In this episode, Joe and Graham talk about Graham's new book, America Before, which is available in two versions: a standard edition and a Barnes&Noble edition with an extra chapter added to it. They also talk about what it's like to be an actor, and why a novelist should write their own novels. Graham also talks about why he thinks actors should write and read their own books, and what it takes to be good at it. And, of course, there's a Q&A! Thanks to Joe for being on the podcast, and thanks to Graham for being kind enough to allow us to use his voice in the episode. We hope you enjoy the episode, and that you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it! Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast! Cheers, Joe & Graham Music by Ian Dorsch and the Electric Light Orchestra (feat. Jeff Kaale) . is a production of Native Creative Podcasts produced and produced by Riley Braydon. . . . produced by Joe McElroy. , , and , is a proud member of the WMM Podcasting Crew. and , produced by the WFMU radio station in Toronto, Canada. & , edited by Rachel Ward in Vancouver, Canada, and . , from Toronto, British Columbia, Canada & Vancouver, BC, Canada . . , and Vancouver, B.C., Canada , Vancouver, and Toronto, BC , Canada, Canada , and Montreal, Canada and Vancouver BC . , Montreal, BC , and Toronto , Canada . and Vancouver Vancouver, Quebec, Canada! , Toronto, Alberta, Canada is home to all the best coffee in the best pizza in the entire country in the whole country, , New York City, Canada's best coffee, New York, Canada & Montreal, New York , and much more! and all the other places in the world, and everywhere else in the rest of the country that you can get a cup of good coffee, good coffee and good vibes, good conversation, good food, great coffee, great places to get a good time, good vibey, good talk, good times, and good coffee , good coffee , good vibee , great coffee I hope you like it, good company, good things
00:00:09.000And we were just talking about your new book, America Before, that there's two versions of it.
00:00:14.000There'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.
00:00:27.000I 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.
00:00:44.000And 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.
00:00:51.000So if people want that, it's a little bit different, and there's a small gold square.
00:00:54.000Well, 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.
00:01:10.000So grahamhancock.com and the America Before page, the link To the Barnes& Noble edition is right there.
00:02:30.000I'm a tremendous Stephen King fan, but when I read Stephen King's books where he reads them or listen to them when he reads them, they're terrible.
00:03:13.000And 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.
00:03:24.000And that's all on the talks and events page of my website.
00:03:26.000So if anybody wants to come along and meet this old man in person, I'll be doing those events.
00:04:22.000I 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,
00:04:40.000I 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 and I mean, all the water erosion stuff on the Sphinx,
00:04:58.000and I've since had Dr. Robert Schock on the podcast to talk about that as well.
00:05:01.000But all this stuff was, at one point, very controversial, and now far less.
00:05:10.000Traditional 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.
00:05:17.000They've had to with things like Gobekli Tepe.
00:05:19.000They've had to because the evidence has overwhelmed them.
00:05:22.000And Gobekli Tepe is an excellent example.
00:05:24.000Prior to the discovery and excavation of Gobekli Tepe, It which is a site in Anatolia in Turkey.
00:05:31.000It was the view, very firm view of archaeologists that there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere on earth.
00:05:37.000And when I say megalithic, I mean literally big stones, stone circles, huge constructions, nothing like that before at the very, very earliest 6000 years ago.
00:05:46.000And they would point to sites in, for example, Malta, a site called Gigantia, which is about 5,800 years old.
00:05:52.000That's the oldest megalithic architecture in the world.
00:05:54.000And they could understand how that was because these were agricultural societies.
00:06:00.000You could free up people who could become specialists in architecture, in astronomy, in geometry, and they could apply their skills to the construction of these sites.
00:06:07.000But 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.
00:06:21.000It's more than 5,000 years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world.
00:06:26.000And it is in the center where there had been no previous evidence of agriculture, but the moment Gobekli Tepe appears, agriculture appears as well.
00:06:34.000And this is just something that's really hard for archaeology to explain.
00:06:38.000They've suddenly got 5,000 years of missing Of missing history that they've just never taken into account.
00:06:42.000And what I see them doing is largely avoiding the problem rather than getting to grips with it directly.
00:06:49.000And in fact, 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.
00:07:01.000Well, 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.
00:07:07.000Very much so, and also subjected to the most blistering and deeply unpleasant criticism from the archaeological fraternity and from their friends in the 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.
00:07:30.000It was regarded almost as offensive that I would put this material out there.
00:07:33.000And archaeologists felt it was their responsibility to show the public that I was full of shit.
00:07:39.000And that was the whole way my work was greeted.
00:07:42.000And to a certain extent still is greeted by archaeologists, but things have changed.
00:07:47.000Central to my work was the notion of a global cataclysm roughly 12,500, 12,800 years ago.
00:07:53.000It made sense to me in 1995 when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, but there was no compelling evidence for a global cataclysm then.
00:08:01.000All the evidence seemed to point to that time and a massive global event.
00:08:05.000And then from 2007 onwards, more than a decade after I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, we get a group of more than 60 people.
00:08:12.000Major 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 megafauna.
00:08:23.000They are not saying that it also wiped out a lost advanced civilization of prehistory.
00:09:13.000If 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.
00:09:24.000Today, to have a mainstream authority figure say that to me is actually an advantage.
00:09:29.000Because people are so distrustful of authority and rightly so because we've been lied to by authority figures in all fields for so long.
