Latest / Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History / The Species With Amnesia – A Journey into Graham Hancock's Lost Civilisation
Transcript
- 0:21Hello and welcome back.
- 0:22Today we are going to take a journey
- 0:24into one of the most controversial and fascinating
- 0:26narratives of our time, the story of humanity's
- 0:30true origin, as told by author and researcher
- 0:33Graham Hancock.
- 0:35And let me, before we start, apologize for
- 0:37my pronunciations of different names, cities.
- 0:42If you need the correct spelling, please look
- 0:47at the transcripts.
- 0:49Now, so, back to the podcast.
- 0:52For more than 30 years, Hancock has been
- 0:54asking one simple prerogative question.
- 0:57What if everything we think we know about
- 0:59the past is only a small part of
- 1:01a much larger truth?
- 1:03What if an advanced civilization existed long before
- 1:07the first cities of Mesopotamia were built?
- 1:10A civilization that was destroyed in a global
- 1:12cataclysm, and what left behind traces of our
- 1:16archaeologists either cannot see or refuse to acknowledge.
- 1:21Hancock is often called a pseudoscientist, a pseudo
- 1:25-archaeologist, a pseudo-historian, a man who presents
- 1:29fascinating theories without evidence.
- 1:32But here is the one interesting thing.
- 1:35In his books, and he emphasizes again and
- 1:38again, he footnotes everything.
- 1:41He cites scientific articles, he references recognized researchers,
- 1:47he points to geological and genetic studies.
- 1:50His claim is not that he found the
- 1:54lost civilization.
- 1:55His claim is that mainstream archaeology has built
- 2:00a house on cards that is about to
- 2:03collapse because new discoveries keep showing that human
- 2:06history is much older, much more complex, and
- 2:10much more catastrophic than we have previously believed.
- 2:17Today we are going to dive into Hancock's
- 2:19extensive body of work based on a series
- 2:23of lectures he has given in the recent
- 2:25years.
- 2:26We travel from the pyramids of Egypt to
- 2:30the 12,000-year-old stone circles of
- 2:34Turkey, from the earthworks of the Mississippi Valley
- 2:38to the deepest secrets of the Amazon rainforest.
- 2:42We will meet geologists, geneticists, and astronomers who
- 2:47have all helped shake the foundation of how
- 2:51we understand our past.
- 2:53And in the end, we will ask ourselves,
- 2:55why does this story matter to us today?
- 2:59So settling, we are going to have a
- 3:01talk about a species with amnesia.
- 3:06So let's start where Hancock started in Egypt.
- 3:10The year was 1989.
- 3:12He was researching another book about the Ark
- 3:16of the Covenant in Ethiopia, and for the
- 3:18first time, he stood before the Great Pyramids
- 3:20of Giza.
- 3:22And he was, as he said, staggered.
- 3:25For most of us, the pyramids is an
- 3:27impressive monument, perhaps tools for pharaohs like Khufu
- 3:31and Khafre.
- 3:33For Hancock, they were something entirely different.
- 3:36He seen them as a kind of three
- 3:38-dimensional book, an astronomical clock that tells us
- 3:42about the time long before the Egyptian dynasties.
- 3:46It is a message carved in stone meant
- 3:49to last for thousands of years.
- 3:53Hancock's argument builds on the recognition that many
- 3:57Egyptians, Egyptologists today accept that the ancient Egyptians
- 4:05identified the god Osiris with the constellation of
- 4:10Orion.
- 4:11They believe that the souls of the dead
- 4:14travel into a heavenly realm called the Dua,
- 4:18which lay between the constellation of Leo and
- 4:21Orion, with the Milky Way as the great
- 4:25celestial river.
- 4:26This is a cosmology deeply rooted in the
- 4:31night sky.
- 4:33But here, words get interesting.
- 4:35Hancock's colleague, Robert Poval, pointed out many years
- 4:39ago that the three large pyramids on the
- 4:42Giza Plateau is positioned in a way that
- 4:45exactly mirrors the three belt stars of the
- 4:48Orion's belt.
- 4:49This is remarkable itself.
- 4:52But the cruer point is that the sky
- 4:54of the pyramids are mirroring is not the
- 4:57sky that would have been seen over Egypt
- 5:00in 2000 BC.
- 5:03When Egyptologists believed that the pyramids were built,
- 5:07no.
