#2215 - Graham Hancock

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

Speaker 1 The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 2 Good to see you, sir. What's happening? Good to see you too, Joe.
I watched episode one and I'm into episode two of your new season.

Speaker 2 Looks fantastic. Looks awesome.
Fantastic information. But before we do anything, I think we should probably address what we know now about the debate that you had with Flint Dibble.

Speaker 2 So that was the last time we were here.

Speaker 2 I appreciate that he came on and I thought it was going to be an interesting discussion, but

Speaker 2 it turned out he played fast and loose with the truth

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 distorted quite a bit of information that

Speaker 2 were some key points that you had discussed. One of them being the amount of shipwrecks that were discovered.
He greatly inflated the amount of shipwrecks that have been discovered.

Speaker 2 And then you released a video today

Speaker 2 that went over a lot of this stuff. And one of the things that went over is the oldest shipwreck that we are currently available.
It's about 4,000 years old.

Speaker 1 About 6,000 years ago. 6,000? The Dokos shipwreck.

Speaker 2 But there's nothing left of the ship.

Speaker 2 And this is what's important.

Speaker 2 What he was trying to say was that it would be preserved by the cold water. That turns out to not be the truth at all.

Speaker 2 And that these ships that are 6,000 years old, there's nothing left of the actual boat itself.

Speaker 1 The only thing that's left is pottery and coins and things of the like and especially when you consider the possibility of ships having gone through a cataclysm right

Speaker 1 but there's a there's a

Speaker 1 more central point than that which which really needed to be brought up by the archaeologist in this which is that which is that archaeology universally accepts that human beings were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 And I put the evidence on this into the video. It's not even in dispute.
Like the the island of Cyprus.

Speaker 1 The nearest Turkish coast is about 60 kilometers from there. It's always been surrounded by huge deeps.
It's always been an island, even at the peak of the

Speaker 1 sea level, lowest sea level during the Ice Age. Cyprus was always an island.
And yet, there's evidence now that it was settled 14,000 years ago, certainly

Speaker 1 14,000 to 12,500 years ago. It was settled, in other words, during the Ice Age.
And these were large planned migrations.

Speaker 1 When you're going to migrate to an island, you can't just go two or three people by accident because you'll become extinct. You have to bring in quite a large population.

Speaker 1 And they reckon that populations of a thousand or so were being brought across that water, across the ocean, across the Mediterranean Sea, to Cyprus near the end of the last ice age.

Speaker 1 But not a single ship has survived from...

Speaker 1 to testify to that. Same with Australia.

Speaker 1 50,000 years ago, human beings got there, and even at the the lowest sea level, they would have had to cross about 90 kilometers of open water in large numbers.

Speaker 1 And again, no ships have been found to testify to that, yet archaeologists accept that they got there by ship.

Speaker 1 So to say that we haven't found any ships from the ice age is not really evidence about anything.

Speaker 2 And if we're finding the oldest ships that we currently are aware of, which is, as you said, about 6,000 years ago, if you tack on another 6,000 years of decay on top of that, what are the odds you're going to find anything?

Speaker 1 I think the odds are very, very low.

Speaker 2 Now, if we had that evidence and that information when we were confronting Flint, that would have been a very different conversation. Totally.

Speaker 2 But the arrogance in which he distributed that fake information was

Speaker 2 disturbing. It sucks when people just want to win and they don't want to get to the truth.

Speaker 1 It does.

Speaker 2 And the truth is kind of, it's very fascinating. Another thing that was very fascinating that he discussed, I didn't watch your whole video, but it was about seeds.

Speaker 2 I asked the question,

Speaker 2 there's a very distinct, noticeable difference between domestic seeds and seeds that are wild. And the difference is the seeds that are wild, they break off easier because

Speaker 2 it makes sense that it would

Speaker 2 help them prosper. It would help them be able to spread the seed if it broke off the plant easier.
And so they can recognize that.

Speaker 2 And then when they start using large-scale agriculture, the seeds become more robust and stick to

Speaker 2 the plant because it makes sense that it would, if you're going to harvest all of the plants and then take the seeds off of it, for the plant to prosper, you would want the seeds to be more robust.

Speaker 2 So there's these changes. And I said,

Speaker 2 have they ever noticed a domesticated seed going back and having the characteristics of a wild seed? He said, no. But that's not true either.

Speaker 1 That's not true either, no. No.

Speaker 1 It's not true.

Speaker 1 And the whole notion of the origins of agriculture, I think archaeology's got a great deal more work to do on that. Often I'm misrepresented as saying that survivors of my supposed lost civilization

Speaker 1 would have brought crops with them. I think that's most unlikely in a cataclysmic situation.
What they brought with them was the knowledge that crops can be domesticated.

Speaker 1 And it's precisely during the Younger Dryas that we see that shift from undomesticated to domesticated crops in the archaeological record.

Speaker 1 And what I'm suggesting is that these were people who had already conquered that problem. They'd already solved that problem.
They knew it could be done.

Speaker 1 And they brought that knowledge with them and shared that knowledge with the people that they took refuge amongst. Because I don't think we're looking at a mass migration.

Speaker 1 I think we're looking at a few survivors who are taking refuge after a global cataclysm.

Speaker 2 You know, it's just very unfortunate when you have a debate and one person is an expert and they're not truthful. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Speaker 1 It's just.

Speaker 1 I think it's very bad for archaeology.

Speaker 2 It is, because it reinforces all the things that you've been saying.

Speaker 1 It does. I mean, to be honest, I felt beaten up after

Speaker 1 that debate. But looking back in retrospect on the whole thing, I think

Speaker 1 it actually makes the point that we have a very arrogant, very controlling discipline in archaeology which has established a narrative about the past and which will fight tooth and nail to maintain that narrative, including using dirty tricks.

Speaker 1 And I think instead of smearing people who talk about the possibility of a lost civilization or people who even talk about aliens, I think instead of smearing them, archaeology should understand why people are asking those questions.

Speaker 1 And people are asking those questions because they're not satisfied with what archaeology is offering.

Speaker 1 It's not providing a nurturing, satisfying resolution to many of the problems that come from the past. And that's what drives me, is curiosity about anomalies in the past.

Speaker 1 often misrepresented as saying that somehow I've proved that a lost civilization existed and I don't claim to have proved that. What I do say is join me on this journey.

Speaker 1 There are mysteries in the past. Let's see if they're explained by archaeology or if they're not explained.
And I found quite a number that are not explained by archaeology.

Speaker 1 And that's particularly to do with astronomical alignments, with traditions that are shared all around the world.

Speaker 1 It's to do with things that archaeologists by and large don't study.

Speaker 2 Well, it's also one of the things that's fascinating is just even with conventional archaeology, the dates keep getting pushed further and further back.

Speaker 1 Further and further back.

Speaker 2 And this is one of the things, the White Sands, New Mexico stuff that you have on episode one.

Speaker 1 That's right. Which is, by the way, White Sands.
Have you been there? No, I haven't been there. An incredible,

Speaker 1 ethereal, otherworldly place. And Alamogordo is sitting right in the middle of that.
This is where they did the nuclear tests and the

Speaker 2 trinitide,

Speaker 1 which was which was created there. And there's gypsum sand.
It's not normal. It's just the most amazing, amazing place.

Speaker 1 And there, yes, they found human footprints dated back more than twenty thro twenty-three thousand years.

Speaker 2 What do they think that environment was like twenty-two thousand years ago?

Speaker 1 Well, it would still have been like that. It would have been gypsum dunes then in that in in that place.

Speaker 2 Gypsum dunes.

Speaker 1 They wouldn't have left the footprints. I'm not exactly sure why the gypsum is there, but there it is.

Speaker 2 Is that the same stuff they use for like gypsum board for construction?

Speaker 1 I reckon so, yeah. Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow. It's a very fine, very white sand, and it just goes on forever, and the dunes are sculpted and massive and huge.
We had an amazing time there. So it looked incredible.

Speaker 2 So they found footprints there, and these are absolutely human footprints, and there's not just a few of them, there's thousands of them.

Speaker 1 There's thousands of them, and what's amazing when you actually see the footprints is you can see the interactions between the human beings and animals.

Speaker 1 You can see that somebody is reacting to a giant sloth which has suddenly turned around and the person who's behind it suddenly turns around as well.

Speaker 1 mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints and then human footprints overlaying those.

Speaker 1 And it goes down for meters under the ground. So you have a very deep stratification of these impressions that have been left behind by our ancestors and by animals that are now completely extinct.

Speaker 1 Mammoths and mastodons went extinct during the Younger Dryas, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings.

Speaker 1 It's very intimate to see a footprint, to see those five toes, to see the heel mark, to see sometimes a child walking beside a mother.

Speaker 1 That's there in the record as well.

Speaker 1 It's quite something special. And it opens the door.
Archaeology has been very reluctant to accept a much older peopling of the Americas than previously was held.

Speaker 1 It was held for a long time that it was about 13,000 years ago. They've abandoned that now.
They did cling on tooth and nail for decades, but that's been abandoned.

Speaker 1 It's accepted that human beings came here long before 13,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 And White Sands is one of the places which provides just absolute definite, irrefutable evidence of that, that they were here 23,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 But we don't know yet how long before that they were here.

Speaker 1 This is part of the problem. I often remember a site called the Ceruti Mastodon site in San Diego.

Speaker 1 I went to see.

Speaker 1 The exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum, and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Demare,

Speaker 1 and they are convinced that they are looking at human... traces there.

Speaker 1 It was a butchering of a mastodon, but the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings. And the thing is,

Speaker 1 it's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old.

Speaker 1 And, you know, this opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they were in Europe. And that becomes...

Speaker 1 That's crazy. That's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities, which have been neglected.
I think that the

Speaker 1 prejudice that the Americas were only settled very late in the human story led archaeology to not have their eye on the possibility of what happens if they were here earlier. Right.

Speaker 1 And they tend not to, and they tend not to look to that.

Speaker 2 Well, what I was going to ask is, as they're digging deeper and deeper and they're finding these footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, is there a possibility that they could dig deeper still and find things that are even older?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 How are they how do they know where to go?

Speaker 1 It was found by accident.

Speaker 1 The first footprints were were found completely by accident. And they were found by Indigenous local people who alerted the National Park Service to them.

Speaker 1 And we have a number of Indigenous spokespeople who speak to the White Sands Mystery and

Speaker 1 how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind will reveal them again.

Speaker 1 And they're fragile, they can be easily destroyed and wiped off. And in a way, it's a a miracle that they've survived.

Speaker 1 But to see the stride of a mammoth, you see how far apart those huge footpads are,

Speaker 1 and to realize this thing was alive, this thing existed on this planet, human beings interacted with it. It's a very compelling evidence for an earlier settlement of the Americas.

Speaker 2 There is some evidence that human beings came across the Bering Land Bridge. Oh, yeah.
So that probably means there was people already here and people came here from Asia.

Speaker 1 Almost certainly. And the way the evidence is looking, it's most likely that South America was settled first,

Speaker 1 before North America was settled. And that raises all kinds of questions.

Speaker 1 And we've gone into this in season two of Ancient Apocalypse, primarily to do with the DNA evidence of a direct connection between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia and the peoples of certain tribes in South America.

Speaker 1 And that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America, but also to do with archaeological sites like Monte Verde.

Speaker 1 I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillahay the last time we were on when Flint was here.

Speaker 1 And Tom Dillahay, who found Monte Verde, who excavated Monte Verde in South America and realized that it was plus 14,000 years old and therefore a lot older than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America.

Speaker 1 When he put that idea forward, he was eviscerated by his colleagues in archaeology. It took them a decade to come around to accepting that actually he was right.

Speaker 1 And there are many other sites in South America going back 30 plus thousand years. They're all controversial because they conflict with an existing model.
But I think instead of...

Speaker 1 clinging on to existing models, I think that's one of the problems with archaeology is this territoriality, this kind of control of the past. I think instead of doing that,

Speaker 1 it would be nicer if archaeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to new and different ideas.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, that's just the thing when people are supposed experts in a subject and someone comes along that's also been studying it but from an untraditional perspective,

Speaker 2 people reject that.

Speaker 1 I've come to the point, and I'm going to say something, some strong words here.

Speaker 1 I feel crazy, Grandma.

Speaker 1 I've come to the point where I believe that some archaeologists, not all of them, most actually this this problem is with a small number of archaeologists, but they're extremely vocal.

Speaker 1 I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power.

Speaker 1 Archaeologists have a power. They are the official spokespeople

Speaker 1 for the past. And they use that power to slap down any point of view that doesn't agree with theirs.
So I think that there's an abuse of power there. And at the same time,

Speaker 1 there's not a realization that that's happening because the mindset that drives it is the feeling that members of the general public are unable to decide things for themselves.

Speaker 1 This is the arrogance of archaeology, that they feel that they have to tell people what to think about the past and they underestimate the intelligence of the public and the ability of the public to discern, to make choices between different possibilities about the past.

Speaker 1 They think that archaeologists seem to think that only one possibility of the past must be considered by the general public and that's their possibility.

Speaker 1 And it reminds me a lot of the heresy hunters back in the 16th century. You know, the people who disagreed with their point of view got burned at the stake.

Speaker 1 Well, you don't get burned at the stake today, but you can get lynched by a mob of archaeologists.

Speaker 2 Well, it's also the same thing that we saw during COVID with medical experts that disagreed with the narrative. It's the same thing.

Speaker 1 It is absolutely the same thing.

Speaker 2 When you take esteemed professors and doctors and physicians and you cast them into this kook label because they disagree with the narrative that the medical establishment is pushing, and then they turn out to be correct, which most of them did,

Speaker 2 you see the same patterns. It's just power.
It's just power and people that

Speaker 2 have their identity wrapped up in them being the ones that have access to the actual information.

Speaker 2 They don't want it to be distributed by some guy on Netflix.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 Even though you've been probably studying it more than them,

Speaker 1 certainly studying particular aspects of it. That's the other thing I noticed, which was the sneering

Speaker 1 attitude towards me. They talk about

Speaker 1 my wife, Santa, taking tourist photos of the places that we've been to. Well, we've never been anywhere as tourists.
We haven't had a holiday for 20 years.

Speaker 1 But the working trips that we do are very intense.

Speaker 2 Your wife's an amazing photographer. Like, who cares if she takes tourist photos?

Speaker 1 The photos are incredible.

Speaker 2 They're of real sites that are very pertinent and very interesting.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 Criticizing amazing photographs is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Like, why would you criticize amazing photographs of ruins that are perplexing?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 But it's like, how could you find

Speaker 2 even an area where you want people to agree with you?

Speaker 1 It's part of this desperate search to say we archaeologists know everything.

Speaker 1 And we must discredit in any way we can anybody who has anything opposite to say.

Speaker 2 It's an unfortunate human characteristic.

Speaker 2 It happens in everything. You see it in martial arts, you see it in science, you see it in everything.

Speaker 1 This reliance on experts, I get it. I would like the pilot of my plane to be an expert pilot.

Speaker 1 I don't want him to be an amateur.

Speaker 1 But I don't think that archaeologists and aircraft pilots can be compared in that sense. Archaeology is a much more interpretive discipline.

Speaker 1 An aircraft pilot is not really interpreting situations that much. He knows what to do in such situations.

Speaker 1 Archaeologists are interpreting the past, and yet they seem to get very upset by other interpretations of the past that are offered that

Speaker 1 don't agree with theirs. And this is the problem of expertise in our society.
Yes, expertise is very important. It's incredibly useful.
But we should not place all our faith and trust in experts.

Speaker 1 We need to liberate our own consciousness and freely think about things and make our own decisions about things and

Speaker 1 resist absolutely being told what to think.

Speaker 2 Well, the problem is these experts are human beings. And human beings have very distinct behavior traits that they exhibit, especially when they're in a position of power and prestige.

Speaker 2 And they like to hold that and they like to, it feels good for them to be the person that looks down upon the people that don't know better and tell them what to do and tell them what to think.

Speaker 2 And when you're doing that with something like our look, if you're doing that with something like mathematics and someone's a mathematical expert, math is a very specific and precise science.

Speaker 2 It's very specific.

Speaker 2 Archaeology is like who fucking knows what's out there because you haven't searched everything.

Speaker 2 It's not possible to. And as we develop more

Speaker 2 these

Speaker 2 fascinating technologies like LIDAR, where you have the ability, ground-penetrating radar, all these different things where you can look into the soil itself and find things that aren't visible on the surface.

Speaker 2 See them through trees, see them through.

