoula and glacial Lake aaziz uh and these Lakes were bounded by Ice dams and that from time to time the pressure of water on the dam would break it and the water in the lake would flood out and and and they try to account for this with sort of 80 flooding events over a period of couple of thousand years or more uh whereas what the evidence on the ground speaks to one major flooding event uh and and that sudden drop in climate is very definitely keyed in to the date of around 12,800 years ago talk to me about Easter Island what a place I love Easter Island it's um it's so beautiful and and mysterious and remote 2,000 mil from the coast of Peru 2,000 mi from Tahiti literally in the middle of nowhere there sits Easter Island and uh we know uh that it has been inhabited by human beings but the general view of Archaeology is not for very long um the general view sees Easter iseland as being settled perhaps as recently as a thousand years ago maybe you could go back to 700 AD 1,300 1,400 years ago there's some dispute about this but the notion that Easter Island might have been settled earlier than that uh is not not widely accepted and so it's the settlement of Easter Island is seen is something that happened towards the end of what is referred to as the Polynesian expansion and let us um recognize the incredible achievements of the Polynesians uh who were the world's ultimate seafarers I mean they explored the whole Pacific Ocean and they found Easter Island that tiny tiny dot in the middle of nowhere uh and there's no doubt that the indigenous inhabitants of Easter Island today are descended from Polynesians they are they are Polynesian people no doubt about that was whatsoever um but the question is is there a prehistory to Easter iseland that is being missed and I I feel very strongly there is um and there are signs already that that um possibility of a much older prehistory to Easter Island is beginning to be explored uh one of our um indigenous guests on the show happens to be an archaeologist from Easter Ireland and her name is Sonia HOA and she and her team have found uh REM of what are called banana phytoliths these tiny little bits microscopic bits of banana in an excavation that they did in a place called the Roca crater and they're datable and they date back not to the ice age but they date back 3,000 years which is at least twice as old as human beings were ever supposed to have been on Easter Island and why I say human beings is because you can't transfer bananas from place to place any other way the human beings bringing them there uh those bananas could not have been the the the the been blown by no they they they are a result of human activity so the presence of that it's quite a dynamite finding it doesn't take Easter isand back to the ice age but it does suggest that there's a lot more that we need to find uh in in Easter isand and I'm just intrigued by the uh traditions of the Easter Islanders um by the fact that they have a memory of a flooded Homeland which was destroyed in a global catac M uh that Homeland was called hea and it was somewhere in the Pacific and it was flooded in an enormous flood and and some of the survivors found their way to Easter Island that's how the story is told but during the period of the Polynesian expansion there was no flooded island of large size in the Pacific Ocean sea levels had already stopped Rising by that point you have to go back to the end of the Ice Age to get that kind of sea level rise that would actually submerge a whole island sized land mass um and and the these memories are very clear still preserved uh by by the E Easter Islanders um and and um they they don't put a date on it uh but it doesn't uh fit in with the conventional archaeological notion of how or when Easter Island was first settled um there's there's this there's this suggestion that there's a mysterious lost history in Easter Ireland and I'm of the view and I present evidence for this in in in the series that the iconic objects for which EAS round is best known the the moai these these huge sculptured figures uh are definitely not from the last 7 or 800 years they're much much older than that is there a way to date them well largely because of the sedimentation that that covers many of them up uh they're they're covered it was first realized when Thor hardal did an excavation there back in the 1980s what you see when you go go up onto Rano raraku there's a number of craters on Easter Island ranoa was where they found the banana fist Rano raraku was one of the main quaries out of which the moai were cut uh and what you see when you go up there today uh is basically Head and Shoulders sticking out of the ground uh but if you excavate those objects those huge statues you find they really are huge and that they go down and Tor hardel did this they go down 30 ft under the ground uh and they weren't deliberately buried there they were covered by sedimentation and so it becomes a calculation of um how long how much sediment get would you get 30 ft of sedimentation in a tiny Island like Easter Island with no other land mass within 2,000 Mi to contribute to the you know wind blown dust and so on and so forth it all has to come from Easter Island itself um so that's a suggestion that they