- 5:08The sky encoded in the pyramids placement on
- 5:11the ground, correspondent to the sky that appears
- 5:14between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
- 5:21Why is that important?
- 5:22Because the earth does not stand still.
- 5:26It has a slow wobble on the sacks.
- 5:29This phenomenon is called precession.
- 5:34That means that the stars that rise behind
- 5:37the sun at the spring equinox change over
- 5:40time.
- 5:41It takes 2,160 years for the sun
- 5:45to move through one of the zodiac constellations.
- 5:48And it takes 26,000 years to complete
- 5:52a full circle.
- 5:54This is a clock that ticks extremely slowly,
- 5:57and Hancock argues that the pyramids are precisely
- 6:01set to this clock.
- 6:04The same story is told about the Sphinx.
- 6:08The massive lion with the pharaoh's head stares
- 6:13east.
- 6:14Each year on the spring equinox, the sun
- 6:18rises directly in front of it.
- 6:20And at the same astronomical epoch, 12,800
- 6:25years to 11,600 years ago, the constellation
- 6:29of Leo rose behind the sun.
- 6:32The Sphinx, in other words, is gazing at
- 6:35its own celestial counterpart.
- 6:39Hancock points out that the ancient Egyptians had
- 6:43a name for this epoch.
- 6:45They called it Settebi, which means the first
- 6:48time.
- 6:50It was the age of the gods, the
- 6:53time when the foundations of the civilization were
- 6:56laid.
- 6:57The oldest pyramid text written inside the Pyramid
- 7:01of Saqqara describes the journey through the Duat.
- 7:06They speak about the winding waterway, the Milky
- 7:10Way, as a central route for the soul.
- 7:14It is as if the pyramids are magnificent
- 7:18structures tells us.
- 7:21This is where it all begins, and it
- 7:23began more than 12,000 years ago.
- 7:26For Hancock, this is the first crucial clue,
- 7:30that an ancient civilization possessed such advanced astronomical
- 7:35knowledge that they could map the sky for
- 7:37an epoch which lay more than 8,000
- 7:40years before the Egyptian dynasties.
- 7:51But if this was only about Egypt, the
- 7:54skeptics would have a point.
- 7:56It would have been a coincidence that makes
- 7:58Hancock's arguments so powerful, is that he finds
- 8:02the same patterns scattered across the globe.
- 8:06He does not call this diffusion, which means
- 8:11that Egypt taught Mexico or Mexico taught Egypt.
- 8:15He calls it a shared inheritance from a
- 8:18distant common ancestor.
- 8:20And here I would like to add a
- 8:21comment of my own.
- 8:23What Hancock is doing is basically that he
- 8:27is doing pattern recognition.
- 8:29And today in our society pattern recognition is
- 8:34everything, because that's the foundation of investment of
- 8:41money, of searching of information, etc.
- 8:46What happens in Google when you search for
- 8:49something is actually that the system is looking
- 8:52for similar patterns.
- 8:54It's basically pattern recognition.
- 8:56And the same goes with all kind of
- 8:58investments on Wall Street and wherever you want
- 9:00to place your money.
- 9:02It is that what you are looking for
- 9:04is a pattern of money.
- 9:08So what Graham Hancock is actually doing is
- 9:12that he is looking for a well-known
- 9:15method of creating money.
- 9:18He just used it on the history.
- 9:22And despite what people that does not earn
- 9:26their own money, they think that is actually
- 9:29a well-known strategy, and it works very
- 9:32well.
- 9:33You can look at the founders of the
- 9:37magnificent seven of the seven largest US companies.
- 9:45They are all electronic.
- 9:47It's Microsoft, it's Meta, it's yeah, you name
- 9:52it.
- 9:52They are all very rich.
- 9:55Back to the text here.
- 9:58If we take Mexico as an example, the
- 10:01ancient Mayas is calling the underworld Xibalba.
- 10:07And where was Xibalba located?
- 10:10In a region of the sky in which
- 10:13the Milky Way runs, just like in Egypt.
- 10:16They also worship Orion.
- 10:20In the ancient Mayan city of Uttalan in
- 10:23Guatemala, the major temples were oriented to the
- 10:27stars of Orion.
- 10:28A researcher named Fernandez was able to prove
- 10:31that all the city's main temples were aligned
- 10:34with the point where Orion stars were set
- 10:38in the horizon.
- 10:39But it does not stop there.
- 10:42Hancock took us to the Mount Will of
- 10:44Alabama in the United States.