Speaker 2 That we're going to find more and more. And obviously in Brazil they have done, in the Amazon they have done that.

Speaker 1 Well that was part of our adventure with season two of Ancient Apocalypse

Speaker 1 was working with a really professional team in Brazil led by an archaeologist, Marty Parsinen from the University of Helsinki, and a geographer from Brazil, Alceo Ranzi.

Speaker 1 Alseu, years ago, was the first person who noticed that there are these huge geometrical structures emerging out of the Amazon jungle. And he noticed it on a flight

Speaker 1 on a commercial aircraft in an area that happened to have been cleared by local farmers for planting crops, that there was this massive geometrical earthwork there. And

Speaker 1 he actually coined the term geoglyphs for these because he compared them in some ways with the Nazca lines, which again are really only visible from the air.

Speaker 1 You get suddenly the massive scope and extent of these things. And it's the same with the geoglyphs in the Amazon.

Speaker 1 And here's the thing. The ones we know about up till now,

Speaker 1 we largely know about them because of these tragic clearances of the Amazon rainforest, which is maybe short-term economic gain, but is a long-term really not a very good idea.

Speaker 1 But now with LiDAR, it's possible to find these things without damaging any rainforest at all. And we had a LiDAR expert with us, and you can fly LiDAR off a drone now.
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's incredible. It's a pretty hefty drone, but they can fly anywhere.
And we found, I say we, it was actually the LiDAR expert who found. He found,

Speaker 1 you can see the edge of the rainforest where the clearances stop and the rainforest hasn't yet been interfered with. And then he flies over there.

Speaker 1 And within a matter of hours, he's found multiple more of these structures, several. Deep in the rainforest.
That are deep in the rainforest. Covered completely.
Covered completely.

Speaker 1 And LiDAR allows him to see through the canopy and to see what's underneath it without damaging it. And there are these huge earthworks.

Speaker 1 And this raises the question, how much more is there in the Amazon to find, especially which even

Speaker 1 the archaeologists who are most reluctant are now willing to accept that the Amazon had a huge population before the Spanish conquest. This is so wild.

Speaker 2 That's such a shift.

Speaker 1 Millions, cities. Yeah.

Speaker 1 A whole different way of life, a whole different kind of civilization from the one that we have today, one that lived in a man-made garden, which is what the Amazon really and truly is, and

Speaker 1 lived in harmony with that.

Speaker 2 That's an interesting thing, too.

Speaker 2 We've talked about that before, but for people who have never heard those other podcasts, they've determined that the Amazon rainforest is at least partially man-made.

Speaker 1 Definitely.

Speaker 1 They've determined that because of the preponderance of trees that serve human needs.

Speaker 1 They call them hyper-dominant. And things like Brazil nut trees,

Speaker 1 which are providing food for human beings, are in massive dominance in relation to trees that aren't useful to human beings and it's it's clear that this is the result of a long-term human project to make this jungle serve human needs.

Speaker 2 What was the other one, the ice cream bean?

Speaker 1 What was that? Ice cream bean and

Speaker 1 I'm forgetting all of the details but there's a bunch of

Speaker 1 food plants which are which are hyperdominant in the in the Amazon rainforest.

Speaker 1 And these food plants show that human beings have been nurturing, have been massaging this natural wonder and turning it into something that really serves human needs.

Speaker 2 And there's the other thing that you've discussed in depth, the terrapraeta,

Speaker 2 this man-made, incredibly rich, nutrient-dense soil that they can grow incredible agriculture off of that we really to this day don't know how they created.

Speaker 1 It's a mystery.

Speaker 1 Again, it was a great privilege to have the opportunity to stand in a pit of terrapraeta that is being excavated to get down 15 feet into that.

Speaker 2 Can they recreate it once they get it?

Speaker 1 It appears that modern, not modern, but

Speaker 1 indigenous communities in the Amazon are still doing this.

Speaker 1 They're still doing it,

Speaker 1 mixing all kinds of refuse and waste together and enriching the soil with it. So it's not stopped.
Terra Praetor is still being made, but most of it is very old.

Speaker 1 And the oldest that they found so far is about 8,000 years old.

Speaker 2 So it's just large-scale regenerative agriculture using some old lost method.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right. That's right.
And making, see a rainforest, even when

Speaker 1 you choose trees that are going to serve human needs, it's not enough. You do need to be able to plant in the rainforest.
And that is what Terra Praetor has allowed people to do.

Speaker 1 Rainforest soils are not particularly fertile by nature. So it's these spots of fertility all over the Amazon.
And we went into that mystery quite a bit in one of the episodes.

Speaker 2 It's so interesting, especially when you consider the stories like the Lost City of Z,

Speaker 2 you know, which they turned into an interesting film. But the the book details these records of these incredible cities that these people had visited a long time ago.

Speaker 2 And then when they tried to go back, there was nothing there. Yeah.
Because everybody had died off because of European diseases, probably.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what happened.

Speaker 2 But those cities were just consumed by the jungle.

Speaker 2 And much like Detroit, if you go to Detroit now, you could see

Speaker 2 there's a bunch of neighborhoods in Detroit that are essentially abandoned, and trees are growing right through the houses and the houses are I mean that's just a few decades ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the houses are almost gone in some in some ways if you went back 200 years ago there'd probably be nothing left of them

Speaker 2 and this is probably exactly what happened in the Amazon except the trees just consume the landscape because it's such an incredible dense rainforest that things grow so quickly there.

Speaker 1 That's what happened. I mean before the lost city of Z we have this very interesting report and I have mentioned it to you before in the previous episode.
The expedition of

Speaker 1 Gaspar de Carvajal and his chronicler Francisco de Orellana,

Speaker 1 which was an accidental expedition. They were just going hunting in a longboat, but the Amazon took them and wouldn't let them go back.

Speaker 1 And they traveled 4,000 miles across South America and ended up in the, they started on the Pacific side and ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.

Speaker 1 And that's in the 1550s, 1560s. And they report seeing enormous, thriving, prosperous cities, highly civilized with advanced arts and crafts.

Speaker 1 And they were not believed because 100 years later, when other Spaniards made that voyage and went into the Amazon, they couldn't find the cities.

Speaker 1 And the reason they couldn't find them is precisely the reason that you give, which is that the jungle had eaten those cities because the human population had been wiped out by disease brought by the Spaniards.

Speaker 1 The Spaniards didn't have to have direct contact with those indigenous peoples in the middle of the Amazon. The diseases just jumped from population to population and just killed everybody.

Speaker 2 It's so wild that that happens. It's so crazy when most people probably aren't even aware.

Speaker 2 Everyone knows there was a genocide of Native Americans in this country, but most people don't know that 90% of them were wiped out by disease.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Which is just unbelievable to think about. Millions of people just wiped out over the course of a few decades or 100 years by diseases.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's an early example of a biological weapon. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right? And to some extent, extent, it was used deliberately as a biological weapon, like those smallpox-infected blankets.

Speaker 2 Is that true, the smallpox-inflicted blankets?

Speaker 1 Because I've heard that that was like a rumor.

Speaker 1 It may well be a rumor, but from what I've looked at from the Spanish conquest of Mexico,

Speaker 1 there was a realization that we can kill these people with smallpox.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it was spread.

Speaker 1 And we have some immunity to it that they don't have.

Speaker 2 Right, because we had it forever in Europe.

Speaker 2 It's just so terrible when you read Cabeza de Vaca's story about visiting the Maya civilization and you realize, like, that was, you guys fucking killed everybody.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the diseases did. I mean, the battles did kill some people.
Sure.

Speaker 1 But not on the order of the diseases.

Speaker 1 Mexico City fell to the Spaniards

Speaker 1 primarily because of disease and secondarily because the Aztecs weren't popular with their neighbors. So it really wasn't just Cortez and 400 Spaniards.

Speaker 1 It was Cortez and 400 Spaniards plus smallpox, plus the Tlascalans, who the Aztecs had used as a sort of farm for human sacrifices for 100 years. And the Tlascalans...

Speaker 1 looked at Cortés and they said, we can use this guy.

Speaker 1 And so they joined him. He had tens of thousands of Trascalan warriors.

Speaker 1 Otherwise,

Speaker 1 he would not have had that victory.

Speaker 2 So what archaeology would like is to be in control of expressing that narrative in its fullest form. And I don't think they know.
I don't think.

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They can.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Nobody can explain the Olmecs. Explain that.
Explain those features and those faces.

Speaker 1 It's a very curious thing.

Speaker 1 And again, and again, the moment we start talking about people's facial features, then they jump in with you being a racist, you're being a white supremacist or whatever, although they'll all make heads.

Speaker 1 Don't say of white supremacism.

Speaker 2 Not at all. How would that be

Speaker 2 racist if these were the most advanced seafaring people alive 6,000 years ago?

Speaker 1 Again, that would be kind of the opposite. The racism angle is just being used to shut it down.
Right. This is something that we, particularly in the climate in the world today.

Speaker 2 Well, Flint does that a lot.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He does that. I saw him do that to Jimmy Corsetti online over uses of parentheses or brackets.
Did you see that? I did. That somehow or another, that's a code for Jews.
Like,

Speaker 2 I thought what he was doing was avoiding

Speaker 2 there's certain algorithms that pick up on particular words that you use. Like, you ever see that people,

Speaker 2 they don't, like, if they want their posts to be more viral, they don't write the word shooter. They write S-H,

Speaker 2 and then they put, like, two asterisks and then T-E-R-S.

Speaker 1 I've noticed people doing that.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 So what people are trying to do by blanking out swear words and cutting out different words is that you can bypass algorithms that selectively remove or limit the distribution of those kind of posts with those keywords in it.

Speaker 2 So that apparently was all he was trying to do, was adding brackets to something to, you know, to enhance the algorithm.

Speaker 1 To enhance the algorithm.

Speaker 2 But it's just like accusing someone of racism, it should be like,

Speaker 2 it should be so it should be very clear what what they're saying.

Speaker 2 It shouldn't be you have decided through some sneaky code

Speaker 2 to decide that this person's racist. Oh, this code means this.
This is a commonly used code.

Speaker 2 From what I understand, those use of brackets is just to trick the algorithm.

Speaker 2 Just like the two asterisks for shooter.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 it's very unfortunate that in serious and interesting discussions about the past, that this issue of race immediately gets dumped into it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because those who are dumping race into the issue know that that's a way to shut down a conversation. Nobody wants to be accused of being a racist.

Speaker 2 It's also the dumbest suggestion because the most sophisticated ancient civilization that's baffling people to this day is in Africa.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up. It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 Those were the most advanced human beings ever. And we are in disagreement.
There's a lot of confusion and debate as to how long ago they were there.

Speaker 2 According to their hieroglyphs, they were there 30,000 plus years ago. But at the very least, those were people in Africa.

Speaker 2 Okay, so all the racism shit should be out the window because no one's saying that was anybody else. No,

Speaker 1 that was an African civilization.

Speaker 2 They literally have images of themselves. We know what they look like, you know, at least drawings of what they looked like.
We have statues of what they looked like. It was an African civilization.

Speaker 2 They were the most advanced people, perhaps ever. I'm leaning towards ever.

Speaker 1 I'm leaning towards ever, too.

Speaker 1 Because, look, can we think of any other other civilization that has survived for 3,000 years? Right.

Speaker 2 That you can go visit right now.

Speaker 1 That you can go visit right now.

Speaker 1 But ancient Egypt, as a culture, survived for 3,000 years.

Speaker 1 It survived the Greek occupation. It survived the previous Persian occupation.
It was only the Romans that brought it low.

Speaker 1 The Roman occupation of Egypt was the beginning of the end.

Speaker 2 To put it into perspective, I always use this quote. I forget who came up with this, but it's a perfect analogy.

Speaker 2 Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the construction of the pyramids.

Speaker 2 Even if you use the conventional 2,500 BC dating of the construction of the pyramids, which is also under debate. It's under debate, yeah.

Speaker 2 Even if that's true, even if it is 2,500 years ago, the most baffling thing is how did they do it? There's no simple answers. I don't give a fuck what anybody says.
There's no simple answers.

Speaker 2 How did they do it? How did they have such incredible sophistication in their construction methods?

Speaker 2 How did they get those massive 80-plus ton stones 500 miles down from the mountains with no equipment, no heavy machinery? Whatever they did, I think it's reasonable to say that in a different way,

Speaker 2 I don't think they had iPhones, I don't think they had email, but they were probably more sophisticated than us today in their ability to manipulate stone and make constructions.

Speaker 1 They certainly were. And I think they had mastery of techniques that we don't know about yet.

Speaker 1 And perhaps equipment. And perhaps equipment.

Speaker 1 The Great Pyramid remains to me an abiding mystery, which, despite probably 100 or more visits to the Great Pyramid and being inside it and spending the night in it and exploring every passage and every chamber, including the so-called relieving chambers above the king's chamber, I still can't figure it out.

Speaker 1 I don't understand how it was possible to do this.

Speaker 1 And then the time span which Egyptology gives us, because Egyptology is fixed on the idea that the Great Pyramid is a tomb and only a tomb.

Speaker 2 And then it was built in about 20 years.

Speaker 1 23 years.

Speaker 1 Because if it's the tomb of Khufu, then it had to be built in 23 years because that was his reign.

Speaker 1 He would start, in theory, building it at the beginning of his reign, and it's finished by the end of his reign. That's 23 years.

Speaker 1 And in the broader span, if you look at the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and even go back to the end of the Third Dynasty, the the pyramid of Zosa, the steppe pyramid, you find that this is a sudden emergence of incredible skills which lasts for about a hundred years and then it goes away.

Speaker 1 It stops.

Speaker 1 The pyramids that follow the Great Pyramid of Giza, the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau, the pyramids that follow them, the Fifth Dynasty pyramids, are really poor.

Speaker 1 They're very, very poor quality workmanship. They're falling to pieces.
You can hardly recognize from the outside that they're a pyramid at all.

Speaker 1 When you get inside, you do find wonderful chambers and you do find find what you don't find in any of the Great Pyramids, which is huge numbers of hieroglyphs and accounts of the person who was supposedly buried in that pyramid.

Speaker 2 What do you think of Christopher Dunn's work? Christopher Dunn came on the podcast and he explained his theory that he thinks the Great Pyramid of Giza was some sort of a power plant.

Speaker 1 I think it's a theory which deserves to be taken seriously along with other theories as to what it is. One thing I know for sure is that the theory that it was just a tomb and nothing else is bust.

Speaker 1 That is not a satisfactory theory anymore. So we should be open to a number of possibilities.
And Chris comes to this from a background of machine tool making.

Speaker 1 He's a very precise guy, he's an engineer, he understands this kind of thing. And when he looks at particularly the

Speaker 1 at Saqqara, you have this thing called the Serapeum, which is an underground labyrinth. And it's got wide corridors through it, and then off each side are rooms.

Speaker 1 And in each room are these gigantic basalt

Speaker 1 boxes which appear to have held the corpses of bulls.

Speaker 1 They're like sarcophagi for human beings but they're on an enormous and gigantic scale

Speaker 1 weighing hundreds of tons and cut out of the hardest possible rock, precisely engineered. Everything is exact.

Speaker 1 And it's that amongst other things that is attracting Chris's attention to the possibility of

Speaker 1 a lost technology in ancient Egypt. And then he asked himself the question, well, what was the Great Pyramid? If it wasn't a tomb, what might it have been?

Speaker 1 And he's come to the solution that it was some kind of energy generator,

Speaker 1 some kind of power plant.

Speaker 2 Yeah, using chemicals and creating hydrogen.

Speaker 1 Oddly enough,

Speaker 1 there's just a recently published archaeological paper concerning the steppe pyramid at Saqqara, which is suggesting that they used hydraulics to lift the big stones up inside there.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that begins to come close to the kind of the kind of technology in some ways that Chris is talking about.

Speaker 1 I think it's worth taking very seriously. I've always had great respect for Chris.
I've traveled to Egypt with him

Speaker 1 and I think he's done very important work

Speaker 1 contributing to this. And also looking at the

Speaker 1 stone vases from ancient Egypt,

Speaker 1 I remember the first time

Speaker 1 I was drawn to this mystery, which was...

Speaker 2 Give us one of them. This is a 3D print of

Speaker 1 those vase.

Speaker 2 This is a 3D print of an actual stone of aze.

Speaker 2 And it might be not that exciting to people. Like, oh, what's the big deal? What the big deal is the precision in which this was constructed with handles on it.