00:09:36.000The bullshit has been so enormous that people are finally waking up and we can't trust what authority figures say.
00:09:42.000I think we can thank the internet for that.
00:10:14.000But Greenland kept its ice whereas the other parts of the world lost their ice at the end of the ice age.
00:10:21.000And what's 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. I think we're good to go.
00:11:02.000Dating 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.
00:11:11.000But what I can say and what the specialists who have explored and excavated the crater are saying… I think?
00:11:53.000They call this the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
00:11:58.000And 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 years.
00:12:49.000And 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.
00:13:07.000And 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 quick demise of the Ice Age,
00:13:24.000and what may have resulted in all these floods that you read about in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
00:13:37.000Yeah, 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.
00:13:48.000Did 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.
00:13:58.000It's been my privilege to work very closely with Randall Carlson.
00:14:05.000He's also a gentle giant and such a kind, generous, spirited person.
00:14:09.000It's a joy to work with him and every minute spent with him is an education.
00:14:13.000I had the privilege of traveling across the Channel Scablands in Washington State with Randall and We're good to go.
00:14:48.000And 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.
00:14:54.000And you look at that and you think anything that was underneath that 12,800 years ago is gone completely.
00:15:02.000There can't be anything left of it at all, utterly, utterly destroyed.
00:15:05.000And 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.
00:15:20.000It's really important to see that because it's easy enough to talk about floods and cataclysms, but actually to see its effect on the landscape directly, it has an emotional impact.
00:15:34.000I felt emotional traveling across the Channel Scablands, realizing that this was the heart of Of an event that changed the world completely.
00:15:49.000In 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.
00:16:00.000But 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.
00:16:15.000So what was the motivation behind creating this book, America Before?
00:16:23.000I have been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 25 years.
00:16:30.000That 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.
00:16:38.000I 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.
00:16:59.000I'd I 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.
00:17:14.000I ended up writing supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind about the role of psychedelics in the origins 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.
00:17:28.000That'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 massive new information from the Americas, specifically from the Americas, which completely rewrites the story of human history,
00:17:45.000that the Americas have been misrepresented for a very long time.
00:18:01.000But 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.
00:18:33.000It was maintained adamantly that these were the first Americans, that no human being touched the soil of the Americas until 13,400 years ago.
00:18:42.000Just animals, but no human beings present at all.
00:18:46.000And 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 We're good to go.
00:19:28.000And interestingly, the Smithsonian, just in 2017, did a big kind of mea culpa, a big admission about this, that everybody had got things wrong, that Jacques Sankt Mars had been ruined by the Clovis first lobby, but he'd been right all along.
00:19:42.000The 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.
00:19:59.000Well, I think he's vindicated, you know, and it's kind of nice to be vindicated.
00:20:04.000There'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.
00:20:14.000But 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.
00:20:28.000You know how it is with archaeology, that the upper levels are the youngest, and the deeper you go, the older it gets.
00:20:34.000That'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.
00:20:43.000And the feeling was, no need to dig below the Clovis Lair, because we already know that there were no human beings there before that.
00:20:50.000And then a few archaeologists, I've mentioned Jack Sank-Mars, but another is Al Goodyear from the University of South Carolina, who excavated a site called Topper in South Carolina.
00:21:01.000Now, Topper is an incredibly rich Clovis site.
00:21:04.000It's full of their tools, their points.
00:21:06.000They made these special flint points that were used as arrowheads and spears.
00:21:11.000He finished excavating the Clovis level and then he did something that was supposed not to be done.
00:21:18.000He 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.
00:21:32.000And 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.
00:21:52.000Now this has really put the cat amongst the pigeons.
00:21:54.000Now 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 10 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.
00:22:15.000What was the evidence from 130,000 years ago?
00:22:18.000Let me be clear about this because this is something that is often misrepresented in my views.
00:22:25.000It is not the evidence for an advanced civilization that we find 130,000 years ago in America.
00:22:32.000The evidence that we find is evidence for human presence.
00:22:35.000And what they were doing was very much Stone Age stuff.
00:22:39.000It's a mastodon skeleton that was excavated.
00:22:43.000It was actually found by accident during road construction near San Diego.
00:22:48.000And an archaeologist was attached to the road construction crew and immediately stopped construction and they investigated it thoroughly.
00:22:56.000And what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it that they decided not to publish at the time.
00:23:04.000Because 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.
00:23:13.000That one tusk had been left standing upright in the ground and another had been left beside it.
00:23:18.000That a femur of the animal had been taken away completely from the site.
00:23:23.000And there was assemblages of instruments that were used to smash and break the bones.
00:23:27.000And 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.
00:23:36.000That's classic, classic human behavior.
00:23:38.000So this sets the goalposts in a totally different place.
00:23:42.000Suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years.
00:23:47.000We already know that a dogmatic approach of archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago.
00:23:54.000And what it does is it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing 100,000 plus years.
00:24:26.000Tom Demare 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.
00:25:25.000Now – 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, the excavation machines.
00:25:35.000I saw Michael's email last night, and I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to engage with this subject, and that's his job.
00:25:44.000He's a professional skeptic, and it's his role to do so.
00:25:48.000What 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 Demaret at San Diego Natural History Museum excavated.
00:26:01.000And what's interesting, since Michael took the trouble to write the questions, can I just...
00:26:10.000I want to read you something that I responded to on this, which is that basically this paper was in no way a refutation of the original paper in Nature.
00:26:26.000As 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.