- 10:46Mount Will is a large ceremonial center from
- 10:52the so-called Mississippian culture, built by Native
- 10:57Americans long before the Europeans arrived.
- 11:00And everywhere at this site you will find
- 11:02recurring symbols, the hand and the eye motif.
- 11:07Hancock reads this as an informational sign at
- 11:11Mount Will that stories passed down among various
- 11:15tribes tell that the dead enter the afterlife
- 11:19through an opening marked by the great warriors'
- 11:23hands in the sky.
- 11:25One account described that hand as the constellation
- 11:28as we know as Orion's belt in the
- 11:31wrist, its fingers pointing downward.
- 11:34A faint cluster of stars in the center
- 11:37of the palm is the portal to the
- 11:40path of the soul or the path to
- 11:42the land of the dead.
- 11:44This is exactly the same concept as in
- 11:47Egypt.
- 11:49And just as in Egypt, the soul has
- 11:51to make a leap to get through the
- 11:55portal.
- 11:56George Langford, a recognized authority in Native American
- 12:01folklore, notes that the portal in the hand
- 12:04must be entered by a leap in the
- 12:07optimum time, precisely the leap of the soul
- 12:10up to Orion that we see in Egypt.
- 12:16And then there is the fearsome figure that
- 12:18the archaeologist calls the brain smasher.
- 12:21In Mount Will tradition, it's a female figure
- 12:24whose task is to crush the brain of
- 12:27the unworthy souls attempting to complete the journey.
- 12:31She destroys them permanently.
- 12:34In the judgment scene in the Book of
- 12:38the Death, a being that devours the condemned.
- 12:43And Hancock has even found a vignette from
- 12:46an ancient Egyptian tomb showing that the goddess
- 12:50who made a man chop opens his own
- 12:54skull, his own brain skull.
- 12:57The accompanying text says she lives from the
- 13:00blood of the damned.
- 13:02The pattern is so consistent that Hancock concludes
- 13:06that there must have been a global religious
- 13:08system focused on the soul's journey after death,
- 13:13on judgment, on rebirth, and on becoming one
- 13:17with the stars.
- 13:18The system does not originate in Egypt or
- 13:20in New Mexico.
- 13:21It was inherited from a third party, a
- 13:23lost civilization whose knowledge was spread across the
- 13:27entire world.
- 13:31If an advanced civilization existed for more than
- 13:3412,000 years ago, then the natural question,
- 13:37what happens to it?
- 13:39Why haven't we found its cities, its roads,
- 13:43its everyday objects?
- 13:45Why are the traces so hard to see?
- 13:47The answer Hancock says is that it is
- 13:50a catastrophe of unprecedented scale.
- 13:56And here he draws on the work of
- 13:58a group of scientists who call themselves the
- 14:01Comet Research Group.
- 14:03This is a group of more than 60
- 14:06geologists, physicians, marine biologists, and other specialists who
- 14:12for years has been published in peer-reviewed
- 14:16journals like Nature, Proceedings of the Natural Academy
- 14:19of Science, and the Journal of Geology.
- 14:22This is not pseudoscience.
- 14:24These are mainstream researchers who have reached a
- 14:29startling conclusion.
- 14:32Around 4,800 years ago, they argued that
- 14:36Earth was struck by multiple fragments of a
- 14:38large disintegrating comet.
- 14:41Some of these fragments were up to 2
- 14:43kilometers in diameter.
- 14:45They hit it at speeds of tens of
- 14:49thousands of miles per hour, and they hit
- 14:53especially the North American ice cap and the
- 14:56Greenland science cap.
- 14:57The evidence is found in a thin layer
- 15:00of sediment that exists all over the planet.
- 15:03It's called the Younger Dryas Boundary Layer.
- 15:06This layer is filled with materials that can
- 15:09only be formed by a massive cosmic impact.
- 15:12We're talking about nanodiamonds, iridium, platinum, carbon, melt
- 15:18glass, etc.
- 15:19These are exactly the same impact practices that
- 15:23convinced the world of an asteroid killing the
- 15:25dinosaur 65 million years ago.
- 15:28Back then, the researchers Lewis and Walter Albers
- 15:33were ridiculed for years until the six o
- 15:39'clock crater was found in Mexico.
- 15:42Only then did the science apologize.
- 15:46The comet research group is in the same
- 15:48situation now.
- 15:50The effect of these impacts were catastrophic.