Speaker 2 So it couldn't have been spun on a lathe because it has these two handles that are also cut out of the stone.

Speaker 2 And everything is precise to within thousands of a human hair, which is bananas.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it doesn't make sense given what we are taught was the level of technology of Egypt at that time.

Speaker 2 Now, there is some dispute of where these came from.

Speaker 2 There is some dispute about the

Speaker 2 what is have these been made in a modern way and has someone tried to replace you know

Speaker 1 are we looking at fakes or hoax. Are we looking at hoaxes? Well perhaps in some cases we are but certainly in others including those in the in the great museums in Cairo.

Speaker 1 They've now moved a lot of the content of the Cairo Museum out to a big museum at Giza and some of it's in in in transition but they have thousands of these things.

Speaker 2 The thing is like even if this was modern technology we don't know what they did.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 We don't know what modern technology exists that you could take an incredibly hard piece of stone and cut it into this unbelievably precise little vase with handles on it and some bizarre method that we don't know and hollowed out the inside of it and some of them with very thin necks and then a hollowed out inside.

Speaker 1 Like how? How did you do that? Very thin necks, and then this bulbous

Speaker 1 base to it. And it's all perfect.
There's another piece which it's hard to describe, but it's got a series of three flanges that come across. It's like a wheel,

Speaker 1 but it's a...

Speaker 1 Nobody knows what it is. And it's cut out of incredibly hard rock or cut or shaped in some way.
I've never seen a satisfactory explanation for this thing.

Speaker 1 I wish I could call up a picture, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 Do you know what it's called?

Speaker 1 I can't remember.

Speaker 2 Jamie's a wizard at finding it.

Speaker 1 I've written about it

Speaker 1 in Fingerprints of the Gods. Let's see.

Speaker 2 I bet Jamie's already found it. Let's see.

Speaker 1 Is that it?

Speaker 1 No. Yes, top left.

Speaker 1 That's the one. That? When I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, it's carved from Schist.
You know, this thing is hard.

Speaker 1 And when I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, I... I thought, how on earth did they do this? Why isn't this a big mystery? Why isn't this being seen as a mystery?

Speaker 2 That looks like a piece of an engine.

Speaker 1 It does, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 That looks like something I'd find on my land cruiser. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It looks like part of something else.

Speaker 1 We're finding a bit of something larger. Wow.

Speaker 2 That looks like, to me, like some part of some kind of machine. Yeah.
That's the only thing that it looks like. Yeah, that's exactly.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what it looks like.

Speaker 2 If you know like automobiles and parts and you look at something like that, like, oh yeah, that goes probably in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Exactly.
And what is its function if it isn't something else? It's difficult to see what function it could have.

Speaker 2 What is the conventional explanation of what this thing is?

Speaker 1 Some kind of offering bowl?

Speaker 2 Click on that, the disc that just that article.

Speaker 1 I want to look it up. Oh, it does for like that.

Speaker 2 The Sabu disc, an ancient Egyptian artifact from the First Dynasty, 3000 to 2800 BC, found in 1936 in North. How do you say that? Saqqara? Saqara, yeah.
Saqqara Necropolis and

Speaker 2 Mastaba.

Speaker 1 Mastaba S311. Those are sort of

Speaker 1 tombs which have got two levels.

Speaker 2 What an incredible piece.

Speaker 1 It is an incredible piece.

Speaker 2 I had never seen that before.

Speaker 1 And there it is, First Dynasty. And of course, you can't actually date the object itself.
So they're dating it from context.

Speaker 1 What they're saying is that it was found in a First Dynasty context, but it may have been a legacy even then.

Speaker 1 It may have been an old object even then. We just don't know that.
But it's at least

Speaker 1 exactly. But it's at least that old from the context.

Speaker 2 So it's at least 3,000 years old.

Speaker 1 They think it was used in 5,000 years old. Excuse me, 3,000 BC.

Speaker 2 They think it was used in brewing beer as a mash rake to mix and even out the mixture of grains and hot water in a big mash

Speaker 2 ton. I don't know what that means.

Speaker 1 I don't know either, but I would have thought that if that was your project, you could do it without carving shift into the.

Speaker 2 Click on that thing, what is the mysterious Egyptian disc? It says it right there.

Speaker 2 That's it. Can we click on that? Can we go full scale on that so I can see what that looks like?

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 That's wild.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it really is. That is such a specific shape.

Speaker 2 Like, if you're going to just use that to make beer, it seems weird.

Speaker 1 And it's a lot of work to make beer. You could do it in other ways.

Speaker 2 That looks like some kind of a fan to me.

Speaker 2 It looks like something that would be on a belt.

Speaker 2 You know, like on some sort of a

Speaker 1 water or something.

Speaker 2 It looks like a fan.

Speaker 2 It looks like those things underneath it. It looks like that's how you would funnel water or air through.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it clearly had a function. Nobody would go to the trouble of creating something as complex and difficult to make as this unless there was a useful function for it.

Speaker 2 What is it made out of?

Speaker 1 Schist, which is a hard stone.

Speaker 2 That's crazy that that's made out of stone. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, how did you do that? Cut out of one piece of stone. How did you do that?

Speaker 2 And what are the how are the measurements of that?

Speaker 1 Oh, look, it's Giorgio.

Speaker 2 He says it's aliens.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to guess.

Speaker 2 Is

Speaker 2 this thing that's cut out of this in oops, lost it there for a second? This thing that's cut out of this incredibly hard stone. Like,

Speaker 2 do they have any sort of an understand

Speaker 2 or a guess of how someone would cut something like that out of this?

Speaker 1 I've never seen a satisfactory guess.

Speaker 1 But those like Chris Dunn, who are studying the technology of ancient Egypt,

Speaker 1 are confident that we're looking at the traces of a lost technology. We don't know how this was done, like so much else in ancient Egypt.

Speaker 1 Like, we don't know how the 70-ton blocks were raised to become the roof of the king's chamber either

Speaker 1 in the Great Pyramid. There's so much that we don't know and that's not explained and that is easily written off by

Speaker 1 abusively arrogant experts who say there's no mystery here.

Speaker 2 That doesn't look super precise in terms of the radius of it when you're looking at it. It looks like it looks handmade, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 I'm sure it is handmade. The question is, how?

Speaker 2 Right, but you know what I'm saying? So are these vases, right? Yeah. But there's something about it that's like a little more crude.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it probably didn't have to be precise because whatever it did

Speaker 2 probably just had a spin.

Speaker 1 And it survived through at least 5,000 years.

Speaker 2 It definitely looks like it was something that spun, right? Because you have that hollowed-out piece in the center that you would have an axle on or something along those lines.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it looks like it's welded in certain spots, too, but like how?

Speaker 2 Well, how do they weld stone?

Speaker 2 Apparently, they carved that shape out of just one ball. That's crazy.
Now, that one looks ultra-precise. This one might have been remade off of the original, maybe.
Click on that.

Speaker 1 I would say that's a remake. Is it?

Speaker 2 If it's not, it's insane. That's even more insane because that looks so perfect.
Why does it look different than the other images?

Speaker 2 I don't know. Well, go back to that one where it's spinning around.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look at it when it spins around. That looks pretty precise.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They do look like they've recreated. Did they only find one and they've recreated it for museums?

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 there's one original. I've no doubt people have tried to make copies with modern materials, but we're looking at a few different versions of it.

Speaker 2 Well, also, you've got to think, if it is made out of stone, some of the edges have to be beat up just from being in the ground for thousands of years.

Speaker 1 It's not the same? No.

Speaker 2 You sure it's not just a different lighting? It's not beat up, like the red.

Speaker 1 It does.

Speaker 1 The other one was smooth.

Speaker 2 Right. That's smooth.

Speaker 2 That almost does look like a recreation, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is. I think that's the way we look at a recreation there.
Okay. But whatever it is.
The thing is, where you come to this, there's thousands of objects that defy explanation.

Speaker 1 What are those, Jamie?

Speaker 2 Put that back up. What are those things?

Speaker 1 Do you know what those are? It's first wheels.

Speaker 1 400 AEC.

Speaker 2 4,000?

Speaker 1 It's wheels, 1500 B.C., basically.

Speaker 2 And that's one of the weirder things about Egypt, right? We don't think they had the wheel.

Speaker 1 No, they definitely had the wheel.

Speaker 1 Whether they had the wheel in the old kingdom

Speaker 1 is another question. But certainly by the New Kingdom, by the time of Ramesses, they had wheels, they had chariots.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But I mean, the people that built the pyramids.

Speaker 2 2,500 B.C. is not...
Like, when do they think the wheel was invented?

Speaker 1 Well, it's actually not clear to me when the wheel was invented. Let's see what the convent.

Speaker 2 I thought the conventional

Speaker 2 guess of when the invention of the wheel was was post-the construction of the pyramids.

Speaker 1 I believe that's the case. But one of the things about a wheel is you have to ask yourself in what circumstances, in what places, in what conditions are wheels useful?

Speaker 1 There are some conditions in which a wheel is not a useful thing, in which it's going to get bogged down in the sand, and which is not going to be helpful.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the use of sleds was certainly part of how ancient Egyptians moved huge stones, and I don't dispute that. The problem is how they then get those stones 300 feet in the air.

Speaker 1 You can slide anything on wet sand on a sled with enough people pulling it.

Speaker 2 How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber?

Speaker 1 How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber?

Speaker 1 How'd you fit it? Perfectly. Perfectly.
Perfectly. And

Speaker 1 I've been up there and I've been in every one of the chambers above it, and each one of them is floored with these 70-ton blocks and roofed with it.

Speaker 2 It's so nuts it doesn't even seem like a thousand years more advanced than us. It seems like thousands of years more advanced.

Speaker 1 More advanced in a different way.

Speaker 1 I think this is part of the problem where I've been perhaps misunderstood by Egyptologists when I talk about an advanced civilization.

Speaker 1 I keep trying to emphasize that we shouldn't look for ourselves in the past, that if we're going to go back 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 years into the past and talk about a civilization, it's not going to be like us.

Speaker 1 It's going to be very different. It's going to have different priorities, different ways of looking at things.

Speaker 1 But one of the things that the ancient Egyptians had, which I'm not aware that any other civilization has had, is the ability to sustain essentially a single culture with a single set of spiritual ideas and to sustain that for 3,000 years and to keep people happy and fed and well looked after.

Speaker 1 You know, this is an amazing achievement, amazing stability

Speaker 1 when you look at it. What our civilization, how old is it really? Can we trace it back to the Romans? Probably not.

Speaker 1 Maybe 500 years, the beginning of mechanization and so on and so forth in our civilization.

Speaker 2 Pretty amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's so many mysteries to it. For anybody to pretend that they have all the answers to something as perplexing as Egypt.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 this is an area where

Speaker 1 I often get criticized, but I think when we look at a civilization and what it is and what it's achieving and why it's so special, when we look at our civilization today, we are fantastic at technology.

Speaker 1 We are brilliant at science. We can make the best possible machines.

Speaker 1 And we're a society that is built around production and consumption and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own, what they possess, and what they produce.

Speaker 1 And it becomes a very materialistic society, a society that's focused on material things where we define ourselves by our material possessions. Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary. Their main thing was, what are we here for? Why are we living this life?

Speaker 1 What happens to us when we die? They investigated that mystery more deeply than any other culture that I know of, and they were doing so right from the beginning of records.

Speaker 2 And they were documenting this journey to the afterlife

Speaker 1 in hieroglyphs.

Speaker 2 And it's like, what were you documenting? Like, how do you know? Like, what were you trying?

Speaker 2 How did everyone agree on this particular myth or this story?

Speaker 1 Unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it. It's one of the things that we point out in season two

Speaker 1 is that the ancient Egyptian notion of a leap to the sky after death, to the Milky Way, of a journey along the Milky Way, of encountering challenges and dangers and risks there, monsters that would block your path, gates that you had to know the password to get through.

Speaker 1 That idea is found all over the world.

Speaker 1 The path of souls. It's found all over the Americas.

Speaker 2 What do you think they're trying to say?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I think, first of all, it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea.

Speaker 1 When it's found amongst cultures all around the world that's apparently had no contact with one another and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death.

Speaker 1 The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization, that these spiritual ideas are found all around the world. And

Speaker 1 they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's called an underworld, but really it's set in the sky. And this journey that takes place, where you are judged on what you've done with your life.

Speaker 1 This is something else that we avoid in the world today, is taking responsibility for our own lives.

Speaker 1 The ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life and if you did not do so the outcome after death would not be good.

Speaker 1 You had to celebrate the gift of life.

Speaker 1 You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given

Speaker 1 and one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom. And that's one of the things hopefully that we all do as we get older is get

Speaker 1 a bit more wisdom and a bit more understanding. But in the case of ancient Egypt, that idea is developed over 3,000 years.
And it's essentially the same at the beginning

Speaker 1 as it is at the end.

Speaker 1 That the soul, that

Speaker 1 death is not the end.

Speaker 1 This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem. That death is not the end.
We may think it is. Scientists may tell us it is.

Speaker 1 But when a scientist says death is the end, there's nothing more, we're just physical bodies, and when the light goes out, it goes out forever, that's actually not a scientific fact.

Speaker 1 That's not something that's been investigated, or can be investigated.

Speaker 2 Consciousness itself is so confusing.

Speaker 2 Just consciousness. Just like what is it? Why are we conscious? What what what it is it local or are we tuning into consciousness? And uh when you die, where does that go? Where's that energy go?

Speaker 2 Is that is the soul a real thing? Like what is the essence of life? What is the essence of human life and human consciousness? Those are perplexing questions.

Speaker 1 They're very perplexing questions which

Speaker 1 actually are of great significance to every one of us. Yeah, I mean suppose death just is the end, then

Speaker 1 that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives, for the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused, or for the joy that we may have caused.

Speaker 1 If death's the end,

Speaker 1 there's no up or downside to that, whatever we do. But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end.
And you have been given the precious gift of life. What did you do with it?

Speaker 1 And there are moral aspects to that question. There's these forty-two assessors, they're called the negative assessors, who ask the soul of the deceased questions about what they did in life.

Speaker 1 And those are all moral questions. They bear some relationship actually to the Ten Commandments.

Speaker 1 But there's another question which is called the weighing of words. And that question is, what did you do with the gift we gave you? We gave you the gift of a human life.

Speaker 1 We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate at your choice.

Speaker 1 We gave you the gift to live in a human body to have this incredible consciousness to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres. What did you do with it?

Speaker 1 Did you leave the world a better place or a worse place than when you came into it?

Speaker 1 Did you hurt and damage and cause pain to others consistently, out of wicked intent, not accidentally but deliberately causing pain. And there are human beings who do that.

Speaker 1 For the ancient Egyptians, that kind of behavior meant an introduction to Amit, the eater of the dead.

Speaker 1 And Amit is displayed in the judgment scene. He's a creature, part hyena, part lion,

Speaker 1 and he sits there, and certain souls do not go on.

Speaker 1 Their journey ends, and it ends because of the choices they made during life and because they never took responsibility for what they did.

Speaker 2 Well, it kind of makes sense. Natural selection of the souls.
In a way. That if there's natural selection of humans and natural selection of animals that allows them to

Speaker 2 prosper

Speaker 2 and to get better and to evolve, it makes sense that that would happen with the soul as well. I'm just so confused as to what the environment was like that allowed these people to

Speaker 2 keep this

Speaker 2 insane civilization developing and innovating for so long that they were so more advanced than anyone else that was alive back then that we're aware of, at least as far as what we've uncovered, what they left behind.

Speaker 1 The beautiful art that they made.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The perfection of their geometry, their incredibly advanced astronomy. All of these things are the hallmarks of a very sophisticated, very advanced civilization.
Sure, they didn't have iPhones.

Speaker 1 It was just a sophistication.

Speaker 2 The application of the symmetry of the facial structure of the statues.

Speaker 2 Incredible.

Speaker 1 Beautiful things. Just

Speaker 2 bizarrely,

Speaker 2 Bizarrely technologically advanced. Bizarrely.

Speaker 2 Because to perform something like that, you need incredible tools of measurement, enormous statues that have faces that are absolutely perfectly symmetrical.

Speaker 2 How did you do that?

Speaker 2 How did you stand that up?

Speaker 1 Well, the answer is we don't know. We don't know.
There's so much that we don't know.

Speaker 1 And it's that.