may be much older and again um Professor Robert shock at Boston University who's done the absolute breakthrough courageous work on the Great Sphinx and and arguing that the Great Sphinx of Giza shows geological evidence of being more than 12,000 years old uh shock is also of the view that the moai of Easter Island are vastly older than than we've been told by archaeologists and he bases that largely on the sedimentation why did they make all of those statues well um the explanation that we were given by an elder on Easter Island Leo pakati is that is that they contain magic they contain Mana they contain a force they contain a power uh which can um affect crops uh and and and which can make all right between humanity and the universe they're and and that they they remember them today as as images of ancestors uh who were of particular importance are there's differ sized ears and stuff yeah there's there's the long earss and the short ears um that's that's true the two original races the long ears and the short ears long ear and the short ears yeah um there's there's a notion that that they're imbued with the power of powerful deceased individuals and that they act as protectors for Easter iseland and there's there's there's one in one particular array array in particular of moai where you have seven of the moai in a row um and that is thought to memorialize the seven wise men who fled to Easter isand from the destruction by flood of the land of hether that seems like a big leap why why are they the seven men why is there seven why did they the flood well that's a big leap all around the world because because there were seven sages that brought civilization to Mesopotamia as well uh according to their myths and traditions there were there were seven sages who brought civilization to Egypt in zepi the first time according to the edu texts um this this notion of of seven survivors of a cataclysm is pretty widespread what about the uh similarities with other statues around the world yeah I've been I've been quite struck by that and I think I was lucky enough to know Tor hyal he was an incredible brilliant open-minded guy and I think if Tor had had the he passed away in 2002 but I I think if he had the opportunity to see gocke and to see the upright t-shaped megaliths there and to see the fact that they have carved into them arms and hands and that the hands cross across the belly like this it's exactly the same posture as the Easter Island statues except in the case of gockley tee particularly in enclosure D where the largest megaliths are we know that they're close to 12,000 years old they're 11,600 years old at least uh and that precise dating cannot be put on the Easter Island statues at least not yet partly because because nobody has looked but there are extraordinary similarities has no one done I don't know what you do carbon dating can you do that with this type of volcanic rock that these well you can't carbon date any kind of rock right um and and has the RO if the there's there's a thing called um luminescence dating where if a rocky object has been kept away from the light if you can be sure that it's not seen light uh for for thousands and thousands of years then you can you can say when it was last exposed to the light if no way yeah you can you can there some kind of radiation comes off it and allows you to say when it was last exposed to light it doesn't necessarily tell you when it was made but it tells you when it was last exposed to light brought into the cave or whatever it might be that's wild it's it's a great it's a great technology uh and then the the other one is carbon dating but carbon dating only works on organic materials so unless something's got lodged in it and the likelihood of that not being degraded that's by and large how most dating is done by AR when archaeologists are confronted by a megalithic site um they will look for bits of datable material bits of something organic yeah which which ideally should be trapped underneath a megalith it should in order to say the gold standard this was here before the thing was here yeah or or to come to the conclusion that the megalith and that object have something in common in terms of their age that's that's the closest a bit of something that's underneath yes it's an assumption rather than necessarily an exact dating but it does give you a guideline and it's pretty good talking about the Americas I notice we haven't touched at all I just want to say one thing about Malta which was in season one okay uh not it's in the first season of ancient apocalypse uh and and and it concerns this because there's been very tiny amount of carbon dating on Malta uh hardly any that you know that Malta is a massive extraordinary megalithic culture with gig gantic megalithic temples and until the discovery of GOC lii the temple called gigantia on the island of goza which is one of the two malti Islands was thought to be the oldest megalithic site uh in the world and uh it was thought to be about 6,000 years old maybe a little bit under and this this is based on um largely what they call contextual dating uh not on carbon dating but they like to say there is some carbon dating that proves that that gigantic here is close to 6,000 years old because carbon