- 15:53The North American ice cap, which was more
- 15:56than a kilometer thick, melted suddenly and wildly.
- 16:00The melt water created the massive floods that
- 16:03forms what is now called the scrap lands
- 16:06in the northwestern United States.
- 16:11Hancock described it traveling through this area with
- 16:14the geologist Randall Carlson.
- 16:18They have seen dry waterfalls, you know, dry
- 16:21falls that is 10 times larger than the
- 16:25Niagara Falls.
- 16:27They have seen enormous granite boulders that was
- 16:31the size of a building that has been
- 16:32carried hundreds of miles on icebergs during the
- 16:37floods.
- 16:38They have seen current ripples of the Carmel's
- 16:42Prairie waves in the landscape that are 30
- 16:45to 50 feet high and perhaps 300 feet
- 16:48long created by retreating flood waters.
- 16:5573% of the North American megafauna, mastodons,
- 17:01saber-toothed tigers, solid sloths, woolly rhinos were
- 17:05extinct.
- 17:07This was a global extension event and it
- 17:10was not just in America.
- 17:14Hancock mentioned that findings from Belgium, from Syria,
- 17:18from Chile, everywhere you find the same black
- 17:22layer filled with evidence of extreme heat and
- 17:25cosmic impact.
- 17:27The climate collapsed.
- 17:28The warming that has been underway since the
- 17:32last ice age stopped abruptly.
- 17:34The earth fell back into a 1,200
- 17:36year deep freeze which geologists call the Yonker
- 17:41Dries.
- 17:42And then 11,600 years ago something else
- 17:45happened.
- 17:46The temperature rose dramatically, sea levels rose violently,
- 17:50which is today called meltwater pools 1b, another
- 17:55catastrophe.
- 17:57For Hancock this is the story, this is
- 18:00the historical backdrop for the story of the
- 18:03lost civilization.
- 18:05If advanced societies existed in the ice age
- 18:08with coastal cities, trade routes, agriculture and so
- 18:13on, they would have been crushed when this
- 18:18cascade.
- 18:20Coastal cities would have been flooded, farmland would
- 18:23have been destroyed by tsunamis and wildfires, only
- 18:27a few people would have survived.
- 18:30And that brings us to the next part
- 18:33of Hancock's argument, what happened to the survivors?
- 18:37All over the world we find myths about
- 18:39civilizing heroes that arrived after a great flood.
- 18:44In Egypt it is Osiris and the seven
- 18:47sages.
- 18:48In Mexico it's Chrysalis, the feathered serpent.
- 18:57In the Andes it's Viracocacha, the bearded figure
- 19:02who walks on water.
- 19:03In Mesopotamia it's Zoanth, which is the fish
- 19:07god who rises from the water to teach
- 19:10humanity writing, astronomy and architecture.
- 19:15These figures are described as bearded men and
- 19:19Hancock shows the image of Olmec heads from
- 19:23Mexico with beards, something that is not typical
- 19:26for Native Americans.
- 19:28They are described as bringers of civilizations, fundamentations
- 19:33like astronomy, agriculture, writing, laws, megalithic construction and
- 19:40so on.
- 19:40They arrived in a dark time after a
- 19:43catastrophe.
- 19:44They are not the originators of the civilization,
- 19:47they are the restorers of civilizations.
- 19:51Hancock's crucial archaeologists' evidence for this restoration are
- 19:56found in Turkey on a plateau near the
- 19:59Syrian border.
- 20:01It's called Glubekli Tepei and that has changed
- 20:04everything.
- 20:05Glubekli Tepei is an enormous megalithic complex with
- 20:09T-shaped stone pillars weighing up to 20
- 20:13tons.
- 20:14The pillars are caved with images of wild
- 20:17animals like snakes, foxes, boars, birds, scorpions, etc.
- 20:23Archaeologists from the German Archaeologist Institute have stated
- 20:27it to 11,600 years ago.
- 20:30This is precisely the end of the Younger
- 20:32Trials.
- 20:33This is precisely the date that Plato gives
- 20:36for the destruction of Atlantis.
- 20:38This is precisely the date of the meltwater
- 20:41pulse 1b raised the sea levels dramatically.
- 20:46But what marks Glubekli Tepei so revolutionary is
- 20:53that it is who built it.
- 20:55Before this discovery, archaeologists told us that agriculture
- 20:59came first.