Speaker 1 It's that attitude towards the past, which I think would be more helpful, is that

Speaker 1 we have this

Speaker 1 mysterious

Speaker 1 background to we human beings. As you said earlier, anatomically modern humans, we think that they first appeared about 300,000 years ago.
Jebel Erhud in Morocco, 310,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 Now, I can remember a time not so long ago, back in the 1990s, when it was thought that the first anatomically modern humans were as recent as 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 And then they shifted it, new finds were made to 110,000 years ago, now 310,000 years ago. We don't really know how far into the past that goes.

Speaker 1 And we don't know about the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, who were also human beings.

Speaker 1 Certainly they were human, the same species as us because they could interbreed with us. You can't breed with another species.

Speaker 1 And that takes the journey back even further. And that's one of the reasons why...

Speaker 1 I have a problem with the notion that civilization just emerges 6,000 years ago,

Speaker 1 because we had the same kit, the same wiring, the same brains for at least 300,000 years and we weren't doing any of this stuff, apparently.

Speaker 1 I suspect we were, but it's not made the record.

Speaker 2 Well, it seems that what they were dealing with in terms of the resources in the Nile Valley was unbelievably bountiful.

Speaker 1 It was bountiful.

Speaker 2 And that's probably one of the reasons before the climate shifted and changed and it became a lot of desert.

Speaker 2 Before that, it was probably incredibly bountiful and that allowed them to stay stay there for a long period of time and not have to worry about food.

Speaker 1 It certainly did. The bounty, however, goes back much further.
This is one of the reasons why I kept on trying to talk about the Sahara during the debate.

Speaker 1 This vast area, which frankly has not been studied properly by archaeology at all.

Speaker 1 Hardly a fraction of it has been studied.

Speaker 1 This vast area...

Speaker 1 I'm often accused of creating what they call a God of the gaps argument.

Speaker 1 I'm saying you haven't looked enough in the Sahara, you haven't looked enough in the submerged continental shelves, you haven't looked enough in the Amazon rainforest, and the argument is that I'm trying to put my lost civilization into these gaps, but these are very special gaps.

Speaker 1 The submerged continental shelves were prime real estate during the Ice Age.

Speaker 1 That was the place to be, just as it is today, to be near coastlines. The Amazon rainforest

Speaker 1 was a bountiful place, and the Sahara Desert was green and rich for thousands of years during the Ice Age, with lakes, with rivers.

Speaker 1 It was the kind of place where a civilization might well have emerged. They'd find whale bones there.

Speaker 1 Whales.

Speaker 2 So anybody who doesn't think there's a mystery in the Sahara Desert,

Speaker 2 and anybody who...

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Speaker 2 Really tries to dismiss the notion that most of it hasn't been really excavated. But it really hasn't been.

Speaker 1 No, it hasn't.

Speaker 2 It's too vast.

Speaker 1 It's too vast and it's too expensive to excavate.

Speaker 2 And excavation, like, you would have to,

Speaker 2 you're dealing with a place where how many people even live there?

Speaker 1 Nobody knows. Because it's not been investigated properly.
It's a desert

Speaker 1 and it's had relatively little attention. We do know there's some amazing rock art from the Upper Paleolithic in the Tassili, in Algeria, in the Sahara.

Speaker 1 But not enough has been done.

Speaker 1 This is the problem for me with saying archaeology has basically got the story of the human past nailed down, is that there's huge areas which have not been investigated.

Speaker 1 And I reject the idea that that is a God of the gaps argument, because that's not why I'm proposing there was a lost civilization. And that's all I'm doing.

Speaker 1 I'm not insisting, I'm not demanding that people believe me.

Speaker 1 I just want to inject this idea into the discussion so that it can be considered.

Speaker 1 Taken out of context was a little clip where you asked me

Speaker 1 during the debate,

Speaker 1 is there any evidence for your lost civilization in what they've found?

Speaker 1 And I said, in what they've found, no.

Speaker 1 And then I went on to say,

Speaker 1 but that brings us to the point of what they've looked for and what they've not looked for, what they've found and what they've not found.

Speaker 1 That has been taken again and again as me saying that there's no evidence for my lost civilization, whereas what I'm actually saying is there's no evidence in what archaeologists have studied for a lost civilization, because I'm not studying what archaeologists study.

Speaker 1 I am very happy to use material from archaeologists and I could not do what I do if I didn't use material from archaeologists. It's a very important basis to my work.

Speaker 1 However, it's the astronomy, it's the astronomical alignments, it's the precision, it's the precision of the Great Pyramid,

Speaker 1 it's the myths of a global flood all around the world.

Speaker 1 It's a universal story of a massive cataclysm with a few survivors who bring their knowledge to others.

Speaker 1 This story, this is one of the reasons why I think the Atlantis story, which Flint Dibble is so opposed to, deserves to be taken seriously,

Speaker 1 because it's part of a global tradition. It's yet another flood myth, in fact.
It's the story, it's just like those 150 or 200 other flood traditions that come from around the world.

Speaker 1 And it's not enough for archaeologists to say, oh, people experienced a little local river flood or there was a tidal wave that day and so they decided that the whole world was submerged with water.

Speaker 1 That doesn't satisfy me at all.

Speaker 1 The fact that this is found all around the world, to me, is a memory of something that happened to our ancestors, something so traumatic, something so huge that it's been preserved better than almost anything else from our past.

Speaker 2 What is your take on the Reichardt structure? Am I saying it right? Reichardt structure.

Speaker 1 Richard structure Mauritania.

Speaker 1 I would not like to say one way or the other because I've not been there.

Speaker 1 I've not had boots on the ground there. I've not been able to look at it.
Yes, it's very intriguing. Very.

Speaker 1 Also the salt all around it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where that shows that at one point in time it was probably submerged, like something happened?

Speaker 1 Probably was, but you might have to go back many millions of years to get to that point. The honest answer to that question is I don't know.
I'm open-minded on the Richard structure.

Speaker 1 It's something that

Speaker 1 I would like to study,

Speaker 1 but I have not had time to yet. In future work, it's something that

Speaker 1 I may study. And after studying it, I may come to the conclusion that it's just a remarkable natural phenomenon, of which there are many.
Or I may come to a different conclusion. It depends what the

Speaker 1 evidence shows me. But I try not to spout off on things that I'm not personally acquainted with with and don't really know about.
Well, good for you.

Speaker 2 I like to spout off.

Speaker 2 It's also like there's so many of those things that people thought were myth, like Troy.

Speaker 1 Troy, yeah. And they find it.

Speaker 1 Find by an amateur,

Speaker 1 turns out to be a real place. I think the myths are the memory banks of our species, and I don't think archaeology takes them seriously enough.
There's a tendency to just dismiss them as fantasies,

Speaker 1 as things that were made up by the ancients for some bizarre reason of their own.

Speaker 1 But they're the memories we have from the time before writing, from the time before documents were kept, and they're a precious resource in understanding our past. So it's things like that.

Speaker 1 And then at the end of the day,

Speaker 1 to say, to twist what I said,

Speaker 1 that in what archaeologists have studied, there's no evidence for my lost civilization,

Speaker 1 is completely wrong. Because I've written thousands of pages of books.
This is one of the issues. Like, in that debate, I was supposed to prove everything about a lost civilization.

Speaker 1 I didn't even come here to prove it. I came here to explain why I'm interested in it and why I want to share my interest and my curiosity about the past with others.

Speaker 1 But if I'm asked to prove it, I would say don't refer to what I managed to say during a three-hour debate.

Speaker 1 I'd say refer to the eight or so major books that I've written with thousands of pages and thousands of documented footnotes. That's where my argument is in place.

Speaker 1 And you'll find that that is not based on what archaeologists have studied. It's based precisely on what they've not studied about the past.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 regardless of the argument that Flint tried to put forth that there's

Speaker 2 no evidence of what you're saying,

Speaker 2 the exaggeration of the shipwrecks, the stuff about seeds,

Speaker 2 the fact is this resonates with a lot of people. This mystery is perplexing, it's confusing, and there's a lot of it out there.
It's not like one site like Egypt. There's a ton of sites.

Speaker 2 The Sage Wall in Montana. What do you think of that thing?

Speaker 1 Again, I will withhold judgment until I have my boots on the ground there and have a look at it. And even then, that might not be enough.

Speaker 1 I do know that the property owners there are doing a lot of ground-penetrating radar, and there may be results from that. But at the moment, I would not

Speaker 1 say that's definitely a man-made structure, nor would I say that's definitely a natural structure. I would say that's an intriguing structure.

Speaker 1 But it is in a geological context where other things like that are found. If I were asked to put money on it, there it is.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it really is hard. It is hard to resist the conclusion.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's super hard to resist the idea that that's man-made. And especially if it goes deeper under the ground than they think it does.
They think it goes deeper.

Speaker 1 Oh, it does.

Speaker 1 It goes deeper. That's what the ground-penetrating radar is.
How far? Is about 30 feet.

Speaker 1 In fact, I was yesterday.

Speaker 2 It looks so man-made.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it really does.

Speaker 1 When I look at that photograph, to me, that is a man-made structure.

Speaker 1 But I realize now, in the environment in which I live, surrounded by archaeologists who are extremely hostile to my work, that I bet

Speaker 1 it's not in my interests to leap to a conclusion about anything

Speaker 1 before I've studied it. And I do intend to go to SageWall.
I was yesterday with Michael Collins, who's the guy who's done a lot of the videography on Sagewall.

Speaker 1 He doesn't know whether it's natural or man-made either. More work needs to be done, but it's an intriguing issue, and it may be part of the lost history of the Americas.
We just don't know yet.

Speaker 2 What's crazy is if that is, how old is that thing?

Speaker 1 How old is it?

Speaker 2 Who knows? Who knows? And if you're talking about footprints of people that lived 22,000 years ago, like what were they making things?

Speaker 1 Yeah. What was going on?

Speaker 2 Did they build something like that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or even earlier? Right.

Speaker 2 Or even earlier.

Speaker 1 Is it part of the lost story of the Americas? There's so much that's been lost, particularly in North America,

Speaker 1 with the massive destruction that took place during the 19th and 18th and early 20th century. It's reckoned that there were a million mound sites in North America.
If you go back to 1500,

Speaker 1 there's about 100,000 left, which is a lot actually.

Speaker 1 But most of them are massively destroyed, and the other 900,000 have gone, just plowed under, turned into

Speaker 1 farmland.

Speaker 1 And how much else of the prehistory of North America has been lost as a result of a process where, first of all, there was a conviction that the indigenous inhabitants had only been here for a very short time, whereas we now know they've been here for a very long time.

Speaker 1 And secondly, there was a propagandistic desire not to give too much credit to them. So

Speaker 1 let's get rid of some of their stuff.

Speaker 1 Wow. I was very disappointed when we were shooting season two of Ancient Apocalypse that we were not allowed by the authorities to film in Cahokia, which is one of the

Speaker 1 great mounds that still survive,

Speaker 1 because they've been told that I'm a pseudo-archaeologist and that I'm going to mislead the public if I go there. So the best way is just to stop me going there.

Speaker 1 We tried to film in Moundville in Alabama as well, and again, we were denied permission to film there.

Speaker 1 There's no doubt that archaeology has joined ranks to do their best to prevent me doing what I do. That's so awful.

Speaker 2 To deny anyone the ability to, especially we're going to put something like this on Netflix where millions of people are going to see it.

Speaker 2 Deny people

Speaker 2 just the access through video of experiencing this site and the mystery that's attached to it. Like, who are these people? Why did they build this?

Speaker 2 What artifacts haven't been discovered that are inside of this thing?

Speaker 1 And, you know, here's what archaeologists say. Here's an alternative point of view.

Speaker 1 You're an intelligent member of of the public. Make up your own mind.
Why are you being reasonable? That's outrageous.

Speaker 1 It's a most unfortunate thing.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 it's not unfortunate that there's a lot of people that are interested in it, though.

Speaker 1 More and more.

Speaker 1 It's a fascinating phenomenon.

Speaker 1 I do see it as an extension of

Speaker 1 our interest in our own genetic origins, for example. A lot of people, I haven't done it yet, but I'm kind of keen to do 23andMe or whatever it's called.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't do it. Nope.
Not now. No, sell your data away.

Speaker 1 They'll sell your data.

Speaker 2 And now someone's going to know your exact DNA.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The whole thing's nuts. Like, I didn't know that they could do that, but apparently they have.
Not only that, databases get breached and they find your

Speaker 2 solution.

Speaker 1 My eldest son, who is half Somali and half English, had his DNA done with 23andMe.

Speaker 1 And he found what it showed was that he's 50% African and 49%

Speaker 1 British and 1% Spanish.

Speaker 1 And we try to figure that out and the answer is that my ancestors came from Cornwall in the southwest of England and that's where the Spanish Armada washed up and the survivors of the Spanish Armada washed up and then integrated with the local community and contributed their genes.

Speaker 1 So, you know, there is an interest in the past.

Speaker 1 There's an interest in our personal past, our personal origins, our ancestors, who we are, and there's a much broader interest in the story of humanity that has brought us to where we are today and this haunting feeling that something's missing and that

Speaker 1 we have a civilization today.

Speaker 1 I often

Speaker 1 would like to compare it to

Speaker 1 a sort of furious, in terms of the level of consciousness, our civilization today is like a furious, petulant teenager.

Speaker 1 But in terms of what it can do, in terms of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, it's a god. So we have godlike powers with the consciousness of an immature teenager.

Speaker 1 That's what we're looking at in the world today.

Speaker 1 And maybe by understanding our past better, by understanding our unity that comes down from the past, maybe we can learn something that would be helpful to us in not carrying on in this way.

Speaker 1 Because we do live at an inflection point just now. This is one thing I'm pretty sure that...

Speaker 1 quote-unquote my lost civilization didn't have and that was nuclear weapons but we have nukes today and we have them in an enormous scale and behind each of those nukes is a fragile human being with his own or her own ego and complexes and fears and paranoia.

Speaker 1 And we're reaching a point where those buttons are going to be pressed. We are, as far as I know, the first human civilization that has the capacity to actually wipe itself out completely.

Speaker 1 We don't need a comet impact. We don't need a solar outburst.
We can do it to ourselves. And that requires humanity to to make a major step forward in consciousness.

Speaker 1 And I think making that major step forward in consciousness will be helped by better understanding our own past.

Speaker 2 I agree. I mean, it's just disturbing how many times we can travel to ancient places like Greece or any place where you go to Rome and realize, oh, there was a thriving civilization here at one point.

Speaker 1 You were in Greece recently. Yeah, with Brian.
You went with Brian Morawski. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Fascinating. Brilliant guy.
Brilliant guy.

Speaker 2 But what a treat it is to to have a tour of the Parthenon, the Acropolis with him.

Speaker 2 And we went to see the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries and all that. It was very, very, very interesting, but just also sobering because you realize this civilization did not make it.

Speaker 2 This insane, fascinating, complex civilization crumbled.

Speaker 2 And the idea that ours can't is one that we kind of hold dear. Like, we're different.
We got to figure it out. We're better.

Speaker 2 But there's so much evidence that that's just a normal pattern of human history.

Speaker 1 Civilizations come and go. Yeah.
We could be gone in 20 years. Yeah.
I'd love to take you on a trip to Egypt. I want to go.

Speaker 2 I want to go. I'll tell you about an idea that was brought to me after the show.
I can't talk about it now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'll tell you.
I've made friends with Zahi Hawass. I heard.

Speaker 2 He's a very interesting. You guys are homies now.
Yeah, we're homies.

Speaker 1 We had a nice dinner together. And it's partly because

Speaker 1 who needs more enemies and hatred in this world? Exactly. And I said some very cruel and harsh things to Zahi in the past, and I felt the time had come to apologise for those.

Speaker 1 So I went to Egypt to apologise to him. Really? And we had a fantastic dinner together.
His son joined us. Santa was there.
It was very friendly and very positive.

Speaker 2 I love stories like that.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we've agreed that we will, if by chance we get a season three of Ancient Apocalypse, which we may or may not get,

Speaker 1 I'm not in control of commissioning decisions at Netflix, but if we get a season three of Ancient Apocalypse, I would like it to be entirely on Egypt.

Speaker 1 And what I would like is for Zahid to confront me on every point as we go through Egypt.

Speaker 1 Whatever one says about Zahi's explosive personality, he's been immersed in ancient Egyptian Egyptology for his whole life, and he has very strong points of view on it.

Speaker 1 And he's a fun guy in some ways.