dating was done uh 2 or 3 years ago in a project called fragos uh and and um but when you look at actually what they carbon dated they didn't carbon date anything under the temple which is a protected site they carbon dated something that was underneath a former toilet block uh 40 m away from the temple and therefore the conclusion that that dates the temple even even if it were under a megalith you have to take it carefully as to how and when it got there but if it's 40 m away from the temple I'm sorry is no use for dating the temple itself uh I think it's possible that the malse temples may be in some cases as old as gockley tee they have uh comparisons in common and this dating problem uh is uh is at the heart of the matter because there's been very little reliable dating on Malta getting back over to America yeah why haven't you talked about Northern America yet well we we've been talking about Brazil we've been talking about C two reasons because we we have filmed in North America America uh we had uh an an an extraordinary uh period of filming in chako Canyon chako Canyon is the most incredible they call it the anastasi people the old ones the ancestral people of the Pueblo people of of uh that part of America today chako Canyon is is a massive beautifully astronomically aligned complex of buildings uh and and semi Subterranean circular structures which again are astonishingly similar to the structures of golee uh and and and which even have that t-shaped Motif that is very common uh in gockley teepe um but the thing about chako Canyon the the the biggest great house there uh has got more than 400 rooms in it uh and many of those rooms are completely sealed off and archaeologists have found there's no evidence that any large population ever live ever lived there this this place was clearly built uh for some sort of s purpose and there is evidence that people made pilgrimages to chako Canyon that that's how they that's how they got there um and and um that the place was was used as a site of pilgrimage and As Above So Below it's locked into the summer solstice sunset and sunrise the winter solstice sunset and sunrise different buildings the equinoxes they're all tied up there are alignments that can that extend over distances of tens of kilometers to other structures which are perfectly in line with with a solstitial alignment this was the work of an amazing astronomical culture uh and and um no I'm not claiming that that astronomical culture was 12,000 years old but what I'm suggesting is that ideas that it expresses may be much older than the structures themselves so we filmed at Cho Canyon uh and we filmed at White Sands in in New Mexico where um uh uh an indigenous expert Kim Charlie who was actually one of the people who found the footprints in the first place uh was my principal informant and it was wonderful to see the emotion that she felt about the connection of her people with these 23,000 year old Footprints would we have filmed elsewhere in America yes but unfortunately archaeologist prevented us from doing so tell me more about that well just as they just as they denied us access to film at Serpent Mound in Ohio uh in the first season of ancient apocalypse uh we'd made a an episode about Serpent mount anyway we were able to do some filming from nebor in land but we were specifically denied access in a written document that I've that I have put online which said that the reason that they were denying us access was because I was presenting the series and basically they don't agree with my ideas therefore the best way to censor me is not to allow me uh to go to Serpent mount at all or at least to to make it as difficult as possible for me to tell a story about Serpent mount a story that would have honored Serpent Mound and does honor Serpent Mound anybody who looks at that episode in season one of ancient apocalypse will realize that where are we heretical we're suggesting that it the serpent man's alignment to the uh sumers Solstice Sunset is just slightly off and the reason that it's slightly off isn't procession it's another motion of the earth which is called the obliquity of the ecliptic the Earth has a tilt on its axis and that tilt shifts around 23.5° and that affects the rising position of the sun on the solstices and the setting position and the what it's targeted at is the setting position of the sun not today not a thousand years ago but 11 and a half thousand years ago uh anyway we we stopped filming there and that that repeated uh in season 2 we wanted to film at Cahokia an amazing massive pyramid site uh we wanted to film it's in Illinois we wanted to let me double check that I'm forgetting which state it's in um I I I do believe it's Illinois uh we wanted to film at I've been to Cahokia it it's an incredible place but we were not allowed to film there filming permission was denied again because I'm the presenter of the series I wanted to film at um Monks Mound in um Alabama Moundville in Alabama we sought permission to film there same reason it was denied so if other Majestic wonderful Mound sites in North America uh don't show up in our series it's because archaeology didn't want us to film there well the SAA asked Netflix to recat cize your last series so I imagine they