Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #1284. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding Lost Civilizations, Alternative Archaeology, and Ancient Human History. Here we go. And boom, we're live. Graham, great
to see you again. Nice to be back with you, Joe.
And we were just talking about your new book.
before that there's two versions of it. There's
one version and then there's a newer version
that's a Barnes & Noble version that's specific
to Barnes & Noble that has an extra whole chapter
in it. That's correct, yeah. Yeah, and so they
can get that at Barnes & Noble. I'm just trying
to keep bookstores alive, man. They're on the
way out. I think it's really important and that's
one of the reasons that I did this because I
had finished the book and then Barnes & Noble...
came to me through my publishers and said they
would like to do a special edition of the book.
But in order to do that, I needed to write them
some extra material. And I had a lot of material
that I hadn't put in the book. And I thought,
well, this is an opportunity to put that out
there. Beautiful. So if people want that, it's
a little bit different than there's a small gold
square. Well, okay. So first of all, my website,
grahamhancock .com, has a page about America
Before. And the link to the Barnes & Noble edition
is there as well as the link to the standard
edition, which is on Amazon and iTunes and all
kinds of other places. So GrahamHancock .com
and the America Before page, the link to the
Barnes & Noble edition is right there. All right.
There it is. So how is this – before we even
get into the book, what is it? Go to Talks and
Events. Okay. We're on the Graham Hancock website.
No. Go to Books. Go to Books. Go to America Before.
Bam. Bam. There it is. Go to United States. You
can see Amazon, Barnes, and there's Barnes &
Noble. Special edition. Special edition. Click
on that. There you go. And then the e -book as
well. The e -book is available. The audio book,
which I read myself, is available there. And
then if you scroll down, oops, that shouldn't
be there. Damn pop -ups. Damn pop -ups. Sons
of bitches. I am so happy you read it yourself.
I get angry when someone else reads someone who
I'm like, come on, he can talk. Yeah, I enjoy
reading web books myself. And what I've learned
from feedback I get from audiences at presentations
is people like me doing that. Oh, yeah, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. It's just weird when someone
else is talking in your voice. Like, hey, man,
I know you're not Graham. You know that I write
fiction as well as nonfiction. And the one thing
I can't read is my fiction. Really? Well, yeah,
because fiction requires accents. You really
need an actor to read a fiction book who can
get into the different characters. But for a
nonfiction book like America Before, it's very
difficult. straightforward for me just to read
it myself i agree i'm a tremendous stephen king
fan but when i read stephen king's books where
he reads them or listen to him when he reads
them they're terrible he's awful at it i don't
think a novelist should should read their own
their own novels i think that's that's a job
for for an actor oddly enough i've just been
reading stephen king's doc tower series yeah
very near the end of the seventh volume of that
yeah i'm just a giant fan of his but man when
he reads it he reads it like he's just reading
it yeah it's like this is rough it's hard to
get behind anyway um America before. On the website,
there's details about the book. There's a page
where there are links to the book. And also the
other thing I would like to take this opportunity
to mention is I'm in America and Canada for the
next seven weeks. And I'm going to be doing something
like 25 presentations in something like 20 American
cities and then three Canadian cities in Vancouver,
Montreal, and Toronto. And that's all on the
talks and events page of my website. So if anybody
wants to come along, And meet this old man in
person. I'll be doing those events. And are you
doing these at theaters? And do you allow Q &As?
Absolutely, I allow Q &As. I encourage that.
I feel as an author that, frankly speaking, I'm
nothing without my audience. I owe my audience,
my readers, big time. And what I try to do at
events is to give back as much as I can. So if
people want to take pictures with me, I am absolutely...
up for that i don't understand why anybody would
want to do that But it's fun. It's kind of fun.
And when people want to come to the desk where
I'm signing and ask me personal questions, I'm
ready to do that. Sometimes on the British book
tour, which I just finished, I was behind in
the event space for four hours after the event
finished. Wow. Signing and taking pictures. But
it's a joy. It's a really opportunity for me
to interact with the people who actually make
my work matter. That's fantastic. Beautiful.
So what inspired this? I know there's always
been – well, you – first of all, we should just
say for people who don't know, You have been
at the front of the line for decades talking
about these lost civilizations. And from reading
your work, I mean, I think I first read your
work in the 90s. You exposed me to a lot of these,
what were at the time, controversial ideas that
have now been substantiated by actual evidence,
particularly Gobekli Tepe. I mean, all the water
erosion stuff on the Sphinx, and I've since had
Dr. Robert Schock on the podcast to talk about
that as well. But all this stuff was, at one
point, very controversial, and now far less.
I mean, whatever... Traditional academics and
traditional historians that are trying to – I
guess it's archaeologists that were trying to
resist. They've let go a lot of that. They've
had to with things like Gobekli Tepe. They've
had to because the evidence has overwhelmed them.
And Gobekli Tepe is an excellent example. Prior
to the discovery and excavation of Gobekli Tepe,
which is a site in Anatolia in Turkey, it was
the view, very firm view of archaeologists that
there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere
on earth. And when I say megalithic, I mean literally
big. stones, stone circles, huge constructions,
nothing like that before at the very, very earliest
6 ,000 years ago. And they would point to sites
in, for example, Malta, a site called Gigantia,
which is about 5 ,800 years old. That's the oldest
megalithic architecture in the world. And they
could understand how that was because these were
agricultural societies. They generated surpluses.
You could free up people who could become specialists
in. architecture in astronomy and geometry, and
they could apply their skills to the construction
of these sites. But what they never considered
possible was that a society that was hunter -gatherers
would have created a gigantic megalithic site.
And then suddenly, Gobekli Tepe is discovered.
It dates to 11 ,600 years ago. It's more than
5 ,000 years older than the supposedly oldest
megalithic architecture in the world. And it
is in a center where there had been no previous
evidence of agriculture. But the moment Gobekli
Tepe appears, agriculture appears as well. And
this is just something that's really hard for
archaeology to explain. They've suddenly got
5 ,000 years of missing history that they've
just never taken into account. And what I see
them doing is largely avoiding the problem rather
than getting to grips with it directly. And in
fact, there have been... There have been a great
number of changes in the last 20 years which
have worked generally in favor of the arguments
that I've proposed. Well, I'm so happy for you
because I know that for a long time you were
out there on your own with a lot of these theories.
Very much so. And also subjected to the most
blistering and deeply unpleasant criticism. From
the archaeological fraternity and from their
friends in the media. Like how dare this journalist
propose that history might be different or that
we might have a forgotten chapter in the human
story. It was regarded almost as offensive that
I would put this material out there. And archaeologists
felt it was their responsibility to show the
public that I was full of shit. And that was
the whole way my work was greeted. And to a certain
extent still is greeted by archaeologists. But
things have changed. Central to my work was the
notion of a global cataclysm roughly 12 ,500,
12 ,800 years ago. It made sense to me in 1995
when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, but there
was no compelling evidence for a global cataclysm
then. All the evidence seemed to point to that
time and a massive global event. And then from
2007 onwards, you know, more than a decade after
I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, we get a group
of more than 60 major scientists who are seriously
proposing that the Earth was hit by multiple
fragments of a giant comet 12 ,800 years ago
and that this caused a huge rise in sea level
and extinctions of megafaunas. They are not saying
that it also wiped out a lost advanced civilization
of prehistory. I'm saying that. But what has
changed is that we now have compelling, hard
scientific evidence. I'm not saying every scientist
accepts it. It's the nature of science to dispute
findings. But we have a group of 60 major figures
who have seriously proposed this in all the leading
mainstream journals. And it's changed the balance
of power in this argument because one thing that
they used to say is Hancock can't be right because
there was no global cataclysm, you know, 12 or
13 ,000 years ago. Well, now we know there was
and there are various explanations for it. So
that's moved things along in the other thing
that's changed a lot is the attitude of the man
in the street to authority. That has changed.
Back in the 90s, authority figures were the gatekeepers.
They controlled everything. If an authority figure
in a discipline like archaeology said, Hancock
is completely wrong. He's made all this stuff
up. That would generally be believed, not by
everybody, but by the majority of people. Today,
to have a mainstream authority figure say that
to me is actually an advantage because people
are so distrustful of authority and rightly so
because we've been lied to by authority figures
in all fields for so long. The bullshit has been
so enormous that people are finally waking up
but we can't trust what authority figures say
and i think we can thank the internet for that
we can thank the internet yeah yeah i'm sure
you've seen the more recent evidence of a crater
that they just discovered like fairly recently
greenland yes enormous enormous it's an enormous
it's an enormous crater uh it's um 18 miles wide
It had not been discovered before because it's
under ice. It's under a lot of ice. At the end
of the Ice Age, Greenland was one area which
never lost its ice cover completely, whereas
North America, everywhere north of Minnesota,
was covered in ice a mile, sometimes two miles
deep. Europe, the same, northern Europe. But
Greenland kept its ice, whereas the other parts
of the world lost their ice at the end of the
Ice Age. Interesting about Greenland is there's
already evidence of comet impact in Greenland,
which goes back to papers published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013,
that they found what are called impact proxies
in Greenland. In other words, nanodiamonds, carbon
spherules, and evidence of a lot of platinum
and iron was found in a layer in the ice dated
to 12 ,800 years ago. But the next development,
and you're absolutely right, and this was just
a few months ago, was the discovery of this humongous
crater in Greenland and evidence that it was
caused by an iron impactor of some kind. Now,
dating of it, I would be irresponsible to say
that that crater definitely dates to 12 ,800
years ago because the work has not been done
to prove that yet. But what I can say and what
the... who have explored and excavated the crater
are saying is that it's recent. They can say
for sure that it happened during the last ice
age. Under it, under the crater, is nothing but
massively disturbed and destroyed and completely
wrecked ice from the ice age, from the Pleistocene.
Above it is smooth, perfect ice from our epoch,
which is called the Holocene, which began about
11 ,600 years ago. So all the evidence... suggests
that this crater dates to that period between
12 ,800 and 11 ,600 years ago, but to absolutely
confirm that more work needs to be done. But
it's part of a growing pattern. The Younger Dryas
impact scientists, they call themselves, they
call this the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
And it's because there was a period in the Earth's
geological history that geologists call the Younger
Dryas, which lasted for 1 ,200 years from 12
,800 to 11 ,600 years ago. It's a very mysterious
period. We see all the megafauna dying off suddenly
and rapidly. We see rises in sea level. We see
a huge collapse in global temperature. It's a
cataclysmic. And what is becoming clearer and
clearer is that the evidence that a comet was
behind it is extremely strong. And as more and
more evidence comes in, we realize how widespread
it was. So they found evidence of the impacts
as far south as Antarctica now. Previously, they
were focused very much on North America. Now,
as far south as Antarctica, as far east as Syria.
This was truly a global event. And it changed
the world. And it's my case that it wiped our
memory. of a previous episode of human civilization
that right at the epicenter of this cataclysm
was a civilization that we would regard as advanced,
not a simple hunter -gatherer civilization, which
was utterly wiped out in this cataclysmic event.
And I should say for anyone who's really fascinated
right now, please maybe pause and go listen to
the two that you did with Randall Carlson, where
it really goes into depth about the impact, the
evidence of these impacts, the evidence of the
very... very quick demise of the ice age. and
what may have resulted in all these floods that
you read about in the Epic of Gilgamesh, that
you read about in Noah's Ark, and that all these
things are probably tales of stories that people
passed down from generation to generation that
survived this time. Yeah, because we now know
that at that time, between 12 ,800 and 11 ,600
years ago, truly global cataclysmic events involving
rapid rises in sea level did occur, and suddenly
the worldwide tradition of a global flood. stops
being just a myth and starts being a memory,
an account of real events. It's been my privilege
to work very closely with Randall Carlson. Yeah,
he's amazing. Randall is absolutely amazing.
He is a total genius. He's also a gentle giant
and such a kind, generous, spirited person. It's
a joy to work with him. And every minute spent
with him is an education. I had the privilege
of traveling across the Channel Scablands in
Washington State with Randall. Seeing things
through his eyes really opened my eyes to the
scale of this disaster. You know, you can look
at these giant boulders called glacial erratics,
and they just look odd sitting there in the landscape.
But when you really consider how they got there,
that they got there in icebergs the size of oil
tankers that were carried on floods that were
at least 500 up to 1 ,000 feet deep that were
tearing through the channeled scablands, literally
ripping the landscape apart. Then the icebergs
would ground on valley sides. The floodwaters
would recede. The icebergs would be. left their
giant icebergs and as they melted away they revealed
the rocks that they had in chain that were caught
up within them and they're scattered all over
the landscape and you look at that and you think
anything that was underneath that 12 ,800 years
ago is gone completely. There can't be anything
left of it at all. Utterly, utterly destroyed.
And I would encourage people that are interested
in this to please watch the YouTube videos of
it because Randall provides all sorts of video
and photographic evidence where you can take
a look at the landscape and you get a perspective
of how immense this destruction was. It's really
important to see that because it's easy enough
to talk about floods and but actually to see
its effect on the landscape directly is – it
has an emotional impact. I felt emotional traveling
across the Channel Scablands, realizing that
this was the heart of an event that changed the
world completely. And the evidence continues
to build. In America before, I've not gone over
old ground that I went over in Magicians of the
Gods that we covered in the various interviews
and podcasts in which it's really a good idea
that people take a look at. But what I have done
is added the new information published since
2015, which further supports the Younger Dryas
impact hypothesis and the notion that… Multiple
fragments of a giant comet hit the earth and
created an absolute global catastrophe. So what
was the motivation behind creating this book,
America Before? It's a curious mixture of things.
I have been exploring the possibility of a lost
civilization. for more than 25 years. That was
the essence of my book, Fingerprints of the Gods,
that was published in 1995, that there has been
a huge forgotten episode in human history. I
continued to follow that in a series of other
books. And by the time I got to 2002, when I
published a book called Underworld, that followed
seven years of scuba diving on continental shelves,
looking for structures that were submerged by
rising sea levels at the end of the last ice
age, I really felt I'd done it. I felt I'd walk
the walk. put put out to the public a massive
body of information and i thought my role in
this is over and i can breathe a sigh of relief
because it's hot in this particular kitchen and
i can go do something else and i ended up writing
a book about psychedelics i ended up writing
supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers
of mankind about the role of psychedelics in
in the origins of the of the human story but
then new information started to come out that
touched on the lost civilization idea and i couldn't
just stand by and ignore that information that's
why I published Magicians of the Gods in 2015.
And then as I was researching that book, I became
aware of something I hadn't realized before,
that there's a mass of new information from the
Americas, specifically from the Americas, which
completely rewrites the story of human history,
that the Americas have been misrepresented for
a very long time. by archaeology. And archaeologists
will be annoyed with me for saying that. They
have a way of forgetting their own errors, of
saying, oh, well, we knew that all along. It
wasn't the case. But the fact of the matter remains
that for the best part of 50 years, from the
1960s through until about 2010, American archaeology
was locked in a dogma that they actually had
a name for, which was Clovis first. That they
invented a name for a culture. They called them
the Clovis culture. We don't know what they called
themselves. They were hunter -gatherers. They
first appear in the archaeological record 13
,400 years ago, and they vanish from the archaeological
record 12 ,600 years ago. And for a very long
time, it was maintained adamantly that these
were the first Americans, that no human being
touched the soil of the Americas until 13 ,400
years ago. Just animals, but no human beings
present at all. And any archaeologist who attempted
to dispute that dogma, and I use the word deliberately,
there should be no room for dogma in science,
but any archaeologist who challenged that would
face severe problems with his or her career.
They would be mocked and humiliated at conferences
like an archaeologist called Jacques -Hank Mars
from Canada who excavated in the Yukon. Humiliated
at conferences, insulted, accused of making stuff
up. Their research funding would be withdrawn.
Basically, to challenge Clovis first was the
end of your archaeological career. So naturally,
very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis
first. What was this gentleman in the Yukon?
He's called Jacques -Hank Mars. And interestingly,
the Smithsonian just in 20… 2017 did a big kind
of mea culpa, a big admission about this, that
everybody had got things wrong, that Jack St.
