The Joe Rogan Experience - #2215 - Graham Hancock

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Graham Hancock, formerly a foreign correspondent for "The Economist," has been an international bestselling author for more than 30 years with a series of books, notably "Fingerprints of the Gods," "Magicians of the Gods" and "America Before," which investigate the controversial possibility of a lost civilization of the Ice Age destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. Graham is the presenter of the hit Netflix documentary series "Ancient Apocalypse." Look for the second season beginning on October 16. https://grahamhancock.com https://www.youtube.com/GrahamHancockDotCom https://x.com/Graham__Hancock Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. 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. 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 Yeah, that was the last time we were here it was I Appreciate that he came on and I thought it was gonna be an interesting discussion, but it turned out he played fast and loose with the truth and and distorted quite a bit of information that

Were some key points that you had discussed one of them being the amount of shipwrecks. Yeah that were discovered He greatly inflated the amount of shipwrecks that have been discovered and then you released a video today Yeah, 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. About 6,000. The Dokos shipwreck. But there's nothing left of the ship and this is what's important that you know 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 and that these ships that are 6,000 years old, there's nothing left of the actual boat itself. 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. But there's a more central point than that, which really needed to be brought up by the archaeologists in this, which is that archaeology universally accepts that human beings were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago. And I put the evidence on this into the video. It's not even in dispute. The island of Cyprus, 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 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 14,000 to 12,500 years ago. It was settled, in other words, during the Ice Age. And these were large planned migrations. 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. 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. But not a single ship has survived to testify to that. Same with Australia. 50,000 years ago human beings got there and even at the lowest sea level

they would have had to cross about 90 kilometers of open water and in large numbers. And again, no ships have been found to testify to that, yet archaeologists accept that they got there by ship. So to say that we haven't found any ships from the Ice Age is not really evidence about anything. And if we're finding the oldest ships that we currently are aware of, which is as you said about 6,000 years ago, 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 gonna find anything? I think the odds are very, very low.

Now, if we have that evidence and that information when we were confronting Flynn, that would have been a very different conversation. Totally. But the arrogance in which he distributed that fake information, disturbing. It sucks when people just want to win and they don't want to get to the truth. It does. And the truth is very fascinating. Another thing that was very fascinating that he discussed, I didn't watch

your whole video, but it was about seeds. I asked the question, 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 it makes sense that it would help them prosper, help them be able to spread the seed if it broke off the plant easier. And so they can recognize that. And then when they start using large-scale agriculture, the seeds become more robust and stick to the plant because it makes sense that it would, if you're going to harvest all the plants and then take the seeds off of it, for the plant to prosper, you would

want the seeds to be more robust. So there's these changes. And I said, 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. That's not true either, no. It's not true. And the whole notion of the origins of agriculture, I think archaeologists got a great deal more work to do on that. Often I'm misrepresented as saying that survivors of my supposed lost civilization 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. And it's precisely during the Younger Dryas that we see that shift from undomesticated to domesticated crops in the archaeological record. 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. 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. I think we're looking at a few survivors who are taking refuge after a global cataclysm. You know, it's just very unfortunate when you have a debate and one person is an expert and they're not truthful. and get more from North America's number one sports book. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario.

Gambling problem, call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connexontario.ca. I think it's very bad for archeology. It is, because it reinforces all the things that you've been saying. It does. I mean, to be honest, I felt beaten up after that debate. But looking back in retrospect on the whole thing, I think it actually makes the point

that we have a very arrogant, very controlling discipline in archaeology which has established a narrative about the past, which will fight tooth and nail to maintain that narrative, including using dirty tricks. 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, archaeologists should understand why people are asking those questions. People are asking those questions because they're not satisfied with what archaeology is offering.

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. I'm 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. 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, and that's particularly to do with astronomical alignments, with traditions that are shared all around the world. It's to do with things that archaeologists by and large don't study.

Well it's also, one of the things that's fascinating is just even with conventional archaeology the dates to keep getting pushed further and further back. Further and further back. And this is one of the things, the White Sands New Mexico stuff that you have on episode one. That's right. Which is by the way, White Sands. Have you been there? No, I haven't. What an incredible, ethereal,

otherworldly place. And Alamogordo is sitting right in the middle of that. This is where they did the nuclear tests and the trinitite, which was created there. And there's gypsum sand, it's not normal, it's just the most amazing, amazing place. And there, yes, they found human footprints dated back more than 23,000 years. What do they think that environment was like 22,000 years ago? Well, it would still have been like that. It would have been gypsum dunes then in that place. Gypsum dunes.

They wouldn't have left the footprints. I'm not exactly sure why the gypsum is there, but there it is. Is that the same stuff they use for gypsum board for construction? I reckon so, yeah. 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. 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. 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. 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. Wow. There's mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints

and then human footprints overlaying those. 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. Mammoths and mastodons went extinct during the younger drys, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings. 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. That's there in the record as well. 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. 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. It's accepted that human beings came here

long before 13,000 years ago. 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. 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. But we don't know yet how long before that they were here. This is part of the problem. I often remember a site called the Saruti Mastodon site

in San Diego. I went to see, the exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Demere. And they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there. 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. The thing is, it's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old. And this opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they

were in Europe. And that becomes... That's crazy. That's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities which have been neglected. I think that the 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. And they tend not to look to that.

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? Yes. Absolutely. How do they know where to go? It was found by accident. The first footprints were found completely by accident.

They were found by indigenous local people who alerted the National Park Service to them. And we have a number of indigenous spokespeople who speak to the White Sands mystery and how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago. The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting

and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind will reveal them again. And they're fragile, they can be easily destroyed and wiped off and in a way it's a miracle that they've survived. But to see the stride of a mammoth, you see how far apart those huge foot pads are 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. 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? Almost certainly and and the way the evidence is looking it's most likely that South America was settled first before North America was settled and that raises all kinds of questions 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 New Guinea and Australia and the peoples of certain tribes in South America and that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America but also to do with archaeological sites like Monte Verde. I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillehay the last time we were on when Flint was here and Tom Dillehay 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.

When he put that idea forward, he was eviscerated by his colleagues in archeology. It took them a decade to come around to accepting that actually he was right. 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 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 it would be nicer if archaeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to new and different ideas.

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, people reject that. I've come to the point, and I'm going to say something, some strong words here. Get crazy, get crazy, Grandmaster. I've come to the point where I believe that some archaeologists, not all of them, most actually this problem is with a small number of archaeologists, but they're extremely vocal. I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power. Archaeologists have a power, they are the official spokespeople

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, 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. 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. 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. 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. Well, you don't get burned at the stake today, but you can get lynched by a mob of archaeologists. Well, it's also the same thing that we saw during COVID. With medical experts, it disagreed with the narrative. It's the same thing. It is absolutely the same thing. 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, you see the same patterns. It's just power. It's just power in people that have their identity wrapped up in them being the ones that have access to the actual information. They don't want it to be distributed by some guy on Netflix. That's right. Even though you've been probably studying it more than them, certainly studying particular aspects of it.

That's the other thing I noticed, which was the sneering attitude towards me. They talk about my wife, Sontha, 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. But the working trips that we do are very intense Your wife's an amazing photographer like who cares if she takes tourist photos photos are incredible They're of real sites that are very pertinent and very interesting. That's right the whole Criticizing amazing photographs is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard Why would you criticize amazing photographs of ruins that are perplexing? Yeah, I know. How could you? How could you find even an area where you want people

to agree with you? It's part of this desperate search to say, we archaeologists know everything. And we must discredit in any way we can anybody who has anything opposite to say. It's an unfortunate human characteristic. It happens in everything. You see it in martial arts.

You see it in science. you see it in martial arts. You see it in science You see it in everything this reliance on experts. I get it I would like the pilot of my plane to be an expert I don't want him to be an amateur Yeah, but I don't think that archaeologists and aircraft pilots are can be compared in that sense Archaeology is a much more interpretive discipline. An aircraft pilot is not really interpreting situations that much. He knows what to do in such situations. Archaeologists are interpreting the past and yet they seem to get very upset by other interpretations

of the past that are offered that 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. We need to liberate our own consciousness and freely think about things and make our own decisions about things and resist, resist absolutely being told what to think. 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. And they like to hold that. And 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. And if you're doing that with something like mathematics and someone's a mathematical expert math is a very Specific and precise science. Yeah, it's very specific Yeah, archaeology is like who fucking knows what's out there because you haven't searched everything

No, it's not possible to and as we develop more These these 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, see them through trees, see them through that, we're going to find more. And obviously in Brazil they have done, in the Amazon they have done that. Well, that was part of our adventure with season two of Ancient Apocalypse was working with a really professional team in Brazil led by an archaeologist, Marti Parssonin from the University of Helsinki and a geographer from Brazil, Alceu Ranze.