must be thrilled that you've released another one well the SAA made a desperate frantic hysterical effort to have me canceled that's basically what it was about they tried to I think it's an abuse of power they tried to to use their power as as a as a body representing 5,000 archaeologists to mount a a smear campaign against ancient apocalypse to say all sorts of things about it that were simply untrue to present that in an open letter to Netflix and to that Netflix reframe the series as science fiction instead of instead of documentary and of course what a clever way to get someone canceled I mean who's going to watch it if it's science fiction you know rightly and properly it is a documentary series and there and and and it is full of expert opinion from from many many different people it's not a work of fiction it's not uh some kind of Novel uh this is this is a documentary but they wanted it to be called science fiction because they knew that that way the viewership would be reduced well there's no and Netflix fortunately ignored them there's no real tension or Stakes if it's just a Whimsical story The only reason that it actually drives people and and and is compelling one of the reasons that it is more so is that this is being proposed as a potential real world story not something that's just been fabricated AB absolutely what's your and and to the annoyance of archology I think I think I think actually there are a number of um archaeologists in the SAA one called John Hoops who's professor at the University of Kansas was actually directly involved in the writing of that SAA uh open open letter um and and another of course is Flint Dibble who I debated with on the J they they um I think they have media aspirations themselves when I look at the reaction of a lot of these individuals what I see fundamentally is jealousy and envy uh they see that I'm getting exposure uh in front of of a mass public and they think it should be theirs uh so so in fact I I'll say something about John hoops and and Flint Dibble in this context which is that if individuals who Define themselves as archaeologists find themselves spending more and more of their lives just attacking the work of other people well what Archaeology are they doing what what what what use is H what have they contributed to human knowledge when I look at Flint Dibble and I look at John Hoops the answer I come to is virtually zero they've contributed nothing to knowledge they are they're not going to make a mark on History nothing in the work that they've done is going to have any effect or any significance a generation or two from now but they can make themselves significant by attacking the ideas of other people especially if they frame those ideas as assaults upon archaeology what's your reflection on the debate that you had with Flint well um I've finally got round to analyzing that debate I've been very busy as you can imagine with making season 2 of ancient apocalypse which went on Final finalization of that series went on long after the debate in in April and I've not had time but I did finally sit down to fact check Flint Dibble um and uh I've just put that video on on online quite recently as as we're talking just a just a couple of days ago um and and uh what I've done is is I've just compared the statements that Flint makes in the debate with the facts uh I'm I'm hardly injecting my own words into it at all it's just it's just uh important I think for people to understand uh the tactics that were used uh in that debate uh I do think that Flint is a better debater than me and and I say that in the video I do think he was better prepared than me uh but some of the tactics that he used I'm not going to Define them here I would prefer that people look at the video uh so the video can be found on my YouTube channel um and I'm going to follow that up ultimately with the only talk that I'm going to give in North America next year uh cuz next year is looking to be very busy but I'm going to give a talk on the 19th and 20th of April in Sedona two days of talks I'm going to present a whole series of arguments called the fight for the past uh and the link for that is up on the events page of my website uh and I hope people will will join me there and I hope people who are critical of my ideas will join me there because I want to open up to to audience discuss discussion uh in in this but the I I think my feeling was I felt quite beaten down after the debate I felt that I'd done badly I felt that I'd let my side down my side being the alternative approach to to archaeology But as time has gone by and as I've looked at the tactics that Flint used in that debate and as more and more people have become aware of those tactics I've realized in a way it was a good thing that I wasn't the outright winner of that debate because what it did was it showed to a wide general public the true face of archaeology which is the skull behind the smile of archaeology which is an archaeology that seeks to crush and Destroy other people to ridicule and diminish their life's work to insult them to humiliate them that's what comes across in the debate that I had with Flint Dibble and unfortunately his kind of archaeologist is most vocal in the issue of attacking alternative