00:26:37.000What 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.
00:26:55.000In other words, the site was not visited.
00:26:57.000They simply looked at secondary references.
00:26:59.000They did not look at the archaeological material.
00:27:01.000And they ignored the entire argument of Tom Demaret and his colleagues who had already addressed that issue.
00:27:10.000When you break a fresh bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone.
00:27:18.000And Tom Demaret 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.
00:27:32.000And 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.
00:27:39.000So, unfortunately, this paper pays no attention to that.
00:27:42.000It just looks at road plans and says there was road work there.
00:28:41.000That would be a proper scientific response.
00:28:44.000Here is a thorough body of work put forward by a very senior group of scientists who hesitated before they published it.
00:28:52.000They 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.
00:29:07.000And 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 Americas.
00:29:15.000And that's what Tom Demeray thinks as well.
00:29:18.000And as he points out, if we don't look...
00:29:22.000If 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.
00:31:09.000Migrants 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.
00:31:23.000So 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.
00:31:39.000What 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 Cordilleran ice sheet and the Laurentide ice sheet, the two major ice keeps in North America.
00:31:53.000And it's thought that the migration came through that corridor.
00:31:55.000Well, the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago.
00:32:02.000There was an episode of global warming I think we're good to go.
00:32:23.000Before 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.
00:33:11.000But 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.
00:33:20.000And that it began about 6,000 years ago.
00:33:23.000And that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world.
00:33:26.000It has nothing to do with the new world at all because the new world was populated so late.
00:33:35.000And this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change.
00:33:39.000That the Americas, this enormous land mass, 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 offered great potential for human occupation.
00:34:00.000Dogma has said there were no humans there.
00:34:02.000Now the first bits of evidence are coming out that says there were humans there.
00:34:07.000And 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.
00:34:14.000It might be a new world invention, not an old world invention.
00:34:17.000Some 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 creating irrigation, humans creating,
00:34:33.000it appears like grids, like a city grid.
00:36:14.000There 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.
00:36:26.000He reported seeing incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving culture.
00:36:33.000And 100 years later, when other Europeans got into the Amazon, they couldn't find these cities.
00:36:37.000So they said, oh, Francisco Oriana, that was his name, made it all up.
00:37:01.000Within 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.
00:37:08.000But now the jungle is being cleared, those cities are emerging.
00:37:11.000And 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.
00:37:38.000It's one of the reasons these soya bean 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.
00:37:47.000So how did they feed all these people?
00:38:09.000And you can take a handful of 8,000-year-old terra praetor, and you can add it to barren soil, and that soil will instantly become fertile.
00:38:18.000It's highly sought after in the Amazon, and it explains how they fed these people.
00:38:24.000Well, this is something that's not understood.
00:38:26.000It'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...
00:38:35.000It's a development in the Amazon that it has been given credit for and of a kind of science in the Amazon.
00:39:17.000What are the theories, composting, some sort of advanced composting?
00:39:29.000There, 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.
00:39:45.000Secondly, new evidence, previously not recognized, the Amazon is basically a garden.
00:39:53.000There 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.
00:40:05.000They're what's referred to as hyper-dominant species.
00:40:07.000In other words, people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees, which they then cultivated and grew.
00:40:54.000Is a ditch, which has been dug deep, and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch.
00:41:00.000When people first saw these structures, they wondered if they'd been built for defense.
00:41:04.000But 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, not inside your embankment.
00:41:13.000So a henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it.
00:41:19.000It 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 henge itself is entirely an earthwork.
00:41:29.000What we find in the Amazon are thousands of henges 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.
00:43:40.000Is what remains in that five and a half million square kilometers that has not been investigated yet.
00:43:46.000We are just, I think, looking at the edges of a mystery.
00:43:49.000The archaeologists involved, who are mainly from Finland and also from Brazil, feel the same.
00:43:55.000Their 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.
00:44:03.000The investigation needs to be done, but what's fascinating about them Is this very powerful geometry and astronomy.
00:44:10.000So a number of the sites are perfectly aligned to true north, true south, true east, and true west.
00:44:17.000I'm talking about true astronomical north.
00:44:18.000To do that, there's only one way to do it, and that's with astronomy.
00:44:22.000So that tells us that astronomers were at work in the Amazon.
00:44:25.000The geometry is very complex and very precise.
00:44:28.000That tells us that people with geometrical skills were at work in the Amazon.
00:44:31.000And 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.
00:44:44.000It's a wonderful mystery, and it deserves much further attention.
00:44:49.000And yeah, that's Jack O'Saar, exactly, the squares.
00:45:35.000In the process of clearing the rainforest, they start discovering these earthworks that had previously been completely overgrown by the jungle.
00:45:42.000Then the next step was to say, what can we do to find out more about this?
00:45:47.000Obviously, they don't want to destroy more jungle.
00:45:50.000And luckily, we have a technology, which is LiDAR, as I mentioned, which uses radar.
00:45:55.000And using LiDAR, they've been able to identify many more of these sites.
00:46:00.000And 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 3000 years.
00:46:12.000This is an intriguing development completely unexplained in our understanding of the Amazon and what it suggests is a heritage.
00:47:47.000The 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,
00:48:04.000which produces a rather different journey from the smoked or vaped DMT trip.
00:48:11.000It allows you to integrate and to interrelate with the strange landscapes in which you find yourself amongst and the entities that you encounter.