Alceu 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 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 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 you get this suddenly the Massive scope and extent of these things and it's same with the geoglyphs in the in the Amazon and and here's the thing the ones we know about

Up till now have luck we largely know about them because of these tragic clearances of the Amazon rainforest, which is maybe a short-term economic game, but is long-term really not a very good idea. 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. 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, 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 and within a matter of hours he's found multiple more of these of these structures. Several that are deep in the rainforest. Covered completely. Covered completely 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 and this

raises the question how much more is there in the Amazon to find, especially which even the archaeologists who are most reluctant are now willing to accept that the Amazon had a huge population before the Spanish conquest. Trevor Burrus So wild. That's such a shift. Richard Larkin Millions, cities, 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 lived in harmony with that.

That's an interesting thing too. 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. Definitely. They've determined that because of the preponderance of trees that serve human needs. They call them hyperdominant and things like Brazil nut trees, 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 clear that this is the result of a long-term human project to make this jungle serve human needs.

What was the other one? The ice cream bean? What was that? Ice cream bean and I'm forgetting all of the details, but there's a bunch of... Food plants. ...of food plants which are hyper-dominant in the Amazon rainforest. 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.

And there's the other thing that you've discussed in depth, the terra-praeta. 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. It's a mystery. Again, it was a great privilege to have the opportunity to stand in a pit of terra preta that is being excavated to get down 15 feet into that. Can they recreate it once they get it? It appears that modern, not modern, but indigenous communities in the Amazon are still doing

this. They're still doing it, mixing all kind of refuse and waste together and enriching the soil with it. So it's not stopped. Terra Prata is still being made, but most of it is very old. And the oldest that they found so far is about 8,000 years old. So it's just large scale regenerative agriculture using some old lost method. Yeah, that's right. That's right. See, a rainforest, even when 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 preta has allowed people to do. 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. It's so interesting, especially when you consider the stories like the lost city of Z, you know,

which they turned into an interesting film. But the book details these records of these incredible cities that these people had visited a long time ago. And then when they tried to go back, there was nothing. Because everybody had died off because of European diseases probably. That's exactly what happened. Yeah. But those cities were just consumed by the jungle. Yeah. And much like Detroit, if you go to Detroit now you could see there's a like 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. And the houses are almost gone

in some ways. If you went back 200 years ago, there'd probably be nothing left of them. 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. 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 previous episode. The expedition of Gaspar de Carvajal and his chronicler Francisco de Orellana, 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.

And they traveled 4,000 miles across South America and ended up in, they started on the Pacific side, and ended up in the Atlantic Ocean. And that's in the 1550s, 1560s. And they report seeing enormous thriving prosperous cities highly civilized with advanced arts and crafts and they were not believed because a hundred years later when other Spaniards made that voyage and went into the Amazon they couldn't find the cities 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 Spanish. The Spanish 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. It's so wild that that happens. It's so crazy when most people probably aren't even aware. 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. Absolutely. Which is just unbelievable to think about. Millions of people just wiped out over the course of a few decades or a

hundred years by diseases. Yeah it's an early example of a biological weapon. Yeah right. And to some extent it was used deliberately as a biological weapon, like those smallpox-infected blankets. Is that true, the smallpox-infected blankets? I've heard that that was a rumor. It may well be a rumor, but from what I've looked at from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, there was a realization that we can kill these people with smallpox and it was spread. And we have some immunity to it that they don't have. Right, because we had it forever in Europe. It's just so terrible when you read Khabiza

Devaka's story about visiting the Maya civilization and you realize like that was you guys fucking killed everybody. Yeah, the disease the diseases did I mean the battles did kill some people sure but but not on the order of the diseases Mexico Mexico City fell to the Spaniards Primarily because of disease and secondarily because the Aztecs weren't popular with their neighbors So it really wasn't just Cortes and 400 Spaniards. It was Cortes and 400 Spaniards plus smallpox, plus the Tlaxcalans who the Aztecs had used as a sort of farm for human sacrifices for a hundred

years. And the Tlaxcalans looked at Cortes and they said, we can use this guy. And so they joined him. He had tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan warriors. Otherwise, he would not have had that victory. 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 they can. No. Nobody can explain the Olmecs. Explain that. Explain those features and those faces. It's a very curious thing. And again, the moment we start talking about people's facial features, then they jump in with you being a racist, you being a white supremacist or whatever. Although they all make heads.

Don't say white supremacism. Not at all. How would that be racist if these were the most advanced seafaring people alive 6,000 years ago? Again, the racism angle is just being used to shut it down. This is something that we, particularly in the climate in the world today. Well, Flint does that a lot. He does a lot. I saw him do that to Jimmy Corsetti online over the uses of parentheses or brackets. Did you see that? I did. That's somehow another that's a code

for Jews. Like I thought it I thought what he was doing was avoiding there's there's certain algorithms that pick up on some particular words that you use. Like you ever see that people they they don't like if they want their posts to be more viral, they don't write the word shooter. They write S-H, and then they put like two asterisks and then T-E-R-S. I've noticed people doing that. Yes. 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. So that apparently was all he was trying to do, was adding brackets to something to enhance the algorithm. To enhance the algorithm. But it's just like, accusing someone of racism, it should be very clear what they're saying there should be it shouldn't be you have decided through some sneaky code to decide that this person's racist oh I that this code means this is commonly used code like

yeah from what I understand that those use of brackets is just to trick the algorithm yeah yeah just like those the two asterix for shooter I think it's I think it's very unfortunate that in serious and interesting discussions about the past that this issue of race immediately gets dumped into it. 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. It's also the dumbest suggestion because the most sophisticated ancient civilization that's baffling people to this day is in Africa.

Yeah. So shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. It doesn't make any sense. 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. According to their hieroglyphs, they were there 30,000 plus years ago.

But at the very least, those were people in Africa. Okay, so all the racism shit should be out the window because no one's saying that was anybody else. No, that was an African civilization. They literally have images of themselves. We know what they look, you know, these drawings of what they looked like, we have statues of what they looked like. It was an African civilization, they were the most advanced people perhaps ever. I'm leaning towards ever.

I'm leaning towards ever too, because look, can we think of any other civilization that has survived for 3,000 years? Right, which is what... Which you can go visit right now. That you can go visit right now. Taurosite. But ancient Egypt as a culture survived for 3,000 years. It survived the Greek occupation, it survived the previous Persian occupation. It was only the Romans that brought it low. The Roman occupation of Egypt was the beginning of the end. To put it into perspective, I always use this quote, I forget who came up with this, but

it's a perfect analogy. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the construction of the pyramids. Even if you use the conventional 2500 BC dating of the construction of the pyramids, which is also under debate. It's under debate. Even if that's true, even if it is 2500 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. How did they do it? How did they have such incredible sophistication in their construction methods? 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, 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 construction. They certainly were. And I think they had mastery of techniques that we don't know about. Right. And perhaps equipment. And perhaps equipment. The Great Pyramid remains to me an abiding mystery, which despite probably

a hundred or more visits to the Great Pyramid and being inside it and spending the night in it and exploring every passage in every chamber, including the so-called relieving chambers above the king's chamber, I still can't figure it out. I don't understand how it was possible to do this. 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. And that it was built in about 20 years. 23 years. Because if it's the tomb of Khufufu then it had to be built in 23 years because that was his reign He would start in theory building it at the beginning of his reign and and it's finished by the by the end of his reign That's 23 years and in the broader span if you look at the fourth dynasty pyramids