Mars had been ruined by the Clovis First Lobby,
but he'd been right all along. The site he excavated
in the Yukon was re -excavated in 2017, and every
single thing he said was correct, even though
they had just sneered at him. And what year was
he? He was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Is he still alive? He's still alive. He's still
alive, yeah. Is he better? Well, I think he's
vindicated, you know, and it's kind of... It's
kind of nice to be vindicated. There's almost
a place in folklore for the individual who is
scorned and humiliated by others but who turns
out to be right. And he was right. But my point
about this is that – What it meant was since
it was the dogma that Clovis was first, that
the oldest dates were 13 ,400 years ago, there
seemed to be no logic to archaeologists in digging
deeper. You know how it is with archaeology that
the upper levels are the youngest and the deeper
you go, the older it gets. That's why we say
upper Paleolithic for the late Ice Age and lower
Paleolithic for the late Stone Age and lower
for the older. Stone Age. And the feeling was
no need to dig below the Clovis lair because
we already know that there were no human beings
there before that. And then a few archaeologists,
I've mentioned Jacques Saint -Germain, but another
is Al Gugier from the University of South Carolina,
who excavated a site called Topper in South Carolina.
Now, Topper is an incredibly rich Clovis site.
It's full of their tools, their points. They
made these special flint points that were used
as arrowheads and spears. Great Clovis site.
He finished excavating the Clovis level. And
then he did something that was supposed not to
be done. He decided to dig deeper. And he carried
on digging down. And there was a layer of about
a meter and a half of barren soil. And then beneath
that, more human artifacts. And they finally
date those back to more than... 50 ,000 years
ago. And then in 2017, published in Nature by
Tom Demare, who's the chief paleontologist at
the San Diego Natural History Museum, and a bunch
of other very high -level paleontologists. published
in Nature magazine, evidence for human presence
in North America 130 ,000 years ago. Now, this
has really put the cat amongst the pigeons. Now,
if humans were present in North America 130 ,000
years ago, and archaeologists have been telling
us for 50 years that they were only present from
13 ,000 years ago. That's ten times as long that
we've had humans in North America capable of
doing stuff. And the archaeological dogma has
prevented any search for what they were doing
until very recently. What was the evidence from
130 ,000 years ago? Okay, so what – it's not
the – let me be clear about this because this
is something that is often misrepresented in
my views. It is not the evidence for an advanced
civilization that we find 130 ,000 years ago
in America. The evidence that we find is evidence
for human presence. And what they were doing
was very much Stone Age stuff. It's a mastodon.
It's a mastodon skeleton that was excavated.
It was actually found by accident during road
construction near San Diego. And an archaeologist
was attached to the rogue construction crew and
immediately stopped construction. And they investigated
it thoroughly. And what they found was so much
dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it
that they decided not to publish at the time.
Because what they found was evidence that those
mastodon bones had been cracked open by human
beings using tools and that the marrow had been
extracted. that one tusk had been left standing
upright in the ground and another had been left
beside it, that a femur of the animal had been
taken away completely from the site. And there
was assemblages of instruments that were used
to smash and break the bones. And the conclusion
of the team was that only one kind of creature
could have done that work using tools on a mastodon,
and that's human beings. That's classic, classic
human behavior. This sets the goalposts in a
totally different place. Suddenly we have to
consider that humans have been in America for
130 ,000 years. We already know that a dogmatic
approach of archaeology has rather refused to
look at anything older than 13 ,000 years ago.
And what it does is it generates an engine of
demand that we need to be looking at those missing
100 ,000 plus years. We need to be looking at
it hard. Of course, the immediate reaction has
not been to go looking for stuff in the other
100 ,000 years. have responded by saying this
is impossible. It can't be. It can't be so. But
that's precisely what they said to Jacques Sainte
-Mars, who said that humans were in bluefish
caves in the Yukon 25 ,000 years ago. And it's
precisely what they said to Al Goodyear, who
said humans had been at Topper 50 ,000 years
ago. And they were both right. And I believe
that Tom Desmarais and his team, you don't get
a big article published in Nature unless it's
already pretty solidly based and pretty much
peer reviews. It has produced a reaction. I would
be wrong to say that it's universally. accepted.
It's very much challenged, but it's intriguing.
What is the challenge? The challenge fundamentally
comes from we archaeologists know that there
were no human beings in the Americas that far
back. To put it in perspective, it's about 60
,000 years before the first evidence of human
beings in Europe. It's about 60 ,000 years before
the first evidence of human beings in Australia.
And this is just evidence of the first human
beings. Yes. We have to point out how difficult
it is to find evidence. It's extremely difficult
to find. You know, sometimes we imagine that
archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal
material. No, they're not. They're not. I mean,
this is one of the ironies. The whole Clovis
first dogma, you would think that they had masses
of material to work with. They did have the tools,
but in terms of skeletal remains, just one. Just
one single skeletal remain from that period.
Now, one of the things that Michael Shermer had
sent me was this dispute that perhaps the bones
had been cracked open by the excavation material.
Yeah. By the excavation machines. I saw Michael's
email last night, and I appreciate that Michael
wants to continue to engage with this subject.
And that's his job. He's a professional skeptic,
and it's his role to do so. But what he misses
out, it's true that a new paper has been published.
which raises questions over what's called the
Cerruti Mastodon site, which is the site that
Tom Desmarais at San Diego Natural History Museum
excavated. And what's interesting, since Michael
took the trouble to write the questions, can
I just read you something that I responded to
on this? Sure. Just do it into the microphone.
In no way a refutation of the original paper
in Nature. As a matter of fact, the gentleman
who wrote that paper never even looked at the
archaeological remains that are now in the San
Diego Natural History Museum. What it is, what
he based it on is... Reference, I'm quoting from
the abstract of the paper itself, reference to
a freeway right -of -way map and construction
plans, contemporary road building practices,
and worksite photographs available on the internet.
In other words, the site was not visited. They
simply looked at secondary references. They did
not look at the archaeological material, and
they ignored the entire argument of Tom Desmarais
and his colleagues who had already addressed
that issue. They didn't look at the bones? They
did not look at the bones. When you break a fresh
bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral
fracture that does not happen when you break
a fossilized bone. And Tom Demare and his team
specifically ruled out road -making machinery
as responsible for this breaking pattern because
they actually carried out experiments on modern
elephants, deceased elephants, and they broke
their bones. And the kind of fracture that you
get in a fresh green bone is completely different
from the kind of fracture you get in a fossilized
bone. So, unfortunately, this paper pays no attention
to that. It just looks at road plans and says
there was road work there. It must have been
done by road work. I think it's very sloppy,
very weak, and it's certainly not the answer.
We can expect ongoing debate, and that is healthy.
But this is not a strong case at all. So this
points to the first evidence that we found. And
is there any effort underway to try to uncover
more evidence from a similar time period? Well,
I'm going to cite… Tom Desmarais, the chief paleontologist
at the San Diego Natural History Museum. That's
what he would like to see. He makes the point
to me. I interview him. I spent a day with him
at the Natural History Museum. He was very generous
with his time. I did an extended interview and
I quote from it in America before. And his wish
is that archaeologists, instead of spending all
their time trying to find ways to dismiss and
get rid of his findings, his wish is that they
would spend a little bit of that time looking
at deposits older than 30. 400 years and even
being willing to go back as far as 130 000 years
that's that's would be a proper scientific response
here is a thorough body of work put forward by
a very senior group of scientists who hesitated
before they published it. They had the information
back in the 1990s, but it wasn't until refined
dating techniques later than in the 21st century
that they finally were sure what they had and
that they published it in Nature in 2017. It's
an important study. And I think what's going
to happen is that we're going to find much more
evidence of a very ancient human presence in
the America. And that's what Tom Demery thinks
as well. And as he points out, if we don't look.
then we're never going to find. If we allow dogma
to stop us looking and saying, oh, it's impossible
that humans were in the Americas 130 ,000 years
ago, so we won't bother to look. What a failure
of science that is. And to spend all the time
instead trying to get rid of the evidence that
doesn't fit the current paradigm. But it's so
fascinating that just this fortuitous discovery
during a construction site could change the way
people perceive things. You've got to wonder
how much of that stuff is under, I mean, how
deep did they have to go to find these mastodon
bones? Well, so this is a, This is a road cut
that's being made. So those would be pretty deep
down, 10, 15 feet down. The grader is going through
and... flattening them. It varies from place
to place depending on soil deposition, the stratification
of the soil. But the key point is that what you
need to do is go deeper than 13 ,400 years ago.
And you need to do so with dedication and vigor
and with some kind of funding. And at the moment,
archaeology doesn't see the point of that. If
the paper in Nature by Tom Desmarais was alone,
if there were nothing else than that, I wouldn't
place so much trust in it. But I've spent a lot
of time during the researching of this book with
archaeologists who did deke. Did dig deeper.
And what those archaeologists all confirm is
that there have been human beings in the Americas
for tens of thousands of years. And it's not
surprising that that can be pushed back to 130
,000 years ago because part of the argument about
the peopling of the Americas has to do with a
place that we now call the Bering Straits between
Alaska and Siberia, which during the Ice Age
were… at times, a land bridge. They were exposed
because of lowered sea levels. Migrants who crossed
that land bridge from Siberia on many occasions
over periods of tens of thousands of years would
find themselves confronted then by the North
American ice cap, which oddly wasn't at the tip
of Alaska but began further in. So there was
living space in a bit of Alaska, but you couldn't
get through the ice mountains, these literally
ice mountains two miles deep covering the whole
of North America and preventing access to the
unglaciated parts of America. What happened?
Around 13 ,400 years ago, there had been a period
of global warming and the ice sheets began to
melt and a corridor opened up between what's
called the Cordillera Ice Sheet and the Laurentide
Ice Sheet, the two major ice keeps in North America.
And it's thought that the migration came through
that corridor. Well, the thing is that exactly
the same thing happened between 140 ,000 years
ago and 120 ,000 years ago. There was an episode
of global warming, an ice -free corridor opened
up, and the same opportunity to enter the Americas
was there at that period. than it was at the
later period and Tom Demery's point and mine
is that we have to pay much more attention to
that earlier period and that's really why I've
gone ahead and written this book is to try to
put before a broad general audience, hopefully
in language that makes sense, an assembly of
all the latest information that casts doubt on
the story we've been told. Because, my goodness,
if archaeology is wrong about the story of the
peopling of the Americas, if it's radically wrong,
as it now appears to be, then our whole understanding
of human history has to change. It's not just
the history of the Americas. It's the history
of the entire world. It has been... an absolute
article of faith amongst archaeologists that
civilization began in the old world. And indeed,
I have a book in my library called History Begins
at Sumer. And it's by Samuel Noah Kramer, a very
renowned archaeologist. And it's a good book,
actually. But the argument is that this is where
civilization began in the culture that we call
the Sumerians in Mesopotamia between the Tigris
and the Euphrates rivers. And that it began about
6 ,000 years ago. And that civilization is entirely
an invention of the old world. And has nothing
to do with the new world at all because the new
world was populated so late. This has been the
argument, and this is the argument that now radically
and suddenly begins to change, that the Americas,
this enormous landmass, resource -rich, bountiful
in every way, south of Minnesota, south of the
ice cap, vast land areas that are bountiful,
get into Central America, South America, the
Amazon, just huge areas of land that were very,
very... offered great potential for human occupation.
Dogma has said there were no humans there. Now
the first bits of evidence are coming out that
says there were humans there. And if that's the
case, then we must consider the possibility that
the story of civilization might have begun in
the Americas, not in the old world at all. It
might be a new world invention, not an old world
invention. Some of the more fascinating pieces
of evidence in South America have come out recently
about these channels and pathways that they've
found in the Amazon that could not have been
created any other way but by humans absolutely
creating irrigation humans creating like it appears
like grids like a city grid definitely the amazon
is a colossal mystery and it's one of the subjects
that i explore in depth in america before first
of all to give some basic figures the amazon
basin is huge the amazon basin is seven million
square kilometers in area And within it, five
and a half million square kilometers remains
almost entirely unstudied by archaeologists.
And that's the five and a half million square
kilometers that is still covered by dense rainforest.
And to put that into perspective, five and a
half million square kilometers is the size of
the entire Indian subcontinent. So it's like
saying we've done world archaeology, but we've
just ignored India. We've done world archaeology,
but we've just ignored the Amazon. It's the same
argument, 5 .5 million square kilometers. The
view was, again, there was a dogma. There was
a preconception. Human beings couldn't have flourished
in the Amazon. It's not a resource -rich area.
The soils are poor. It's a difficult area, challenging
to get to, very far from the Bering Straits.
So the view was that humans hadn't entered the
Amazon until about 1 ,000 years ago. And then
gradually, little by little, that view has begun
to change. And it's begun to change because of
the tragic clearances of the Amazon, because
the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut
down and turned into soya bean farms and cattle
ranches. And in that cutting down process has
emerged things that shouldn't be there at all.
For example, evidence that large cities flourished
in the Amazon, enormous cities, which were larger.
There was a Spanish explorer who went down the
Amazon River system in 1541 to 1542. He was the
first European to cross the entire length of
South America from west to east along the Amazon.
He reported seeing incredible cities, advanced
arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving
culture. And 100 years later, when other Europeans
got into the Amazon, they couldn't find these
cities. So they said, oh, Francisco Oriana, that
was his name, made it all up. It was just a fantasy.
And then in the last decade as the clearances
of the Amazon have proceeded, we've begun to
see the traces of those cities. What happened
was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into
the Amazon. Smallpox devastated the local population
because there was no immunity to it. There was
a massive die -off. The cities were deserted.
Within 50 years, they were completely overgrown
by the jungle. And that's why they were not seen
by the explorers who came in 100 years later.
But now the jungle is being cleared. Those cities
are emerging. And we can say that a city like
London, which had a population of roughly 50
,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of
that size all over the Amazon. Huge numbers of
them. And a possible... Total population of the
Amazon that exceeded 20 million people. What?
Yes, 20 million. This is the latest evidence
from the Amazon. And then you ask yourself, how
did they do that? How did they feed 20 million
people in the Amazon? Because it's a fact. Rainforest
soils are poor. It's one of the reasons these
soybean farms are a really stupid idea because
once you clear the rainforest, the land is largely
unfertile and you can't grow stuff on it for
very long. So how did they feed all these people?
The answer was they invented a soil. And that
soil has a name. It's called terra preta. Archaeologists
refer to it as Amazonian dark earths or Amazonian
black earth. It's a man -made soil. It's thousands
of years old. It's full of microbes that are
not found in adjoining soil. It's based around
biochar. And you can take a handful of 8 ,000
-year -old terra preta, and you can add it to
barren soil, and that soil will instantly become
fertile. It's highly sought after in the Amazon,
and it explains how they fed these people. There
was science in the Amazon. How did they create
this? Well, this is something that's not understood.
It's still not understood by soil experts to
this day as to how that was done, but it's one
of many intriguing evidences, pieces of evidence
of much higher development in the Amazon that
it has been given credit for and of a kind of
science in the Amazon. Jamie's got an image of
it up there. So this is it? This is terra preta,
yeah. Wow. Exactly. So was that done by burns?
Did they use controlled? They did. One way that
it was achieved was to do wet burning of middens.
They would be burned and smolder. They wouldn't
burn fiercely, which just produces charcoal.
They would burn and smolder. And that, what is
called biochar, would result. And that's part
of the fertility of the soil. But the mystery
is the microbial. content of this soil, which
is completely different from the microbes in
neighboring soils. And that remains unexplained.
So what are the theories? Composting? Some sort
of advanced composting? Some sort of advanced
composting. But again, what has not been explained
is the microbial content of these soils. So there,
first of all, is an issue of how – two things.
How large populations get fed in the Amazon and
– Evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon
that was capable of manipulating the environment
in such a way that it could support large populations
with the invention of terra preta. Secondly,
new evidence previously not recognized. The Amazon
is basically a garden. The Amazon is a man -made
rainforest. There are certain trees like Brazil
nut trees or the ice cream bean tree, which are
food crops, which are very, very valuable. And
they dominate the tree regime in the Amazon.