00:48:18.000I'm not making any claims about the reality status of those entities, but what I am saying, and it's a fact, I think?
00:48:45.000And ayahuasca means the vine of the dead.
00:48:48.000And what it's connected to in South American religious and spiritual thinking is what happens to us when we die.
00:48:58.000And 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.
00:49:35.000of the afterlife realm, of the entrance to the other world are geometrical and they look exactly like the geoglyphs.
00:49:42.000So 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.
00:49:55.000And oddly enough, that same system of ideas is found in the Mississippi Valley.
00:50:00.000In 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.
00:50:09.000In 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.
00:50:22.000That 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.
00:50:41.000Then we go to Egypt, and what do we find?
00:50:46.000The soul must rise up to the constellation of Orion.
00:50:49.000There'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.
00:50:57.000Widely 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.
00:51:05.000It would then transit to the Milky Way, which the ancient Egyptians called the winding waterway.
00:51:10.000And it would make a journey along the Milky Way where it would be confronted by challenges and ordeals.
00:51:17.000Very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley.
00:51:19.000As far as we know, none of these cultures were in contact with one another.
00:51:23.000Either we're dealing with a huge, unbelievable, extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas, or we're looking at a legacy that was inherited in all of these different places from a remote common ancestor.
00:51:37.000And I believe that that's what we're looking at.
00:51:39.000What 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?
00:51:46.000Or do we think that's what they were using?
00:51:48.000Well, that's an interesting question, whether visionary substances are the only way to get into altered states of consciousness.
00:51:57.000And I would say they are definitely not.
00:52:00.000Of course, there are visionary substances which are used in Native American vision quests.
00:52:06.000I've had the privilege of peyote ceremony with the Native American church.
00:52:24.000You feel much more integrated and connected with nature.
00:52:27.000Your thought processes are quite clear.
00:52:30.000It felt just like a very beautiful and healing experience.
00:52:33.000And I love the ceremony that I'm inside a teepee with 30 or 40 other people.
00:52:38.000There are specific roles that are assigned to those different individuals.
00:52:41.000One will keep the door, another will be responsible for the fire, which is a work of art in itself.
00:52:45.000Just gazing into that fire and the glowing embers is enough to induce an altered state of consciousness on its own.
00:52:52.000Incredible drumming, which drives your state of consciousness into a kind of peak experience.
00:52:58.000This is a technology for accessing other levels of experience and other levels of reality.
00:53:04.000And it's clear that the Native Americans had A number of advanced technologies in this area.
00:53:09.000The Sundance doesn't use a substance, but it uses austerity.
00:53:13.000It uses pain to drive an altered state of consciousness.
00:53:16.000The 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.
00:53:27.000Hunter-gatherers need it just as much as people in cities need it.
00:53:30.000But it's not the only state of consciousness available to human beings.
00:53:34.000And maybe that's one of the big mistakes that we're making in our culture and was not made in shamanistic societies.
00:53:43.000That is a really interesting breakdown, that maybe that is one of the big mistakes we're making in our culture.
00:53:48.000When 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,
00:54:07.000And 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.
00:54:30.000Not enforcing your ideas or pushing them on other people and forcing people to behave the way you behave, but instead, love.
00:54:37.000And think about religious ideas, which cause so much division, so much chaos, so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion in the world today.
00:54:49.000Really 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.
00:55:08.000We've had this, you know, this recent event in Sri Lanka, primarily a religiously motivated terrorist event.
00:55:17.000People 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.
00:55:33.000Are they so insecure in In their own beliefs that they're prepared to go to that level of actually murdering another human being.
00:55:42.000They're so threatened by the other beliefs that other human beings hold.
00:55:45.000So it's an abnegation of our responsibility as human beings.
00:55:50.000We should not be accepting packages of ideas intact, fully formed, and using them to drive the way we behave towards one another.
00:55:57.000That was part of the human story, but we need to move on from that.
00:56:01.000It'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.
00:56:38.000You were born by accident in a particular nation.
00:56:42.000Why 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?
00:57:23.000Similarities 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.
00:57:37.000And when I say I'm against nationalism, I need also to make clear that does not mean...
00:57:43.000And I hope I'm not taken out of context by others who are listening to this.
00:57:47.000That does not mean I'm in favor of world government.
00:57:55.000If we have them, they should have a very minimal role in our society.
00:58:00.000I 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 suspicions.
00:58:13.000What responsible leaders should be doing is encouraging love and unity.
00:58:18.000And their failure to do that, in my view, disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely.
00:58:25.000And 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.
00:59:14.000My 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.
00:59:32.000And that your idea of like, I love what America stands for.
00:59:36.000And what America stands for is kind of a nation that's Where people go to.
00:59:41.000This 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.
00:59:50.000The reason why I'm here is because it was pretty easy to get here.
01:00:01.000I would hope that this idea of being able to just, if you want to do better, you can.
01:00:13.000I believe it can spread out and, you know, I see many signs of hope in America.
01:00:21.000America 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.
01:00:29.000I have a son and daughter-in-law who live in LA. I have another son and daughter-in-law who I live in Boston.
01:00:35.000I'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.
01:01:58.000People can be misled with information.
01:01:59.000They can be told that what they're receiving is the truth, whereas, in fact, it's not the truth.
01:02:04.000And you can end up with a kind of dictatorship that the people have given their assent to on the basis of false information.
01:02:11.000And 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.