And even go back to the to the end of the third dynasty, 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. It stops. 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. 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. When you get inside, you do find wonderful chambers and you do 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. 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. I think it's a theory which deserves to be taken seriously along with other theories as to what it is. But one thing I know for sure is that the theory that it was just a tomb and

nothing else is bust. 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. He's a very precise guy. He's an engineer. He understands this kind of thing. And when he looks at particularly the... At Saqqara, you have this thing called the Serapium, which is an underground labyrinth, and it's got wide corridors through it, and then off each side are rooms. And in each room are these gigantic basalt boxes, which appear to have held the corpses of bulls. They're like sarcophagi for human beings, but they're on an enormous gigantic scale,

weighing hundreds of tons and cut out of the hardest possible rock, precisely engineered. Everything is exact. And it's that, amongst other things, that is attracting Chris's attention to the possibility of 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? And he's come to the solution that it was some kind of energy generator,

some kind of power plant. And using chemicals and creating hydrogen. Oddly enough, there's just a recently published archeological paper concerning the step pyramid at Saqqara, which is suggesting that they used hydraulics to lift the big stones up inside there. And that, you know, that begins to come close to the kind of technology in some ways that Chris is talking about. I think it's worth taking very seriously. I've always had great respect for Chris. I've traveled to Egypt with him, And I think he's done very important work contributing to this. And also, looking at the stone vases from

ancient Egypt, I remember the first time I was drawn to this mystery, which was- He gave us one of them. This is a 3D print of one. That's a 3D print of one of those vases. Yeah, this is a 3D print of an actual stone. That's a 3D print of one of those vases. This is a 3D print of an actual stone vase. And it might be not that exciting to people, like, oh, what's the big deal? The big deal is the precision in which this was constructed with handles on it. So it couldn't have been spun on a lathe, because it has these two handles that are also cut out of the stone. And everything is precise to within thousands of a human hair, which

is bananas. Yeah, it doesn't make sense given what we are taught was the level of technology of Egypt at that time. Now there is some dispute of where these came from. There is some dispute about the, what is, have these been made in a modern way and has someone tried to replace you know are we looking at fakes or right we're looking at hoaxes well perhaps in some cases we are but but certainly in others including those in the in the great museums in Cairo 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 transition, but they have thousands of these things. The thing is that even if this was modern technology, we don't know what they did. No. 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 and some of them with very thin necks and then a hollowed out inside Like how? How did you do that? Very thin necks and then this bulbous base to it. It's all perfect There's another piece which it's hard to describe, but it's got a it's got a series of three

Flanges that come across it's like a describe but it's got a series of three flanges that come across. It's like a wheel but 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. I wish I could call up a picture but I don't know. Do you know what it's called? I can't remember. Jamie's a wizard at finding things. I've written about it in Fingerprints of the Gods. I bet Jamie's already found it. Is that it? No. Yes, top left. That's the one.

That? When I first saw that in the Cairo Museum, it's cut from schist, you know, this thing is hard, and when I first saw that in the Caiira Museum, 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? That looks like a piece of an engine. It does, doesn't it? That looks like something I'd find on my Land Cruiser. Yeah. It looks like part of something else. We're finding a bit of something larger. Wow. 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 what it looks like. If you know like automobiles and parts, and you look at something like that, like oh yeah, that goes probably in there somewhere. Exactly, exactly. And what is its function if it isn't something else?

It's difficult to see what function it could have. How it could be. What is the conventional explanation of what this thing is? Some kind of offering bowl. Click on that, the disc that does that article. Oh okay. The Sabu disc from the ancient Egyptian artifact from the first dynasty 3000 to 2800 BC found in 1936 in north, how do you say that? Saqqara? Saqqara Necropolis in Mastaba? Mastaba S311. Those are sort of tombs which have got two levels. What an incredible piece. It is an incredible piece. I had never seen that before. There it is, First Dynasty. And of course, you can't actually date the object

itself. So they're dating it from context. What they're saying is that it was found in a First Dynasty context, but it may have been a legacy even then. It may have been an old object even then we just don't know that. But it's at least that old from the context. So it's at least 3,000 years old. 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 turn, ton. I don't know what that means. I don't know either, but I would have thought that if that was your project, you could do it without carving shift into that. Click on that thing.

What is the mysterious Egyptian disk? What it says it right there. That's it. Can we click on that? Can go full scale on that? So I can see what that looks like. Wow, that's wild. That is such a specific shape. Like if you're going to just use that to make

beer, that seems weird. And it's a lot of work to make beer. You could do it in other ways. That looks like some kind of a fan to me. It looks like something that would be on a belt. You know, like on some sort of an axle or something. Something's driving it, yeah. It looks like a fan. Yeah. It could be. It looks like those things underneath it, it looks like that's how you would funnel water or air through.

Yeah. 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. What is it made out of? Schist, which is a hard stone. That's crazy that that's made out of stone. Cut out of one piece of stone. How did you do that?

How are the measurements of that? Oh look, it's Giorgio. He says it's aliens. I'm just going to guess. This thing that's cut out of this incredibly hard stone, do they have any sort of an understanding or a guess of how someone would cut something like that out of stone? I've never seen a satisfactory guess. But those like Chris Dunn who are studying the technology of ancient Egypt 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, like we don't know how the 70 ton blocks were raised to become the roof of the king's chamber either 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 abusively arrogant experts who say there's no mystery here. 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?

I'm sure it is handmade. The question is how. 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. But it probably didn't have to

be precise because whatever it did, it probably just had a spin. It survived through at least 5,000 years. 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. It looks like it's welded in certain spots too, but how? How do they weld stone? What's apparently they carve that shape out of just one book? That's crazy. Now that one looks ultra precise

Yeah, it might have been remade off of the original maybe click on that. I would say that's a remake. Is it? Hmm That's not it's insane. That's even more insane because that looks so perfect Why does that look different than the other images well go back to that one where it's spinning around yeah look at it when it spins around it looks pretty precise yeah they do look like they've recreate did they only find one and they've recreated for museums or no there's there's 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. Yeah Well also you got to think if it is made of stone some of the edges have to be beat up just from being in The ground for thousands of years. Yeah, it's not the same. You sure it's not just a different lighting beat up like the right Does move the other one was smooth right? That almost that does look like a recreation doesn't it is I think Okay, whatever it is the thing is where you come to where you come to this there's there's thousands of objects that defy explanation What are those Jamie put that back up? What are those things? Do you know what those are? this first wheels

Four thousand Wheels 1500 BC basically And that's the weird one of the weird of things about Egypt right we don't think they had the wheel No, they definitely had the wheel whether they had the wheel in the old kingdom, right? That's another question, but certainly by by the new kingdom by the time of the Ramesses, they had wheels, they had chariots. Yeah, but I mean the people that built the pyramids. 2500 BC is not like when do they think the wheel was invented? Well, it's actually not clear to me when the wheel was invented. Let's see what they can do. I thought the conventional guess of when the invention of the wheel was was post the construction appearance. I believe that's the case

But the one of the things about wheel is you have to ask yourself in what? Circumstances in what places in what conditions are wheels useful? There are some conditions in which a wheel is not a useful thing in which is going to get bogged down in the sand Which is not going to be helpful so so helpful. So 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. You can slide anything on wet sand on a sled with enough people pulling it. Trevor Burrus How do you get it to the top of the king's

chamber? David Morgan How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber? That's the problem. Trevor Burrus How do you fit it perfectly? David Morgan Perfect king's chamber? How do you get it to the top of the king's chamber? That's the problem. How do you fit it perfectly? Perfectly. Perfectly. And, you know, 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 it's roofed with it.

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. More advanced in a different way. I think this is part of the problem where I've been perhaps misunderstood by Egyptologists when I talk about an advanced civilization. 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. It's going to be very different. It's going to have different

priorities, different ways of looking at things. 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. You know, this is an amazing achievement, amazing stability when you look at it. Our civilization, how old is it really? Can we trace it back to the Romans? Probably not. Maybe 500 years, the beginning of mechanization and so on and so forth in our civilization.

Nat. Pretty amazing. Stephen. Yeah. Nat. If you think about it. There's so many mysteries to it. For anybody to pretend that they have all the answers to something as perplexing as Egypt. It's nuts. I think this is an area where 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. We are brilliant at science. We can make the best possible machines. 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, what they produce.

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. 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?

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. And they were documenting this journey to the afterlife in hieroglyphs and it's like what were you documenting? How do you know? How did everyone agree on this particular myth or this story? Unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it. It's one of the things that we point out in season two 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. That idea is found all over the world. The path of souls is found all over the Americas. What do you think that they're trying to say? Well, I think first of all, it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea. 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. 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. 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 they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens. 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. This is something else

that we avoid in the world today is taking responsibility for our own lives. 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. You had to you had to celebrate the gift of life. You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given. 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 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 as it is at the end. Death is not the end. This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem. The death is not the end. We may think it is. Scientists may tell us it is. 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. That's not something that's been investigated or can be investigated. Consciousness itself is so confusing. Just consciousness. Just like what is it, why are we conscious, what is it

local or are we tuning into consciousness and when you die where's that go? Where's that energy go? Is that is a 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.? Those are perplexing questions. They're very perplexing questions which actually are of great significance to every one of us. Yeah, I mean, suppose death just is the end, then 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 pain that we may have caused, or for the joy that we may have caused. If death's the end, 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? And there are moral aspects to that question. There's these 42 assessors, they're called the negative assessors, who ask the soul of the deceased questions about what they did in life. And those are all moral questions. They bear some relationship actually to the Ten Commandments. 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. We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate at your choice. 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? Did you leave the world a better place or a worse place than when you came into it? 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. For the ancient Egyptians, that kind of behavior meant an introduction to Amit, the eater of the dead. and Ammit is displayed in the

judgment scene. He's a creature, part hyena, part lion, and he sits there, and certain souls do not go on. Their journey ends, and it ends because of the choices they made during life and because they never took responsibility for what they did. Wow. Well, it kind of makes sense, a natural selection of the souls. In a way. If there's natural selection of humans and natural selection of animals that allows them to prosper 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 keep this 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. The beautiful art that they made. 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, but they did other stuff. Yeah, but just the sophistication of the symmetry of the facial structure of the statues. Incredible. Beautiful things. Beautiful. Just bizarrely technologically advanced. Bizarrely.