They're what's referred to as hyperdominant species.
In other words, people living in the Amazon over
thousands of years selected certain trees, which
they then cultivated and grew. So the whole thing
is not. simply a wild pristine rainforest. It's
a very ancient man -made environment. And emerging
from that man -made environment, as well as evidence
of large cities, large populations, and this
mysterious dark earth, are huge geometrical structures.
And again, I go into this at length in America
before because I love this mystery. We have in
the UK structures that are called henges. I live
in the city of Bath and about 30 miles away,
there's a beautiful site called Avebury and another
more famous site called Stonehenge. And what
a henge is, is a ditch which has been dug deep
and then an embankment has been pushed up outside
the ditch. When people first saw these structures,
they wondered if they'd been built for defense.
But then it became obvious they hadn't been built
for defense because if you want to create a moat,
you put it outside your embankment. inside your
embankment so a hinge is an earthwork which consists
of a deep moat with a large embankment outside
it and it can be circular it can be square and
in the uk and other parts of europe it often
contains stone circles megalithic stone circles
as well but the hinge itself is entirely an earthwork
what we find in the amazon are thousands of hinges
that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared
area of the jungle, and others that have been
identified for the first time with LiDAR. LiDAR
technology is being employed in the Amazon. It's
non -destructive. You can see what's under the
trees. What is LiDAR? Light Imaging and Detective
Radar. They bounce laser beams down into the
jungle. It's a whole pattern of them. You need
helicopters, but it doesn't damage the rainforest.
And you can strip away and see what's there.
If this isn't too much of a diversion, let me
give you the example of Guatemala. Guatemala
is a small country, if I remember correctly.
It's not much more than 100 ,000 square kilometers
in size. It is filled with intriguing Mayan ruins.
Everybody has heard of Tikal. What archaeologists
didn't know was that literally within walking
distance of Tikal, surrounding that whole area
were more than 60 ,000 structures that they hadn't
identified. And these have all been identified
by LIDAR in a country that's just 100 ,000 kilometers
in area. So you have to ask yourself, in that
five and a half million square kilometers of
the Amazon, if LiDAR technology could be applied
comprehensively, what would we find beneath there?
And the evidence already is extremely tempting
and extremely... And I'm intrigued by these huge
geometrical figures, which involve primarily
circles and squares. And they are classic hinges
in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded
by huge embankments. They're extremely geometrical.
For example, you can find an octagon surrounding
a square. At a place called Jakosar in the Amazon,
you can find a square. perfectly enclosing a
circle. Now that is an exercise called squaring
the circle that our academics have given to the
Greeks. They said the Greeks were the first people
who performed that exercise. But now we find
in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being
done in the Amazon long before the Greeks. What
are the dates? The earliest dates that have been
found in these sites now are about 3 ,500 years
old. About 3 ,500 years old. But the evidence
is that the sites have been constantly remade.
And what intrigues me... is what remains in that
five and a half million square kilometers that
has not been investigated yet we are just i think
looking at the edges of a mystery the archaeologists
involved who are mainly from finland and also
from brazil feel the same their estimate is that
there are thousands of these structures remaining
in the jungle and they're open as to how old
they may ultimately prove to be. The investigation
needs to be done. But what's fascinating about
them is this very powerful geometry and astronomy.
So a number of the sites are perfectly aligned
to true north, true south, true east, and true
west. I'm not talking about magnetic north. I'm
talking about true astronomical north. To do
that, there's only one way to do it, and that's
with astronomy. So that tells us that astronomers
were at work in the Amazon. The geometry is very
complex and very... precise. That tells us that
people with geometrical skills were at work in
the Amazon. And thirdly, the scale of the sites
of hundreds of meters, gigantic earthworks on
the scale of hundreds of meters, tells us that
this was a highly organized project that was
undertaken on a very large scale by very large
numbers of people. It's a wonderful mystery,
and it deserves much further attention. And yeah,
that's Jakosar, exactly. The squares, squaring
the circles. So you can see the outside embankment,
and then inside Inside it is the square ditch,
and then there's another embankment inside that
and a circle inside that. It's crazy that they
made a road right through that. Well, a modern
road, yeah, you know, because there's no respect
for the ancient world, unfortunately. And there's
another one. Look at that. Wow, that's incredible.
So there are thousands of these things. The stuff
that they found in the Amazon, what imaging technology
were they using to find? Initially, it was entirely
found because areas of the rainforest had been
cleared. Economic interest said, we want to make
a cattle ranch here, or we want to make a soya
bean farm here. clear the rainforest. In the
process of clearing the rainforest, they start
discovering these earthworks that had previously
been completely overgrown by the jungle. Then
the next step was to say, what can we do to find
out more about this? Obviously, they don't want
to destroy more jungle. And luckily, we have
a technology, which is LIDAR, as I mentioned,
which uses radar. And using LIDAR, they've been
able to identify many more of these sites and
then to get to the sites without destroying the
jungle. and to begin excavations on them and
to find that they go back, in the cases of the
ones that have been explored so far, at least
3 ,000 years. This is an intriguing development,
completely unexplained in our understanding of
the Amazon. And what it suggests is a heritage
of extremely ancient knowledge. You don't wake
up one morning and create a perfectly geometrical
square or circular earthwork. perfectly aligned
to true north, south, east and west on an enormous
scale. There has to be a background to that.
There has to be a reason for doing it. And the
evidence is none of these sites were lived in.
There's no habitation refuse found in them whatsoever.
We don't know what they were used for. I make
the case in America before that they're connected
to a system of ideas which is found all around
the world, which is to do with death and the
afterlife destiny of the soul. And I go into
the issue of ayahuasca in this book because,
first of all, ayahuasca is itself another example
of Amazonian science. As you and I and many of
the listeners and viewers know, the active ingredient
of ayahuasca is DMT, dimethyltryptamine. But
dimethyltryptamine is not normally accessible
through the gut. We have to smoke it or vape
it to get that. rocket ship to the other side
of reality. And the journey lasts, what, 10,
12 minutes, not much more than that, and sometimes
quite a lot less. What ayahuasca does is it makes
DMT available through the gut. The reason it's
not available through the gut is because of an
enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase, and
that switches off DMT. on contact the ayahuasca
vine which is one of the two ingredients of the
ayahuasca brew the other ingredient is leaves
that contain DMT the ayahuasca vine contains
a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which switches
off the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT
to be accessed orally which produces a rather
different journey from the smoked or vaped DMT
trip it's a much longer journey it's four or
five hours it allows you to integrate and to
and to interrelate with the strange landscapes
in which you find yourself amongst and the entities
that you encounter. I'm not making any claims
about the reality status of those entities, but
what I am saying, and it's a fact, is that people
who work with DMT and ayahuasca do encounter
what they construe to be entities who communicate
with them intelligently. So somebody in the Amazon,
out of 150 ,000 different species of plants and
trees, selected two that are not psychoactive
on their own, but when put together, create an
extraordinary visionary brew. And ayahuasca means
the vine of the dead. And what it's connected
to in South American religious and spiritual
thinking is what happens to us when we die. And
the Tucano, who are an Amazonian people who work
regularly with ayahuasca, I mean the Tucano actually
will give a teaspoonful of ayahuasca to a newborn
infant. They feel ayahuasca is so important that
there is a hidden realm around us which we are
not normally aware of and we need to be aware
of it. And ayahuasca is an important part of
that. In their ayahuasca journeys, the Tucano
shamans experience visions and they will then
come back to an alert. normal problem -solving
state of consciousness, and they will paint and
depict their visions. And what's intriguing,
and I go into it in the book, is that quite a
number of the Tucano paintings of the other world,
of the afterlife realm, of the entrance to the
other world, are geometrical, and they look exactly
like the geoglyphs. So I'm beginning to wonder
whether these geoglyphs were part of a system
of spiritual ideas concerning what happens to
us after death and what we need to do in this
life to ensure a beneficial outcome. And oddly
enough, that same system of ideas is found in
the Mississippi Valley. In the Amazon, it involves
particularly ayahuasca and the belief that the
ayahuasca journey takes you to the afterlife
realm and a journey along the Milky Way. In the
Mississippi Valley… The mound builder sites up
and down the Mississippi Valley, particularly
Moundville in Alabama, exactly the same system
of religious ideas associated with geometrical
constructions. That on death, the soul, they're
very specific, ascends to the constellation of
Orion, transits from the constellation of Orion
to the Milky Way, makes a journey along the Milky
Way, which they call the path of souls, and encounters
challenges and ordeals where the soul must account
for the life that it has lived. Then we go to
Egypt, and what do we find? The same system of
ideas. The soul must rise up to the constellation
of Orion. There's a narrow shaft cut through
the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza,
which targets directly the lowest of the three
stars of Orion's belt. widely accepted as a star
shaft or a soul shaft. The soul would rise up
through that shaft, get to the constellation
of Orion, which stands by the banks of the Milky
Way. It would then transit to the Milky Way,
which the ancient Egyptians called the winding
waterway. And it would make a journey along the
Milky Way where it would be confronted by challenges
and ordeals. Very similar idea to the Tucano,
very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley.
As far as we know, none of these cultures were
in contact with one another. Either we're dealing
with a huge, unbelievable... extraordinarily
detailed coincidence involving architecture and
ideas, or we're looking at the legacy that was
inherited in all of these different places from
a remote common ancestor. And I believe that
that's what we're looking at. What do we think
the people from the ancient Mississippi Valley,
that culture, what do we think they were using
if they weren't using ayahuasca? Or do we think
that's what they were using? Well, that's an
interesting... question whether visionary substances
are the only way to get into altered states of
consciousness and I would say they are definitely
not of course there are visionary substances
which are used in Native American vision quests
I've had the privilege of peyote ceremony uh
with the native american church um i've never
done that what is that like i loved it actually
i thought i thought it was i thought it was amazing
it it doesn't overpower you in the way that dmt
or ayahuasca does uh it's it's it's much gentler
it's much more you feel much more integrated
and connected with with with nature your thought
processes are quite are quite clear it felt it
felt just like a very beautiful and healing experience
and i love the ceremony that i'm in i'm inside
a teepee with with 30 or 40 other people and
that there are there are specific roles that
are assigned to those different individuals one
will keep the door another will be responsible
for the fire which is a work of art in itself
just gazing into that fire and the glowing the
glowing embers is enough to induce an altered
state of consciousness on its own incredible
drumming which which drives your state of consciousness
into a kind of peak This is a technology for
accessing other levels of experience and other
levels of reality. And it's clear that the Native
Americans had a number of advanced technologies
in this area. The Sundance doesn't use a substance,
but it uses austerity. It uses pain to drive
an altered state of consciousness. The objective
in every case seems to be let's. just for a while,
get ourselves out of the narrow, rigid frame
of the alert, problem -solving state of consciousness.
We all need that. It's incredibly useful. Hunter
-gatherers need it just as much as people in
cities need it. But it's not the only state of
consciousness available to human beings. And
maybe that's one of the big mistakes that we're
making in our culture and was not made in shamanistic
societies. That is a really interesting breakdown
that maybe that is one of the big mistakes we're
making in our culture. When people point to the
problems that we have in this country, one of
the problems we have is our inability to connect
with each other or to recognize that we're all
sharing this space and time together and instead
wanting to uphold our own religious or ideological
ideas as being the only one way to get going.
Yeah. The only one way to get through. And one
of the things that I've found. These psychedelic
experiences, it really makes ideologies seem,
if not preposterous, at the very least insignificant
in comparison to human experiences. The experience
of camaraderie and friendship and love, you realize,
oh, this is what's important. This is what it's
really about. Not enforcing your ideas or pushing
them on other people and forcing people to behave
the way you behave, but instead, love. religious
ideas which cause so much division, so much chaos,
so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion
in the world today. Is it really what we want
to do as human beings? Simply to accept a package
of ideas that were believed in? by our ancestors,
to accept them whole, without question, as absolute
fact, which we regard as such authoritative fact
that in some cases we're willing to be deeply
unpleasant to people who hold different views
or perhaps even kill them. We've had this recent
event in Sri Lanka, primarily a religiously motivated
terrorist event. It happens all over the world.
People feel so convinced. that the inherited
package of ideas that they had nothing to do
with creating and that they have never questioned,
they're so convinced that those ideas are right
that in extreme cases they're actually prepared
to kill other human beings who hold different
ideas. Are they so insecure in their own beliefs
that they're prepared to go to that level of
actually murdering another human being? They're
so threatened by the other beliefs that other
human beings hold. So it's an abnegation of our
responsibility as human beings. should be questioning
things. We should not be accepting packages of
ideas intact, fully formed, and using them to
drive the way we behave towards one another.
That was part of the human story, but we need
to move on from that. It's a very dangerous situation
in a very complex modern world with billions
of human beings on the planet to have these kind
of energies being generated where certain groups
of people are saying, we are absolutely right,
and you are absolutely wrong. We are superior.
You are inferior. This is a very, very dangerous
path. that we're on and it needs to be changed.
Personally, I know this is not a comment that
will go down well with many people, but I am
strongly opposed to nationalism. I don't see
any virtue in nationalism. It is an accident
of birth, which nation you were born in. It was
nothing that you did for your own merit. You
didn't earn that. You were born by accident in
a particular nation. Why should we automatically
feel that other people who were born by accident
in that particular nation have something special
in common with us and that we together are a
group who are much more important than other
groups of people? I've been privileged to spend
my life traveling around the world. living with
communities all over the world. And one thing
that really comes across to me strongly, it should
be a cliche, and yet it's not, is that we are
all one family, that humans are intimately interconnected
all around the world, that you can go to the
remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the
same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams that
we have in industrialized cities shared by the
hunter -gatherers in the middle of the Amazon.
Our similarities as human beings and what we
share in common at the emotional level and the
level of love and at the level of heart are far
more important than our differences that are
defined by the nation or the political group
in which we grew up in. And when I say I'm against
nationalism, I need also to make clear that does
not mean, and I hope I'm not taken out of context
by others who are listening to this, that does
not mean I'm in favor. of world government. I
detest governments. That's another thing we need
to grow out of. We don't need governments anymore.
If we have them, they should have a very minimal
role in our society. I think it's possible for
the human race to relate as one family without
leaders and governments who are exploiting the
worst aspects of our character, the lowest common
denominator of our society, deliberately encouraging
fears and hatreds and suspicion. What responsible
leaders should be doing is encouraging love and
unity. And their failure to do that, in my view,
disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely.
And that's why I've often said I would like to
see a situation in which no head of state can
be appointed to that position unless he or she
has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca. That
would be the condition. Don't even bother applying
for the job. if you haven't done this. And we
have to be there where you have it. And we have
to be. We want to see that you're drinking every
drop. And we want an experienced shaman present
who's really going to guide you through the journey.
And I suspect that that would be a transformative
experience for many of our political class and
that they would start to question why they do
what they do, why they exploit fears in order
to magnify their own position. They'd start to
question that and to wonder about a different
destiny for humanity. But that's a dream. I guess
it's not going to happen. It's very, very, very
well said and i couldn't agree more my hope is
that what you were saying and what we were discussing
earlier about how the internet has sort of eroded
our faith in many institutions as being the only
or the primary source of knowledge that i hope
that that takes place globally in terms of the
way we view government yeah and that we do and
that your idea of like i love what america stands
for and what america stands for is kind of a
nation that's where people go to. This is one
of the more insidious problems with this idea
of building walls and keeping people out and
making it incredibly difficult to get here. The
reason why I'm here is because it was pretty
easy to get here. That's why I'm here. That's
the essence of America. A free and open society.
Come here and do better. That's the whole idea
behind it. I would hope that this idea of being
able to just... If you want to do better, you
can anywhere in the world. This could eventually
spread out. This is my hope. I believe it can
spread out. And I see many signs of hope in America.
America has become a big part of my life, not
just because I wrote this book, but because I
have children who are now living in America.