01:02:25.000And remain enormously encouraged by America.
01:02:28.000It 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.
01:02:38.000It's ironic, it's strange that at the federal level, even though, what, eight states now totally legal for recreational, Twenty-three, twenty-four states legal for medical use that at the federal level it's still a Schedule I controlled drug.
01:02:51.000This is a huge state of dissonance that exists and America is going to have to put it right.
01:02:56.000What it says to me is that people can change things.
01:02:59.000People 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.
01:03:27.000Ben and Jerry released something yesterday, which is really on 420, I should say, Which was talking about the drug laws in this country and talking about how many – it's really opening the idea of how unjust these laws were and how many of these laws targeted people of color and how many people who are white people have profited off of this and how many people are still in jail.
01:04:51.000Marijuana removes those blinders, and it really makes you understand that this is a strange, strange life.
01:04:57.000And 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.
01:05:09.000And cannabis and many of these other psychedelic drugs, they encourage this connection with each other, which is, I think, what we need.
01:05:26.000It's really just the last hundred years.
01:05:28.000It's a tiny part of the human story, and yet we're so arrogant as a society that we can set aside thousands of years of human tradition and experience and wisdom working with the plant medicines.
01:05:43.000What a huge and stupid mistake that is.
01:05:47.000On 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 I think?
01:06:38.000Actually does lead you to question stuff.
01:06:40.000It 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.
01:07:04.000That's the part of the problem is that these people that are holding people back from these psychedelic experiences, they've never had them.
01:07:57.000Our 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.
01:08:05.000We'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.
01:08:14.000I've made this point several times but our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such.
01:11:02.000I probably would still be off cannabis if it hadn't been for that joint.
01:11:05.000Well, I think people can develop these patterns of behavior that are destructive with anything, whether it's with alcohol or cannabis or sex or anything.
01:11:28.000But the fundamental thing is, we as adult human beings need to take responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions.
01:11:35.000And we need not hand that responsibility over to governmental institutions, especially when it concerns something as intimate and personal as our consciousness.
01:11:45.000And my view is, the ancient world had the right attitude to this kind of thing, and the modern world I think it was a civilization that emerged from shamanism But did not stay
01:12:15.000at 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.
01:12:24.000A lot of archaeologists have said to me, but we don't find any plastic bottles from the Ice Age.
01:12:29.000That means there was no advanced civilization during the Ice Age.
01:13:19.000And 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.
01:13:36.000It is very hard for archaeologists to explain how that was done using purely leverage and mechanical advantage.
01:13:44.000You can say, oh, perhaps they built a ramp and hauled the stones up the ramp.
01:13:49.000But then you have to confront basic laws of physics.
01:13:52.000You can't haul a stone weighing tens of tons up a slope that exceeds 10 degrees.
01:14:01.000How long a ramp do I need with a 10 degree slope to get to 350 feet above the ground?
01:14:07.000And the answer is you need a fucking long ramp.
01:14:10.000Which should still be there because it couldn't have been a sand ramp.
01:14:14.000It would have collapsed under the weight of those stones.
01:14:16.000It had to be as massive as the pyramid itself.
01:14:18.000So this begins to seem like an absurd idea, the idea that is foisted on us by archaeology.
01:14:24.000Maybe 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.
01:14:38.000We have gone down a path of leverage and mechanical advantage.
01:14:44.000But we hear anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic powers, who can move things with their minds, of people who have telepathic powers.
01:14:52.000And our automatic reaction is to just dismiss all of that because science says it's impossible.
01:14:59.000Because science regards consciousness as local to the brain and doesn't see how it can exert itself outside of that.
01:15:06.000But 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.
01:15:13.000And maybe we could wake those techniques up again.
01:15:16.000Maybe the ability of human beings to do almost superhuman things is resident within all of us, but sleeping.
01:15:24.000Well, it's pure speculation that they use some sort of a telekinetic power, but it's absolute that they did something that we don't understand.
01:15:32.000If 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.
01:15:42.000The Great Pyramid is supposed to be about 4,500 years old, yeah.
01:15:47.000To think that someone back then could do something that would perplex us today with modern machinery.
01:15:53.000And that somehow or another they figured this out.
01:15:56.000It's almost like what they had done was leave behind something that was so stupendous So monstrously impressive that it would transcend time.
01:16:08.000And that you would have to look at it even thousands and thousands of years later and say, hey, like, this defies conventional explanation.
01:16:17.000This is not a simple – and I've seen some of the conventional explanations of the construction of the pyramid, and they conveniently neglect those chambers above the king's chamber.
01:18:29.000We should be approaching this problem from many different perspectives and trying to figure out what the fuck caused this extraordinary event that occurs at a pivotal moment in the human story.
01:18:40.000The 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.
01:18:46.000And suddenly we see these signs of civilization appearing and in places like Gobekli Tepe those signs already include highly sophisticated knowledge.
01:18:54.000And that's why I feel we really need to investigate the Amazon.
01:19:35.000They say, well, why would we spend the money on marine archaeology?
01:19:38.000It'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.
01:19:45.000So that's the argument for the resources there.
01:19:48.000And the same with the Amazon and the same with the Sahara Desert.
01:19:52.000Places 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.
01:20:01.000Are the very prices we should be looking at.
01:20:05.000I had a thought once while I was under the influence.
01:20:09.000And 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,
01:20:31.000when people did things, and that, I mean, I don't even know if this would be physical.