views of the past I think it's very good that the public got to see an archaeologist doing that uh over a period of several hours uh in a debate and I'm actually quite glad that I didn't do better than I did but I'm also glad now that I've had time to put the record straight uh with this with this video how has it been personally to spend such a long time being criticized so heavily from so many people yeah it's it goes back a fairly Long Way um my first book about a historical mystery was called the sign and the seal a quest for the Lost Arc of the Covenant it's based on my years of experience in Ethiopia and looks at Ethiopia's claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant I'd written many books before that but they were entirely on current affairs issues the sign and the seal was the first book I wrote about a historical mystery um none of my books about current affairs issues received much criticism the sign and the seal didn't either um it was quite quite welcomed as an as an interesting story good Lord could the Ark of the Covenant actually be in Ethiopia what is the Arc of the Covenant as the Ethiopians claim well you've obviously not seen Raiders of the Lost Arc then it's the the Indiana Jones movie it's the it's the object that's described in the book of Exodus carried on carrying poles made of gold wood and gold with the tablets of the Ten Commandments supposedly uh inside it I won't go into the long details of why it might be in Ethiopia but my point is that that book only got to number six in the bestseller list and that seemed to be just a little bit below the Horizon where archaeologist needed to attack it but the next book Fingerprints of the Gods got to number one on the best seller list not only in the UK but also in six other countries including Italy and Japan uh it became a worldwide phenomenon and that attracted the eye of Sauron uh from from archaeologists who even then in 1995 were very annoyed that the public were listen listening to me and that's when I started to be directly targeted and attacked by archaeologists uh and by non- archaeologists who support the archaeological mainstream position uh and those attacks grew increasingly Furious and unpleasant uh during the 1990s um and I naturally began to feel quite annoyed about them myself and and I began to feel that I I needed to defend myself against these kind of things I couldn't just I couldn't just let it happen so I can that really I've been locked in a kind of argument with archaeology uh since the mid 1990s um and and uh from time to time they've got a big TV program to attack me like BBC Horizon uh did a big so-called expose on my work in around the year 2000 there were some serious errors in the Horizon presentation and it's the first time ever that BBC Horizon has been forced to re-edit and reissue a program because but those errors were there because the archaeologist behind it wanted me and my colleagues like Robert bval destroyed stopped stopped in our tracks don't let these people speak because goodness knows they might might mislead the public and this is a problem that I have with this attitude within archaeology which is an attitude fundamentally of disrespect towards the intelligence of the general public I think Sovereign adults should have the right to make up their own minds they should have the right to explore alternative ative points of view those who are presenting alternative points of view should not be stopped from filming at sites where those alternative points of view can expressed it should be an open market in ideas and the general public is quite intelligent enough to make up its own mind about which idea it supports and which it doesn't I re strongly reject the tendency within a small faction of archaeologists who nevertheless present themselves as speaking for the rest and who the rest circle the wagons around whenever necessary uh I I I I I strongly resent their notion that they somehow need to tell the public what to think has it been frustrating for you as somebody who wants to focus on work uh the you say not perverse incentives but the the temptation to play defense for yourself given that lots of accusations are coming at you which then means that if you don't respond the vacuum of response sometimes sucks in speculation or like complicity or you know a lie through or Mission or whatever it might be um so this do you ever sort of feel wistful for how much of your life has been spent this back and forth I've heard you I've heard you have this conversation a number of times with Joe I've heard you do it directly to Flint it's evident that this has been a uh something that's got under your skin for a long time and it's been poke poke poke poke poke continuously but I I think about how much time of both archaeologists doing the debunking and then the I think what's now technically referred to as dunking which is the reverse of the debunking debunking the mainstream yeah that that's um Dan Richards his channel is called called the duning he's done some some great work and I'd like to give a shout out to to another YouTube channel run by a guy called independent scholar um that's his handle um he's done some some excellent it's very small Channel right now but it deserves to be