I have a son and daughter -in -law who live in
L .A. I have another son and daughter -in -law
who live in Boston. I'm British, but America
has become a very central part of my life, and
it's a fascinating and amazing country, and it's
been my privilege to travel. thousands of miles
across America, across many, many, many different
states. And I love this country. It's an amazing
place. Only in America could we see happening
what has happened with cannabis. You know, the
fact that at a local level, individuals have
got together, mobilized petitions, organized
votes, and changed the law. changed the law,
literally stuck a finger up at central government
and said, fuck off. This is none of your business.
What I do with my consciousness in the inner
sanctum of my own life is not the business of
the state. That's a very American feeling. It's
something that you don't find often in other
countries where the state is granted much more.
power and much more authority than it perhaps
should be americans are naturally questioning
of government authority and that has that is
what has led to the uh legalization increasing
legalization of cannabis which is going to change
the world in lots of ways but then ironically
at the same time see the thing about democracies
is that in order to um get things done in a democracy,
you need to persuade people of your point of
view. So information becomes very important in
democracies. And information can be abused. People
can be misled with information. They can be told
that what they're receiving is the truth, whereas
in fact, it's not the truth. And you can end
up with a kind of dictatorship that the people
have given their assent to on the basis of false
information. And frankly, I'd rather have a real
dictatorship, which is out in the open and clear,
rather than one that has been subtly manipulated
into position through manipulating the views
of the voters. and remain enormously encouraged
by America. It may seem like a trivial issue,
but the fact that state by state cannabis is
being legalized and that is resulting from a
grassroots movement, that this enormous change
has been made. It's ironic, it's strange that
at the federal level, even though what, eight
states now totally legal for recreational, 23,
24 states legal for medical use, that at the
federal level, it's still a schedule one controlled
drug. This is a huge state of dissonance that
exists. And America is going to have to put it
right. What it says to me is that people can
change things. People can get together at the
local level and they can make a better world
because there's no doubt that the cannabis laws
were vicious and wrong and cruel and evil and
ruined people's lives for decades. And it's people
who've changed that. It's not government who's
changed that. It's the people at the grassroots
level. America is a country where that can happen.
I remain encouraged about the role of the American
people, while often in despair about the role
of the American state. How many people who are
white people have profited off of this and how
many people are still in jail for crimes that
they committed, you know, air quote crimes that
are no longer crimes. That are no longer crimes.
Yeah. And this is ridiculous. These records should
be expunged. They should be completely expunged.
I see that California has made some steps in
that direction. There has been some expunging
of records. Well, we can only hope that also
what opens up next is. Psilocybin is now going
to be on the ballot. Absolutely. And when that
opens up, I mean, you really think marijuana
is a gateway drug? Well, guess what? It is if
psilocybin gets in. Yes. Because psilocybin can
legitimately change the world. It certainly can.
I mean, I think marijuana can change the world,
and I really do think that cannabis is changing
people's perceptions and making people more calm
and friendly. And even what they talk about with
paranoia, I welcome that. And the reason why
I welcome that is I think people are entirely
too cocky. Yeah. The life we live is bizarre
as you could ever imagine in a book. And we're
just accustomed to it because it's our day -to
-day existence. Take it all for granted. Yeah.
Marijuana removes those blinders. It does. And
it really makes you understand that this is a
strange, strange life. A lot of these pitfalls
and problems that we have in our society are
due to fear. And they're due to ignorance. And
they're due to this lack of connection with each
other. And cannabis and many of these other psychedelic
drugs. They encourage this connection with each
other, which is, I think, what we need. It's
certainly what we need. And it's an aberration
in human culture that we've created a society
that demonized these substances and made them
illegal. It's a relatively recent thing. It's
really just the last hundred years. It's a tiny
part of the human story. And yet we're so arrogant
as a society that we set aside thousands of years
of human tradition and experience and wisdom
working with the plant medicines. Set it aside,
turn them into criminal substances and say we
know everything. What a huge and stupid mistake
that is on cannabis as a quote -unquote gateway
drug. It absolutely is in this sense that the
legalization of cannabis is going to open the
doors, as you say, to the legalization of psychedelics.
Because what's happening is that the population
is completely waking up to the fact that they
have been bullshitted and lied to about cannabis
for the best part of a century. And once that
dawns on people, the realization at a direct
personal level, here's this herb I love, I have
been lied to. systematically misinformed by central
government about this about this herb that leads
to questioning of everything that central government
does and so in that sense it is a gateway to
a questioning society the psychedelics are different
in that in that psilocybin actually does lead
you to question stuff. It leads you to really
ask questions about everything, about your role
in the world, about you as a person, about how
you relate to other people, and about the whole
system on this planet and the beautiful, gorgeous
planet that we have and what we're doing to it.
enters enters awareness so it erodes confidence
and authority and it also erodes confidence and
authority that doesn't have experiences that
you've experienced exactly that's the part of
the problem is that these people that are holding
people back from these psychedelic experiences
they've never had them they've never had they
don't even know what they're rallying they're
coming to it from a place of fear and prejudice
uh they're simply accepting stuff that they've
been told without really thinking it through
and and and examining it and again it's a failure
of of what human beings should should be doing.
We have to get rid of this fear. And ironically,
it's bad for them as well. It's bad for the people
that are actually encouraging these laws to be
enforced. Yes. It's bad for the whole of society
because it is healthy for a society where adults
become self -realized individuals, where they
make their own responsible choices about their
own lives, where they don't say, oh, government
must make this choice for me. That's the next
step for humanity. We need to start becoming
our own leaders and making our own choices. And
that is what's being revealed now that we're
getting to the skull beneath the smile of the
war on drugs. We're realizing that it's part
of a big program of lying that has been about...
keeping people's minds closed down, not wanting
free thinking. I've made this point several times,
but our society is not against altered states
of consciousness as such. Our society will allow
big pharma to make billions of dollars with drugs
that alter consciousness like Seroxat and Prozac
antidepressants, which in my opinion, having
had some experience of them, are amongst the
most horrible drugs. They are very harmful, very
dangerous drugs, but they're completely legal
and they're encouraged with our system. Likewise,
alcohol, very dangerous drug, causes fights,
causes drunk driving accidents, leads to cirrhosis
of the liver, completely legal and open. Our
society is not against altered states of consciousness.
As such, it's against particular kinds of altered
states of consciousness that lead to questioning
of the existing control system. That's what's
going on here. Hear, hear. Well said. And as
you know, I have my own story with cannabis.
Yes, well, you and I had a moment. We had a moment,
which was quite a life -changing moment for me,
because if I may just rehearse a little bit of
this for the audience. In 2011, I had a series
of ayahuasca sessions. in which it was shown
to me that I was using cannabis completely wrong,
that it had become a dominant force in my life,
that it was making me, you're speaking about
paranoia, and I agree with you, paranoia is a
useful thing, if only to overcome it, that it
was making me paranoid, that it was making me
suspicious, that I approached everybody around
me in a state of suspicion. And I was shown this
by ayahuasca, and given a very strong message,
you need to quit cannabis. What I didn't realize
at the time is that the problem was not cannabis.
The problem was me, that I needed to fix those
aspects of myself before I could have a proper
relationship with cannabis. So after that ayahuasca
session, having smoked cannabis for decades,
literally 16 hours a day, seven days a week,
I quit. I quit for three years. And then I'm
on your show. And we're sitting opposite one
another as we are now. And you asked me a question.
are you still off the cannabis? And I say, well,
I'm thinking of dipping my toes back in the water,
at which point you produce a joint and we smoke
it together. First of all, after three years,
your tolerance is way down on cannabis. So I
got really stoned. I did listen to that interview
back and somehow I held it together. Oh, you
held it together brilliantly. You opened up and
it was like a wave of information came pouring
out of you. It was wonderful to watch. It was
a liberation for me. And what it said to me is,
It's time to go back to cannabis, but perhaps
in a different way. I need a different relationship
with this amazing medicine. And if I can forge
that, if I can make that different relationship
happen, then it can be a constructive and positive
part of my life. And I can say definitely that
that has been the case. That's excellent. And
so it's all thanks to you, Joe. I probably would
still be off cannabis if it hadn't been for that
joint. Well, I think people can develop these
patterns of behavior that are destructive with
anything, whether it's with alcohol or cannabis.
Yes. sex or anything people get they get in ruts
yeah and you know it doesn't mean that the cannabis
is bad this means that you are on a bad mental
path yes you know exactly and i mean i'm not
encouraging it for everybody because some people
genuinely biologically doesn't jive with them
yeah yeah But the fundamental thing is we as
adult human beings need to take responsibility
for our own lives and our own decisions. And
we need not hand that responsibility over to
governmental institutions, especially when it
concerns something as intimate and personal as
our consciousness. And my view is the ancient
world had the right attitude to this kind of
thing. And the modern world does not. And that
we can sit down and learn a lot from the ancient
world. You know, Hancock, you've been arguing
that there's been a lost civilization in the
human story. But what sort of civilization? Do
you think it was? Well, one of the things I think
is it was a civilization that used psychedelics.
I think it was a civilization that emerged from
shamanism but did not stay at the hunter -gatherer
stage but that took the essence of shamanism
and integrated it into a very different kind
of civilization from our own which pursued things
in different ways. A lot of archaeologists have
said to me, but we don't find any plastic bottles
from the Ice Age. That means there was no advanced
civilization during the Ice Age. Well, hang on.
Maybe an advanced civilization might have decided
never to... to get involved in plastic in the
first place. Maybe there would have been a clear
choice not to make plastic. Maybe they did things
in completely different ways. Maybe they cultivated
powers of the human mind that we dismiss and
regard as completely unimportant. You know, woo
-woo. Yeah, this is the thoughts about Egypt,
correct? It's about Egypt and about other things.
I mean, the specific example I give is above
the king's chamber. in the Great Pyramid are
five further chambers. And these chambers are
roofed and floored with granite beams that weigh
about 70 tons each. And there are hundreds of
them. And these 70 -ton granite beams, which
to put in context, a 70 -ton beam is equivalent
in weight to 35 large SUVs. These 70 -ton granite
beams have been elevated to a height of more
than 350 feet above the ground and carefully
and precisely placed in position. Very hard for
archaeologists to explain how that was done using
purely leverage and mechanical advantage. You
can say, oh, perhaps they built a ramp and hauled
the stones up the ramp. But then you have to
confront basic laws of physics. You can't haul
a stone weighing tens of tons up a slope that
exceeds 10 degrees. Then you start doing the
calculation. How long a ramp do I need with a
10 degree slope to get to 350 feet above the
ground? And the answer is you need a fucking
long ramp, which should still be there. Because
it couldn't have been a sand ramp. It would have
collapsed under the weight of those stones. It
had to be as massive as the pyramid itself. So
this begins to seem like an absurd idea, the
idea that is foisted on us by archaeology. Maybe
the idea that they regard as absurd, namely that
psychic. powers were cultivated by ancient civilizations
that they could use powers of the human mind
that we have allowed to lapse maybe that idea
deserves Further consideration. We have gone
down a path of leverage and mechanical advantage.
We're used to relying on machines. But we hear
anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic
powers, who can move things with their minds,
of people who have telepathic powers. And our
automatic reaction is to just dismiss all of
that because science says it's impossible. Because
science regards consciousness as local to the
brain and doesn't see how it can exert itself
outside. of that but maybe we should open up
to those possibilities that we're dealing with
a very different kind of culture that used techniques
that we have allowed to lapse and maybe we could
wake those techniques up again maybe the ability
of human beings to do almost superhuman things
is resident within all of us but sleeping Well,
it's pure speculation that they used some sort
of a telekinetic power, but it's absolute that
they did something that we don't understand.
If you think about the distance between us and
the construction, just the modern accepted construction
dates of the Great Pyramid, it's more than 5
,000 years ago or close to 5 ,000 years ago.
The Great Pyramid is supposed to be about 4 ,500
years old, yeah. That's really old. It's incredibly
old, yeah. To think that someone back then could
do something that would perplex us today with
modern machinery. Yeah. And that somehow or another
they figured this out. It's almost like what
they had done was leave behind something that
was so stupendous, so monstrously impressive
that it would transcend time. And that you would
have to look at it even thousands and thousands
of years later and say, hey, this defies conventional
explanation. This is not as simple. And I've
seen some of the conventional explanations of
the construction of the pyramid. conveniently
neglect those chambers above the king's chamber
they do they conveniently neglect a lot of those
massive stones yeah and it's because it's it's
one of those things you just go oh i don't know
What is this, Jamie? There are the chambers above
the king's chambers, and each one of those floors
consists of a row of 70 -ton granite blocks that
have been raised 350 feet above the ground, and
not only that, but brought from Aswan in the
south of Egypt, 500 kilometers south of the Great
Pyramid. If there's any time in history where
you could go in a time machine and go back and
observe, would that be the time? I am just...
completely fascinated by the Ice Age at the moment.
If you had one shot to go back and see what it
was like in some place, you wouldn't go to the
construction of the Great Pyramids? I think right
now where I'd go is 12 ,800 years ago in the
beginning of the Younger Dryas. Ah, just to see.
Because I think that's where the whole human
story changes. I think that's where we change
tracks from one path. to another path and following
those cataclysmic events of the Younger Dryas
between 12 ,800 and 11 ,600 years ago, following
those, the signs of civilization that we see
emerging are not the beginnings of civilization.
They're a restarting of civilization that had
existed before the cataclysm. And for that reason,
I would... I would like to be present during
that cataclysmic event, if only to satisfy myself
that it was indeed a comet. You see, the one
thing there's no dispute about anymore is that
the Younger Dryas was a cataclysm. You can't
argue about that. The megafauna that die off,
the disruption of human activity that takes place
at that time, the huge climate changes, this
was a cataclysm by any standards. Where the argument
still goes on is what caused the cataclysm. I
vote strongly for... Comet, multiple fragments
of a comet hitting the North American ice cap
and hitting Greenland as well. But there are
other researchers in the field, like my colleague
Robert Shock, who thinks that the sun is more
involved. This is healthy. This is very, very
healthy, that we should be approaching this problem
from many different perspectives and trying to
figure out what the fuck caused this extraordinary
event. occurs at a pivotal moment in the human
story. The end of the Stone Age, the beginning
of the Mesolithic, the end of the Ice Age, the
beginning of the current age of the Earth. And
suddenly we see these signs of civilization appearing.
And in places like Gobekli Tepe, those signs
already include highly sophisticated knowledge.
And that's why I feel we really need to investigate
the Amazon. There are three places in the world
which are really lacking in the investigation
right now. One of them is the Amazon, five and
a half million square kilometers, very little
archaeology done. Another is the Sahara Desert.
The Sahara Desert, tough place to work. I can
understand why there's little archaeology done
there. But the Sahara Desert was green during
the Ice Age. It had a completely different climate
regime. We should consider the possibility that
missing parts of the human story are there. And
then under the continental shelves because sea
level rose 400 feet. These are three domains
that archaeology has. largely not investigated
and and it is largely not done so they say well
why would we spend the money on marine archaeology
it's much better to spend it on looking for shipwrecks
rather than looking for signs of a lost civilization
because we archaeologists know there was no lost
civilization so that's the argument for the resources
there and and the same the same with the amazon
and the same with the with with the sahara desert
places in the very places in the world that those
amongst us who are charged with the responsibility
of interpreting the past have not looked at are
the very places we should be looking at. I had
a thought once while I was under the influence,
and it was a thought that one day computational
powers will reach a point where they will be
able to take into consideration all of the objects
on Earth and what we know about the history.
And vividly recreate the past through computation
to the point where you could actually know who
did what, when people did things. And that, I
mean, I don't even know if this would be physical.
Today, certainly not be possible. But with the
exponential increase in computational power and
technology and innovation that one day we'll
reach a point where you'll be able to watch.
You'll be able to see what happened. And they'll
be able to recreate what happened. Exactly. And
that this would be something that would be –
it's impossible for us to imagine that someone
would be able to do that right now. Yeah. But
that one day with technology, as it gets more
and more advanced, we will reach some sort of
an innovation or some sort of an invention that
will allow us to go back and see, literally see
what happened, how things were done. Technology
is changing our whole understanding of the past
and what you're envisaging is perfectly possible.
We will come to a time if… 100 years, 500 years.