Speaker 2 You know, I would imagine that as people get older and wiser and realize the folly of their ways, particularly in their youth, maybe he would be more open to the idea that the civilization is just this civilization, same civilization, but older than you think it is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm hoping to persuade him

Speaker 1 of that. I think it'll be an interesting dialogue if we get to have it.

Speaker 2 I think people for a long time

Speaker 2 had this concept in their mind that changing the dates somehow negates the accomplishment of the people that lived in the prescribed date.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, somehow or another.

Speaker 1 They're pushing it back. Yeah, yes.

Speaker 2 They're pushing it back somehow or another. And even they'll even say it's racist.

Speaker 1 This is propaganda. This is archaeological propaganda.

Speaker 1 That's been said to me repeatedly, that I'm suggesting that all the achievements of certain indigenous cultures around the world should actually be handed to a lost civilization, that ideas were brought to them.

Speaker 1 Yet, weirdly, those same archaeologists recognize that agriculture was introduced to Europe by emigrants from precisely the Kobekli-Tepi area.

Speaker 1 That's where agriculture wasn't present in Europe until five or six thousand years ago. It was brought in by other people.

Speaker 1 This is part of the human nature that we share ideas.

Speaker 1 Somebody has a great idea, we look at that, we think, we'd like a bit of that too. Teach me how to do it.
And

Speaker 1 this happens all the time. And it doesn't mean that the person who's being taught is any less than the person who's doing the teaching.

Speaker 1 The person who's being taught may have things to teach themselves.

Speaker 1 I've always felt that there were,

Speaker 1 if there was a lost civilization at all, and I believe there was, but I can't absolutely prove it, I think we're looking at a terrible cataclysm. Part of it happened near Gobekli Tepe.

Speaker 1 Abu Huraira in Syria was hit by one of those airbursts, absolutely incinerated

Speaker 1 at that time.

Speaker 1 A terrible cataclysm with relatively few survivors and that those survivors, just as we would do today, took refuge amongst people who'd made it through the disaster better. And

Speaker 1 those

Speaker 1 people who'd made it through would most likely have been hunter-gatherers, because hunter-gatherers are so resilient and so able to survive disasters, whereas people in a quote-unquote civilized condition are often not.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, we can see relative...

Speaker 1 I understand that the hurricanes that are happening in the U.S. at the moment are horrific, horrific natural events,

Speaker 1 which are killing people. But we're talking about something on a scale vastly larger than than that.
And it's difficult for me to see. We find it hard enough to make it through a hurricane.

Speaker 1 I find it difficult to see how we could make it through another younger dryass impact event or how we could make it through a man-made cataclysm as a result of nuclear war, which is, I suspect and I fear, is much closer than we think.

Speaker 1 I hate the idea that nuclear missiles may be flying in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children, but I have to say, honestly, it's a possibility with the state of the world at the moment and the low state of consciousness of the people who lead us.

Speaker 1 The leaders and governments are behind this. It's not human beings, individual people who are behind this hatred in the world today.

Speaker 1 It's leaders and governments who are mobilizing that hatred to serve their own interests. And it's very dangerous.
If we didn't have nukes, it would be less dangerous.

Speaker 2 I agree with you.

Speaker 2 When you're talking about Gobekli Tepe, one of the things that Jimmy Corsetti has talked about recently in his YouTube show is that they have stopped excavation and they've planted trees above some of the areas, which is very strange.

Speaker 2 It is, yeah. And they want the excavation to resume in 150 years.
Yes. So what would be a logical reason to not excavate these fascinating ancient sites that are at least 11,000 years old?

Speaker 1 Generally, with any archaeological site, they don't excavate more than 5% of it, and often less than 2% of it.

Speaker 2 Is that because of funds?

Speaker 1 It's often because of funds, but it's also because of the feeling that as technology improves,

Speaker 1 more may be learnt from these sites in the future. And that's a reasonable argument, because excavation is destruction.

Speaker 1 To a certain extent, excavation destroys what's being excavated.

Speaker 1 And therefore, when you interfere with a site and start excavating it, you may be destroying materials that in a hundred years technology would be able to interpret in a completely different way.

Speaker 1 I mean 100 years, go back 100 years from where we are at present and you didn't have carbon dating, you didn't have LIDAR, you didn't have

Speaker 1 all kinds of methods

Speaker 1 of dating

Speaker 1 objects. You know, luminescence, the luminescence from rocks is another way of dating.
We didn't have any of those technologies. We do have them now.

Speaker 1 And so I think the speculation is 100 years in the future, archaeologists

Speaker 1 may have technologies that would be able to extract more information than this. That's the case that's made.

Speaker 1 I get it, but I think Gobekli Tepe is such an important site and we know, I know for sure because I spent three days with Claire Schmidt, who was the original excavator of Gobekli Tepe, that underneath that place there are dozens of huge unexcavated stone circles with enormous megalithic pillars in them, all under the ground, waiting to be excavated.

Speaker 1 And the decision appears to have been made not to excavate them. And I do find that slightly suspicious.

Speaker 1 I do find it odd. I think the site has

Speaker 1 got such an important role, it's such an iconic site that to just stop the excavation or to only continue it in a very small way isn't satisfactory.

Speaker 2 When you say suspicious, what would be the motivation for discontinuing that kind of excavation other than the fear of destroying things?

Speaker 1 I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. Please do.

Speaker 1 Jump right in.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 there is an issue here.

Speaker 1 I've noticed that it isn't just attacks on me that certain archaeologists are making. It's also attacks on

Speaker 1 other specialists, for example, Danny Hilman Natabajaja, who is the geologist who brought to the world's attention the mystery of Gunung Padang in Indonesia, which appeared in the first episode of season one of Ancient Apocalypse.

Speaker 1 The possibility that this site is more than 27,000 years old, that we're looking at a pyramidial structure that has had several phases of work done on it, and that the earliest phases go back deep into the last ice age.

Speaker 1 He managed to publish a peer-reviewed paper on this, but unfortunately for Danny, he'd appeared on my show.

Speaker 1 And that led archaeologists to dive in on him, and there was a ganging up of archaeologists, and complaints were made to the peer-reviewed journal that published it and finally

Speaker 1 they retracted his paper without any good reasons. I've got a major article by Danny on my website explaining what happened here.

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 1 we don't want too much attention brought to this. Let's crush it.
Let's crush it right now. The same thing is happening with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

Speaker 1 An enormous amount of attacks are being made on that hypothesis.

Speaker 1 Rather than considering it as an interesting explanation for the cataclysms at the end of the ice age, a lot of people are just focused on trying to destroy it in every way possible.

Speaker 1 And I can't help wondering, maybe there's some truth, deep truth to this, that there was a cataclysm, that there was an ancient apocalypse, something really horrific that happened.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's a cyclical disaster. Maybe it's coming round again.

Speaker 1 This is something that would lead any government to want to avoid panic, to suppress, to cover up these issues.

Speaker 1 So that would be the conspiracy theory on it. I'm not saying I buy it, but I'm saying that it's possible.

Speaker 2 Would also a conspiracy be that they'd recognized that some of the area around Gobekli Tepe was older still, and they decided just the archaeologists didn't want to confront it and they put a stop to it.

Speaker 1 That's also possible. That's also possible.
But in their favor and to their credit,

Speaker 1 the excavation of that whole area around not Gobekli Tepe itself, but other neighboring sites. Karahantepe is the best known.

Speaker 1 Turkish archaeologists, it's interesting, are calling this now a civilization. They're calling it the Tas Tepeler civilization, the Stone Hills civilization.

Speaker 1 And they're finding that the same iconography, the same building techniques, not quite on the scale of Gobekli Tepi, are repeated all across the region.

Speaker 1 They extend all the way down to the south of the Jordan Valley to Jericho. The ancient site of Jericho is part of that lost or emerging civilization that appeared at the end of the Younger Drya.

Speaker 1 Cyprus is another example I was mentioning about how it was settled in what appear to have been planned, organized settlement events near the end of the last ice age.

Speaker 1 Again, you find that same iconography that you find at Gobekli Tepe turning up there. Which iconography, specifically?

Speaker 1 The tendency to use T-shaped pillars,

Speaker 1 to use certain designs like a V-shaped necklace,

Speaker 1 this kind of iconography, and the structures, these circular structures,

Speaker 1 semi-subterranean structures that are so characteristic of Gobekli Tepe. They're found there as well.
They're found all across the region. Jericho in the Jordan Valley is absolutely intriguing.

Speaker 1 The massive tower there, which again dates back right to the end of the last ice age, a huge megalithic tower with the world's oldest known megalithic stairway that

Speaker 1 runs up inside it. So what's emerging as a result, if Gobekli Tepe hadn't been found, none of this would have happened.
But it's led to a widespread interest in the whole area.

Speaker 1 So while excavation may have stopped at Gobekli Tepe Tepe or may have slowed down, it is continuing elsewhere across the region. And to be fair to archaeologists, we need to recognize that.

Speaker 2 Is the size and scale of Gobekli Tepe unique in comparison to the ones that are around it? Yes.

Speaker 1 So far, the ones that have been found, Gobekli Tepe is unique. And I think it's clear now that Gobekli Tepe itself was the end of a process, not the beginning of a process.

Speaker 1 It was something that marked, it was a marker. It was something that brought together the best of everything that they'd accumulated and created it in one place

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 left it there, finally at the end burying it, sealing it as a time capsule, which then was untouched for more than 10,000 years before Klaus Schmidt opened it up in 1996.

Speaker 1 I can't help feeling that's precisely what Gobekli Tepe is. It's a time capsule.
It's a memorial to a lost time.

Speaker 1 And I think that what we're looking at in that whole area is the outcome of contact with an earlier largely lost civilization. I think it passed on its cultural genes right there

Speaker 1 in that area of Turkey and down into the Jordan Valley and Cyprus.

Speaker 1 And not only there, also the Indus Valley civilization. It's an incredible iconography which shows a man between two felines.

Speaker 1 It's a very striking image. You see a man and two tigers or leopards on either side of him, and he may be holding them apart, he may be gripping them in some way.

Speaker 2 What is this so Jamie can find it?

Speaker 1 You can find it on

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 Gebel al-Arak knife handle from Egypt.

Speaker 1 You can find it from Sebuk, S-A-Y-B-U-R-K,

Speaker 1 in

Speaker 1 Turkey, the man between two sea...

Speaker 1 two felines and you can find it in the Indus Valley civilization right across in Pakistan on these steatite seals that they used to make where again you see that same icon of the man between two felines.

Speaker 1 And it suggests that cultural ideas way back in the remote past were being spread around the world very, very rapidly.

Speaker 1 Find anything there, Jamie?

Speaker 1 I can tell you the...

Speaker 2 So how much of that area where Gobekli Tepe has been searched with LIDAR?

Speaker 2 Here it is. Here's the images.
Look at that. Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there we are. That's Harappa.
That's from the Indus Valley civilization, man between two felines.

Speaker 2 What do you think that supposedly represents?

Speaker 1 Nobody knows what it represents, but what's intriguing is that it turns up in so many different places.

Speaker 1 But I'd like to find the same.

Speaker 1 Just give me one second just to

Speaker 1 find something. I hope I'm online here.
I am.

Speaker 2 How many of the

Speaker 2 areas have been searched with LiDAR?

Speaker 2 Hang on, Joe, bear with me. No worries, no worries.

Speaker 1 This is where I have to take my bloody glasses off.

Speaker 2 You got to go back and forth? Yeah.

Speaker 1 You look at Dasha. Karen Teppi has some cool stuff that I don't think we've seen before.

Speaker 1 There's this huge skeletal figure. This one,

Speaker 1 12 feet high or something like that. Extraordinary.

Speaker 2 Kind of similar to the Easter Island heads. What's going on down there? It's a hog.

Speaker 1 What do you think it is?

Speaker 1 How weird are those structures?

Speaker 2 You know, but like the way their hands are placed, it's kind of similar to the way the Easter Island hands are placed.

Speaker 1 Jamie, could I get plugged into the HDMI?

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 Do you need to?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, pause, please. We'll pause.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 All right, we're back. We're back.
Okay, we found these images.

Speaker 1 So this is from... Jamie, maybe you could expand that, the Saibuk relief.

Speaker 2 I think you have to do it.

Speaker 1 Okay, it's on my... Yeah.
There we go.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this is about 10,000 years old. It's from a site in the area of Gobeklutepe

Speaker 1 called Saibuk,

Speaker 1 and it's gone.

Speaker 1 One second, one second.

Speaker 1 There it is. And

Speaker 1 it's clearly a man between two felines. And interestingly, he's holding his dick, exactly like that piece that you just showed from Karahatepe.

Speaker 1 And then if we go on.

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Speaker 2 Terms apply.

Speaker 2 I don't understand what I'm doing with this thing.

Speaker 1 There it is. So then the Indus Valley,

Speaker 1 again.

Speaker 1 I'm controlling what's on the screen. You are.
Okay. So there's the man between two felines.
Again, expand that.

Speaker 2 So that particular image, is there any sort of a theory as to what they were trying, what that represented?

Speaker 1 Human mastery of animals is the only one I've heard that's being suggested.

Speaker 2 But it seems like they're trying to get them.

Speaker 1 It does in that case, rather than, or that he's holding them, he's holding them at bay.

Speaker 2 He's keeping them from getting each other.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then if you go down to the Egyptian one, which is the Gebelalaric knife handle, there it is. That's from ancient Egypt.
Pre-Dynastic Egypt, same thing. Wow.

Speaker 1 And then the next one is from Tiwanaco in Bolivia.

Speaker 1 That's a redrawing

Speaker 1 from Tiwanaco in Bolivia. And again, it's a man between two felines.

Speaker 1 So when I see this kind of complicated image turning up all around the world, I can't help feeling that there's a remote common source which is sharing.

Speaker 1 It's not each culture representing or influencing the other, it's a remote common source that they all share.

Speaker 2 What's the last one from where's it from again?

Speaker 1 From Tijuana in Bolivia.

Speaker 2 What do you think he's got in his hands?

Speaker 1 Well it looks like two felines that he's holding apart.

Speaker 2 Right, but what are those things that are dangling down?

Speaker 1 I absolutely have no idea, and I'm not sure if anybody else does, although I'm reminded in that one of the handbags that we see in some of the figures from ancient Sumer.

Speaker 2 Right, but what is the thing on the left?

Speaker 1 Again, I don't know, and I don't think anybody's very strange.

Speaker 2 Why does he have steps on his chest and a wheel? Like, what is that?

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 what is that spiral in the center of his body?

Speaker 1 It's a spiral of mystery. I honestly don't know the answer to that.

Speaker 2 It's like, look, there's a geometric pattern.

Speaker 2 It goes up and down with the steps, and it repeats on both corners, that one where it steps up and the other side where it steps down.

Speaker 2 Very strange.

Speaker 1 It It would be nice if there were written records from Tiwanaka. Wouldn't that be sweet? What it was about, but unfortunately there aren't.

Speaker 1 Just

Speaker 2 very, very bizarre.

Speaker 1 So what I'm saying is we're seeing a sudden emergence of something that is being recognized as a civilization in Turkey just immediately after Kobekli Tepe, around the time of Kobekli Tepe.

Speaker 1 And we're seeing it in the Jordan Valley and we're seeing it in the Indus Valley and we're seeing it in South America as well.

Speaker 1 The same iconography keeps on repeating and I don't think it's a coincidence.

Speaker 2 The area where the Olmec are, have there ever been LiDAR

Speaker 2 excavations?

Speaker 1 I wouldn't be surprised if there have. Villa Hermosa, the sort of central of the Olmec area, is a very highly populated area.
It's been heavily developed.

Speaker 1 The areas where LiDAR has been used in Mexico and Central America and Guatemala

Speaker 1 has been finding thousands of Mayan ruins that nobody knew were there before. Again, under the jungle canopy.
LiDAR has been used extensively in the Yucatan, in Mexico, and into Guatemala as well.

Speaker 1 But whether it's been used there with

Speaker 1 all Mex ceremonial centers. Wow.

Speaker 1 This is all thank you, LiDAR.

Speaker 2 This is so crazy that that stuff was there all along.

Speaker 1 And nobody knew.

Speaker 2 And nobody knew. Yeah,

Speaker 1 and of course, the Amazon rainforest is an even bigger rainforest than this. And what's hiding in it

Speaker 1 is a mystery that needs to be solved in the coming years

Speaker 1 if we're going to have any idea of our own past. I think the Amazon's incredibly important.

Speaker 1 It's why I chose to focus season two of Ancient Apocalypse on the Americas, because I think in terms of the quest for the origins of civilization, the Americas are the most neglected area.