- 21:01Only when you have a surplus of farming
- 21:05output, you could free up people to become
- 21:09specialists, architects, stonemasons, priests, etc.
- 21:13And then you would build large monuments.
- 21:17But at Glubekli Tepei, there was no agriculture.
- 21:23When they started, it was hunter-gatherers who
- 21:26built this enormous complex.
- 21:28And after a thousand years, all of those
- 21:31hunter-gatherers have become farmers.
- 21:34This model turns upside down.
- 21:39Hancock argues that Glubekli Tepei is the evidence
- 21:42of civilization mission.
- 21:45Survivors of the lost civilization have come to
- 21:48the area.
- 21:48They mobilize the local population with a large
- 21:51secret building project.
- 21:53The project requires organization, planning, leadership, etc.
- 21:58It requires people to work together across generations.
- 22:01And in the process, they taught the local
- 22:03hunter-gatherers different techniques like agriculture, animal husbandry,
- 22:12advanced stonemasonry, and astronomy.
- 22:16This is not a chance invasion.
- 22:18This is technological transfer.
- 22:23Hancock empathized that Glubekli Tepei was not alone.
- 22:27Karen Tepei is another complex in the same
- 22:29region.
- 22:30It is just beginning in the excavation.
- 22:34There they have found a sanctuary carved directly
- 22:38out of bedrock with pillars that is caught
- 22:41from the living rock.
- 22:44It is a system that spreads across the
- 22:47southeastern Turkey.
- 22:49And Hancock sees the same T-shaped pillars,
- 22:53the same animal carving, the same man bags,
- 22:57small bags.
- 22:59Those are carried by the Mesopotamians, reappearing thousands
- 23:05of miles away in Peru and Malta on
- 23:07the East Island.
- 23:08For him, this is a fingerprint of tracing
- 23:11pointing to a common origin.
- 23:18You would think that the Amazon rainforest is
- 23:21one of the last places you will expect
- 23:23to find traces of an ancient civilization.
- 23:26It is one of the most inaccessible and
- 23:29hostile environments on the Earth.
- 23:31But Hancock takes us out into the jungle
- 23:34where the mysteries pile up.
- 23:36First, there is a genetic mystery.
- 23:39In 2018, two independent research teams, one led
- 23:43by Cosimo Posch and David Reich, the other
- 23:48by Eske Willersloh, published studies in the journals
- 23:54called Cell and Science.
- 23:56They have found a strong genetic signal in
- 24:01certain isolated Amazonian tribes.
- 24:05There's Suri, the Katerinian, and the Savant that
- 24:11links them to the Papuvans and the Austrian
- 24:15aboriginals.
- 24:16This signal is not found anywhere in North
- 24:19America population.
- 24:21It is not found in Siberia where, according
- 24:24to the standard model, all Native Americans are
- 24:26supposed to have come from.
- 24:29So how did this signal get to Amazon?
- 24:34Hancock quotes Eske Willersloh, which is one of
- 24:38the world's leading geneticists.
- 24:42Willersloh says that, based purely on the genetic
- 24:45data, the most pernicious explanation is that somebody
- 24:54is carrying this signal to the Americans, not
- 24:58through the Bering Strait, but by crossing the
- 25:02ocean directly into South America.
- 25:05Yet, however, it does not make practical sense.
- 25:11Hancock asks why not.
- 25:14Because archaeologists did not believe that people for
- 25:17perhaps 10 or 20,000 years ago were
- 25:21capable of such a long ocean voyage.
- 25:24But Hancock points to ancient maps, like the
- 25:27Piri Reis map, that shows coastlines that existed
- 25:31only during the Ice Age, where the sea
- 25:34level was 400 feet lower.
- 25:38Some of the mapped coastlines.
- 25:43So the question is, who?
- 25:47Second, there is Ayahuasca.
- 25:50Hancock describes the incredible science behind this sacred
- 25:54brew.
- 25:56Ayahuasca consists of two plants.
- 25:59One, Chacruna, contains DMT, which is one of
- 26:04the most powerful psychedelics known to science.
- 26:08But DMT is not normally orally active.
- 26:13It is destroyed by the enzyme that, in
- 26:15our guts, is called monamine oxidase.
- 26:21The second plant, the Ayahuasca wine, contains precisely
- 26:26the substance that inherits this enzyme.
- 26:29The monamine oxidase inhibitor.
- 26:33So when the two plants are cooked together,
- 26:36the DMT becomes orally active.