01:20:39.000The exponential increase in computational power and technology and innovation that one day will reach a point where you'll be able to watch.
01:20:51.000And they'll be able to recreate what happened exactly.
01:20:54.000And that this would be something that would be...
01:20:58.000Impossible for us to imagine that someone would be able to do that right now.
01:21:02.000But that one day with technology, as it gets more and more advanced, we will reach some sort of innovation or some sort of an invention that will allow us to go back and see, literally see, what happened,
01:21:30.000If 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.
01:21:44.000One 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,
01:22:02.000has 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.
01:22:16.000And this new technology of genome sequencing and DNA is another factor that is raising huge question marks over the past of the Americas.
01:22:28.000And 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,
01:22:44.000and that is in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea, and amongst Australian Aborigines.
01:22:51.000It's Australasian DNA. In South America?
01:22:54.000Not only in South America, but in the depths of I think?
01:23:22.000And 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.
01:23:38.000If that was the whole story, then we would find this DNA signal in North America and in Central America.
01:23:46.000We would not find it only in the Amazon.
01:23:49.000I 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?
01:24:09.000We 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.
01:24:30.000That would account perfectly for the DNA data.
01:24:34.000And when a scientist says the most parsimonious explanation, what that scientist is saying is he likes that explanation.
01:24:39.000That it's a simple, direct, clear explanation of the DNA mystery.
01:24:43.000But then he added, however, it doesn't make practical sense.
01:24:47.000And I asked him, well, why doesn't it make practical sense?
01:24:49.000And 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?
01:25:01.000And he said, well, in science we do trust the work of other scientists.
01:25:10.000And 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… I think?
01:25:50.000When the younger Dryas cataclysm unfolds, it's not an overnight thing.
01:26:07.000I think their project was to restart civilization.
01:26:10.000And 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.
01:26:20.000We ourselves are an advanced civilization, at least that's what we call ourselves, and we coexist in the world with hunter-gatherers.
01:26:28.000It's not an odd idea that an advanced civilization and hunter-gatherers should coexist.
01:26:33.000And there is separation between us and the Amazonian hunter-gatherers.
01:27:20.000They don't know how to grow crops, because they've handed that responsibility over to others.
01:27:24.000We 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.
01:27:34.000So in a global cataclysm, Actually, at first, counterintuitively, the people who would survive it would be the hunter-gatherers.
01:27:41.000And 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.
01:27:51.000And 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.
01:28:06.000Well, it's fascinating to me that the geneticists would rely on the archaeologists, being that the geneticists have the actual DNA that they can examine, where the archaeologists are piecing things together.
01:28:17.000Little 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.
01:28:36.000It's an attempt to interpret the past based on rather flimsy and limited evidence.
01:28:44.000And 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 the So the problem is drawing these conclusions and then being too rigid with these conclusions upon further evidence.
01:29:16.000There's a climate of fear in archaeology.
01:29:18.000I don't mean to pick particularly on archaeologists here.
01:29:21.000I think this is generally true across other disciplines as well.
01:29:27.000These days, academics are driven by the need to publish research papers.
01:29:31.000That's what they build their careers on.
01:29:32.000If 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.
01:29:41.000But 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 publish that information.
01:29:58.000Now, what is the mainstream, when archaeologists talk about seafaring humans, what do they date that to?
01:30:06.000Well, the great seafaring adventure that is accepted by archaeology is called the Polynesian expansion.
01:31:01.000And 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 attempt should be made to consider what that might mean.
01:31:21.000Well, it's interesting because we know that the Egyptians had boats.
01:31:47.000In the Ice Age that archaeologists can't swallow.
01:31:51.000It's a subject that I've kept on coming up against over a number of years.
01:31:55.000I think the best evidence for it is ancient maps which show the world as it looked during the last Ice Age.
01:32:02.000I 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.
01:32:11.000We're talking about maps that were drawn roughly between the 1300s and the 1700s.
01:32:17.000In other words, in relatively recent history.
01:32:20.000However, these maps were largely based on much older source maps, which they copied.
01:32:27.000And 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.
01:32:40.000We now just have a bit that shows the East Coast of South America and North America and the West Coast of Africa.
01:32:46.000Piri 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.
01:32:58.000In other words, that maps had been – 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,
01:33:15.000as well as incorporating more recent navigational information.
01:33:19.000And this is one of a whole category of maps which are extremely hard to explain.
01:33:23.000All of them based on older source maps now lost, all of them incorporating extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes.
01:33:32.000Latitude is not that difficult a technological feat, but longitude is a difficult technological feat.
01:34:15.000Based 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.
01:34:28.000Classic 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.
01:35:24.000The 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.
01:35:37.000So 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.
01:35:49.000Wasn't there also a map of Greenland that showed it underneath the ice?
01:35:54.000And another intriguing thing, I mentioned the Piri Rees map just now.
01:36:00.000Shown on the Piri Rees 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.
01:36:11.000That island is in the exact place of the Grand Bahama banks.
01:37:04.000I don't care whether the Bimini Road is natural or man-made.
01:37:08.000For me, the mystery is that it is shown above water on that map.
01:37:11.000And the last time it was above water was thousands and thousands of years ago.
01:37:16.000So 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.
01:39:28.000And bits of it look highly constructed.
01:39:30.000I would not seek to claim that the Bimini Road is absolutely man-made.
01:39:37.000My 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.
01:39:46.000Now, when they found that ancient Greek computer thing, what is that called?