Speaker 1 Archaeologists haven't looked there.

Speaker 1 They've they they define themselves as being in favor of indigenous peoples and uh uh against any kind of supremacy, but by and large they look to Europe and and to the Middle East as the origins of civilization and don't consider that it might have been in the Americas.

Speaker 1 And what we're trying to show is that the story in the Americas is much older than it's been and that there are mysteries here that have never been explained by archaeology.

Speaker 2 How much of the Amazon has been explored with LIDAR?

Speaker 1 A very tiny proportion. I worked with the team who are doing this and they're solely in the province of Acre

Speaker 1 in the southwest of Brazil. They haven't worked in other areas.

Speaker 1 What would be needed, I'm hoping some amazing amazing philanthropist will come forward, and if such a philanthropist will come forward, I can connect him with the people who are doing the work in Accre,

Speaker 1 that we have a LiDAR survey of the whole of the Amazon. That's what I'd like to see.
And it wouldn't be a billion-dollar project because it can be done with drones now.

Speaker 1 It could be relatively cost-efficient. That would be incredible.

Speaker 1 Just imagine what's out there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that's the, and we have the tech. We can do that.
We can do a LiDAR survey of the Amazon.

Speaker 2 Where specifically did they think that lost city of Z was? And did they try to explore that game?

Speaker 1 I think it was in Ecuador or Colombia. I can't remember.
That was Percy Fawcett, wasn't it?

Speaker 1 And a kind of

Speaker 1 echo of that earlier discovery of lost cities in the Amazon. These stories won't go away because there is a hidden past in the Amazon.

Speaker 1 And because there were cities in the Amazon, and God knows what was in them, you know, before the Spanish came along and destroyed everything.

Speaker 2 God, it seems like that has to be discovered. I mean, that has to be looked at.

Speaker 2 Just specifically, if we could just find that the Lost City of Z was a real place.

Speaker 1 If we could find it was a real place? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I wish we could.

Speaker 2 I mean, just finding Lost City of Z is a legendary season of the Amazon rainforest and British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett

Speaker 2 Mato Grosso in Brazil, yeah.

Speaker 2 Theorized that the city was a refuge for people fleeing the destruction of Atlantis.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 2 And its wisdom could still be found there.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 I think we're going to find the lost city of X and Y as well.

Speaker 2 I bet.

Speaker 1 And W. Maybe ABC, and possibly ABC and D too.

Speaker 2 Maybe a bunch. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 at the very least, it's clear that not enough is known. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not enough is known. And I think it's right and proper that we have curiosity.
about our past.

Speaker 1 And I think it's unfortunate that

Speaker 1 people, including myself, who express that curiosity without any dogma, but simply are mystified by problems from the past, are so likely to get slapped down and face this abusive power grab by archaeology who are saying the past is ours.

Speaker 1 You may not intrude here. We will define you as a pseudoscientist.
We will call you a hoaxer and a liar. I defy anyone out there to find a single statement I've made that is a lie.

Speaker 1 And a lie is a knowing untruth.

Speaker 1 As far as I know, I have never ever told knowingly an untruth. What a stupid thing to do that would be.
That would scupper my whole work.

Speaker 1 I may have made some honest mistakes. Everybody does, including the most godlike archaeologist, but I have never knowingly told an untruth, and I never would.

Speaker 2 Of course not.

Speaker 2 The interesting thing, though, is...

Speaker 1 But seriously, I'd like an example, because this is thrown at me so many times.

Speaker 2 You can't be responding to the haters all the time. It's bad.
But they include archaeologists. I know, but the reality is most people aren't listening anymore.

Speaker 1 Define the untrust.

Speaker 2 I don't think that's working anymore because I think enough people have seen your work and enough people have heard your talk and they know that you're reasonable and intelligent and that there's something there.

Speaker 2 And the more people look at these images and the more people hear people like Flint just out and out lie. to try to dismiss these things.

Speaker 1 It was most unfortunate.

Speaker 1 I think he let archaeology down very badly in the way that he manipulated that debate.

Speaker 1 And I'm sorry it's it's taken me so long to come back with the fact-checking, but it was necessary to do.

Speaker 1 And I'm very grateful to a number of completely independent, separate individuals on the internet who have drawn attention to some of what

Speaker 1 Flint did.

Speaker 1 One calls himself illegitimate scholar, and the other calls himself dedunking. And they got into this material very, very early and helped me to understand how I'd been duped by this material.

Speaker 1 Because I took it all at face value.

Speaker 2 Well, that's the beautiful thing about the internet.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of people out there that are very invested in these ideas and exploring them, and they also find it very uncomfortable that they're being confronted by these

Speaker 2 scholars, these people that are supposed to be the ones that are

Speaker 2 the experts in this area that are dismissing things that shouldn't be dismissed, that are lying about statistics, just try to diffuse your argument.

Speaker 1 And there's also that feeling of just being patronized by the so-called experts. Nobody wants to be patronized

Speaker 1 and feel that somebody else regards them as too stupid to make up their own mind on something.

Speaker 2 Right. And they think that somehow or another that exploring these ideas dismisses the legitimate work that archaeologists have already done, which I don't think it does at all.

Speaker 1 Not at all. Archaeologists have done some fantastic work, and it's really important work.
What I've realized is that there's almost two different mindsets at work here in looking at the past.

Speaker 1 I think archaeology is very determined to demonstrate that it's a science, that it's a hard science, that it's completely rational, that it's all based on scientific method and anything that sounds unscientific, which include myths,

Speaker 1 must be avoided.

Speaker 1 And also

Speaker 1 I do find that archaeology, and it may be true in other sciences as well, very reluctant to use the imagination. The imagination is seen as a deadly threat.

Speaker 1 Whereas I think imagination is a really important thing in interpreting the past.

Speaker 1 We should be open to possibilities rather than coming into what we confront with a closed idea. We should consider how it might have been, what might have happened.

Speaker 1 Let's use our imagination and think about this. Think what all this means.
Think what that common iconography all around the world means rather than just saying, oh, it's a coincidence.

Speaker 2 Well, in some places that's your only option, like the OMEC culture, where you like, we don't know.

Speaker 2 We have these faces that don't look like

Speaker 2 it's confusing. They look like maybe they're from Polynesia.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe from Africa.

Speaker 1 Could be Polynesia,

Speaker 1 could be Africa.

Speaker 1 And then there are these other faces, which in the video I've put out, I've shown some of these.

Speaker 1 It's not just myths of a bearded foreigner turning up in the Americas, which Flint Dibble and other archaeologists say were all concocted and invented by the Spaniards.

Speaker 1 We discussed that during the debate. I have a real problem with that because that is patronizing to the indigenous people.

Speaker 1 I think the myths were there amongst the indigenous people and I think the Spaniards saw how they could use them, how they could manipulate them.

Speaker 1 But I don't think they made up the myths and somehow imposed them upon the indigenous people who then believed that they were their own myths.

Speaker 1 I don't think they were that stupid. They knew what their myths were.

Speaker 2 Well, my concern with that line of thinking is that we've seen evidence of that sort of destruction of the real history of people in America with how they forced Native Americans onto reservations and spoke forced them into speaking English and forced them into learning Christianity.

Speaker 2 That we, there was a concerted effort to erase their history and their culture and that the conquerors imposed that on the people that were there.

Speaker 1 But this is a kind of conspiracy theory that's being proposed, that the Spanish Cortez and Pizarro and others who were involved in the conquest of the Americas, that they got together and they created a fiction and then they made the indigenous people believe that fiction.

Speaker 1 While accepting everything else that the indigenous people believed, that was a fiction. There's no document which says that Spaniards conspired to create these stories.

Speaker 1 I believe that when we find them in Mexico, when we find them in Peru, when we find them in Colombia, when we find them in Bolivia, we are looking at indigenous traditions.

Speaker 1 And I have no doubt that the Spanish saw those traditions and said, we can use this, we can take advantage of this, we can exploit this, but I don't think they made up the traditions.

Speaker 2 So it's possibly a myth of people that came over on ships that looked different.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
It's about that. That's about what it comes to.

Speaker 2 When you hear about things like the lost city of Z, when you hear about all the different times where European explorers did make it to the Americas and spread their diseases, like, well, you're going to miss from those folks, too.

Speaker 2 So who's to think that there wasn't multiple versions of that that happened all throughout history? Yeah, I suspect that's. It happened in the 1400s.

Speaker 1 It probably happened a long, long time ago as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The whole thing is so interesting, and it never ends. And every now and again, a new discovery comes along that pushes back the date of humans in specific areas.
I mean look at the Denisovans.

Speaker 2 They only found out about them in like what 2010 or something like that?

Speaker 1 Very, very recently. I think Santha and I went to Denisova Cave in 2013.
Crazy. Something like that.

Speaker 2 So a whole new branch of the

Speaker 1 previously unknown.

Speaker 1 And there's so much that's unknown about our past.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know what I wanted to bring up to you today because I saw this online. Maybe you could find it before I could pull it up, Jamie, because you're that good.

Speaker 2 But there's a scientist that believes there's reason to believe that those hobbit people in the island of Flores, that they exist currently.

Speaker 2 So this was,

Speaker 2 yeah, the hobbit-like species of early humans may still be living in the jungles of Indonesia.

Speaker 1 Interesting theory. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that's another branch of the human chain that... When did they find out about this? It wasn't that long ago either.

Speaker 1 It certainly wasn't. I think you're looking around 2000s, 2010, maybe.

Speaker 1 Very, very recent discovery.

Speaker 2 I wonder what this, the latest find is public on Tuesday Journal of

Speaker 2 Nature Communications following the 2016 discovery, a tiny arm bone and teeth.

Speaker 2 There's something that these people are considering. I don't know why.

Speaker 2 Is there any article that says they consider they're still alive today?

Speaker 2 That's what this one is?

Speaker 2 But that one.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 It's like a small version of Bigfoot.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is... This is three to two years old.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Someone sent this to me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So why do they think that there's

Speaker 2 might still roam? Well, this is just because of anecdotal stories, right?

Speaker 2 Because there have been multiple stories that people that live in the deep rainforest have said that they've encountered these

Speaker 1 little hair creatures.

Speaker 1 Why not? Why should it be impossible? It has a parallel with the Bigfoot story, of course, a different size of creature. But maybe creatures have survived, which we think are extinct.

Speaker 2 Especially small populations of them that are very remote and very difficult to get.

Speaker 2 There are reports of sighting by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly, and I conclude the best way to explain that they told me what they told me is a non-sapiens hominin has survived on floras to the present or very recent times.

Speaker 1 Fascinating.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I would love to hear their stories.

Speaker 2 Oh, imagine trying to, maybe AI could decipher their language. Imagine they found them.
You know how nutty it would be if they found a little three-foot-tall, hairy human being that's still alive?

Speaker 2 Oh, my goodness. Just for clarity, he made this claim and put out a book.
So it might be like, come read my book.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a good thing to do if you have a good theory.

Speaker 1 For sure.

Speaker 2 I know what you're saying, though. I know what you're saying.

Speaker 2 I hope it's true, of course.

Speaker 1 Of course. Of course.

Speaker 2 Because it's fun.

Speaker 2 It's fun to hope it's true. All of it's fun.

Speaker 1 That's what I would, what I'm so grateful to the universe for and so grateful to my readers for

Speaker 1 is that I have been given this opportunity to live a fun life

Speaker 1 and to travel the world and to investigate mysteries and to put across my point of view on those mysteries. I couldn't do any of that if it wasn't for my readers.
I've never had sponsorship.

Speaker 1 I've never sought anybody to fund me to do anything. I started out massively in debt.
I've got to the place now where I can travel whenever I want and explore places and that's all down to my readers.

Speaker 1 It's not just me, it's me and my readers that are making this possible and I'm enormously grateful to them. And these days my

Speaker 1 viewers as well.

Speaker 2 You're a very lucky man. I was going to say that earlier when you were talking about how you've never taken a vacation.

Speaker 1 Like, well,

Speaker 2 you haven't. Your whole life's a vacation.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's why I don't see, I'm 74 years old now.
I don't see myself retiring. The idea of retirement is just out of the question.

Speaker 2 You try to retire, I'll go find you. I'm going to go grab you.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 I love doing some vitamins.

Speaker 1 I love doing what I do.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I hope it's contributed something useful to the world rather than just flim flam.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, it most certainly has. It most certainly has.

Speaker 2 You know, I first found out about you because of Fingerprints of the Gods, and one of the things that I found most fascinating when I started going into work was the the idea that the Ark of the Covenant exists in Ethiopia.

Speaker 1 That's what brought me into this field.

Speaker 1 Before that I wrote all about current affairs.

Speaker 2 That story is so nuts. And it sounds so ridiculous and people you go, what, the Ark of the Covenant's real?

Speaker 2 But then when you go into the history of these people that lived there and they all suffered radiation poisoning and it's like waiting.

Speaker 1 Cataracts over their eyes.

Speaker 1 And and and let's let's not forget that there's an indigenous population of of Old Testament Jews in Ethiopia, the Falashas, who have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant got there,

Speaker 1 different from the Ethiopian national epic, which is called the Kebra Nagas, the glory of kings. That's why I got into this field.
I was a current affairs guy, and Ethiopia was on my beat.

Speaker 1 And I just kept on coming across this story, and I realized it was central to Ethiopian culture, and I decided to investigate it and explore it.

Speaker 1 And it led to the sign and the seal, which was published in 1992. And that's what set me on the path to fingerprints of the gods and everything that that that followed that.

Speaker 2 So who is getting the cataracts?

Speaker 1 The guardian of the ark.

Speaker 1 This is a monk who is appointed.

Speaker 1 The place is Aksum in the province of Tigray in northern Ethiopia. It's a massive

Speaker 1 massively interesting place. Aksum has these huge granite steely.
They're very similar in many ways to ancient Egyptian obelisks.

Speaker 1 They're a bit different in shape, but same sort of height, some of them going 110 feet high,

Speaker 1 cut out of solid granite, right up there in the highlands of Ethiopia. And then they have an ancient church, the Church of St.
Mary, Cathedral actually, of St.

Speaker 1 Mary of Zion, where the Ark apparently was kept for hundreds and hundreds of years. Before that, it was kept elsewhere.
And then now it's been moved into a chapel that stands next to St.

Speaker 1 Mary of Zion Cathedral. And that chapel is guarded by armed men.

Speaker 1 The whole town is an armed camp that is protecting what they believe to be the Ark of the Covenant, but it's guarded particularly by one guy who is the official guardian of the Ark.

Speaker 1 And he's elected by other monks to be the guardian of the Ark. And several of them have run away when they get that election.

Speaker 1 Because once you're elected as the guardian of the Ark, when the previous one has died, you're going to be kept in that chapel forever.

Speaker 1 You'll never be allowed to leave it. So they're close to, whatever this object is, they're close to it.

Speaker 1 And I met three of them over a succession of years because their mortality is very once they're appointed they die very soon uh and they all had these cataracts over their eyes and they all blamed the object in that chapel whether or not it's the ark uh for for for causing their blindness wow

Speaker 2 so it's uh and no one is going in there and trying to get to the bottom of it they won't let you they won't let you

Speaker 1 they won't let you um can they describe them no

Speaker 1 it seems like someone should go look yeah the hell is that yeah

Speaker 2 What's in there? I mean, if we really find out the Ark of the Covenant was an actual object.

Speaker 1 I think it was an actual object.

Speaker 2 And you think it was some nuclear something or another?

Speaker 1 I don't know what it was.

Speaker 1 I think it's what is rightly described as an out-of-place artifact.

Speaker 1 Because if you look at the description in the book of Exodus, the very precise dimensions of it, I think in modern terms we'd say three feet nine inches long by two feet three inches high and wide.

Speaker 1 It's got a layer of gold, it's got a layer of wood, it's got another layer of gold. It's very precisely specified, like a blueprint in the book of Exodus.
And then it does all this stuff.

Speaker 1 It shoots out jets of fire and kills completely innocent people.

Speaker 1 It kills 50,000 Philistines in the city of Ashdod when they briefly capture it from the Israelites and make the mistake of treating it like a tourist object.

Speaker 1 And they open the Ark of the Covenant and look inside, and suddenly everybody in that city is dying. And what they're dying of is cancerous tumors.

Speaker 1 This is described

Speaker 1 in the Old Testament. So it's intriguing that this object is so precisely specified and is reported to have done these terrible things.