- 26:39Hancock points out that you could not accidentally
- 26:44find these two plants in a jungle with
- 26:47more than 150 plant specimens that together creates
- 26:53this chemical key.
- 26:55The evidence of systematic experimentation, of scientific thinking,
- 27:03it is no different from inventing cura.
- 27:06The muscle relaxing poison that the Amazonian people
- 27:10also produced by combining several plants and boiling
- 27:14them for 72 hours while avoiding them deadly
- 27:20fumes.
- 27:21These are not primitive people.
- 27:23These are advanced chemists.
- 27:27Hancock mentioned that the evidence of the Ayahuasca
- 27:29has been found going back more than 4
- 27:32,000 years in the Amazon.
- 27:34He himself is convinced that it goes much
- 27:38further back.
- 27:39Third, there are the Gyrglyphs.
- 27:42The recent clearings of the rainforest, which is
- 27:45a tragedy of itself, has revealed that something
- 27:50is not expected.
- 27:52Enormous earthworks, geometric patterns in the forms of
- 27:56squares, circles, octagons, and U-shaped structures stretching
- 28:00over large distances.
- 28:04Some of these structures are aligned to true
- 28:06north.
- 28:07One of them, Cerino-Casaliens, is exactly at
- 28:12the same footprints as the Great Pyramids of
- 28:15Giza, 230 meters on each side, precisely oriented
- 28:19north.
- 28:21Hancock sees these Gyrglyphs as a part of
- 28:23the same cosmological system that we saw in
- 28:27Egypt and in the Mount Will.
- 28:29They represent the underworld and he connects them
- 28:33to the shamanic journeys where the Ayahuasca is
- 28:37used to ascend the Milky Way.
- 28:40The Amazon is not a pristine wilderness.
- 28:44It was a place where the ancient knowledge
- 28:47were practiced, cultivated, and passed down for thousands
- 28:50of years.
- 28:55Hancock also spends considerable time criticizing the archaeologist
- 29:01establishment's reluctance to change its models.
- 29:05He tells the stories of Jacques Sigmars, a
- 29:08Canadian archaeologist that in the 1970s, 1980s, found
- 29:15evidence of human presence at bluefish caves in
- 29:18the Yukon dating 24,000 years back.
- 29:25At the time, the dominant theory was clues
- 29:27first, that the first people in the Americas
- 29:32were the clue's culture, appearing in around 13
- 29:36,400 years ago.
- 29:40Sigmars was ridiculed.
- 29:41His research funding was withdrawn.
- 29:44He was called a pseudoscientist.
- 29:46His career was destroyed.
- 29:50In 2017, a team of researchers led by
- 29:54a PhD student published a newly study of
- 29:58the bluefish cave.
- 30:00They confirmed that humans were there 24,000
- 30:05years ago.
- 30:06Sigmars was vindicated, but as Hancock points out,
- 30:10it took nearly 40 years and this is
- 30:13not an isolated incident.
- 30:16He mentioned a Goodyear who found evidence of
- 30:20humans in North America from 50,000 years
- 30:23ago at a site called Tupper and South
- 30:26Carolina.
- 30:28He mentioned Tom Demeer, who at the Cerruti
- 30:34Mastodon site at California has found evidence of
- 30:38human activity from 130,000 years ago.
- 30:42Bones broken to extract marrow, stone used as
- 30:46tools.
- 30:46That does not mean that there was an
- 30:49advanced civilization 130,000 years ago.
- 30:51It meant that there were humans, perhaps Homo
- 30:54erectus or an early form of Homo sapiens
- 30:58in America 130,000 years ago, which again
- 31:03challenged the established timeline.
- 31:06Hancock points out that the archaeology does not
- 31:09behave like a science.
- 31:12A science changes its theories when new evidence
- 31:15emerges.
- 31:17Archaeology, as he says, behaves like a religion.
- 31:20It relies on authority rather than evidence.
- 31:23It protects its doma and it persecutes dissidents.
- 31:28He quotes that the Native American author Wayne
- 31:32Deloria Jr. says that the problem is in
- 31:35getting advocates of orthodoxy to admit that there
- 31:39is a problem and that the solution that
- 31:42they have suggested is not really convincing.
- 31:51So what does Hancock want us to take
- 31:53away from his journey?
- 31:55Why does it matter today to believe in
- 31:58a lost civilization from the Ice Age?