01:40:22.000I think that goes back to Greek times.
01:40:24.000I'm guessing here because the Greek times are not of great interest to me, but I'm thinking around about 500 BC. So, at least 2,000 years old, 2,000 plus, and we know that there had to be more than one of these things.
01:41:12.000And again, my suggestion would be Perhaps a secret technology.
01:41:18.000It'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.
01:41:29.000It may have been as top secret as nuclear power is in our world today.
01:42:46.000They called them the Olmecs and it means the rubber people because they – a rubber producing area of Mexico.
01:42:52.000They worked in giant megalithic constructions.
01:42:56.000What 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,
01:43:38.000What do we think those helmets were that they were wearing?
01:43:41.000Nobody 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.
01:43:50.000All we see is the stone reproductions of them.
01:43:53.000Do they universally wear these helmets?
01:43:55.000They pretty much all wear these helmets in the Olmec stonework.
01:44:00.000There's another fascinating figure from La Venta, One of the Olmec sites, which is the earliest ever image of a plumed or feathered serpent.
01:44:12.000The feathered serpent is a famous icon in Central America.
01:44:16.000Quetzalcoatl, who's the god of peace, the bringer of civilization.
01:44:21.000Who 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.
01:44:44.000And 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.
01:44:55.000And 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.
01:45:05.000And they also show up on Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe.
01:45:11.000And in that case, at Gobekli Tepe, we know they're at least 11,600 years old.
01:45:15.000So 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...
01:45:24.000I deploy a concept in this book that I actually got from Richard Dawkins.
01:45:28.000Richard 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 any mystery in life that we're just accidents of chemistry and biology.
01:45:42.000He also has no psychedelic experience.
01:45:44.000I did challenge him at a public event to go have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca.
01:46:15.000They're passed on from one individual to another.
01:46:17.000Memes are cultural objects, cultural ideas that are passed on and replicate and reproduce themselves.
01:46:22.000And what I see right across the Americas and right across the old world as well is a set of memes that That involve the sky, that involve the ground, that involve geometry, that involve notions of life after death.
01:46:37.000And 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.
01:46:48.000I think that's what we're looking at in the Amazon.
01:47:02.000I 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,
01:47:18.000which are fundamental to any concept of civilization.
01:47:22.000And it's weird the way agriculture just suddenly appears in Gobekli Tepe.
01:47:27.000And there's huge agricultural mysteries in the Amazon as well.
01:47:32.000May I share a couple of those mysteries with you?
01:47:36.000Before you do that, though, can you pull up that image from Gobekli Tepe of Pillar 43 in Enclosure D? I would like to see that guy holding that bag.
01:48:01.000So there's the bags in a row along the top.
01:48:05.000It's the same sort of square-shaped bag with a curved handle that you find on the earliest image of the feathered serpent and that you find...
01:48:20.000It'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?
01:48:27.000There is no mainstream interpretation of those bags.
01:48:29.000That's my interpretation of those bags.
01:48:35.000I'm intrigued by the anomaly that the similar bag and turns up in the hands of the Quetzalcoatl figure and turns up in Mesopotamia repeatedly in the hands of the individual so-called the Apkalu, the magicians of the gods, the bringers of civilization.
01:48:50.000And the plume serpent, Quetzalcoatl, it's an Aztec god, right?
01:48:54.000Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec god, but the Aztecs acquired him from earlier cultures.
01:49:00.000The very fact that an image of the plume 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,
01:49:17.000so there's 3,000 years between the Aztecs.
01:49:29.000I think it's very clear from the accounts that have survived that what he's associated with are two things in particular.
01:50:11.000There'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.
01:50:31.000I mentioned the Tucano in the Amazon who are big drinkers of ayahuasca.
01:50:38.000The Tucano have a fascinating origin myth.
01:50:41.000The origin myth states specifically that their ancestors were brought to the Amazon.
01:50:49.000They 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.
01:51:00.000In which this settlement mission in the Amazon was performed.
01:51:03.000And what these so-called supernaturals did was they brought the ancestors of Tucano to the Amazon and they showed them the best places to settle.
01:51:10.000The best places where they might find hunting.
01:51:13.000The best places where they might create a village.
01:51:28.000Rather 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 supernaturals.
01:53:16.000African or Polynesian-looking skulls was that they were tested for DNA when DNA technology was not as advanced as it is today.
01:53:26.000And what that DNA showed was that they were more closely related to modern Native Americans than they are to any other people in the world.
01:53:34.000So the notion that there was some connection with Polynesia or Africa But now that we have very firm evidence of an Australasian genetic signal, Australian Aborigines, Papua New Guinea, Melanesians, with those kind of features,
01:53:51.000now 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.
01:54:19.000I won't claim that every single Olmec head has a helmet on it, because I think I've seen one that didn't.
01:54:24.000It's quite a while ago since I We've explored the Olmec area.
01:54:28.000But 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.
01:54:40.000That whole mystery of the Mayan calendar was clearly inherited from the Olmecs.
01:54:48.000The Mayan calendar is actually an Olmec calendar and if we 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.
01:55:00.000Do you plan on having any debates with people that oppose these ideas?
01:55:06.000Well, 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, who I got a bit annoyed with,
01:55:23.000and myself and my great friend and colleague, the genius, Randall Carlson.
01:55:29.000And I felt that that was a very useful debate.
01:55:35.000I 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.