Because to perform something like that you need incredible tools of measurement. Enormous statues that have faces that are absolutely perfectly symmetrical. How did you do that? How did you stand that up? The answer is we don't know. We don't know. There's so much that we don't know. And it's that attitude towards the past, which I think would be more helpful, is that we

have this mysterious background to we human beings. As you said earlier, anatomically modern humans, we think that they first appeared about 300,000 years ago. Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, 310,000 years ago. 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. 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. And we don't know about the Neanderthals and the Denisovans

who were also human beings. Certainly they were human, the same species as us, because they could interbreed with us. You can't breed with another species. So that takes the journey back even further. And that's one of the reasons why I have a problem with the notion that civilization just emerges 6,000 years ago, 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. I suspect we were, but it's not made the record. Well, it seems that what they were dealing with in terms of the resources in the Nile Valley was unbelievably bountiful.

It was bountiful. And that's probably one of the reasons, before the climate shifted and changed and it became a lot of desert, before that it was probably incredibly bountiful and that allowed them to stay there for a long period of time and not have to worry about food. 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. This vast area, which frankly has not been studied properly by archaeology at all, hardly a fraction of it has been studied properly by archaeology at all. Hardly a fraction of it has been studied.

This vast area, I'm often accused of creating what they call a God of the gaps argument. 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. The submerged continental shelves were prime real estate during the Ice Age.

That was the place to be, just as it is today, to be near coastlines. The Amazon rainforest was a bountiful place, and the Sahara Desert was green and rich for thousands of years during the Ice Age with lakes, with rivers. It was the kind of place where a civilization might well have emerged. They find whale bones there. Whales. So anybody who doesn't think there's a mystery in the Sahara Desert and anybody who really tries to dismiss's a mystery in the Sahara Desert, and anybody who really

tries to dismiss the notion that most of it hasn't been really excavated, but it really hasn't been. No, it hasn't. It's too vast. It's too vast and it's too expensive to excavate there. And the excavation, like, you would have to, you're dealing with a place where how many people even live there? Nobody knows because it's not been investigated properly. It's a desert

And and it's had relatively little attention. We do know there's some amazing Rock art from the upper Paleolithic in in the tassili in Algeria in in the Sahara But not enough has been done. This is this 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. 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. I'm not insisting, I'm not demanding that people believe me. I just want to inject this idea into the discussion so that it can be considered. When taken out of context was a little clip where you asked me during the debate, is there any evidence for your lost civilization in what they've found. And I said, in what they've found, no. And then I went on to say, 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. 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. 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. However, it's the astronomy, it's the astronomical alignment, it's the precision, it's the precision of the Great Pyramid. It's the myths of a global flood all around the world.

It's a universal story of a massive cataclysm with a few survivors who bring their knowledge to others. This is one of the reasons why I think the Atlantis story, which Flint-Dibble is so opposed to, deserves to be taken seriously, 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, 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. That doesn't satisfy

me at all. 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. What is your take on the Rishat structure? Am I saying it right? Rishat structure? Rishat structure. Mauritania.

I would not like to say one way or the other because I've not been there. I've not had boots on the ground there. I've not been able to look at it. Yes, it's very intriguing. Very. I... Also, the salt look at it. Yes, it's very intriguing. Very. Also the salt all around it. Yeah. Whether it shows that at one point in time it was probably submerged, like something happened. 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 Rishat structure. It's something that I would like to study, but I have not had time to yet. In future work, it's something that 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 evidence shows me. But I try not to spout off on things that I'm not personally acquainted with and don't really know about. Well, good for you. I like to spout off. It's also like there's so many of those things that people thought were myth, like Troy.

Troy, yeah. And they find it. It's found by an amateur. 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, as things that were made up by the ancients for some bizarre reason of their own. 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. And then at the end of the day, to say, to twist what I said, that in what archaeologists have studied, there's no evidence for my lost civilization, 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. 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. 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. 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. And you'll find that that argument is not based on what archaeologists have studied. It's based precisely on what they've not studied about the past. Well, regardless of the argument that Flint tried to put forth that there's no evidence of what you're saying, the exaggeration of the shipwrecks, the stuff about seeds, 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. The Sage wall in Montana, what do you think of that thing?

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. 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 say that's definitely a at the moment, I would not say that's definitely a manmade structure, nor would I say that's definitely a natural structure. I would say that's an intriguing structure. 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. Boy, that looks very big. I mean, it really is hard. It is hard to resist the conclusion. I mean, it's super hard to resist the idea that that's man-made, especially if it goes

deeper under the ground, they think it does, they think it goes as deep. Oh it does, it goes deeper, that's what the ground penetrating radar is about, 30 feet. In fact I was yesterday... That looks so man-made. Yeah, it really does. When I look at that photograph, to me that is a man-made structure. But I realize now in the environment in which I live surrounded by archaeologists who are extremely hostile to my work, that I better... It's not in my interests to leap to a conclusion

about anything before I've studied it. And I do intend to go to Sagewall. I was yesterday with with Michael Collins who's the guy who's done a lot of the videography on Sagewall. 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. What's crazy is if that is, how old is that thing? How old is it? Who knows? Who knows? And if you're talking about footprints of people that lived 22,000 years ago, like were they making things? Like what was going on? Did they build something like that? Yeah, or even earlier.

Right, or even earlier. Is it part of the lost story of the Americas? There's so much that's been lost, particularly in North America, 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. There's about 100,000 left, which is a lot actually. But most of them are massively destroyed and the other 900,000 have gone, just plowed under, turned into farmland. 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 inhabitants had only been here for a very short time whereas we now know they've been here for a very long time. And secondly, there was a propagandistic desire not to give too much credit to them. So let's get rid of some of their stuff. 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 great mounds that still survive, 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. We tried to film in Moundville in Alabama as well, and again we were denied permission to film there. There's no doubt that archaeology has joined ranks to do their best to prevent me doing what I do. That's so awful to deny anyone the ability to, especially when you're going to put something

like this on Netflix where millions of people are going to see it, deny people the, just the access through video of experiencing this site and the mystery that's attached to it. Deny people the, 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? What artifacts haven't been discovered that are inside of this thing? And you know, here's what archaeologists say. Here's an alternative point of view. You're an intelligent member of the public. Make up your own mind. You're being reasonable. That's outrageous. It's a most unfortunate thing. Well, it's not unfortunate that there's a lot of people that are interested in it though. More and more.

It's a fascinating phenomenon. I do see it as an extension of our interest in our own genetic origins, for example, a lot of people that I haven't done it yet, but I'm kind of keen to do 23andMe or whatever it's called. I wouldn't do it. Nope. Not now. No, they sell your data away. They'll sell your data.

Now someone's going to know your exact DNA. The whole thing's nuts. Like, I didn't know that they could do that, but apparently they have. Not only that, database get breached and they find your information. My eldest son, who is half Somali and half English, had his DNA done with 23andMe. And he found, what it showed was that he's 50% African and 49% British and 1% Spanish. 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. So you know, there is an interest in the past. 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 we have a civilization today. I often would like to compare it to a sort of furious, in terms of the level of consciousness, our civilization today is like a furious, petulant

teenager. But in terms of what it can do, in terms of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, it's a god. So, we have god-like powers with the consciousness of an immature teenager. That's what we're looking at in the world today. 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, because we do live at an inflection point just now. This is

one thing I'm pretty sure that 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. 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.

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 make a major step forward in consciousness and I think making that major step forward in consciousness will be helped by better understanding our own past. 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's a thriving civilization here at

one point. You were in Greece recently. Yeah, with Brian. You, with Brian Muroreski. You went with Brian Muroreski. Yeah. Fascinating. Brilliant guy. Amazing.