bigger I like that dunking wood but my point being that so much time of both uh established mainstream archaeology yourself and then from what I can tell even parts of your psychology maybe this anger predisposition uh has played into it a little bit um has been captured Yeah by criticism criticism capture in many ways it's it's made me defensive just take a look at a book that I published in 2002 called underworld it's about a th pages long it's got 2,000 footnotes I wrote that book defensively that book describes the seven years of scuba diving that I and my wife Santa did to look at structures that were submerged by rising sea level at the end of the last ice Agee um but I made it a very heavy read because I was trying to bulletproof it against the attacks that I knew were going to to come and and and as a result it's a much heavier read than than most of my books I don't feel I need to write so defensively now but I do feel that I need to document and provide the source for every single statement that I make uh so that I can't be accused of misrepresenting information I'm aware that I'm surrounded by a group of hostile people who want to find any error or mistake in my work and magnify it into some kind of uh conspiracy that hanok is in involved in look when the SAA wrote that open letter to Netflix it took me a month to research and document my rebuttal to the saa's open letter and that rebuttal part of it I I actually read out during this this video I've told you about but it's on my website it's in my it's in my blog a detailed rebuttal to the to the points that I make so I that was a month of my life that I could have been doing something much more constructive with that I was spent immersed in each and every one of their criticisms to show that those criticisms are not based on anything solid yes it's most unfortunate why can't archaeology be a bit Kinder and a bit more generous it is but why is it why is it necessary for people who Define themselves as scientists I don't think archaeologists are scientists I think they're I I I I think they're like the the lady who protests too much you know I think that's a Shakespearean line they they desperately want to be scientists um you know but but uh you know why should they why should they have this power why should they have this ability to to just use their authority to try to shut people down I saw a interesting video about uh pseudoarchaeology and how it's a dangerous Gateway basically that accusing you of being the beginning of a radicalization pipeline because questioning the status quo and established theories in archaeology gets you very quickly into Ross the child and lizard people things soon enough well I think I I was amused by my first season of an apocalypse apocalypse being called the most dangerous Show on Netflix uh in newspapers and by archaeologists um and I've never seen why uh that should be the case and my rebuttal to the saa's open letter makes that makes that clear um but um uh just how did we get on to that point I'm getting tired no I was saying that what's it been like psychologically dealing with all of the criticism and then there was this pseudoarchaeology pipeline into danger the the idea that that um thinking for oneself about the past might dangerously lead to thinking on for oneself about other things too this has often been connected to the climate change issue people said my goodness if people believe hanock that we're wrong about the past then they'll believe experts were are wrong about climate change as well uh and that's one of the reasons why it's seen as as Danger but behind that is a notion that the public should not be provided with information that can enable them to make choices between different points of view and I think that's the heart of a democracy it's the heart of a democratic system that we should have an open forum for alternative points of view and rather than despising the public and think that they need to be told what to think by so-called experts who are archaeologists we should trust the public to make up their own mind on information and we should provide that information to them and I don't think that's dangerous I think what's Danger ous is shutting that down can we talk a little bit about Stonehenge because there was some recent Revelations that came out about the distance that the central rocks had traveled well one from Scotland yeah I mean that's a for the people who aren't in the UK UK is not as big as America all right but that's a good distance you're looking at hundreds of miles with a pretty big rock with a pretty hefty multi-ton rock yeah and that's 4,000 years old 4,000 or more years old there's parts of Stonehenge that are much older there was a woodhenge at Stonehenge which may go back as much as 10 ,000 years uh into the past this is a site that was developed over a long period of time we're looking at the latest incarnation of it at around 4,000 years ago uh another mystery is that the blue stones the smaller stones at Stonehenge also don't come from the malor Downs where Stonehenge stands they come from Wales they were brought a distance of more than a 100 miles uh and and and in fact you can see an almost almost here a template of Stonehenge in the pril mountains in Wales uh