Speaker 1 It's just insane that we know where it is. Well,

Speaker 1 we know that I believe Ethiopia has a very strong claim to it, but that's all I can say because I've not seen it myself. I've been right outside the door of that sanctuary chapel several times.

Speaker 2 Did you bring a Geiger counter?

Speaker 1 No. That would be a good thought.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Imagine it was going nuts as you got it close.

Speaker 1 That would be a good thought.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's not like it's going to be if it's radioactive, it's not like it's going to be contained just this one small area. You're going to have traces of it that leak out.

Speaker 1 That's true. It would be a good thing.

Speaker 2 Especially if people are getting cataracts from being in the room with it. Yeah.
And so three different people you talk to have cataracts from that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And they all, and they all blame the ark.
And one of them, it's a resonant phrase which sticks in my memory. I asked him why, and he said, the ark is a thing of fire.

Speaker 1 Just that.

Speaker 1 Did he describe it to you?

Speaker 1 He did describe it as a box, rather like the biblical description, unsurprisingly.

Speaker 2 Did he describe what it looked like, like the outside of it? Gold.

Speaker 1 Gold.

Speaker 1 Gold.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 And of course, gold is a very good insulator

Speaker 1 against radiation. I don't want to go too far down this track.

Speaker 1 To me,

Speaker 1 the fascinating thing is that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that actually claims to have the Ark of the Covenant, that it's central to religion and culture in Ethiopia today, that there's much to support that argument, particularly in the form of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews, and their very ancient traditions about how they got to Ethiopia in the first place.

Speaker 1 In context of all of that, I think Ethiopia has a very good claim, very interesting claim, and that's why I wrote a book about it.

Speaker 2 That one to me is just like, we know where it is.

Speaker 2 That one to me is so crazy that someone is keeping that information from the rest of the humans.

Speaker 2 Because if we found out the Ark of the Covenant was, in fact, a real object and we know where it is and it does match the description of the Bible, that kind of changes everything.

Speaker 2 Now all of a sudden the Bible is not just stories and myths. The Bible is some sort of a historical record.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well let's not forget that one of the world's best-known flood myths also comes from the Bible, which is the flood of Noah.

Speaker 1 Which again is part of this worldwide tradition of which I am absolutely convinced Atlantis should be understood as a part of that worldwide tradition of a global flood and the loss of a former civilization.

Speaker 1 And again, it's one of the reasons why I've done the work I've done over these years.

Speaker 2 So when you're doing season two,

Speaker 2 what did you learn from doing season one that you applied to season two? Was there anything different about the way you went about it?

Speaker 1 Definitely.

Speaker 1 I have learned from the criticisms of archaeologists and one of the first things that became very clear to me, and they're absolutely right, is we need more indigenous voices in this series and that's what we've made sure to do.

Speaker 1 We have an amazing archaeologist, Indigenous archaeologist from Easter Island. We

Speaker 1 spent quite a bit of time filming in Easter Island and it's a strong...

Speaker 1 This series doesn't do country-by-country episodes, it's all merged together. Different bits of the story come together in each episode.
But a good chunk of it is on Easter Island.

Speaker 1 And there, Sonia Hoa Cardinali is an Indigenous Easter Islander. Her married name is Cardinali because she married an Italian guy.

Speaker 1 And she gave us incredible material on Easter Island. And she revealed that she and her team have found what are called banana phytoliths.
Now phytoliths are a minute part of the banana plant.

Speaker 1 They've excavated them from a crater in Easter Island and they've found that those are 3,000 years old. Now this is interesting for two reasons.
Firstly, bananas do not propagate propagate naturally.

Speaker 1 You can't get bananas to Easter Island without human beings bringing them there.

Speaker 1 That's how they got there.

Speaker 1 And secondly, the date that she's found 3,000-year-old banana phytoliths in Easter Island blows out of the water the notion that Easter Island was only settled 1,000 years ago or less,

Speaker 1 which is the current idea of archaeology. Again and again, we've had indigenous guests on the show who have brought real important information to it.
Amongst those geoglyphs in Brazil,

Speaker 1 we had a member of the Apurina people who is a caretaker for those geoglyphs.

Speaker 1 And he talked to us about what is special to him about the geoglyphs, about how this is a sacred place to his tribe and how they still gather there today

Speaker 1 and how they understand that it's somehow connected to the journey to the next world, to the journey of life after death.

Speaker 1 And that then rings a bell in my mind of that whole idea of a journey to the afterlife and a portal through which we pass into that other realm.

Speaker 1 We find that right there in Brazil.

Speaker 2 So if the Easter Island,

Speaker 2 if the island was settled at least 3,000 years ago, do we know where from?

Speaker 1 Well, 3,000 years ago, you're still within the period of the Polynesian expansion. This is not the Ice Age.
This is more recent. It's early in the Polynesian expansion rather than late.

Speaker 1 Easter Island was seen as one of the last places that the Polynesians got to. This new evidence is suggesting it may have been one of the first places that the Polynesians got to.

Speaker 1 But the question that arises is, did they find the Moai already in place when they came there, even 3,000 years ago? And I think there's a lot of evidence for that.

Speaker 1 I think this is going to make archaeologists absolutely furious with me.

Speaker 1 But I hope that I'm paying full respect to indigenous traditions.

Speaker 1 We had an amazing Easter Island elder

Speaker 1 who told us the tradition of the lost land of Heva.

Speaker 1 Easter Island has its own flood myth.

Speaker 1 They say that there was a huge land in the Pacific, far, far away, called Heva, and that it was H-I-V-A, and that it was destroyed in a flood cataclysm, and that there were survivors, specifically seven wise men.

Speaker 1 That's another thing that is found all around the world. It's found in ancient Sumer, it's found in ancient Egypt, it's found almost everywhere.
Specific

Speaker 1 seven wise men who came and settled Easter Island after this great cataclysm. So it's great to have indigenous testimony on that.
And then you have the mystery of the Easter Island script.

Speaker 1 How did that happen?

Speaker 1 How come this tiny island, which only ever had a population of a few thousand, did something that is normally only done by big civilizations, which was create a written script.

Speaker 1 But they have a script, the Easter Island script, and it's written on wooden boards. And we learned that these were the boards we see today, none of which, by the way, are in Easter Island now.

Speaker 1 They're all in museums around the world. They themselves were copies of copies of copies of earlier wooden boards that wore out.

Speaker 1 And these things go back far into the remote past as far as the indigenous people of Easter Island are concerned.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 to have a fully formed, elaborate script, which nobody can interpret today, you have to remember the tragic history of Easter Island.

Speaker 1 There was a point where Easter Island's population was reduced to just 11 people. And it was reduced to 11 people by Peruvian slave raids.

Speaker 1 They came and slaved the people of Easter Island, and they took them to work in Peru and put them elsewhere in the Pacific.

Speaker 1 Eventually there was a movement to restore them to their homeland, and gradually people came back. But at one point its population was reduced to 11.

Speaker 1 All the elders were wiped out, those who were the memory carriers. And And so what's left now is just a hint of a memory of these things.
But they speak with awe of these

Speaker 1 tablets with the script on it. And to me, that is a sign again that there's something wrong with our understanding of Easter Island.

Speaker 1 How can we explain that this tiny little place produces its own written language? Why would it even need a written language when you can walk across the island in three hours?

Speaker 1 It wouldn't need to communicate in that way, and yet it had its own script.

Speaker 2 And this script,

Speaker 2 can we we see what it looks like? Can you find the Easter Island script, Jason? If you look up the word Rongo Rongo,

Speaker 1 R-O-N-G-O, Rongo-Rongo tablets.

Speaker 2 One of the things that's interesting about AI is that they believe that AI is going to be able to determine or decipher rather a bunch of different things that we currently can't.

Speaker 1 There they are. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 That's crazy.

Speaker 1 It bears some curious similarities to the Indus Valley script, which has also not been deciphered. And let's hope AI can decipher both of them.
Look at that. That's so sad.
And

Speaker 1 the way it runs is you read from left to right along the top row, then you go from right to left along the next row, then you go from left to right along the next row, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 They're sort of snake-like. How do they know that?

Speaker 1 Because that's one of the memories that's been preserved by the Easter Islanders, and because of the way they all run on.

Speaker 2 And what do they think it represents?

Speaker 1 According to Leo, the elder who we talked to in Easter Island,

Speaker 1 it contains memories of the past. It contains memories of the past in Easter Island, instructions on how to navigate, information about the stars, and information about how to live as a community.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 But in a language that we don't know.

Speaker 1 We don't know what it is.

Speaker 2 No, nobody knows it.

Speaker 1 All we have is an oral tradition which itself is very fragmented and very faint because of that reduction of Easter Island's population to just 11 people and the fact that the elders who were within historical times able to read these tablets were all wiped out.

Speaker 2 How did they decipher

Speaker 2 cuneiform?

Speaker 1 Cuneiform, I think, because of its relationship to later languages, which were known. That's the...
I mean, cuneiform is a writing system.

Speaker 1 You find the earliest version, I think, amongst the Sumerians and then in later Babylonian society as well.

Speaker 1 But when you have a language and you have

Speaker 1 a language that it's related to that you can read,

Speaker 1 or where you have have a text in two different languages but it's the same text then you're in a place where you can begin to translate it that's what the rosetta stone does in in ancient egypt because because we have it in the ancient egyptian hieroglyphs but we also have it in greek and that's why suddenly the code of the ancient egyptian hieroglyphs was cracked because of the rosetta stone well there isn't a rosetta stone for the easter island script or for the indusphali script but i think in the case of the cuneiform there was something similar some context to place it in So the Easter Island, these enormous statues, one of the things they found, and I don't know when they started doing this, they dug deeper and deeper and deeper and found out that the heads that are above the surface are just a tiny part of it.

Speaker 2 So do you think that it's just natural erosion that covered up everything else?

Speaker 1 No. You think it was purposely?

Speaker 1 I think it's a very complicated issue.

Speaker 1 The issue of erosion, it's not so much erosion, it's the deposition of sediment. It's the deposition of sediment.
Over time. Over time.

Speaker 1 And what we're looking at with these Easter Island heads, I was fortunate to know, there we are, and I was just going to say, I was fortunate to know Tor Haradal, and there he is in the blue safari suit standing at the shoulder of

Speaker 1 the Easter Island Moai.

Speaker 1 And you can see that the... dark bit is the bit that was above ground and then they dig down and they find that it goes down 30 feet underground this enormous thing and this is not as a result of of

Speaker 1 being exposed by erosion.

Speaker 1 This had to be excavated in order to reveal it.

Speaker 1 And the issue is, on this tiny island,

Speaker 1 if this thing is only 700 years old, which is something that archaeologists often say, 700 or 1,000 years old, if it's only that old, how do you get 30 feet of sedimentation on this tiny island in just 700 years?

Speaker 1 It looks like a much longer period that would be required to create that depth of sedimentation.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 how much time do you think, I mean, has there been speculation? Like, if it was just natural layers of sediment being dropped down, how long would it take to cover something?

Speaker 1 Well, this is where I'd like to defer to the work of Dr. Robert Schock, who's a brilliant expert in this field.

Speaker 1 We invited Robert Schock to join us in season two of Ancient Apocalypse, but he declined.

Speaker 1 I think that's unfortunate because I think Robert Schock has done breakthrough work on Easter Island, and it's Robert Schock who first first realized that this is a problem.

Speaker 1 This deep burial of these statues by natural sedimentation is a problem. It's a chronological problem that speaks to these statues being much older than we imagine they are.

Speaker 2 Is Robert Schock declining because of the criticism that he received about the Temple of the Sphinx?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure why.

Speaker 1 He probably doesn't want to deal with it anyway.

Speaker 1 I've always regarded Robert as a good friend, but he and I have not spoken spoken since 2015.

Speaker 3 On purpose?

Speaker 1 Well, I would love to speak to Robert.

Speaker 2 I'm trying not to talk to you.

Speaker 1 And I take every opportunity to express my admiration for him. And Robert has been very brave.

Speaker 1 He is a credentialed geologist, and he has stuck his neck out on the Sphinx. And a lot of people want to cut his head off for doing that.

Speaker 1 And I appreciate his courage, and I appreciate his openness of mind and his willingness to get into this. But I don't know.
Somewhere between

Speaker 1 2013, we were still good friends. We traveled to Gunung Padang together in 2013.

Speaker 2 What year did he do the podcast, Jamie?

Speaker 2 He did our podcast

Speaker 2 back in the day. I want to say it was around 2015, 2016.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Six years ago? Okay.

Speaker 2 So 2018? Six years ago. Maybe that's why I stopped being your friend.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I don't know why it is. Maybe I did something that offended him.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I can be very unpleasant and can be very angry. You're a nice guy.
Well,

Speaker 1 we're all nice guys, but we all have a dark side. And sometimes I am very harsh and very unpleasant.
I don't think I was with Robert. I don't understand what the problem is between us.

Speaker 1 He and I disagree over the cause of the Younger Dryass cataclysm.

Speaker 1 Robert Schock believes that it was a massive solar outburst that brought this catastrophe about, and he focuses on the end of the Younger Dryass 11,600 years ago.

Speaker 1 I'm more of the view that the Comet Research Group is right and that we're looking at the effect of largely of airbursts of large cometary fragments right across the surface of the Earth, which caused the Younger Dryas.

Speaker 1 Why are they mutually exclusive? But

Speaker 1 I don't see why they're mutually exclusive.

Speaker 1 I don't see why one has to write off the other. What we both agree on is that the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago was...

Speaker 1 an extraordinary global cataclysm which changed everything, which extinguished all the megafauna of the ice age. We agree on that.

Speaker 1 And we agree that it likely wiped out a lost civilization of the ice age as well. We disagree on the mechanism but I don't see why we shouldn't be friends for that.

Speaker 1 So Robert, if you're listening, if you're listening, please,

Speaker 1 let's work together because we have many common enemies.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the problems with the alternative side is that there's a lot of infighting in the alternative side and everybody's scrambling for their own bit of turf.

Speaker 1 Whereas the archaeological side, they're very unified in terms of attacking what they call pseudo-archaeology. They work as a team and

Speaker 1 that team work makes them very efficient. We're very inefficient on the alternative side.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm assuming,

Speaker 2 I shouldn't be assuming, but I'm assuming it's the criticism. Probably wants to keep his job and he said everything he wants to say.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 I think Robert is open to doing television. The fact is, we invited him to come to Israel and to give his point of view, and he declined.
And therefore,

Speaker 1 he must have a strong reason to do that.

Speaker 2 Oh, I hope he still loves you.

Speaker 2 I hope so, too.

Speaker 2 Has anybody speculated about how much time it would take to cover those Easter Island statues with sediments?

Speaker 1 Thousands of years. Thousands.

Speaker 1 Thousands of years.

Speaker 2 Thousands of years.

Speaker 2 Thirty feet of dirt.

Speaker 1 Remember, it's a small island. It's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
It's 2,000 miles from Tahiti and 2,000 miles from the coast of Peru.

Speaker 2 It just seems strange that there's so many of those statues in this one area, too. What did that island signify? Like, why did they do that?

Speaker 1 Well, it's what it calls itself, Te Pituo Tehenua, the navel of the earth.

Speaker 1 It calls itself the navel of the earth. And it's not the only place.
Delphi in Greece calls itself the navel of the earth. Heliopolis in Egypt, close to Giza, was a navel of the earth.

Speaker 1 Angkor, what in Cambodia is a navel of the earth. Gobekli Tepi means...

Speaker 1 the navel, the hill of the navel.

Speaker 1 This notion of navels of the earth, I think it's connected to an ancient geodetic survey of the earth, that there were certain anchor points that lines of longitude were drawn from by a civilization that didn't have our tech, didn't have our iPhones, but did explore the world, did sail the oceans, and I'm not surprised that we haven't found their ships, since we haven't found the ships from those who sailed to Australia or for those who sailed to Cyprus either.

Speaker 1 But it had abilities that we do not attribute to period of that time.

Speaker 1 And those abilities included the ability to calculate longitude, something that our civilization didn't crack until the 18th century.

Speaker 1 And I suggest it's only a theory that these multiple navels of the earth around the world were fixed points on the earth where longitude connections were made. They were established places.

Speaker 1 So I do not think it's an accident.