Brilliant guy. But what I treated as to have a tour of the Parthenon, the Acropolis, with him. And we went to see the site of the Illusinian mysteries and all that. It was very, very, very interesting, but just also sobering because you realize like this civilization did not make it. You know, this insane, fascinating, complex civilization crumbled. 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. But there's so much evidence that that's just a normal pattern of human history 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 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 Yeah, I'll tell you I've made friends with Sahih Hawass. I heard. He's a very interesting man. You guys are homies now. Yeah, we're homies. We had a nice dinner together. It's partly because who needs more enemies and hatred in this world? Exactly. I said some very cruel and harsh things to Zahi in the past, and I felt the time had

come to apologize for those. So I went to Egypt to apologize to him. Really? We had a fantastic dinner together. His son joined us. Santha was there. It was very friendly and very positive. I love stories like that. 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. 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. And what I would like is

for Zahi to confront me on every point as we go through Egypt. 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. And he's a fun guy in some ways. You know, I'd 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. Yeah, I'm hoping to persuade him of that. I think it'll be an interesting dialogue if we get to have it. I think people for a long time had this concept in their mind that changing the dates somehow negates the accomplishment of the people that lived in the prescribed date. Yeah. You know, the somehow or another... The pushing it back.

Yeah, the pushing it back somehow or another. And they'll even say it's racist. This is propaganda. This is archaeological propaganda. 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. Yet, weirdly, those same archaeologists recognize that agriculture was introduced to Europe by emigrants from precisely the Gobekli Tepe area. That's where agriculture wasn't present in Europe until five or six thousand years ago. It was brought in by other people. This is part of the human nature that we share ideas. If 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 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. The person who's being taught may have things to teach themselves. I've always felt that there were, 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. Abu Huraira in Syria was hit by one of those air bursts, absolutely incinerated at that time. 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 those 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. I mean, you know, we can see relative... I understand that the hurricanes that are happening in the US at the moment are horrific, horrific natural events which are killing people. But we're talking about something on a scale vastly larger than that. And it's difficult for me to see. We find it hard enough to make

it through a hurricane. I find it difficult to see how we could make it through another younger dry-ass 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. 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, the leaders and governments are behind this. It's not human beings, individual people who are behind this hatred in the world today. 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. I agree with you. 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. 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? Generally, with any archaeological site, they don't excavate more than 5% of it, and often less than 2% of it. Is that because of funds? It's often because of funds, but it's also because of the feeling that as technology improves, more may be learnt from these sites in the future. And that's a reasonable argument,

because excavation is destruction. To a certain extent, excavation destroys what's being excavated. 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. I mean, a hundred years, go back a hundred years from where we are at present and you didn't have carbon dating, you didn't have LIDAR, you didn't have all kinds of methods of dating 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. And so I think the speculation is 100 years in the future, archaeologists may have technologies that would be able to extract more information than this. That's the case that's made. 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 Klaus 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. And the decision appears to have been made not to excavate them. And I do find that slightly suspicious. I do find it odd. I think the site has 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 to what's happening. When you say suspicious, what would be the motivation for discontinuing that kind of excavation other than the fear of destroying things? I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist.

Please do. Jump right in. But there is an issue here. I've noticed that it isn't just attacks on me that certain archaeologists are making. It's also attacks on other specialists. For example, Dani Hilman Natu Wajaja, 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. The possibility that this site is more than 27,000 years old, that we're looking at a pyramidal structure that has had several phases of work done on it and that the earliest phases go back deep into the last ice age. He managed to publish a peer-reviewed paper on this, but unfortunately

for Danny, he'd appeared on my show. 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 they retracted they retracted his paper without any good reasons I've got a major article by Danny on my website explaining what what happened here. It's like It's like 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. An enormous amount of attacks are being made on that hypothesis 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. 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. Maybe it's a cyclical disaster. Maybe it's coming around again. This is something that would lead any government to want to avoid panic, to suppress, to cover up these issues. So that would be the conspiracy theory on it. I'm not saying I buy it, but I'm saying that it's possible. Adam Felsenfeld Would also a conspiracy be that they'd recognize

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. That's also possible. That's also possible. But in their favor and to their credit, the excavation of that whole area around, not go back to Tepe itself, but other neighboring sites, Karahan Tepe is the best known. Turkish archaeologists, it's interesting, are calling this now a civilization. They're calling it the Tas Tepeler civilization, the Stone Hills civilization. And they're

finding that the same iconography, the same building techniques, not quite on the scale of Gobekli Tepe, are repeated all across the region. 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 Dryas. Cyprus is another example I was mentioning about how it was settled in what appeared to have been planned, organized settlement events near the end of the last ice age. Again, you find that same iconography that you find at Gobekli Tepe turning up there as well. Which iconography that you find at Gobekli Tepe turning up there. Which iconography specifically? The tendency to use T-shaped pillars, to use certain designs like a V-shaped necklace,

this kind of iconography and the structures, these circular structures, 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. There's a 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 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 So while excavation may have stopped at gobeckli tepe or may have slowed down it is continuing elsewhere Across the region and to be fair to archaeologists

We need to recognize that is the size and scale of gobeckli tepe unique in comparison to the ones that are around it Yes, 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. 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 and 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. 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. 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 in that area of Turkey and down into the Jordan Valley and Cyprus. And not only there, also the Indus Valley civilization. It's incredible iconography which shows a man between two felines. 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. What is this that Jamie can find it? You can find it on the Gebel al-Arak knife handle from Egypt. You can find it from Seybuk,

S-A-Y-B-U-R-K in Turkey, the man between 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. And it suggests that cultural ideas way back in the remote past were being spread around the world very, very rapidly. Find anything there, Jeremy? I can tell you the... So how much of that area where Gobekli Tepe has been searched with Lidar? Here it is. Here's the images. Look at that. Wow.

Yeah, there we are. That's Harappa. That's from the Indus Valley civilization. Man between two felines. What do you think that supposedly represents? Nobody knows what it represents, but what's intriguing is that it turns up in so many different places. But I'd like to find the same... Just give me one second just to find something. I hope I'm online here.

I am. How many of the areas have been searched with LIDAR? Hang on, Joe. Bear with me. No worries. One minute. This is where I have to take my bloody glasses off. You got to go back and forth? Yeah. He looks at the usher. That Karen Teppi has some cool stuff that I don't think we've seen before. Whoa. There's this huge skeletal figure. This one 12 feet high or something like that. Kind of similar to the Easter Island heads. What's going on down there? It's a hog. What do you think it is? How weird are those structures? You know, but like the way their

hands are placed it's kind of similar to the way the Easter Island hands are placed. Jamie, could I could I get plugged into the HDMI? Sure. Do you need to? Yeah. Okay, pause please. We'll pause. We'll be right back. We're back. Okay, we found these images. So this is from, Jamie, maybe you could expand that the Cyborg relief. I think you have to do it. Okay, it's on my... Yeah. There we go. So this is about 10,000 years old. It's from a site in the area of Gobekli Tepe called Seybuk, and it's gone. One second, one second. Here it is. And it's clearly a man between two felines. And interestingly, he's holding his dick exactly like that piece that you just showed from Karan Tepe. And then if we go on, I don't understand what I'm doing with

this thing. There it is. So then the Indus Valley again. Yeah, I'm controlling what's on the screen. You are. Okay. So there's the man between two felines. Again, expand that. So that particular image, is there any sort of a theory as to what they were trying that would that represented? Human mastery of animals is the only one I've heard that's being suggested. But it seems like they're trying to get them. Well, it does in that in that case rather than or that he's holding them.

Right. He's holding them at bay. Keeping them from getting each other. Yeah. And then if you go down to the Egyptian one, which is the Gebel Alaric knife rather than, or that he's holding them at bay. Keeping them from getting each other. Yeah, and then if you go down to the Egyptian one, which is the Gebel Alaric knife handle, there it is. That's from ancient Egypt, pre-Danasic Egypt, same thing. Wow.