Perhaps less. If we don't first destroy ourselves
entirely as a civilization, we will come to a
time where our cleverness and our techniques
will allow a much wider opening up of the past
than has presently happened. But it is already
happening. One of the areas of science that I
go into in America before is genetics and DNA.
This is an area of science that was not... much
informing archaeology until about the 1990s.
But since the 2000s has become very important
in archaeology because the technology has been
developed where ancient DNA can be extracted
and tested and you can actually genotype an entire
individual from DNA that may be 15, 20 ,000 years
old. And this... new technology of genome sequencing
and DNA is another factor that is raising huge
question marks over the past of the Americas.
And one of the issues I go into in this book
is the presence in the Amazon rainforest of...
A very specific, clearly identifiable pattern
of DNA, which is only found in one other place
in the world, and that is in Australasia, in
Papua New Guinea and amongst Australian Aborigines.
It's Australasian DNA. In South America? Not
only in South America, but in the depths. of
the Amazon rainforest amongst tribes who have
only been contacted in the last 20 or 30 years.
And furthermore, although skeletal remains are
rare... It has been found in ancient skeletal
remains that are close to 11 ,000 years old in
the Amazon. So that tells us that this DNA signal
has been in the Amazon for at least 11 ,000 years.
The geneticists think that it came to the Amazon
during the last ice age. And this raises a huge
mystery because the peopling of the Americas
is supposed to have occurred. from Siberia, across
the Bering Straits, down through that ice -free
corridor into North America, down through North
America, into South America, into Central America,
and finally into South America. If that was the
whole story, then we would find this DNA signal
in North America and in Central America. We would
not find it only in the Amazon. And I talked
to some of the leading geneticists about this,
specifically Professor S .K. Willislev at the
University of Copenhagen, who's been the lead
author in a number of major studies of ancient
DNA. And I asked him, what do you make of this
Australasian DNA in the Amazon? And he said,
honestly, we don't have a proper explanation
for it at the moment. But what he did say is
that the most… parsimonious explanation he used
that specific word the most parsimonious explanation
is that a group of people during the ice age
crossed the pacific ocean and ended up in South
America and settled in the Amazon and brought
their DNA with them. That would account perfectly
for the DNA data. And when a scientist says the
most parsimonious explanation, what that scientist
is saying is he likes that explanation, that
it's a simple, direct, clear explanation of the
DNA mystery. But then he added, however, it doesn't
make practical sense. And I asked him, well,
why doesn't it make practical sense? And he said,
because the archaeologists... tell me that no
human population was capable of crossing the
pacific ocean during the ice age at which point
it was natural for me to say do you really trust
the archaeologists and he said well in science
we do trust the work of other scientists we don't
really question it we don't really investigate
it that's their side of the their side of the
business um and and my my view is that that is
rather than Rather than taking this weird anomalous
Australasian DNA signal in the heart of the Amazon
as something to be explained away and as something
to be… For it to be denied that it could be connected
to a voyage across the Pacific Ocean. Maybe it's
the first compelling evidence that voyages were
taking place across the Pacific Ocean during
the Ice Age. And maybe we should be opening up
that whole issue for exploration. And again,
I think a lost civilization is the best answer.
And that near the end of the Ice Age. When the
Younger Dryas cataclysm unfolds, it's not an
overnight thing. It's very bad 12 ,800 years
ago. There's about 1 ,200 years of horror. I
don't think the civilization went down in a single
day and night. I think there were survivors.
I think bits of it were left. I think their project
was to restart civilization. And I suggest very
strongly that where they tried to mount that
project was amongst the hunter -gatherers who
coexisted in the world with them. At that time,
we ourselves are an advanced civilization. At
least that's what we call ourselves. And we coexist
in the world with hunter -gatherers. It's not
an odd idea that an advanced civilization and
hunter -gatherers should coexist. And there is
separation between us and the Amazonian hunter
-gatherers. There are tribes in the Amazon that
are uncontacted and that we don't know even exist.
If a catastrophe on the level of the Younger
Dryas were to occur today, I don't think that
our civilization would make it through. We are
the spoiled children of the earth. We are just
used to having everything laid on. You know,
the supermarket shelves are groaning with food.
We can get food delivered to our homes. We have
roofs over our head. We have shelters. We have
clothing. Everything is taken for granted. I
guess you're an exception, but very few people
in modern Western culture know how to survive.
They don't have survival skills. They don't know
how to hunt. They don't know how to gather. They
don't know how to grow crops because they've
handed that responsibility over to others. We
live in a society that's highly segmented and
specialized and different people specialize in
different things, but nobody has the vast general
survival skill that a hunter -gatherer has. So
in a global cataclysm, actually, at first counterintuitively,
the people who would survive it would be. the
hunter -gatherers. And an advanced civilization
would be smart if they were survivors to seek
refuge amongst hunter -gatherers to make that
the place where they might try to restart their
civilization. And that's why I think that this
Australasian DNA signal in the Amazon may be
part of the evidence for a sort of outreach effort
that was being made by a lost civilization seeing
the disaster coming down on it and realizing
that something needed to be done. It's fascinating
to me that the geneticists would rely on the
archaeologists being that the geneticists have
the actual DNA they can examine where the archaeologists
are piecing things together. Little tiny bits
of information over the entire landscape and
then you consider how much information they don't
have access to that's in the ground. Exactly.
There's so much. I strongly resist the idea that
archaeology is a science. I don't think it should
be described as a science. What do you think
it should be described as? It's more like a kind
of It's an attempt to interpret the past based
on rather... flimsy and limited evidence. And
what you find in that interpretation is that
the preconceptions of the individuals involved
are being imposed upon the evidence, which then
turns out to support their preconceptions. And
that's not a scientific way of doing things.
A scientific way of doing things is testing,
testing hypotheses and seeking to falsify them
and seeing if they work out. So the problem is
drawing these conclusions and then being too
rigid with these conclusions upon further evidence.
That's my view. has been much too rigid and that
there's a climate of fear in archaeology. I don't
mean to pick particularly on archaeologists here.
I think this is generally true across other disciplines
as well. These days, academics are driven by
the need to publish research papers. That's what
they build their careers on. If they can get
a paper on their bit of research published in
Nature or the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, etc., that's good for their careers.
But then you confront the gatekeepers in those
publications who regard any archaeological idea
that is not part of the mainstream accepted consensus
with great suspicion and are most reluctant to…
you know, to publish that information. Now, what
is the mainstream... When archaeologists talk
about seafaring humans, what do they date that
to? Well, the great seafaring adventure that
is accepted by archaeology is called the Polynesian
expansion. And it's a remarkable story. And that
occurs roughly 3 ,000 to 3 ,500 years ago. And
those Polynesians were amazing ocean navigators.
They could cross distances of thousands of kilometers.
pinpoint accuracy I mean it's not an accident
that the Polynesians found Easter Island finding
Easter Island is a really challenging project
Easter Island is 2 ,000 miles from the coast
of South America. It's 2 ,000 miles from the
nearest other island, which is Tahiti. It's just
a little speck in the middle of the ocean, but
the Polynesians found it and settled there and
appear to have brought a reproductively viable
population there and appear to have made voyages
back and forth. But that was 3 ,000 to 3 ,500
years ago. That was not 12 ,800 years ago. And
this is where archaeology's adamant position
that ocean voyaging, was begun by the Polynesians
and that there was no major ocean voyages before
that, I think needs to be strongly questioned
and it needs to be strongly questioned in the
light of this DNA evidence from the Amazon rather
than rejecting the evidence and attempts should
be made to consider what that might mean. Well,
it's interesting because we know that the Egyptians
had boats. Yeah. And so, I mean, if there were
boats 4 ,500 years ago, why do we think that
they didn't try them out in the ocean? That doesn't
make any sense, especially if they existed a
thousand years prior, which is also possible.
Archaeologists wouldn't argue that the Egyptians
had boats, but that is still within the framework
of accepted history. It's the notion of a global
navigating culture in the Ice Age that archaeologists
can't swallow. it's a subject that I've kept
on coming up against over a number of years I
think the best evidence for it is ancient maps
which show the world as it looked during the
last ice age. I first explored this in Fingerprints
of the Gods, and I've touched on the mystery
again. And I have an appendix on the subject
in this book, because I think these are very
important. We're talking about maps that were
drawn roughly between the 1300s and the 1700s.
In other words, in relatively recent history.
However, these maps were largely based on much
older source maps, which they copied. And we
can say that. For sure, because one of the famous
maps is the Piri Reis map, which was created
by a Turkish admiral called Piri Reis in the
year 1513. Actually, only a corner of his map
has survived. It was originally a world map.
We now just have a bit that shows the east coast
of South America and North America and the west
coast of Africa. Piri Reis writes in that map
that it is in his own handwriting that he based
it on more than 100 older source maps, some of
which had come. from the Library of Alexandria.
In other words, when the Library of Alexandria
had been destroyed in the 4th century AD or whenever
it was, some of its contents had been rescued
and brought to Constantinople, which became the
Turkish capital, and Piri Reis had access to
those maps, and he incorporated information from
those maps on his maps, as well as incorporating
more recent navigational information. And this
is one of a whole category of maps which are
extremely hard to explain. all of them based
on older source maps now lost, all of them incorporating
extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes.
Latitude is not that difficult a technological
feat, but longitude is a difficult technological
feat. Longitude... involves a chronometer. It
involves knowing the time at the place you began
your voyage and the local noon as well and calculating
the difference between them. You need a chronometer
that will keep accurate time at sea with the
motions of a ship. And it's just a plain fact
that our civilization did not invent such a chronometer
until the late 18th century. Before that, we
didn't know what longitude we were at. And ships
were constantly sailing unexpectedly into coastlines
that they thought were hundreds of miles further
away. So So the discovery of the technique to
do longitude was a major civilizational advance.
Its presence in maps based on much older source
maps that actually show the world as it looks
during the last ice age suggests that somebody
during the last ice age was mapping the world
and had mastered the technique of calculating
longitude. Classic example of these maps, and
I make a point of this, is what's called the
Pinkerton world map. which was drawn in the year
1818, and it was based on the latest navigational
information at that time. I reproduce that map
in the book. What's missing from the map, entirely
missing, is Antarctica. There's just a hole at
the bottom of the world. There's nothing there.
And the reason there's nothing there, there's
another Pinkerton map that shows that. The reason
that you need to find one that's centered on
Antarctica. The reason that Antarctica is not
there is that our civilization hadn't discovered
Antarctica in 1818. So they couldn't authentically
put it on a map in 1818. Actually, we discovered
it in 1819. And that's when it starts appearing
on modern maps. The problem is that Antarctica
appears repeatedly. on these much older maps.
And it appears in the right place and a bit bigger
than it is today, but very much as it looked
during the last ice age. So what all of this
suggests to me is that the world was mapped and
explored by a global seafaring culture with a
level of technology that was at least equivalent
to ours at the end of the 18th century during
the ice age. Wasn't there also a map of Greenland
that showed it underneath the ice? Yes, there
are. And another intriguing thing I mentioned
I mentioned the Piri Reis map just now. Shown
on the Piri Reis map lying off the east coast
of North America is a large island with a row
of megaliths, like a road of megaliths, running
up the middle of it. That island is in the exact
place of the Grand Bahama banks. Is it on? Is
it on this one? Yeah, it is. But can I point
it out to you? Sure, sure. It's there. Okay,
this thing. That one. Okay. Right here. That's
great that you can bring this up, Jeremy. That's
really good. So this island is sitting there
off the southeast coast of North America. Look
at the way they used to draw things back then,
too. And what you see running down the middle
of it is this road -like feature of megaliths.
Yes, I see. Right there, yeah. These here. Now,
the thing is... It was a long period of my life
when I did a lot of scuba diving and I was looking
at underwater structures. And one of the sites
I dived on was the Bimini Road, which is in the
Grand Bahama Banks. And the Bimini Road is exactly
where that island is. And here's the issue. I
don't care whether the Bimini Road is natural
or man -made. For me, the mystery is that it
is shown above water on that map. And the last
time it was above water was thousands and thousands
of years ago. So for me, this is all evidence
that we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that
our ancestors had achieved a level of technology
where they could explore and map the world's
oceans. We shouldn't dismiss that. There it is
right there. So we don't know what those stones
are or how they were created. Boy, do they look
artificial. That's Yonaguni in Japan we're looking
at now. Go back to that image, Jimmy, the last
image that we were just looking at. Look at that.
I mean, that looks so man -made. And you can
see that it's rather like the pattern that's
shown on the island in the map. How deep is that
today? Oh, it's not very deep. It's about 20
feet. But we think that that was above water
at some point in history? It was definitely above
water during the last ice age. When it finally
went underwater may have been as late as 8 ,000
or 9 ,000 years ago. Is there anything else compelling
that's in the immediate area that seems to indicate
that there was some sort of a man -made structure?
Well, nobody's looked for it. And the whole effort
of archaeology has been to dismiss the significance
of the Bimini Road. How would they dismiss that?
Well, they say it's totally natural. Come on!
Is it? Go back to that image again. This is the
argument. Go back to that image that we just
saw. Are you sure? As somebody who spent a lot
of time diving on the Bimini Road, I can tell
you I absolutely do not think it's natural. I
think it's a man -made structure. But the argument
is that it's a kind of beach rock that forms
in these blocky formations. Does it? Yes, beach
rock does form in blocky formations. But here
I believe that the beach rock has been used as
a construction material. But I repeat. The key
issue is not whether the Bimini Road is man -made
or not. The key issue is that it features on
a map above water. And that is a dating project.
That tells us that somebody was mapping that
bit of the world when it was above water. And
that takes us back a very long way into the past.
The one that you just pulled up. Yeah, look at
that one. That's a stunning place. It's an amazing
sight. It's just like the odds of that being
in that order with those uniformly sized rocks.
How long is that? Oh, hundreds of feet. It's
actually shaped like the letter J. It's a giant
underwater structure. It's really an enormous
thing and very beautiful to dive on. And there's
lots of very gentle, sweet nurse sharks down
there that you can play with. So that looks much
more like random. That's more random. And bits
of it do look more random. And bits of it look
highly constructed. I would not seek to claim
that the Bimini Road is absolutely man -made.
My claim about the Bimini Road is it's really
fucking weird that it appears. on a map above
water, a map that was drawn in 1513 based on
older source maps. Now, when they found that
ancient Greek computer thing, what is that called?
The Antikythera Mechanism. Yes. Again, that...
testifies to a lost navigational skill that we
have not taken account of before. Incredibly
complex. And it took a long time for them to
figure out what that even is. What do they think
that is now? It tracks the movements of the planets.
It's a navigational device. It's a geared, cogged
system that allows you to track the passage of
time and figure out where you are. It's some
kind of navigational device. It's not fully understood.
And how old is that? I think that goes back to
Greek times. I'm guessing here because the Greek
times are not of great interest to me, but I'm
thinking around about 500 BC. At least 2 ,000
years old, 2 ,000 plus. And we know that there
had to be more than one of these things. Yes.
You can't have something like that without a
vast effort behind it. Human beings were working
on creating this geared and cogged machinery
that reflected the patterns in the sky. Oh, is
that a recreation of it? That's a recreation.
Wow. Yeah. Can you buy one of those? It looks
like you can buy that. Dude. Bookmark that. We
need one right there, right next to the plaster
cells. So such a thing is a cultural artifact
which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It
has to have a context. It has to have a background.
And again, my suggestion would be perhaps a secret
technology. It's very odd that… Very few of these
have been found. And it may be that ship owners
and navigators in Greek times were extremely
careful about who they shared this technology
with. Of course. It may have been as top secret
as nuclear power is in our world today. That
makes sense. But the fact is that then we have
to – it exists. It's real. It's there. And then
we must consider – What's behind it? What led
to that? Is that just the latest manifestation
of something that goes much more deeply back
into human culture? And I think that is. I suppose
my main message is that we have a so far untold
backstory, that we're concentrating entirely
on the front story. And the backstory is missing,
very largely missing from the picture. And what
I've tried to do is to fill in bits of the backstory.
Do you have anything in this book about the Olmecs?