Speaker 1 that Angkor Watt is 72 degrees of longitude east of Giza because that number 72 occurs in ancient myths all around the world and is strongly connected to this phenomenon called precession of the equinoxes which

Speaker 1 first of all it changes the pole star at the moment our the earth wobbles on its axis but it's a very slow wobble over 26,000 years

Speaker 1 it changes the pole star now it's Polaris in the past it was Tuban in the past it was Draco but but but now it's now it's Polaris

Speaker 1 because the extended north pole of the Earth is spiraling in the heavens and it's pointing at different bits of space over a roughly 26,000 year period, 25,920 years to be exact.

Speaker 1 One degree of precession takes 72 years to unfold.

Speaker 1 That's why the fact that the relationship of the Great Pyramid to the Earth being on the scale of 1 to 43,200 is interesting. If it was on the scale of 1 to 57,000, I couldn't care less.

Speaker 1 But 43,200 is one of those numbers that we find in mythology and traditions all around the world.

Speaker 1 And there's very solid scholarly backing for this in a book I've mentioned to you before, which is called Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santigliana and Hertha von Deschen.

Speaker 1 Giorgio was professor of history of science at MIT.

Speaker 1 They draw attention to this, that there appears to have been a very ancient knowledge of this obscure astronomical phenomenon, which our culture attributes to the Greeks and thinks only goes back a couple of thousand years.

Speaker 1 years. Santigliana and von Deschen were of the view that it goes back to what they called some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of the remote past.

Speaker 2 How could they even know that that was happening? Like, by what method could they make those calculations that the Earth wobbles on its axis every 26,000 years?

Speaker 1 You have to observe for more than one human lifetime.

Speaker 1 You've got to keep observing.

Speaker 2 And then extrapolate the wobble?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 you may have to observe for hundreds of years.

Speaker 1 To conclude that it's a wobble is another thing, but to conclude that the skies are changing at a regular fixed rate, that's going to take observation over a few hundred years.

Speaker 1 72 years is one human lifetime. In that 72 years, the processional shift would be the equivalent of the width of your finger held up to the horizon.
Very hard to note.

Speaker 1 But if you extend it for several hundred years, it'll be very clear that something is going on.

Speaker 1 And what's going on is the constellation that rises behind the sun, particularly notable at key moments of the year, the summer and winter solstice and the spring and autumn equinox and and the age in which we live as anybody of course astrology is another one of those things that archaeologists despise but as anybody who follows astrology will know we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius and and that's because the sun on the spring equinox is within the next 150 years is going to move entirely out of Pisces where it sits at the moment and is going to move into Aquarius.

Speaker 1 The age of Pisces with Pisces housing the sun on the spring equinox, began around the time of Christ, about just over 2,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 And before that it was the age of Aries. We have all this ram symbolism in ancient Egypt at that time.
Before that it was the age of Taurus, constellation of Taurus housing the sun.

Speaker 1 All of this is a process that unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years. So when I find that the great pyramid models the earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200, which is 72 times 600,

Speaker 1 I wake up and I think this is interesting. And when I find that Angkor, one navel of the earth, is separated from Giza, another navel of the earth, by 72 degrees of longitude, that rings another bell.

Speaker 1 And I think that's something curious and worthy of exploration.

Speaker 2 I think we also,

Speaker 2 when we talk about ancient people studying the sky, we think of the sky today. And our sky, unfortunately, is burdened by light pollution almost everywhere.

Speaker 2 Anywhere there's civilization, it's very difficult to see the stars. Very difficult.
Whereas they had none of that, and they were in constant awe of this thing that they could see every night.

Speaker 2 And they probably had a very detailed understanding of where everything was,

Speaker 2 you know, in a way that you're far more detailed than most people have today.

Speaker 2 Right, because we don't have access to it unless you're in like deep, you know, deep wilderness and with a clear night sky.

Speaker 1 The presence of the sky in our lives, if we're living in a city, is close to zero. So it's not zero, but it's close to zero.

Speaker 2 Bizarre. Yeah.
It's a bizarre detachment that is propagated by technology. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Very, very much so.

Speaker 2 Very weird, right? Because it's actually dangerous for us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because I think it makes us disconnected from the idea that we're connected totally to the universe and that feeling of awe that you get when you see a completely star-filled night.

Speaker 2 I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again. I was in

Speaker 2 the observatory in the Big Island, Hawaii. And when you go up to the Keck Observatory, the sky, you go through the clouds.

Speaker 2 and when you get up to the top and you look you can't believe that you could see it you can't believe I've been there three four times only once did we really catch it the last time was pretty good but one time we caught it perfectly where there was no moon in the sky and the sky was completely clear and it was astounding astounding yeah you feel like it's a windshield and you are on a spaceship and you're flying through deep space you see stars everywhere that's a beautiful way to put it

Speaker 1 that's exactly what we are we're in a convertible we're in a convertible spaceship flying through the universe.

Speaker 2 That's really what it is. And you don't see it every day because of light pollution.
And I think it's one of the most

Speaker 2 saddest things about our culture. It's incredible that you can go out at night and you can see and drive and go to your favorite restaurant and go to the movies and all kinds of nice stuff.
But

Speaker 2 what we're trading off is literally our connection to this insanely beautiful thing

Speaker 2 that hypnotizes you with its awe.

Speaker 2 You look at this, if you get to go camping on a night where you see everything, it's incredible. It's one of the greatest things you could ever see.

Speaker 2 And it used to be there for everybody and it used to be how they live their lives. It was an ever-present reality.

Speaker 1 It was impossible to avoid it.

Speaker 1 That is why it's so crazy to say that the phenomenon like precession wasn't discovered until the Greeks about 2,200 years ago, because the ancients were living with those skies for thousands and thousands of years before, and they were paying very close attention to them.

Speaker 1 There's strong evidence that the constellations of the zodiac were not inventions of the Greeks either.

Speaker 1 I mean, in a sense, the constellations aren't inventions because they happen to be on the path of the sun.

Speaker 1 The zodiac are the constellations which roughly are in the place in the sky that the sun occupies through the course of the year. That's why we see them.

Speaker 1 But there's increasing evidence that the Greeks inherited that, and that the knowledge was very early, and it may well go back into into the Upper Paleolithic.

Speaker 1 There's this incredible figure of Taurus in the Hall of Bulls at Lasco Cave in France, one of those cave paintings, which shows the stars of the Pleiades above the shoulder of the bull, exactly where they should be.

Speaker 2 What is the oldest version of astrology that we have?

Speaker 1 Well, again, you...

Speaker 1 you know, you have the official position on this, and you have the unofficial position. What's the official position?

Speaker 1 Well, the official position is that it's something that developed during the time of the late Mesopotamians and the Greeks.

Speaker 1 This notion that somehow there was a connection between

Speaker 1 events in the sky and what happens to us.

Speaker 1 But I think it's much older than that.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 the idea that the sky in some way determines our destinies

Speaker 1 is a very ancient idea,

Speaker 1 not a recent idea.

Speaker 1 And it kind of makes sense. I mean,

Speaker 1 it's weird to think this. I don't mean to be selfish to the human race, but we would not be here.
No human beings would be here if it were not for that whole vast universe out there.

Speaker 1 It would be wrong to say that the universe exists so that we can be.

Speaker 1 But the fact is we would not be.

Speaker 1 We're part of that huge cosmos. And you're right.
It's forgetting that we're part of the cosmos or regarding the cosmos as something that we must conquer,

Speaker 1 which is the modern mindset, which is most unhelpful.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, yeah,

Speaker 2 I've always been fascinated by astrology, not like the newspaper astrology, like you're a cancer, so that means this. But the idea that the time you were born, the place on earth you were born,

Speaker 2 where you were conceived, all these play a factor in your personality, and that this was somehow or another mapped out by people thousands and thousands of years ago.

Speaker 2 I know a lot of people like to dismiss it as myth, and I've been one of those people, but part of me wonders if there is some sort of an impact that, look, we know that the gravity from the moon affects the tides.

Speaker 2 We know that we're mostly water. We know that there's some sort of an effect that planets and gravity and stars must have on the entirety of the universe.

Speaker 2 And the idea that these very bizarre biological entities, that their personalities and their existence is in some way motivated, shaped, or at least influenced by the position in the stars in which they were born is very interesting

Speaker 2 because people studied that shit for a long time. If there was nothing to it,

Speaker 2 why have so many generations of people studied it?

Speaker 1 I think it's a good question.

Speaker 2 And what was the root of it? Like, how the hell did they figure that out?

Speaker 1 Well, it must come from a place where we feel connected to the universe. And we feel that the universe influences us directly.
Right.

Speaker 1 Not the way we look at it at the moment as sort of something out there that doesn't mean much to us, except that we're going to conquer it with spaceships. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, and go to the moon and go to planets and things like that. But to see it as an ever-present reality, we understand that we're affected by the climate on planet Earth.

Speaker 1 We understand we're affected by the weather, by the oceans, by the winds.

Speaker 1 They affect us. They affect our personalities.
So why shouldn't we be affected by the broader universe that surrounds us?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it it does make sense, but I've never heard anybody explain it. Have you ever talked to like a legitimate air quotes astrologer? No.

Speaker 1 I haven't.

Speaker 1 It's not been a central focus for me.

Speaker 1 My central focus has more been on the evidence for really precise ancient astronomy, particularly amongst the ancient Egyptians, but also fantastically advanced amongst the Maya in Mexico

Speaker 1 as well. And we have a big focus on the Maya in season two of Ancient Apocalypse.
And I was fortunate, blessed, to have a brilliant archaeologist, Ed Barnhart,

Speaker 1 who joined me there in Palenque. And he's not sneering at me.
He doesn't agree with everything I say. He's very clear on that.
But he's not sneering at me.

Speaker 1 And he feels that there's something useful being contributed by this approach.

Speaker 2 And so is it generally agreed that there is a connection between the methods or the design of the construction and the correlation between star systems?

Speaker 1 I don't follow the question quite.

Speaker 2 Is it agreed by archaeologists that the reason why these things are constructed in a very specific direction and in a very specific design, that it is mirroring the cosmos?

Speaker 1 I think that archaeologists are very reluctant to accept the broader idea.

Speaker 1 They are willing, they can hardly deny, that some structures are specifically aligned to the equinoctial rising point of the sun, in other words, due east, and other structures are aligned to the rising or the setting of the sun on the summer or the winter solstice.

Speaker 1 That cannot be denied. Serpent Mound in Ohio is a classic example of that,

Speaker 1 which is oriented precisely to the setting sun on the winter solstice. But the broader idea that, for example,

Speaker 1 positions of stars in the sky might be replicated on the ground, that's an idea that archaeology completely rejects.

Speaker 1 And that's where I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend Robert Boval, who's been very ill for the last many years. But Robert Boval brought us the Orion correlation.

Speaker 1 And my God, did archaeology descend upon him like a ton of bricks for just noticing that the three great pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion's belt.

Speaker 1 And then when we work precession into the equation, we find that they're not laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt as it looked in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built.

Speaker 1 They're laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago.

Speaker 1 So it's like a marker on the Giza Plateau speaking to that age, just as Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe speaks to that age in the astronomical diagram on that on that pillar.

Speaker 2 Which also means that they would have been aligned 35,000 years ago as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right. Because it's a cycle.
Yeah, it goes back. Then

Speaker 2 the Sphinx is another one of those, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Sphinx is another one.

Speaker 1 The Sphinx aligned with, it was looking at the rising sun and behind it the constellation of Leo 12,500 years ago.

Speaker 1 But if you go back 25,000, 26,000 years before that, you'll find the same alignment occurring. It's a cycle.
It's not a one-off event.

Speaker 1 It's a cycle that occurs every 26,000 years.

Speaker 1 It's a mind-blower. It's a mind-blower.
And that's why John Anthony West, who I'm so glad you had him on your show. I've had him on a couple times before he passed.

Speaker 1 He was such a genius and such a funny guy.

Speaker 2 I recommend that to everybody, that Magical Egypt, the two DVD series that he had, they're amazing.

Speaker 2 My wife hated them because I was watching them so often. You watched this Egypt thing again.

Speaker 2 I couldn't stop.

Speaker 2 I probably watched it 30 times.

Speaker 1 He was an absolute genius. And John was of the view that the Sphinx is more than 30,000 years old rather than just 12,500 years old.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what aligned so interestingly with Robert Schock's

Speaker 2 analysis of the water erosion, that this is thousands of years of rainfall.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, that's that's the really important matter that Robert Schock has brought to the table, which no other person has dared to do. Now, John Anthony West started that process.

Speaker 1 He was aware of a problem in the weathering of the Sphinx, but he wasn't quite sure what the problem was.

Speaker 1 He was following up some writings by a scholar called Schwaler de Lubix back in the 1920s or 1930s who said something about water weathering on the Sphinx.

Speaker 1 And so John brought Robert Schock there to Giza, and Robert Schock immediately recognized the weathering patterns on the Sphinx as the result of heavy rainfall,

Speaker 1 exposure to heavy rainfall for thousands of years.

Speaker 1 And you have to go back to the younger dryass to get that kind of heavy rainfall in Giza, hence the notion that the Sphinx geologically, whatever else we may say about it, is 12,000 plus years old.

Speaker 1 And it was courageous of Robert to do that. He put his own career in jeopardy, just like anybody who sticks their neck out in this field does.

Speaker 1 He put his own career in jeopardy by standing up for a much older Sphinx. And I just hugely respect him for doing that.

Speaker 2 I also thought it was really fascinating that he showed images, cropped images of this water erosion to other geologists, and they all agreed it was water erosion until they figured out where it was.

Speaker 2 There you go. And they were like, I'm not signing off on that.
That's right.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 Because it's just too controversial.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they circle the wagons at a certain point. And go on.
And onto your career. Yeah.
Yeah. Most unfortunately.

Speaker 2 Well, we are very fortunate that you're out there, buddy.

Speaker 1 Thank you. We really are.

Speaker 2 Thank you. I love your show.
I love you. You're always fun to talk to.

Speaker 1 Can I say I appreciate you very much? A couple of things about the show. Sure, please.
First of all,

Speaker 1 thank you to the viewers of season one of Ancient Apocalypse. And I hope you'll enjoy season two.

Speaker 1 I hope we're bringing really important new information to the table. And a special request, if you do like it, please give it a thumbs up on Netflix.

Speaker 1 Season two is all about the Americas.

Speaker 1 Secondly,

Speaker 1 I will be doing a speaking event in the U.S. It'll be the only speaking event that I do in 2025, and that's going to be in Sedona, 19th and 20th of April 2025.

Speaker 2 That's a good place for it, all those freaks.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 19th and 20th of April 2025. And it's going to be called the Fight for the Past, because I believe

Speaker 1 that's what's going on here.

Speaker 1 So I hope that people will enjoy the show and express that enjoyment. That would be

Speaker 1 really, really helpful. I know they will.
I know they will. And the final thing I want to say is thank you to Keanu Rees.
Thank you to Keanu Rees for joining me on the show.

Speaker 1 Keanu reached out to me some years ago because he's making this incredible comic book series called Berserker, B-R-Z-R-K-R,

Speaker 1 about an immortal warrior who's born 80,000 years ago, but has the power of a god and cannot be killed.

Speaker 1 And back, I think, in at least two years ago, Keanu reached out to me for some advice, some historical advice on where in the world could such an individual have been born 80,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 And we talked about that and we exchanged emails and then we had some nice Zoom conversations together. Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 1 And I sensed that this is a very open-minded, very curious, very interesting person. So when we were doing season two, I did ask him,

Speaker 1 would you join me and speak about this and speak about your curiosity of the past? And he knew what he was up against.

Speaker 1 Actually, just before Keanu and I spent a day together filming for Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse, he'd watched the debate between me and Flint Dibble.

Speaker 1 He knew what he was facing getting into this, but he had, again, the courage and the integrity to stand up, to stand by me in that story. And I'm enormously grateful to him for doing that.

Speaker 1 And I found along the way, I suspected it when we knew each other just by Zoom and by email, I found along the way what an incredible gentleman Keanu Reeves is, how kind-hearted he is, how humble he is, how he turned turned up for the shoot carrying his own baggage.

Speaker 1 He's just a gem of a human being and he radiates kindness and decency and care and love towards others. And I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know him.

Speaker 1 And I hope our paths will continue to cross in the future. That's awesome.
Above all, I'm grateful to him.

Speaker 2 Shout out to Keanu. He seems like an awesome guy.

Speaker 1 He's an awesome guy. Everything that people say about Keanu is right.
He's a great man. There he is.
There's the two of you together.

Speaker 2 Yep, yep. All right, Graham.
It's always a pleasure. Thank you, sir.
Appreciate you very much.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me back on the show.

Speaker 2 Bye, everyone.