And then the next one is from Tiwanako in Bolivia. That's a redrawing from Tiwanako in Bolivia, and again, it's a man between two felines. 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. It's not each culture representing or influencing the other, it's a remote common source that they all share. What's the last one from? Where's it from again? From Tiwanaku in

Bolivia. What do you think he's got in his hands? Well it looks like two felines that he's holding apart. Right, but what are those things that are dangling down? 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. Right, but what is the thing on the left? Again, I don't know and I don't think anybody does. Very strange. And why does he have steps on his chest and a wheel? Like, what is that? You

know? What is that spiral in the center of his body? It's a spiral of mystery. I honestly don't know the answer to that question. Bizarre, because look, there's a geometric pattern. It goes up and down with the steps and it repeats on both corners, that one where it steps up and the other the steps and repeats on both corners that one Where it steps up and the other side where it steps down. Yeah, very strange It would be nice if there were written records from from T when I go when that be sweet what it was about But unfortunately there aren't Very very bizarre. So what I'm saying is we're we're seeing a sudden emergence of something that is being recognized as a civilization in Turkey Just immediately after go back to Tappi around the time of go back to Tappi a sudden emergence of something that is being recognized as a civilization in Turkey just

immediately after Gobekli Tepe, around the time of Gobekli Tepe. 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. The same iconography keeps on repeating and I don't think it's a coincidence. The area where the Olmec are, have there ever been lidar excavations or discoveries? 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. The areas where lidar has been used in Mexico and Central America and Guatemala 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. But whether it's been used there we go. Look at that. Hundreds of them. And all Mec ceremonial centers. Wow. This is all thank you LIDAR. So crazy that that stuff was there all along. And nobody knew. And of course the Amazon rainforest is an even bigger rainforest than this and what's hiding in it is a mystery that needs to be solved in the coming years if we're going to have any idea of our own past. I think the Amazon

is incredibly important. 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. Archaeologists haven't looked there. They define themselves as being in favor of indigenous peoples and against any kind of supremacy, but by and large they look to Europe and to the Middle East as the origins of civilization and don't consider that it might have been in the Americas. 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.

How much of the Amazon has been explored with LIDAR? A very tiny proportion. I worked with the team who are doing this, and they're solely in the province of Acre in the southwest of Brazil. They haven't worked in other areas. What would be needed? I'm hoping some 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 Accra that we have

allied our 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. It could be it could be relatively cost-efficient. That would be incredible. Just imagine what's out there. Yeah. And we have the tech. We can do that. We can do a LIDAR survey of the Amazon. Where specifically do they think that lost city of Z was? And did they try to explore that yet?

I think it was in Ecuador or Colombia. I can't remember. That was Percy Fawcett, wasn't it? And a kind of 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 and because there were cities in the Amazon and God knows what was in them before the Spanish came along and destroyed everything. God, it seems like that has to be discovered. I mean, that has to be looked at. Just specifically if we could just find that the lost city of Z was a real place.

If we could find it was a real place? I wish we could. I mean just finding lost city of Z is a legendary scene in the Amazon rainforest in British Explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett. Matto Grosso. In Brazil, yeah. Theorized that the city was a refuge for people fleeing the destruction of Atlantis. Whoa Its wisdom could still be found there. Wow

Yeah Wow, I think we're gonna find the lost city of X and Y as well. I bet and W Yeah, maybe a bunch yeah, it's At the very least it's clear that not enough is known. Yeah, not enough is known. And I think it's right and proper that we have curiosity about our past. And I think it's unfortunate that 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, 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. And a lie is a knowing untruth. 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. 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.

Of course not. The interesting thing though is... But seriously, I'd like an example, because this is thrown at me so many times. 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. Define the untruths. I don't think that's working anymore because I think enough people have seen your work and enough people have heard you talk and they know that you're reasonable and intelligent and that there's something there. And the more people look at these images, the more people hear people like Flint just out and

out lie to try to dismiss these things. It was most unfortunate. I think he let archaeology down very badly in the way that he manipulated that debate. And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come back with the fact checking, but it was necessary to do. And I'm very grateful to a number of completely independent, separate individuals on the internet who have drawn attention to some of what Flint did. One calls himself an illegitimate scholar and the other calls himself a dedunking. They got into this material very, very early and helped me to understand how I'd been duped by this material. Because I took it all at face value.

Well, that's the beautiful thing about the internet. 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 scholars, these people that are supposed to be the ones that are the experts in this area that are dismissing things that shouldn't be dismissed, that are lying about statistics, just try to defuse your argument. And there's also that feeling of just being patronized by the so-called experts. Nobody wants to be patronized and feel that somebody else regards them as too stupid to

make up their own mind on something. 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. Not at all. Archaeologists have done some fantastic work. 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. 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, must be avoided. And also, I do find that archaeology, and it may be true in other sciences as well, are very reluctant to use the imagination. The imagination is seen as a deadly threat. Whereas I think imagination is a really important thing in interpreting the past. 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. 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. Well, in some places that's your only option, like themec culture where you like we don't know. Well we have these faces that don't look like, I mean it's confusing they look like maybe they're from Polynesia, maybe they're from Africa. Yeah could be Polynesia, could be Africa and then there are these other faces which I in the video I've put out, I've shown some of these. 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.

We discussed that during the debate. I have a real problem with that because that is patronizing to the indigenous people. 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, 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. I don't think they were that stupid. They knew what their myths were. 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. 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. But this is a kind of conspiracy theory that's being proposed, that the Spanish Cortes 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. While accepting everything else that the indigenous people believe, that was a fiction. There's no document which says that Spaniards conspired to create these stories. 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. 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. So it's possibly a myth of people that came over on ships that look different.

Yeah. It's about that. That's about what it comes to. 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 gonna miss from those folks, too 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. Yeah, probably happened a long long time ago as well. Yeah 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 they only found out about them in like what 2010 or something. Very recently I think Santa and I went to Denisova Cave in 2013. Crazy. Something like that. So a whole new branch. Yeah. Previously unknown. Crazy. And there's so much that's unknown about our past.

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. 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. So this was, yeah, the hobbit-like species of early humans may still be living in the jungles of Indonesia. Interesting theory. Yeah.

Well, that's another branch of the human chain that when did they find out about this? It wasn't that long ago either. It certainly wasn't. I think you're looking around 2000s, 2010 maybe. Very very recent discovery. I wonder what this the latest find is public on Tuesday Journal of Nature Communications found the 2016 discovery of tiny arm bone and teeth. There's something that these people are considering. I don't know why. Is there any article that says they consider they're still alive today?

That's what this one is? But that one... Sorry, I'm sorry. No. It's like a small version of Bigfoot. Yeah, this is it. This is three, two years old. Okay Okay someone sent this to me. Yeah. So why do they think that there's might still roam? Well this is just because of

anecdotal stories right? Because there have been multiple stories that people that live in the deep rainforest have said that they've encountered these. Why not? 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. Especially small populations of them that are very remote and very difficult to get. There were reports of sighting by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly and I conclude the best would explain that

they told me what they told me is a non sapiens hominid has survived on flora's to the present or very recent times. Fascinating. Yeah. I would love to hear their stories. Imagine trying to maybe AI could decipher their language. Imagine if 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. Oh my goodness just for Clarity he made this claim and put out a book. So I feel like come read my book, you know Well, it's a good thing to do if you have a good theory

I mean, yeah Know what you're saying though. I know you you're saying. Yeah. I hope it's true. Of course Of course, of course because it's fun. Yeah, it's fun to hope it's true. Oh, it's fun. That's what I would what I'm so grateful to the universe for and so grateful to my readers for Is that I have been given this opportunity to live a fun life Oh, yeah, 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. 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. 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 viewers as well. You're a very lucky man. I was going to say that earlier when you were talking about I've never taken a vacation like oh

Yeah, but your whole life's a vacation 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 you try to retire. I'll go find you I'm gonna go grab you drag. Yeah, I Love doing vitamins. I love doing what I do. Yeah, and and I I hope it it's contributed something useful to the world rather than just flim flam. Oh no, it most certainly has. 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 your work was the idea that the Ark of the Covenant exists in Ethiopia.

That's what brought me into this field. Before that I wrote all about current affairs. That story is so nuts and it sounds so ridiculous and people go, what? The Ark of the Covenant's real? But then when you go into the history of these people that live there and they all suffered radiation poisoning and it's like way to... Cataracts over their eyes. And let's not forget that there's an indigenous population of Old Testament Jews in Ethiopia, the Fallashas, who have their own story about how the Ark of the Covenant got there,

different from the Ethiopian national epic, which is called the Kebrin Agast, the glory of kings. That's why I got into this field. I was a current affairs guy, and Ethiopia was on my my beat 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 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 followed that. So who is getting the cataracts? Peter T. Leeson The guardian of the ark. This is a monk who is appointed. The place is Aksum

in the province of Tigray in northern Ethiopia. It's a massively interesting place. Aksum has these huge granite stele. They're very similar in many ways to ancient Egyptian obelisks. They're a bit different in shape, but same sort of height, some of them going 110 feet high, 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. 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. Mary of Zion Cathedral. And that chapel is guarded by armed men. 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, 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, 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. You'll never be allowed to leave it. So they're close to whatever this object is, they're close to it. And I met three of them over a succession of years because their mortality is very, once they're appointed, they die very soon.