No, not really. I mentioned them briefly. I explored
the Olmec mystery in considerable depth. Can
you explain that to people? In Fingerprints of
the Gods. Yes. So it's considered to be the earliest
high culture of Central America. Everybody's
heard about the Aztecs. Everybody's heard about
the Maya. But before the Aztecs and before the
Maya, there were a culture who are referred to
as the Olmecs. Again, we don't know what they
called themselves. That's what the Aztecs called
them. They called them the Olmecs. It means the
rubber people because they – a rubber -producing
area of Mexico. They worked in giant megalithic
constructions. What they're most famous for is
these huge carved human heads, which can be on
a scale of up to 20 to 25 tons in weight and
which have – Curious features, which have been
interpreted variously as Polynesian, African,
don't look like classic Native American features.
But one of the things one of the things I've
realized is that there is no classic Native American
feature that Native Americans are a very have
a very complex genetic story with very many different
elements brought into it. And we shouldn't be
necessarily surprised by the supposedly non Native
American look. What do we think those helmets
were that they were wearing? Nobody knows because
no physical example of such a helmet has ever
been found, just like no physical example of
an Egyptian pharaoh's crown has ever been found.
All we see is the stone reproductions of them.
Do they universally wear these helmets in these
stone reproductions? They pretty much all wear
these helmets in the Olmec stonework. There's
another fascinating figure. from La Venta, one
of the Olmec sites, which is the earliest ever
image of a plumed or feathered serpent. The feathered
serpent is a famous icon in Central America.
Quetzalcoatl, who's the god of peace, the bringer
of civilization, who is associated, for example,
with the famous pyramid of Kukulkan, which is
just another name for Quetzalcoatl at Chichen
Itza, where on the spring equinox, a shadow effect
creates the... image of a serpent coiling down
the stairway and joining with the carved head
of the serpent. There's the image from Leventa.
That's the earliest image of a plumed serpent
in the Americas. And sitting in the middle of
it, and I made a big deal out of this because
I think it is a big deal in Magicians of the
Gods, sitting in the middle of it is this human
figure who's holding this strange bag in his
hand. And it's just a fact that... Those identical
bags are found in ancient Sumer in the hands
of individuals who were considered to be civilization
bringers. And they also show up on Pillar 43
at Gobekli Tepe. I call them man bags. And in
that case at Gobekli Tepe, we know they're at
least 11 ,600 years old. So I wonder if we're
looking at a sort of badge of office of a group
of civilizers who traveled around the world trying
to bring back to life a lost civilization and
pass down. I deploy a concept in this book that
I actually got from Richard Dawkins. Richard
Dawkins is the author of the book called The
Selfish Gene. And he's not one of my favorite
people because he's a materialist reductionist
and he doesn't believe in. spirit or or any mystery
in life that we're just accidents of chemistry
and biology he also has no psychedelic experience
and he's had no i did challenge him at a public
event to to go to go have a dozen sessions of
ayahuasca and still take acid once oh just once
it would be enough but he has an excellent out
because and sadly he's had a he's had a stroke
so he has a good excuse for not for not doing
that but he's a clever man and one of his concepts
that he's introduced into human culture is the
concept of the meme We're all, I think, familiar
with that word. Genes are physical reproductive
mechanisms. They reproduce themselves down the
generations. They replicate. They multiply. They're
passed on from one individual to another. Memes
are cultural objects, cultural ideas that are
passed on and replicate and reproduce themselves.
And what I see right across the Americas and
right across the old world as well is a set of
memes that involve the sky, that involve the
ground, that involve geometry. involve notions
of life after death. And I think the only way
to explain these is that they have been inherited
from an earlier culture that was in some way
connected with the ancestors of all of these
cultures. I think that's what we're looking at
in the Amazon. We're looking at a meme which
was deliberately created. Once you mobilize a
population to start creating huge geometrical
structures, you are also facilitating many other
possibilities that an organized population allows.
I think that's what... happened at gobekli tepe
i think that's why they created the megalithic
site there to mobilize the local population of
hunter -gatherers to give them a project to do
to engage them and in the process of engaging
them to teach them the skills of agriculture
which were which which are fundamental to to
any concept of of civilization and it's weird
the way agriculture just suddenly appears in
in gobekli tepe and there's huge agricultural
mysteries in the amazon as well May I share a
couple of those mysteries with you? Before you
do that, though, can you pull up that image from
Gobekli Tepe of Pillar – was it Pillar 43? Pillar
43 in Enclosure D. I would like to see that guy
holding that bag. That is really fascinating.
The bags are in a row along the top of the pillar.
It's Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe.
Is there an image of that online that's available?
Okay, here we go. Yeah, there's the bags. So
there's the bags in a row along the top. It's
the same sort of square -shaped bag with a curved
handle that you find on the earliest image of
the feathered serpent. No, you have to go above
that, Jamie. Just a little bit higher up the
pillar. Those bags, right at the top there. It's
odd that this symbol crops up in many different
cultures and tends to be associated with some
kind of… What's the mainstream interpretation
of those bags? There is no mainstream interpretation
of those bags. That's my interpretation of those
bags, which I freely confess. That's how I read
them. I'm intrigued by the anomaly that the similar
bag turns up in the hands of the Quetzalcoatl
figure and turns up in Mesopotamia repeatedly
in the hands of the individual. so -called the
Apkallu, the magicians of the gods, the bringers
of civilization. And the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl,
it's an Aztec god, right? Quetzalcoatl is an
Aztec god, but the Aztecs acquired him from earlier
cultures. The very fact that an image of the
plumed serpent is given such... priority in Olmec
culture tells us that that system of ideas was
present during Olmec times, which takes us back
at least to 1500 BC, probably quite a bit earlier
than that, whereas the Aztecs are 1500 AD. So
there's 3000 years between the Aztecs and the
Olmecs. And that same system of ideas is running
through all of those cultures. And the Mayans
had a name for it as well? Kukulkan. And what
do you think that plume serpent was? I think
it's very clear from the accounts that have survived
that what he's associated with are two things
in particular. One of them, he's a god of peace.
He's not a war god. And the other thing that
he's primarily about is giving the gifts of civilization.
This is what you human beings need to know in
order to move on to the next level. That is the
function and the role of Quetzalcoatl. And there
are very similar... We could refer to them as
civilizing heroes who are found in other cultures
and other locations. Osiris in Egypt plays that
role as a bringer of civilization. There's hardly
a culture in the ancient world that doesn't remember
a time far back in remote prehistory when some
kind of supernaturals or advanced human beings,
and I prefer the latter, that some kind of advanced
human beings were involved in a project to...
disseminate civilization. I mentioned the Tucano
in the Amazon who are big drinkers of ayahuasca.
The Tucano have a fascinating origin myth. They
say that their origin myth states specifically
that their ancestors were brought to the Amazon.
They were brought to the Amazon by a group of
supernaturals who included the daughter of the
sun and an individual called the helmsman who
steered the serpent canoe in which this settlement
mission in the Amazon was performed. And what
these so -called supernaturals did was they brought
the ancestors of the Ducano to the Amazon and
they showed them the best places to settle, the
best places where they might find hunting, the
best places where they might create a village,
the best places for agriculture. And then they
left. But they left them behind one gift, and
that gift was ayahuasca. That's the story of
the origin myth of the Tucano. And it sounds
to me rather like the other side of the story
of that DNA signal in the Amazon, that a group
of people were deliberately settled in the Amazon
by human beings who they… chose to regard as
uh as as supernaturals that's that's what makes
sense of it to me um when i interrupted you to
talk about quetzalcoatl what were you about to
say i can't remember i'm in california i've been
smoking lots of dope you know we were talking
about different things in the amazon should we
rewind and figure out what we said the serpent
god you're talking about uh before quetzalcoatl
before that I have another question. The Olmecs,
you were talking about the genetics of these
people that live in Native Americans, that they
vary widely, but the Olmecs seem to have very
similar features, the thick lips, the wide noses.
Why do we think that is? Well, this is part of
a... A curious mystery that is not unconnected
to the genetic mystery. It's been known by archaeologists
for quite a long time that there are anomalous
skulls in parts of Brazil, which appear to show
very strongly Polynesian or... African features,
very much like the features that we see on the
Olmec heads. And a number of archaeologists who
got into trouble with their colleagues for this
have used that to argue many years ago, 30, 40
years ago, that the settlement story of the Americas
is much more complicated than we've realized.
And what the DNA is doing is it's telling us
that There was something really weird happened
with settlement. You see, what happened with
those African or Polynesian looking skulls was
that they were tested for DNA when DNA technology
was not as advanced as it is today. And what
that DNA showed was that they were more closely
related to modern Native Americans than they
are to any other. So the notion that there was
some connection with Polynesia or Africa was
dismissed. But now that we have very firm evidence
of an Australasian genetic signal, Australian
Aborigines, Papua New Guinea, Melanesians, with
those kind of features, now that we have the
genetic evidence that that is found in the Amazon,
we have to go back to that old evidence and reconsider
it. Wow. Yeah, I would love to find out what
that is. They've always fascinated me. The Olmecs,
it's always been such a strange image, the large
heads with the helmets on them. Do they universally
look like that? All of the features are very
similar. Wow. Very similar. And always with the
helmets. And almost always. I won't claim that
every single Olmec head has a helmet of it because
I think I've seen one that didn't. It's quite
a while ago since I… explored the Olmec area.
But what's fascinating about them is they are
supposedly the first high civilization of Central
America, that they create structures on a massive
scale, that you can see connections between them
and the later Maya. That whole mystery of the
Mayan calendar was clearly inherited from the
Olmecs. It wasn't something the Maya made up.
The Olmecs used that same symbolism. So the Mayan
calendar is actually an Olmec calendar. then
consider the possibility that the Olmecs may
just be the latest, the earliest surviving manifestation
of that calendar. It could go back much further
than that. Do you plan on having any debates
with people that oppose these ideas? Well, it
was interesting on your very show, Joe, to have
the debate that involved Michael Shermer, who's
the editor of the Skeptic magazine, and some
colleague of his who came in online yeah who
I got a bit annoyed with and and myself and my
great friend and colleague the genius Randall
Carson and and I felt that that was a very useful
I felt that it's possibly the first time that
those of us on the alternative side of the argument
about history were given an opportunity really
to put our evidence forward and to confront so
-called skeptics. Well, so -called, that's what
he calls himself, Michael Shermer, with this
evidence. And obviously I'm biased, but I don't
feel that he fielded the situation. particularly
well. I don't think mainstream archaeology came
out of that looking really good. I think it came
out of that looking rather ignorant and uninformed.
And a man like Michael Shermer, who is a professional
skeptic, cannot begin to match the knowledge
of a man like Randall Carson, who has devoted
his whole life to walking the walk of the geology
of the end of the Ice Age in North America. And
that showed on that debate. So I think the debate...
was worth doing. I think it showed that the alternative
side isn't just wishy -washy stuff out there
on the fringes of things, that there are those
of us working in this field who are using really
solid information and who our project is to rewrite
history. And we're not going to do that with
slight. It has to be solid information. I think
we had the opportunity on your show to say that
that solid information is there. I'm not claiming
it was a complete victory for the alternative
side. Michael Sherm is a smart guy, and he put
forward some good arguments too. And there were
constructive aspects of that debate, which I
appreciated. I'd like to see much more engagement
and much more positive approach. I wish the skeptics,
welcome to their skepticism, but I wish they'd
be less hateful, less full of derision. less
despising. Well, they're so defensive with their
ideas. And so defensive with their ideas when
the possibility is there for a constructive...
Well, what's interesting to me is that as this
evidence piles up and it seems to be continuing
to pile up as more like these impact sites and
more of this ancient civilization material gets
unearthed, it's almost insurmountable. Yeah.
And this is how paradigms shift. I mean, everybody's
familiar with the concept of a… paradigm shift
and there's a book called The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn which outlines what
a paradigm shift is where an established model
in some discipline of science that has been in
control of people's thinking for a very long
time suddenly falls apart and it doesn't fall
apart suddenly. What happens is that there's
an accumulation of evidence which that model
cannot explain. That paradigm cannot explain
it. It seemed like a great paradigm at one point
but then it doesn't explain this and then it
doesn't explain like Like the paradigm that says
that megalithic architecture is only 6 ,000 years
old and that the first megalithic architecture
was in Malta. That can't explain the massive
megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey 5 ,500
years before that. It's evidence like that, the
slow accumulation of evidence that the existing
system cannot explain, that at an eventual point,
no matter how strongly the advocates of the existing
system hold on to it, no matter how determined
they are in their defense, no matter what dirty
tricks they may choose, to deploy to undermine
their opponents, sooner or later the evidence
overwhelms them and the paradigm goes down and
you have a new way of thinking. And that is the
story of science and it is a story that I think
we're at a tipping point in our understanding
of the past of the human species. I am not saying
that I am 100 % right. I believe that what I'm
doing that's worthwhile is I'm asking questions
about the past that haven't been asked enough.
I'm putting archaeologists on the spot and demanding
that they explain themselves. I don't claim that
I'm right. I'm offering an alternative theory,
and my objective is to get people to think for
themselves, to think about this stuff, and not
to accept the voice of authority as the sole
medium of truth. That's what I've tried to do.
Have you had any archaeologists review any of
this work and change their opinions? No. No.
I haven't. But what I have found, and I found
it interestingly during the research trips for
America before, is a younger generation of archaeologists
who are in the field. And they are quite different
from the older generation of archaeologists who
were running the whole scene 25 years ago. Now
we have a very different younger generation,
a younger generation that has been exposed to
open -minded thinking, that has been exposed
to the Internet, that itself as part of the general
pattern of the younger generation is suspicious
of authority. I'm meeting young archaeologists
on sites. For example, I met a couple of really
amazing young minds on a site called Blackwater
Draw. in Arizona, New Mexico, where one of the
first Clovis sites, the young archaeologists
I met there were incredibly open -minded and
really willing to consider extraordinary possibilities
about the past and privately admitted to me that
they'd read my books. Well, that's where I get
the hope. I get the hope in this young generation
that is growing up with the Internet that does
understand that there's a lot more out there
than just what they're being taught in schools.
Yes. Yeah. This is where the hope lies and it
lies in every area. And it's why one of the intriguing
things that has happened with me and your show
is an important part of this is that when I go
around giving public events, doing a public.
presentation of my work. The demography of the
audience is extremely interesting, and this is
true whether I'm giving the talk in Britain,
whether I'm giving it in Canada, whether I'm
giving it in America. Part of the audience are
older people who read me in the 1990s, who got
onto my work with Fingerprints of the Gods in
1995, and they've stuck with me, and they've
carried on reading my work. Another part of the
audience, a very big part of the audience, consists
to a large extent of young people, most of whom
are men, but there are women amongst them as
well. And what those mainly young men come up
to me and say at the end of the event is, we
first encountered your work on Joe Rogan's show.
it completely opened our minds it changed it
i've had so many young men say this has changed
my life and then i asked myself well why should
a different take on the past change people's
lives why should people feel that their lives
have been changed by a different take on the
past which i add they would not know about unless
you'd had the good grace to to bring me on that
on your show this these ideas would not be known
but they are known because of the amazing outreach
of your show and the answer to that question
why does it why does it change a person's life
is that Once we realize that we have been misinformed
about our past, that everything that we've built
our idea of who we are upon and of where we're
going as a culture may be founded on falsehoods
and perhaps even deliberate lies. Once that is
realized, then… all the questions about the nature
of the society we live in become open. And young
people are feeling the need to take an independent
path, not to follow the path that has been set
down for them by previous generations. And in
some way, and I'm very gratified to hear this,
the fact that I'm an elder now, I'm 69 next birthday.
You look great. Thank you. The fact that I, as
an elder, have... consistently pursued an independent
path have been willing to put up with the shit
that's been thrown at me over the years but have
stuck to my guns and have continued to add new
information to the dossier of information that
i put forward that is and i'm encouraged to see
this that's found as inspiring by younger people
and what what better gift could an old guy hope
to leave to the world than a younger generation
who feel inspired by that person's work to change
the world Well, I'm very, very thankful that
I could introduce people to you because your
first book that I read of you, Fingerprints of
the Gods, changed my view of the world. I mean,
I remember putting that book down after I was
finishing and going, wow, if he's right, this
whole thing is a mess. Yeah, a complete mess.