where these Stones were cut out of and brought to you could actually put them back into the gaps that have been left for them uh so the Ancients were doing something on a very large scale across hundreds of miles uh to to create that site and of course we have no documents that have survived from that period so we don't know why but what we do know is that Stonehenge like Serpent Mound like the Great Sphinx is oriented at a key moment in the Solar year in the case of Stonehenge it's sunrise is on the summer solers in the case of Serpent Mound it's sunset on the summer solers but you can see the connection that as above so below that we're seeing in the Americas we're also seeing in ancient Britain and I'm not saying that that's because it came from ancient Britain to ancient America or from ancient America to ancient Britain I'm saying that the best explanation for that is that both received a legacy from an older and Lost Civilization up next would you ever consider doing any work in Antarctica um I don't see the point uh I I don't see the point I'd love to I'd love to go to anartica and and and see that magnificence but what work could I usefully do i' I'd have to I'd have to have a I'd have to have a billionaire backer and lots of and lots of amazing kit uh you know to start investigating under the The Ice properly in Antarctica where would you like to go next then if it's not Antarctica um I in intend to spend the next year refocusing on Ancient Egypt I've been I've been out of ancient Egypt for quite a while um but I've recently mended my fences and established a new a new friendship with zah AAS who who um is the leading Egypt Egyptian egyptologist uh and I hope to work with sahi rather than we've buried our old conflict and there was a conflict between us we we've decided that is not fruitful for either of us he has his point of view I respect it and it's based on his lifetime exposure to the mysteries of ancient Egypt and he comes at it from a mainstream archaeological point of view I've been exposed to ancient Egypt for 30 years and I'm coming at it from an alternative point of view and how interesting to work together to it's the first time I might have a really constructive long-term working relationship with so and and it's odd because zahi and I were once at dager drawn but uh you know we both we're both getting old and and we both feel that there's no point in having bitterness in life so I want to get back to ancient Egypt and I want to spend a lot more time there uh I think Egypt is the heart of the mystery that's where ultimately all the stories will come out I originally had this plan that obviously you're not aware of because I never told you um but we may be able to make it work I guess with your new found Egyptian contact and your uh next Focus I wanted to do a uh podcast at sunrise in front of the Pyramids of Giza with you at some point I imagine that getting the license from the Egyptian government may be difficult I imagine that all of the technical problems all the rest of it uh but if and when uh you're ready to do that I've got the team that can put it together so I think we could make it happen I think we could make it happen but uh I would say what you want is sunrise by the Sphinx or between the Sphinx and the second pyramid behind the to negotiate looking at the looking precisely in the direction of the Gaze of the Sphinx and watch the Sun come over the horizon directly in the eyeline of the Sphinx the Sphinx is oriented perfectly to the sunrise at dawn on the Spring Equinox I will allow you to contribute to the location but maybe we can make that work grae hanock ladies and gentlemen gra I I really appreciate you I appreciate your bravery to be able to to go and do this stuff the new series uh which I got Early Access to which is pretty sweet on Netflix is really awesome uh I actually prefer the second series to the first one I think that the the pacing is is awesome it's uh it's engaging where should people go and what can they expect over the next however long well uh the the series goes public on Netflix is released on Netflix on the 16th of October Wednesday the 16th of October so anybody anywhere in the world who has Netflix will be able to watch Ancient apocalypse season 2 from the 16th of October 2024 onwards and and that's one of the great things about Netflix is that that that when you put a year and a half of effort into making something on this scale uh it doesn't just disappear with one showing it stays there for a long period of time so people can view it even a year or two years or three years uh after it was first released and to keep up to date with everything else that you're doing should my website is is the primary focus uh grahamhancock.com and of course I have a I have a substantial Facebook page it's my I have a personal page but I would I look up author Graham hanok it's my author page uh that that is my main Facebook page and I have a Twitter account uh as as well maybe we can put them under the description in your when you release this thank you G I appreciate you thank you good to be with you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that you will love my full length three and a half hour conversation with Eric Weinstein right here go on