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, for causing their blindness. Wow. So it's the ark for causing their blindness. Wow. 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. They won't let you. Can I bribe them? No. It seems like someone should go look. What the hell is that? What's in there?

I mean, if we really find out the Ark of the Covenant was an actual object. Hmm. I think it was an actual object. And you think it was some nuclear something or another? I don't know what it was. I think it's what is rightly described as an out-of-place artifact. 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. 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. It shoots out jets of fire and kills completely innocent people. 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 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. This is described in the Old Testament. So it's intriguing that this object is so precisely specified and is reported to have done these terrible things. It's just insane that we know where it is.

Well, 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. Did you bring a Geiger counter? No, that would be a good thought. Yeah, imagine what was going nuts as you got close. That would be a good thought. 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 as one small area. You're going to have traces of it that leak out. That's true. It would be a good way to do it. 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. Yeah.

And they all blame the ark. And one of them, it's a resonant phrase, sticks in my memory. I asked him why, and he said, the ark is a thing of fire. Just that. Did he describe it to you? He did describe it as a box, rather like the biblical description, unsurprisingly. But what... Did he describe what it looked like, like like the biblical description, unsurprisingly. But what... Did he describe what it looked like, like the outside of it?

Gold. Gold. Gold. Wow. And of course, gold is a very good insulator against radiation. I don't want to go too far down this track. To me, the... Too speculative.

Yeah. 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 Falashias, the Ethiopian Jews, and their very ancient traditions about how they got to Ethiopia in the first place. In context to all of that, I think Ethiopia has a very good claim, very interesting claim, and that's why I wrote a book about it. That one to me is just like, we know where it is.

Yeah. That one to me is so crazy that someone is keeping that information from the rest of the humans. Yeah. 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. Now all of a sudden the Bible is not just stories and myths. The Bible is some sort of a historical record. 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, 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. And again, it's one of the reasons why I've done the work I've done over these years. Trevor Burrus So when you're doing season two, 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? Yes, definitely. 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. We have an amazing archaeologist, indigenous

archaeologist from Easter Island. We spent quite a bit of time filming in Easter Island and it's a strong... 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. And Sonia Hoa Cardinali is an indigenous Easter Islander. Her married name is Cardinali because she married an Italian guy 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. 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 naturally. You can't get bananas to Easter Island without human beings bringing them there. That's how they got there. 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 a thousand years ago or less, 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, we had a member of the Apurinar people who is a caretaker for those geoglyphs. 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, and how they understand that it's somehow connected to the journey to the next world, to the journey of life after death. 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. We find that right there in Brazil. So if the Easter Island, if the island was settled at least 3,000 years ago, do we know where from?

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. East Ireland 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. 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. I think that this is going to make archaeologists absolutely furious with me, but I hope that I'm paying full respect to

indigenous traditions. We had an amazing Easter Island elder who told us the tradition of the lost land of Heva. Easter Island has its own flood myth. They say that there was a huge land in the Pacific, far, far away, called Heva, and that it was HIVA, 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. 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 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. How did that

happen? 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. 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, they're all in museums around the world. They themselves were copies of copies of copies of earlier wooden boards that wore out. And these things go back far into the remote past as far as the indigenous people of Easter Island are concerned. And to have a fully formed elaborate script, which nobody can interpret today, you have

to remember the tragic history of Easter Island. 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. They came and slaved the people of Easter Island, and they took them to work in Peru and put them elsewhere in them In the Pacific 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 all the elders were wiped out those who were the memory carriers And so what's left now is just a hint of a memory of these things, but they speak with awe of these 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. 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? It wouldn't need to communicate in that way, and yet it had its own script. And the script, we... what is... can we see what it looks like? You can find the Easter Island script, Jamie? If you look up the word rongo-rongo, r-o-n-g-o, rongo-rongo tablets. 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 really oh wow It bears its crazy bears some curious 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 The way it runs 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, a sort of snake-like pattern.

How do they know that? Because that's one of the memories that's been preserved by the Easter Islanders, and because of the way they all run on. And what do they think it represents? According to Leo, the elder who we talk to in Easter Island, 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. Wow. But in a language that we don't know. Nobody knows it. 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. How did they decipher cuneiform? Cuneiform I think because of its

relationship to later languages which were known. Cuneiform is a writing system you find the earliest version I think amongst the Sumerians and then in later Babylonian society as well. But when you have a language and you have a language that it's related to that you can read, or where you 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 ancient Egypt 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 Indus Valley 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, 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. Absolutely. So do you think that it's just natural erosion that covered up everything else? No. You think it was purposely? I think it's a very complicated issue. 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. 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 Hardal, and there he is in the blue safari suit standing at the shoulder of the Easter Island Moai. 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 being exposed by erosion. This had to be excavated in order to reveal it. And the issue is on this tiny island, 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. It looks like a much longer period that would be required to create that depth of sedimentation. So, how much time do you think, I mean, has there been speculation, like if it just natural layers of sediment being dropped down, how long would it take to cover something like

that? Well, this is where I'd like to defer to the work of Dr. Robert Shock, who's a brilliant expert in this field. We invited Robert Shock to join us in season two of Ancient Apocalypse, but he declined. I think that's unfortunate because I think Robert Shock has done breakthrough work on Easter Island, and it's Robert Shock who first realized that this is a problem. This deep burial of these statues by natural sediment this is a problem. 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.

Is Robert Shock declining because of the criticism that he received about the temple of the Sphinx? I'm not sure why. He probably doesn't want to deal with it anymore. the Sphinx? I'm not sure why. I've always regarded Robert as a good friend, but he and I have not spoken since 2015. On purpose? Well, I would love to speak to Robert. Is he trying not to talk to you? And I take every opportunity to express my admiration for him. Robert has been very brave. He is a credential 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. 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 2013 we were still good friends. We traveled to Gunung Padang together in 2013. What year did he do the podcast Jamie? He did our podcast yeah back in the day. Yeah, I want to say it was around 2015 2016. Yeah, I Six years ago. Okay So 2018 Maybe that's why I stopped being your friend No, I don't I don, I don't know why it is.

Maybe I did something that offended him. Sometimes I can be very unpleasant and can be very... You're a nice guy. Get out of here. Well, we're all nice guys, but we all have a dark side. 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.

He and I disagree over the cause of the Younger Dryas Cataclysm. Robert Schock believes that it was a massive solar outburst that brought this catastrophe about, and he focuses on the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago. I'm more of the view that the Comet Research Group is right and that we're looking at the effect of, largely of air bursts of large cometary fragments right across the surface of the Earth, which caused the Younger Dryas. Why are they mutually exclusive? But I don't see why, no, I don't see why they're mutually exclusive. 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 an extraordinary global cataclysm, which changed everything, which extinguished all the megafauna of the Ice Age. We agree on that, 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. So Robert if you're listening if you're listening please let's let's let's work together because we have we have many common enemies and this is one of the problems with the alternative

side is is that there's a lot of infighting in the alternative side and everybody's scrambling for their own bit of turf. Whereas the archaeological side, they're very unified in terms of attacking what they call pseudo-archaeology. They work as a team and that teamwork makes them very efficient. We're very inefficient on the alternative side. Well, I'm assuming. I shouldn't be assuming, but I'm assuming it's the criticism. Probably wants to keep his job, and he's said everything he wants to say.

I'm not sure. 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 he must have a strong reason to do that. Oh, I hope he still loves you. But the... I hope so too.

Has anybody speculated about how much time it would take to cover those Easter Island statues with sediments? Thousands of years. Thousands. Thousands of years. Thousands of years. 30 feet of dirt. Remember, it's a small island. It's in the middle of years. Yeah. 30 feet of dirt. Mm-hmm.

Remember, it's a small island. Right. It's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Right. It's 2,000 miles from Tahiti and 2,000 miles from the coast of Peru. It just seems strange that there's so many of those statues in this one area, too. Like, what did that island signify? Hundreds of them.

Like, why did they do that? Well, it's what it calls itself, Te Pitu or Te Henua, the navel of the earth. Ooh. It calls itself the navel of the earth. 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. Angkor Wat in Cambodia is a navel of the earth. Gobekli Tepe means the navel, the hill of the navel. This notion of navels of the earth, I think it's connected to an ancient geodetic survey of the naval, the hill of the naval. This notion of navals 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. But it had abilities that we do not attribute to period of that time and those abilities included the ability to calculate longitude, something that our civilization didn't crack until the 18th century. 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. So I do not think it's an accident that Angkor Wat 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 first of all it changes the pole star. At the moment, the earth wobbles on its axis, but it's a very slow wobble over 26,000 years. It changes the pole star, now it's Polaris.