Because our idea of who we are is very much founded
in our idea of who we were. And I think one of
the mistakes that's made in our civilization
is that We are very conceited. We're very big
-headed. And we tend to view the whole story
of history as though it's a project that leads
to us, that we're what it's all about. And I
think what is, how can I put it, undermining
of the existing system about… A new take on the
past is the notion that we're not what it's all
about at all, that there may have been an earlier
civilization that reached a high level of advancement,
perhaps different from ours, but nevertheless
an advanced civilization, which was just... taken
out of the story completely by a global cataclysm.
Then we suddenly realize that in a way we're
here accidentally, that it's not been a process
that's been all about us. And that if we've been
misinformed about how we got here, then we need
to get the true information about what's going
on. So these are, in a way, profoundly revolutionary
ideas. They do lead people on a path of inquiry
that leads to questioning of everything. And
our fears that you were just discussing earlier
about how soft we are in comparison to past civilizations
in terms of our ability to live off the land,
that's one aspect that bothers me. But one of
the big ones that bothers me is the fact that
everything is digital. All of our information
is stored on hard drives. You bet. And if that
goes down, there's not much left. You have paper
books and a few thousands of years. imagine what
would be left. We would lose all of our advancement.
Well, I can speak to this at a personal level.
There was a time when I was an excellent map
reader. I could navigate anywhere with maps.
My wife, Santa, and I did huge journeys in Mexico
back in the early 1990s in really cheap hire
cars with maps. And we found our way everywhere
without any problem. Today, I can hardly use
a map. The skill of using a map has lapsed within
me. Why? Because of GPS. GPS technology has come
along and it always tells me where I am and being
a bit lazy. I just accept that technology. But
then I had cause to ask myself this just the
other day. Supposing GPS, supposing all those
satellites go down and there's no GPS, is the
whole industrialized human race is going to suddenly
be lost? All those Uber drivers who don't know
their way from A to B and who rely entirely on
their GPSs, they won't know where they're going.
And it's true with digital data. Digital data,
unlike print data, is very fragile. and requires
programs in order to access and interpret it
that are much more complicated than simply cracking
the code of a lost language. I mean, the programs
vary between different phone platforms. Exactly.
They vary in computer platforms. It's just...
It's so fragile and it's so – I mean, I don't
know if there's any precautions that have been
taken in place to preserve this information in
case of like what Robert Shock described, coronal
mass ejection or something crazy. Take down all
the satellites. Yeah. No, I don't think preparation
has been made. And I don't – and it's very clear
that preparation is not being made for the risk
of another cosmic impact. And again, a point
that I'd like to make about this is that we are
at – We are in a sense in a place where history
can repeat itself, that there are certain cycles
at work. The work on the comet impact 12 ,800
years ago has very clearly and specifically identified
the debris trail of that comet. And that debris
trail is the... torrid meteor stream and it's
called the torrid meteor stream because it appears
to emanate from the region of the sky in which
the constellation of taurus sits it doesn't it's
within our solar system it's an optical illusion
The torrid meteor stream is a giant complex of
debris. It is 30 million kilometers wide. What
you had was an original comet that might have
been 100 to 200 kilometers in diameter, a small
moon, which fragmented and broke up into multiple,
multiple parts. And those parts began to spread
out along the whole orbit of the torrid meteor
stream and to widen, the whole thing widened.
So it's like a giant tube of debris. And the
evidence and the argument is that 12 ,800 years
ago, several large bits of that debris fell out
of the taurid meteor stream and impacted with
the Earth. The problem is that the taurid meteor
stream still exists. And our planet still passes
through it twice a year. And those passages take
place in June and in November. And each passage
takes 12 and a half days. And the same group
of scientists who are looking at the evidence
for the impacts 12 ,800 years ago are deeply
concerned that we may face future impacts from
the Taurid meteor stream, that there are still
large objects up there. This is not theory. This
is a fact. There's a comet up there called Comet
Enki, which is part of the Taurid meteor stream.
It's a large fragment of the original giant comet.
Comet Enki has a diameter of, I don't know, five
or six kilometers. There's 19. recognized huge
objects within the taurid meteor stream calculations
indicate that there may be as much as 200 asteroids
within the taurid meteor stream of a diameter
of a kilometer or more which would have catastrophic
effect if they if they hit the earth and responsible
astronomers regard the taurid meteor stream as
the greatest collision hazard facing mankind
at the present time And it's not something that
we need to fall into despair about because it's
perfectly within the level of our technology
to do something about it. What could they do?
Well, to give you an example, commercial interests
are looking right now, and the technology is
there, to mine asteroids. We can go to asteroids
if the commercial interest is high. high enough.
We can go to them, we can mine them, we can extract
minerals, we can bring them back to the Earth.
The same technology would allow you to move asteroids
or comet fragments. You don't want to blow them
up with a nuke. That would be a really bad idea.
That would turn... one large object into multiple
smaller objects which could cause equally massive
devastation and would be very difficult to predict
where that devastation was going to fall what
you want to do is to nudge them and move them
out of a dangerous orbit into a less dangerous
orbit and the evidence is in the next 30 years
we are going to be passing through dangerous
filaments of the torrid meteor stream and if
we were smart we would be devoting some resources
to protecting our cosmic environment just as
there are many issues that we need to devote
resources to. Unfortunately, the one that's most
attractive to our politicians at the moment is
warfare. We devote limitless resources to technologies
of mass destruction. There really is no end to
the amount that we're prepared to spend on that
in terms of our so -called security. We feel
somehow we're making ourselves more secure by
having these incredible weapons and spending
trillions of dollars on them. But the cosmos
doesn't give a fuck about any of it. that the
cosmos is out there with these with these giant
giant objects uh which have a far greater explosive
power than all the nuclear um weapons stored
on earth at the at the present time the comet
shoemaker levy 9 which hit jupiter in 1994 had
a Total calculated explosive power of 300 gigatons.
If you took the entire nuclear arsenal of the
world today and blew it all up at once, it would
yield 6 .4 gigatons. So these objects are producing
catastrophic results on a scale that far beyond
anything that we ourselves could do with nuclear
weapons. It's time we spent a bit less. Time
and money on weapons of mass destruction and
a bit more on looking after this beautiful garden
that we call the Earth and that is our home and
it will be the home of our children and our children's
children. I'm a grandfather now. I feel passionately
about this. We need to look after this planet.
It's our responsibility as a human species to
do so. And one of the challenges, it's not the
only challenge there. many, many other challenges.
One of the challenges is to pay attention to
our cosmic environment and to realize that the
cosmos can intervene cataclysmically in the human
story and that the Taurid meteor stream in particular
may have been a hidden hand in human history,
that there may have been other impacts in the
last 13 ,000 years that have affected and changed
the course of humanity on this earth. The ancients
were very good at paying attention to the sky.
We ourselves have amazing tech to study the sky,
but for some reason we're ignoring this problem
of cosmic impacts. And that's incredibly irresponsible
because, as I said a moment ago, it is a solvable
problem. It is within the limits of our technology.
It would require a global cooperative effort
to sweep our cosmic environment clean, but it
could be done. And a side product of that global
cooperation might be a friendlier, more nurturing,
more loving more positive human community it
is very odd that we have this infantile nature
even as grown adults and world leaders that we
don't we do like to ignore imminent danger as
long as it hasn't affected us in the past yes
there's no real moment we can point to other
than Tunguska In photographic history, modern
history where you could take pictures of things.
If I can pause you on that very point, the evidence
is compelling that the Tunguska event was an
object that fell out of the Taurid meteor stream.
That happened at the peak of the Beta Taurids
in June 1908. It is extremely likely that that
Tunguska object came from the Taurid meteor stream
because we were passing through the Taurid meteor
stream at exactly that time. And the Tunguska
object is estimated to be between 60 and 190
meters in diameter. So it's not a very big object.
It's not a kilometer scale object. It's big,
but it's not that big. It doesn't even hit the
earth. It's an airburst. It explodes in the sky.
Above, fortunately, an uninhabited area of Siberia.
But the devastation is huge. It wasn't even noticed
for some years afterwards until scientific teams
went in and studied the area and discovered that
80 million trees across 2 ,000 square kilometers
had been completely flattened. by that airburst.
And to put that in context, 2 ,000 square kilometers
is the size of London. So anybody who knows London
is aware that there's a ring road around London
called the M25. If that airburst had taken place
over central London, everything of London out
as far as the M25 would have been gone completely.
Is that what it looks like today? Pretty close.
It says like 100 years later there's still no
trees. And if you look above there, you're looking
at the black and whites that were taken in the
early 1900s, which revealed the extent of this
damage. So it's just stupid of us not to pay
a bit more attention to this, especially when
we have the tech to actually do something about
it. We have that nature, though, when it comes
to climate change. There's a curious denial.
There's a denial of the role of cataclysms in
the human story. And there is even a word for
that. in science and it's called uniformitarianism
and this is a particular philosophy of science
where the view is that Everything as we see it
in the world today is how things have always
been. So if we don't see cataclysms today and
they're not playing a major part in our story
today, then there weren't cataclysms and they
didn't play a major part in our story in the
past. That's why, although it's before the time
of human beings, when the evidence that the dinosaurs
were made extinct by a comet or an asteroid first
came out. Lewis and Walter Alvarez the father
-son team who were behind that science were ridiculed
by their colleagues and they were told it's absolutely
absurd of course no cosmic event could have made
the dinosaurs extinct they spent 10 years taking
that ridicule until they found the crater in
the Gulf of Mexico since then the whole scientific
community has accepted that the course of life
on this planet was radically changed by a cosmic
impact and you know I like to joke about it but
It was a cosmic impact that was big enough literally
to turn dinosaurs into chickens because that's
what's left of the dinosaur line is, you know,
the birds. And at the same time, skulking in
those primeval forests is this little mammal.
And it looks a bit like a shrew 65 million years
ago going nowhere. The dinosaurs rule the earth.
Then the cosmos intervenes. The dinosaurs are
swept out of the way. And what happens? The mammals
start to evolve very rapidly and they start to
occupy niches that were previously closed to
them. And the bottom line is we would not be
here. The human species would not be here. We
would not be having this conversation if the
dinosaurs had not been made extinct 65 million
years ago. So these are world -changing events,
and my argument is that such a world -changing
event occurred between 12 ,800 and 11 ,600 years
ago, and it's high time we paid more attention
to it. Is there any evidence that there was other
species of human beings that existed in the Americas?
Like we're finding in Russia and there's many
of them that are being discovered all over the
world now, these subspecies of human beings.
Yeah. This is an issue that I go into in America
before. And what first drew me into it was Denisova
Cave in Siberia. I think everybody's heard of
the Neanderthals. And these days, I think everybody's
heard of the Denisovans as well. A lot of people
have. Well, I guess a lot of people haven't.
But first of all, let's take the Neanderthals.
For a long time, it was held that the Neanderthals
were stupid, primitive subhumans, shambling,
lacking symbolism. Turns out that that's not
true at all. The latest scientific evidence on
the Neanderthals is that they were symbolic creatures,
that they did do art, that they were in every
sense human. And they were in every sense human
because anatomically modern. humans interbred
with Neanderthals. You can't interbreed with
another species. They clearly were human beings,
but they looked rather different from us. And
that's why certain populations in the world today
still have three to five percent of Neanderthal
DNA. Then in Russia, in Denisova Cave, they find
a single pinky bone from a little finger. And
they do. the dna testing on it they're able to
get a complete genome from it and what they discover
is this isn't a neanderthal this isn't an anatomically
modern human being this is another human species
who they named the denisovans they think they're
more closely related to neanderthals than they
are to anatomically modern humans but they're
clearly another human species and they also interbred
with anatomically modern humans. And Denisovan
DNA survives, interestingly enough, it survives
predominantly in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea
and amongst Australian Aborigines. So as part
of the research for this book, I went to Denisovan
Cave. I had an amazing, actually just incredible
trip to Russia. I hadn't expected it to be like
that at all. Siberia. I mean, America is vast,
but my God, crossing Siberia, this is endless
rolling plains, you know, this just vast area.
How did you cross it? We took a car. You can't
travel independently in Russia. It's very difficult.
You have to get you have to get permission and
you have to state in advance where you're going
to be stopping off at. So what I found and I
just did so through the Internet was a was a
local guy called Sergei. Kurgin, who had a little
tour business in Siberia, in the city of Novosibirsk.
I got in touch with him. He found a translator
who would translate my emails, and I said, we
want to make this journey to Denisova Cave. And
can you set this up for us and get all the permissions?
And he did. And so we flew into Novosibirsk.
Sergei and his translator, who turned out to
be a Russian student who spoke good English,
joined us. And we did this immense journey across
Siberia. How long did it take? Oh, it took us
three days to get to Denisova Cave. Three days
of driving every day. Some stopping off along
the way. Incredible hospitality of the Russians
that we were amongst. Very independent people.
People who are living out there in the wilderness.
and who actually do know how to survive. It's
the first time I've ever drunk milk fresh from
the cow. Literally milked right out of the cow
and poured down my throat. How was it? It was
delicious. And the cream, I mean, thick, thick
cream. So there was a lot of things about Russia
that surprised me. Denisova Cave is a fascinating,
beautiful place to visit. It's another example
of a missing chapter in the human story that
is beginning to be pieced together. It's obvious
now that we were not alone, that there were multiple
other human species who were human enough. to
interbreed with us and leave DNA. And this Denisovan
species was only discovered in like, was it 2000
something? Very recently, the 2000s. It's a very
recent discovery. Did they leave behind art?
Better than that. They left behind certain physical
objects, which are extremely hard to explain.
One of them is a greenstone bracelet. And that
bracelet is in the form of a... talk which was
therefore slipped on sideways onto the hand it's
not a full ring and A hole has been drilled through
the bracelet. And from that hole, it's been possible
to reconstruct that a pendant was hung. Then
the archaeologists, there it is, then the archaeologists
started to take a look in detail at the drill
marks on that hole. And what they discovered
was a huge anomaly, that that was drilled with
a stable, fixed drill. And it was drilled at
extremely high speed. thought to be 40 or 50
,000 years old. There is not supposed to have
been any such technology in that period that
was capable of drilling with a stable fixed drill.
And yet there it is. And there it appears. So
there are also incredible, very fine needles,
bone needles that the Denisovans made, very long
ones, which suggest that they were stitching
very heavy stuff together. And the suggestion
has been, were they making skin boats, for example,
to use to navigate? That would explain how they
managed to get. themselves to australia which
is where the largest amount of denisovan dna
survives today there's one of those there's one
of those needles so that there are indications
of strangely out of place technology amongst
the denisovans which is 20 30 000 years earlier
in the human story than it than it should be
those kind of needles that kind of bracelet you
could expect to find them in what archaeologists
call the neolithic but to find it in the paleolithic
is very puzzling and and very odd and it suggests
that the denisovans were certainly not shambling
subhumans. They were refined creatures. Can you
find out what year they discovered the Denisovans,
Jamie? Can you Google that real quick? I want
to say it's in the 2000s. But, I mean, imagine.
Human beings have been around for this long.
Here we are in 2019 and within the last decade
or so, they figured this out. Yeah, we're discovering
new stuff about ourselves. We're discovering
that our story is much richer, much more textured,
much more layered than we thought it was. It's
not a simple story. It's a very complicated story.
And we ourselves are. A hybrid species. We are
the result of interactions with all kinds of
different looking human beings. And the end result
is ourselves. So it's not just that we carry
Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. In a sense, we
are Neanderthals and Denisovans. They are part
of the anatomically modern human heritage. So
you make a good point. The fact that this is
only being discovered now and that it's incredibly
important. It completely rewrites the story of
our ancestry. The notion… This is the 1970s.
1970s. Oh, okay. I'm way off. The real work that's
been done in Denisovan Cave has been done in
the 2000s, from 2006, 2007 onwards. Genetic examination.