- 32:00For Hancock, it's not about the past, it's
- 32:03about the present and the future.
- 32:05His fundamental claim is that we suffer from
- 32:08collective amnesia.
- 32:10We have forgotten who we are, where we
- 32:14came from, and what force shapes us.
- 32:17And this amnesia makes us vulnerable.
- 32:20First, we have forgotten that civilization can fall.
- 32:23We live in a culture believing in endless
- 32:26progress.
- 32:27We believe that we are the goal of
- 32:30the history, the inheritance of culmination of evolution.
- 32:34But if an advanced civilization existed 12,000
- 32:37years ago and was destroyed in a single
- 32:39day, then our own civilization is now immortal.
- 32:44That is a humbling recognition that our society
- 32:47refuses to make.
- 32:49Second, we have forgotten that there are other
- 32:53states of consciousness than the one we live
- 32:56in.
- 32:58Hancock calls this our normal state, the attentive,
- 33:02problem-solving consciousness.
- 33:04It's good for trade, for war, technology, and
- 33:06consumption.
- 33:08But it's also brought us to the brink
- 33:09of an environment collapse, to a brink of
- 33:12nuclear war and global problems.
- 33:16The ancient cultures that he studies has access
- 33:20to the other states of consciousness through plants
- 33:24like ayahuasca.
- 33:26They used the state to prepare for death,
- 33:29to confront their own life, to gain vision,
- 33:32wisdom, and healing.
- 33:34Why are these plants criminalized today?
- 33:38Hancock argues that it is because they challenge
- 33:43the established order.
- 33:44A person who has a deep ayahuasca experience
- 33:47begins to ask the big questions.
- 33:50What are the meaning of life?
- 33:52How do I treat other people?
- 33:55What is my responsibility to the planet?
- 33:58These are dangerous questions for a society built
- 34:00on consumption, on submission, and fear.
- 34:04Psychedelics, Hancock says, threatens the structure, the dark
- 34:09forces that wish to keep humanity in ignorance
- 34:13and control.
- 34:18And then there is the threat in the
- 34:21sky.
- 34:21The comet that struck the Earth 12,800
- 34:28years ago is not necessarily a one-time
- 34:30event.
- 34:31The fragment object that caused the Young Earth
- 34:33Rise is still there.
- 34:35It lies in the Taurid-Meteor stream through
- 34:39which the Earth passes every year.
- 34:41Scientists like Bill Napier and Victor Klube have
- 34:45warned for decades that within this stream there
- 34:50are large, blue, dark objects several kilometers in
- 34:55diameter that has not yet been discovered.
- 34:59NASA has only identified less than one percent
- 35:02of the potential dangerous asteroids.
- 35:10But Hancock is not a doomsday prophet.
- 35:13We have the technology to detect and deflect
- 35:16a new catastrophe.
- 35:18It simply requires that we choose to spend
- 35:21resources rather than on war and destruction.
- 35:25It requires that we take the responsibility.
- 35:27It requires we wake up.
- 35:30So Hancock often ends his lectures with a
- 35:34passage from the heretic text written more than
- 35:372,000 years ago.
- 35:38It speaks of a time when Egypt is
- 35:41forsaken, when the gods have returned to heaven,
- 35:45and when men no longer find the universe
- 35:48worthy of reverent wonder.
- 35:51But it also speaks of rebirth, a time
- 35:55when God looks up and what happens and
- 35:59stops the disorder.
- 36:01He cleansed the world of evil with water
- 36:04and fire and then the cosmos again became
- 36:07worthy of worship.
- 36:10Perhaps that is the rebirth Hancock sees taking
- 36:14shape in our time.
- 36:16Perhaps we are virgin from our amnesia.
- 36:20Perhaps we are ready to listen to the
- 36:22history as it is really lived in all
- 36:25of its complexity, its catastrophes, its lost wisdom,
- 36:29and its great overwhelming wonders.
- 36:37If there is one thing I hope you
- 36:38take away from this podcast, that is this,
- 36:41the questions are more important than the answers.
- 36:45And are we really the first civilization on
- 36:47the earth?
- 36:48What happened 12,800 years ago?
- 36:52Why do we find the same myth all
- 36:55over the globe?
- 36:56Why is our history so full of gaps
- 36:58and contradictions?
- 37:00These are the questions we all can ask,
- 37:02and these are the questions we all have
- 37:04the right to investigate.
- 37:08Thank you for listening.