In the past, it was Thuban. In the past, it was Draco. But now it's Polaris 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. One degree of precession takes 72 years to unfold. 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. But 43,200 is one of those numbers that we

find in mythology and traditions all around the world. 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 Santillana and Hertha von Deschen. Giorgio was professor of history of science at MIT. 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. Santillana and Vendetta were of the view that it goes back to what they called some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of the remote past. How could they even know that that was happening?

By what method could they make those calculations that there's wobbles on Exaxis every 26,000 years? You have to observe for more than one human lifetime. You've got to keep observing. And then extrapolate the wobble? Well, you may have to observe for hundreds of years in order 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. 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. But if you extend it for several hundred years, it'll be very clear that something is going on. 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 the age in which we live, as anybody, of course astrology is another one of those things that archeologists despise, but as anybody

who follows astrology will know, we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. 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 entirely out of Pisces where it sits at the moment and is going to move into Aquarius. 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. 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. 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 one to 43,200, which is 72 times 600, 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. And I think that's something curious and worthy of exploration. I think we also, 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. 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. And they probably had a very detailed understanding of where everything was, in a way that you're- Far more detailed than most people have today.

Right, because we don't have access to it, unless you're in deep deep wilderness and with a clear night sky. The presence of the sky in our lives if we're living in a city is close to zero. It's not zero but it's close to zero. Bizarre. Yeah. It's a bizarre detachment that is propagated by technology.

Oh yeah, very much so. Very weird, right? Because it's actually dangerous for us. 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. I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again.

I was in the observatory in the Big Island, Hawaii. And when you go up to the Keck Observatory, the sky, you go through the clouds. 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. You feel like it's a windshield and you're on a spaceship and you're flying through deep space. You see stars everywhere. That's a beautiful way to put it. That's exactly what we are. We're in a convertible. We're in a convertible spaceship flying through the universe. That's really what it is. You don't see it every day because of light pollution. And I think it's one of the most,

it's one of the 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 what we're trading off is literally our connection to this insanely beautiful thing that hypnotizes you with its awe. It just, 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. And it used to be there for everybody, and it used to be how they lived their life. It was an ever-present reality. It was impossible to avoid it. And that is why it's so crazy to say that the phenomenon like procession 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. There's strong evidence that the constellations of the zodiac were not inventions of the Greeks either. I mean in a sense the constellations aren't inventions because they happen to be on the path of the Sun. 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. But there's increasing evidence that the Greeks inherited that and that the knowledge was very early and it may well go back into the Upper Paleolithic.

There's this incredible figure of Taurus in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux 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. What is the oldest version of astrology that we have? Well again, you know, you have the official position on this and you have the unofficial position. What's the official position? Well, the official position is that it's something that developed during the time of the late

Mesopotamians and the Greeks. This notion that somehow there was a connection between events in the sky and what happens to us. But I think it's much older than that. I think the idea that the sky in some way determines our destinies is a very ancient idea, not a recent idea. And it kind of makes sense.

I mean, 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. It would be wrong to say that the universe exists so that we can be, but the fact is we would not be. 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, which is the modern mindset, which is most unhelpful. Soterios Johnson Yeah, it's... 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, 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. 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. We know that we are 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. And the idea that these very bizarre biological entities, that their personalities and their existences in some way motivated, shaped, or at least influenced by the position in the stars in which they were born is very interesting.

Because people studied that shit for a long time. If there was nothing to it, why would they, why have so many generations of people studied it? I think it's a good question. And what was the root of it? Like how the hell did they figure that out? Well it must come from a place

where we feel connected to the universe. And we feel that the universe influences us directly. Right. Not the way we And we feel that the universe influences us directly. 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 gonna conquer it with spaceships 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. We understand we're affected by the weather, by the oceans, by the winds. They affect us. They affect our personalities. So why shouldn't we be affected by the broader universe that surrounds us? Yeah, it does make sense, but I've never heard anybody explain it. Have you ever talked to like a legitimate air quotes astrologer? No, I haven't. It's not been a central focus for me. 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 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, 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. And he feels that there's something useful being contributed by this approach. 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? I don't follow the question quite. Is there, 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. I think that archaeologists are very reluctant to accept the broader idea. 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. That cannot be denied. Serpent Mound in Ohio is a classic example of that, which is oriented precisely to the setting sun on the winter solstice. But the broader idea that, for example, positions of stars in the sky might be replicated on the ground, that's an idea that, for example, positions of stars in the sky might be replicated on the ground. That's an idea that archaeology completely rejects. And that's where I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend Robert Bravall, who's been very ill for the last many years. But Robert Bravall brought us the Orion correlation. 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. 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. They're laid out in the pattern of Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago. 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 pillar. Which also means that there would have been a line 35,000 years ago as well. Yeah, that's right, because it's a cycle. It goes back.

Then the Sphinx is another one of those, right? Yeah, the Sphinx is another one. The Sphinx aligned with, it was looking at the rising sun and behind it the constellation of Leo 12,500 years ago. But if you go back 26,000 years before that, you'll find the same alignment occurring. It's a cycle, it's not a one-off event. It's a cycle that occurs every 26,000 years before that, you'll find the same alignment occurring. It's a cycle. It's not a one-off event. It's a cycle that occurs every 26,000 years. 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 before he passed. He was such a genius and such a funny guy.

I recommend that to everybody, that Magical Egypt, the two DVD series. Yeah, they had they're amazing Yeah, my wife hated them because I was watching them still watch you watch this Egypt thing again. I couldn't stop Yeah, I probably watched it 30 times He was an absolute genius and and and John was of the view that the Sphinx is more than 30,000 years old Yeah, rather than just twelve and a half thousand years old. Well, that's what aligns so interestingly with Robert Schock's analysis of the water erosion. That this is thousands of years of rainfall. Yes.

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. He was aware of a problem in the weathering of the Sphinx, but he wasn't quite sure what the problem was. He was following up some writings by a scholar called Schwalder de Lubbix back in the 1920s or 1930s who'd said something about water weathering on the Sphinx. And so John brought Robert Shock there to Giza, and Robert Shock immediately recognized the weathering patterns on the Sphinx as the

result of heavy rainfall, exposure to heavy rainfall for thousands of years. And you have to go back to the younger dryers 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. 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. He put his own career in jeopardy by standing up

for a much older Sphinx. And I just hugely respect him for doing that. 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. There you go. And they were like, I'm not signing off on that.

That's right. Because it's just too controversial. Yeah, they circled the wagons at a certain point. And go out to your career. Yeah, most unfortunately. Well, we are very fortunate you're out there, buddy. Thank you. We really are.

And I love your show. I love you. You're always fun to talk to. Can I say a couple of things about the show? Sure, please. First of all, thank you to the viewers of season one of Ancient Apocalypse and I hope you'll enjoy season two. I hope we're bringing really important new information to the table and a special request. you do like it please give it a thumbs up on Netflix. Season two is all about the Americas. Secondly I will be doing a speaking event in the US 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. That's a good place for it all those fre in Sedona 19th and 20th of April 2025. That's a good place for it, all those freaks.

Yeah 19th and 20th of April 2025 and it's going to be called the fight for the past because I believe that's what's going on here. So I hope that people will enjoy the show and express that enjoyment, that would be Really really help. I know they will I know they will and the last the final thing I want to say is thank you to Keanu Reeves. Thank you to Keanu Reeves for joining me on the show Keanu reached out to me some years ago because he's making this incredible comic book series called berserker BRZ RKR about an immortal warrior who's born 80,000

years ago but has the power of a god and cannot be killed. 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. And we talked about that and we exchanged emails and then we had some nice Zoom conversations together. That was cool. And I sense that this is a very open-minded, very curious, very interesting person.

So when we were doing season two, I did ask him, would you join me and speak about this and speak about your curiosity of the past? And he knew what he was up against. Actually, just before Keanu and I spent a day together filming for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, he'd watched the debate between me and Flint Dibble. 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. 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 up for the shoot carrying his own baggage. 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 and I hope our paths will continue to cross in the future. That's awesome. Above all I'm grateful to him. Shout out to Keanu, He seems like an awesome guy. He's an awesome guy. Everything that people say about Keanu is right. He's a great man.

There he is. There are two of you together. Yep. Alright, Graham, it's always a pleasure. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you very much. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me back on the show.

My pleasure. Bye. Have a good night. Thanks for watching!