That's when the major papers have been… 2008,
there it is. …have been published, which have
revealed the genome of the Denisovans and revealed
the Denisovan connection to anatomically modern
humans. The fact that we're only finding this
out now that we… That we told the story of our
past and weren't aware of this raises the question,
how much else in the story of our past is there
that we're not aware of? Let's stop being so
arrogant, so sure of ourselves, so confident
in our findings. Let's be more tentative. Let's
keep an open mind and see where it takes us.
That's the main message that I have from all
of this. And I think and I hope that this will
be. effect of this book. I'm not kidding myself
that the archaeologists are going to jump on
board overnight, particularly so since I'm very
critical of American archaeology in this book.
And I'm critical of it specifically and explicitly
because of the dominance of the Clovis first
model for so long, which prevented other research
taking place. And I have to say, archaeologists
like to insult me by calling me a pseudoscientist.
I can't think of anything more pseudoscientific
than the Clovis First Doctrine, which locked
American archaeology for 50 years in a particular
framework, which we now know was totally wrong.
Nothing good about it at all. A complete mistake.
What I'm hoping the book will do in the long
run is that it will lead to more attention being
focused on the Americas. This is a very neglected
area of the world as far as deep and ancient
archaeology goes. The recent history of the Americas
has been relatively well studied, but the deep
and ancient history has not been well studied.
And I think America is going to contain revelations
for us about our story and about our past. And
I'm serious when I suggest that America is the
most plausible. and the most likely home base
for a lost civilization, if you're going to propose
a lost civilization. There are certain preconditions.
You can't have it on a small island. There's
got to be a large landmass with enormous resources
and the ability for population to grow and for
those resources to be mobilized. And what I suddenly
realized, you asked earlier why I started to
write this book at all, is what the new evidence
is pointing to is that the Americas have been
wrongly neglected, that here we have a giant
continental landmass. extraordinary resources
that has just been ruled out of the story of
human civilization. But once we take account
of the fact that there was a giant cataclysm
over North America 12 ,800 years ago, once we
start looking, as I do in America before, at
the incredible, deep, in -depth similarities
between, for example, the religious system. of
ancient Egypt and the religious system of the
Mississippi Valley, then you realize that you're
into a global mystery here and that the answer
to that mystery may not at all be in the old
world and may very much be in the Americas. See,
it's odd. I mentioned Moundville earlier on.
It's kind of odd that we should find what is
essentially the ancient Egyptian religion manifesting
in the symbolism of Moundville, the ascent to
Orion. transit to the Milky Way, the journey
along the Milky Way. These are very specific
and idiosyncratic ideas. And what makes it doubly
odd is Moundville isn't that old. Moundville
as a site is about a thousand years old. Ancient
Egypt had already been gone completely from the
world for at least 600 years before Moundville
was created. The end of ancient Egypt, there's
Moundville. And what we're looking at in the
Foreground is mound B, and we're looking at mound
A in the distance. And a complete circle of mounds.
What is odd about it is... We find this system
of ancient Egyptian ideas in Moundville 500 years
after ancient Egypt has gone from the world.
The Romans were the end of ancient Egypt. By
400 AD, ancient Egypt is gone. Moundville doesn't
even exist then, but 600 years later, it is created
and it manifests the entire set of ancient Egyptian
ideas. Clearly, it did not get that as a result
of direct transmission from ancient Egypt unless
they were time travelers. The only way I think
it could have got it is as a result of a legacy
passed down from a much earlier civilization
that had been influenced and affected many different
parts of the world. And the characteristics of
that civilization, the shamanistic heart of it,
the use of altered states of consciousness, the
focus on those. are amongst the reasons that
I would suggest that America is the place that
we should be looking. And the big mysteries are
in the areas that were so devastated at the end
of the last ice age, up in the north of North
America, the channeled scab lands in particular,
and then the Mississippi Valley, the whole story
of the Mississippi Valley. Yes, Moundville is
1 ,000 years old, but then you can go back to
Poverty Point in Louisiana, which is 2 ,700 years
old. You can go to Watson Break in Louisiana,
which is... 5 ,500 years old. You can go to sites
like Conley, which are 8 ,000 years old. The
system keeps on going back and disappearing back
into time. And I think the most fruitful new
work on exploring the origins of civilization
is going to occur counterintuitively in the Americas,
the very last place on Earth that archaeologists
have ever thought to look. What do mainstream
archaeologists, what do they think? cause those
drill marks in the Denisovan bracelets? It's
not really explained it. The Russian archaeologists
who published the report on that are themselves
mystified by it, and they realize that it's dynamite.
It's an explosive discovery. It's an out -of
-place technology. And so they're trying to explain
how come fixed stable drilling, which we thought
was introduced first in the Neolithic, maybe
7 ,000, 8 ,000 years ago. How come that is now
found in a site that's 40 ,000 or 50 ,000 years
old? That's how old those bracelets are? Oh,
yeah, absolutely. Those bracelets are 40 ,000
years old? They may have been older. There's
recent research suggesting that they may go back
65 ,000 to 70 ,000 years. Oh, my God. They're
extremely ancient, and therefore they're incorporating
an out -of -place technology, which doesn't fit
with the timeline of history that we've been…
Very, very out of place. Very, very, very odd
feature that we have here. So what this says
to me is that we as a species, and I've... I
guess this is kind of my pet phrase. We are a
species with amnesia. It's my favorite phrase
of yours. We have forgotten so much more about
ourselves than we remember. And what the process
of history and archaeology should really be about
is a process of remembering. We shouldn't be
imposing our ideas of what we should have been
on the past. We should allow the past to speak
for itself. And when it does so, it speaks eloquently.
One of the sites that we visited and explored
for America before was Serpent Mound in Ohio.
I don't know if you've ever been there, Jamie.
No, I've heard of it, though. It is an amazing…
Jamie's from Ohio. You ever be there? Yeah, Jamie
and I were talking about it earlier. There's
Serpent Mound. There's an aerial view of Serpent
Mound. Oh, that is crazy. But here's the thing.
That's beautiful. You see the head end of Serpent
Mound there? So, Santa and I went there at the
summer solstice in 2017. We were there on June
21st, 2017. And my wife, Santa, is a photographer,
and we acquired a drone for this specific purpose.
And she flew the drone up 400 feet above Serpent
Mound. And we sat it up there watching the sun
set. And what happens on the summer solstice,
and you can only see it perfectly with a drone.
There's pictures of it in the book here. What
happens on the summer solstice, you can see it
from ground level, but you get up 400 feet, you
really get it. The head of that serpent is pointing
directly at a niche in the distant hills through
which the sun sets on the summer solstice, on
the longest day of the year. So it's a sky -ground
alignment. perfection that is taking place there.
It's a beautiful thing to see, to watch that
sun majestically sinking down into the horizon
and see this. awesome figure of the serpent gazing
directly at it with its jaws open, almost as
though it's about to swallow the sun. And then
we remember that there are other sites around
the world which are also aligned to key moments
of the solar year, aligned to the winter solstice,
for example, the Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt.
That kilometer -long axis targets exactly the
rising point of the sun on the winter solstice.
One of the interesting things about Serpent Mound,
and I urge anybody listening to this, go visit
Serpent Mound and especially go there on the
summer solstice because that's the moment, that's
the marriage of heaven and earth. That's when
sky and ground unite in majesty at that place.
But one of the mysteries of Serpent Mound concerns
how old is this mound really? How far back does
it go? And there have been arguments that there
is a group of archaeologists who would like it
to be just a thousand years old and they attribute
it to a culture called the Fort Ancient culture.
There's another group of archaeologists, in my
view, who've done much more thorough work who
attribute it to the Adena culture. The thing
about which goes back to 2 ,300 years ago or
so, there's evidence for an earlier construction
enterprise. It looks like the site has been continuously
reconstructed and remodeled as we would do with
any sacred site. If it begins to wear down, you
remodel it. And then you get later organic material
being introduced to the site that may give you
the impression that the site is only that old.
What's intriguing about Serpent Mound is it stands
on a natural ridge. And that natural ridge, and
this is entirely an accident of heaven and earth,
that natural ridge, the head end of it, if you
like, is naturally oriented to the summer solstice
sunset. Somebody a long time ago noticed that
natural orientation and they decided to monumentalize
it. Here was a place where earth whispered to
sky, the earth in her own nature. looked directly
at the place on the horizon where the sun was
setting. This was a highly significant place.
This place mattered. So they then created Serpent
Mound on top of it. They memorialized it. They
turned it into a special, special place that
human beings had had a hand in making to honor
the marriage of heaven and earth. And what I
found researching this book is that Serpent Mound
is not alone in that respect. A lot of people
are puzzled by Stonehenge in England. Stonehenge
is built on Salisbury Plain, and there are two
kinds of big megaliths at Stonehenge. One of
them are called sarsens, and the other are called
the bluestones. The bluestones, we know for sure,
were brought a long way. They were brought from
Wales to Stonehenge, a distance of about 150
miles. The sarsens are found in abundance. on
a place called the Marlborough Downs, which is
about 20 miles from Stonehenge. But until very
recently, it was thought there were no sarsens
on Salisbury Plain at all. And archaeologists
couldn't understand why Stonehenge wasn't built
on the Marlborough Downs, where the big sarsen
stones, the 20, the 30 -ton megaliths, were available
locally and didn't have to be brought there.
Very recent research, 2018 research, has provided
the answer that two of those sarsens were naturally
in position all the time. at Stonehenge and they
are Sarsenstone 16 and the Heelstone. And if
you stand behind Sarsenstone 16 and look at the
Heelstone at dawn on the summer solstice, you
see the sun rising in direct alignment with the
view. And the Heelstone is like the sight on
the barrel of a rifle targeting the sun. And
that was there naturally. Earth was speaking
to sky. The ancients saw that. They decided this
was sacred. They went to huge... to bring the
Sarsens, the rest of the Sarsens, from the Marlborough
Downs to create the big stone circle at Stonehenge
and then to put the blue stones inside it. But
initially, what they were celebrating was a natural
union of heaven and earth. And that brings us
to the notion of as above, so below. that we
are connected to the cosmos, that it is part
of our heritage. We in modern cities forget the
cosmos exists. We have all kinds of tech that
can look at astronomy, astronomy programs. We
can all do that, but actually looking at the
stars is something that's very difficult for
people who live in cities to do. We're cut off
from the cosmos. We're cut off from the notion
that it is sacred, that it matters to the human
creature. And what the ancients seem to have
done is to realize how vital that connection
is. to memorialize it and to celebrate it and
to draw our attention to the intimate connection
between ground and sky. Yeah, light pollution
sort of fuels our infantile existence in a lot
of ways, right? Because it doesn't constantly
remind us that we're a part of this great thing.
Yeah, light pollution is a huge factor. It's
very easy to forget that we live in a universe.
Very easy to forget that. Very easy to believe
that it's just about these cities that we live
in and the intimate concerns of our daily lives.
But in fact, we're part of something much, much
bigger. And my God, I mean, it's a mystery enough.
to be born a human being at all. Just to be alive
is an extraordinary mystery. To have the ability
to love, to feel emotions, to understand beauty,
to be moved by a symphony. All of these things
we take for granted, but actually they're deeply
mysterious. We don't really know. What we are
or or who we are and which is one of the reasons
I'm so fascinated by Rick Strassman's You presented
his film, DMT, The Spirit Molecule. And on my
upcoming speaking tour, I'm going to be doing
an event with Rick on the 14th or 15th of May
in Sedona. I think it'll be the first time that
Rick has spoken publicly for quite a while. Rick
has a colleague called Andrew Gallimore who teaches
at the University of Okinawa in Japan. And Rick
and Andrew have together developed a technology.
for releasing DMT into human volunteers in a
very slow drip that will keep them in the DMT
state, if they wish, for hours on end. And the
intention is to use this technology to explore
and map the DMT realm. When do I sign up? As
soon as possible. Where do I go? It's very close.
Imperial College, it looks like Imperial College
London is going to deploy this technology in
further research into DMT and that that research
is not going to be... Purely and simply into
the therapeutic potential of a psychedelic, which
is very important research to do, it's going
to be an investigation into the nature of reality
using a psychedelic, the mysterious nature of
reality. And it is odd, and you know this from
personal experience, that when you get plunged
into that DMT realm, it is so different from
the realm of our daily world, filled with geometry,
filled with these sprightly intelligences, completely
internally. How can that be generated by the
brain? Or are we dealing with some other level
of reality that we haven't encountered yet? I
think that ancient cultures and in particular
my lost civilization were deeply involved in
exploring the mysterious nature of reality and
used the plant medicines as part of that process.
When it comes to the serpent mound where the
head points in the summer solstice, does that
take into account the procession of the equinoxes
in terms of like trying to… The position of the
summer solstice sun on the horizon is not affected
by the procession. However, it is affected by
another factor which is a slight… nod on the
axis of the earth. A nod but not a wobble? Not
a wobble. What is the nod? A nod and it's called
nutation and the axis of the earth nods back
and forward over a cycle of about 41 ,000 years
and that can that does adjust the position of
sunrise on the horizon over a very long period
of time. And it would, in theory, if this idea
can be taken seriously enough, it would, in theory,
be possible to use very precise observations
using the latest modern tech, not simply being
up there in a drone and seeing the general connection
between the position of the sun on the horizon
and the head of serpent man. It would be possible
to refine that and actually say astronomically
the precise date on which... which serpent mound
must have been first created to precisely target
the rising sun on the equinox. Wow. And on that
note, we just did three hours. Did we? Flew by.
I would ask your listeners and viewers, while
we're talking about Ohio, don't forget about
Newark and High Bank. What are those? These are
two incredible, amazing, absolutely stunning,
gorgeous geometrical sites. It's sad, but one
of them is preserved within a private golf course.
Oh, no. However, it's not so sad because if it
hadn't been preserved within a private golf course,
it would be gone completely. More than 90 % of
the Native American earthworks that were documented
in the 19th century are gone now. They've been
plowed under for agriculture. That's another
part of our missing story. There we're looking
at Newark. See that octagon and circle combination?
That's repeated at another site called High Bank,
which is 60 miles away. Go back to that, Jamie.
Give me a larger. image of that so you see an
overlay or is that what it actually that's what
it actually looks like that's i mean that's a
graphic based on it well the octagon circle combination
in the top left of the image are best preserved
the other bits are not so well preserved and
the reason the octagon circle are best preserved
is because they're in a private golf club where
otherwise they would have been plowed under the
interesting thing is that that octagon circle
combination is 60 miles from high bank But there's
another octagon circle combination there and
it is oriented at precisely 90 degrees to that
one. That speaks of high science in the Mississippi
Valley a very, very, very long time ago. There's
so much to explore and so much to investigate
and so much to inquire into in America. It's
just an incredible land and its mysteries have
been hidden from us. And I'm hoping with this
book that I have managed to pull. the veil back
a little bit on those mysteries. And if we're
really coming to the end of our, is it really
three hours? My God. If we're really coming to
the end of our three hours, can I repeat, I would
love to see readers of my books at my events.
I'm doing three events in Canada, Vancouver,
Montreal. and Toronto. And I'm doing something
like 17 or 18 events in the United States. I'm
just speaking continuously right the way across
the US. I wish I could visit every state in the
US, but my goodness, this is an enormous country.
Every state in the US is as big as the entire
British Isles, you know. But I'm visiting as
many as I am. I'm going to be giving illustrated
presentations. I'll be signing books afterwards.
I'll be taking pictures. I would like to meet
my readers. Please check out my website, grahamhancock
.com. Look at the talks and events page and you'll
see where all these events are occurring over
the next seven weeks. We're on the 22nd of April
today. I will not leave North America until the
5th of June. Well, I hope I see you again then.
Indeed. Listen, thank you so much. You're a treasure.
And this book, I can't wait to get into it, America
Before, and the audio book is available now as
well. Yeah, the audio book's available. I read
it. Thank you so much, Graham. It's always a
pleasure having you here. I really, really appreciate
you. Thanks for having me back on, Joe. Graham
Hancock, ladies and gentlemen. Bye.