01:55:48.000Well, so-called, that's what he calls himself, Michael Shermer, with this evidence.
01:55:53.000And obviously I'm biased, but I don't feel that he fielded the situation particularly well.
01:56:00.000I don't think mainstream archaeology came out of that looking well.
01:56:28.000So I think the debate was worth doing.
01:56:30.000I 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.
01:56:43.000And we're not going to do that with slight information.
01:56:48.000I think we had the opportunity On your show, to say that that solid information is there.
01:56:54.000I'm not claiming it was a complete victory for the alternative side.
01:56:57.000Michael Sherm is a smart guy, and he put forward some good arguments too.
01:57:01.000And there were constructive aspects of that debate, which I appreciated.
01:57:05.000I'd like to see much more engagement and much more positive approach.
01:57:08.000I wish the skeptics – welcome to their skepticism – but I wish they'd be less hateful, less full of derision, less despising.
01:57:17.000Well, they're so defensive with their ideas.
01:57:19.000And so defensive with their ideas when the possibility is there for a constructive debate, you know.
01:57:26.000Well, 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,
01:57:47.000I mean, everybody's familiar with the concept of a paradigm shift.
01:57:50.000And 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.
01:58:33.000Before 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 onto it, no matter how determined they are in their defense, no matter what dirty tricks they may choose to deploy to undermine their opponents,
01:58:53.000sooner or later the evidence overwhelms them and the paradigm goes down and you have a new way of thinking.
01:58:59.000And 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.
01:59:24.000I'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.
01:59:46.000But 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.
01:59:58.000And they are quite different from the older generation of archaeologists who were running the whole scene 25 years ago.
02:00:28.000In 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.
02:00:46.000I 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.
02:01:01.000One 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.
02:01:18.000And 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.
02:01:24.000Part of the audience are older people.
02:01:26.000Who 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.
02:01:35.000But 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.
02:01:45.000And 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, and it completely opened our minds.
02:01:59.000I've had so many young men say, this has changed my life.
02:02:02.000And then I asked myself, well, why should a different take on the past change people's lives?
02:02:07.000Why 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 Have the good grace to bring me on your show.
02:02:16.000These ideas would not be known, but they are known because of the amazing outreach of your show.
02:02:20.000And the answer to that question, 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.
02:02:44.000Once that is realized, then all the questions about the nature of the society we live in become open.
02:02:51.000And 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.
02:03:01.000And in some way, and I'm very gratified to hear this, the fact that I'm an elder now.
02:03:12.000The 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.
02:03:30.000That is, and I'm encouraged to see this, that's found as inspiring by younger people.
02:03:36.000Could 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?
02:03:43.000Well, 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.
02:03:52.000I mean, I remember putting that book down after I was finishing and going, wow, if he's right, this whole thing is a mess.
02:04:16.000And 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.
02:04:24.000And 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.
02:04:39.000That 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.
02:04:53.000Then we suddenly realize that in a way we're here accidentally, that it's not been a process that's been all about us.
02:05:00.000And that if we've been misinformed about how we got here, then we need to get the true information about what's going on.
02:05:07.000So these are in a way profoundly revolutionary ideas.
02:05:12.000They do lead people on a path of inquiry that leads to questioning of everything.
02:05:17.000And 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.
02:05:30.000But one of the big ones that bothers me is the fact that everything is digital.
02:05:33.000All of our information is stored on hard drives.
02:06:01.000My 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.
02:06:25.000Being a bit lazy, I just accept that technology.
02:06:29.000But then I had caused to ask myself this just the other day.
02:06:32.000Supposing GPS, supposing all those satellites go down and there's no GPS, the whole industrialized human race is going to suddenly be lost.
02:06:41.000All those Uber drivers who don't know their way from A to B and who rely entirely on their GPS, they won't know where they're going.
02:06:50.000Digital 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.
02:07:04.000I mean, the programs vary between different phone platforms.
02:07:09.000It's just, it's so fragile and it's so, I mean, I don't know if there's any precautions that have been taking place to preserve this information in case of, like what Robert Schock described, coronal mass ejection or something crazy.
02:07:23.000No, I don't think preparation has been made.
02:07:25.000And it's very clear that preparation is not being made for the risk of another cosmic impact.
02:07:34.000And 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.
02:07:47.000The 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.
02:08:01.000And 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.
02:08:21.000What 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.
02:08:32.000And those parts began to spread out along the whole orbit of the Taurid meteor stream and to widen.
02:08:38.000The whole thing widens, so it's like a giant tube of debris.
02:08:42.000And the evidence and the argument is that 12,800 years ago, several large bits of that debris fell out of the torrid meteor stream and impacted with the Earth.
02:08:51.000The problem is that the torrid meteor stream still exists, and our planet still passes through it twice a year.
02:08:59.000And those passages take place in June and in November.
02:09:03.000And each passage takes 12 and a half days.
02:09:06.000And 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.
02:09:41.000Asteroids within the torrid meteor stream of a diameter of a kilometer or more, which would have catastrophic effect if they hit the Earth.
02:09:49.000And responsible astronomers regard the torrid meteor stream as the greatest collision hazard facing mankind at the present time.
02:09:55.000And 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.
02:10:31.000One 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.
02:10:41.000What 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...
02:10:54.000We would be devoting some resources to protecting our cosmic environment.
02:10:58.000Just 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.
02:11:14.000There really is no end to the amount that we're prepared to spend on that in terms of our so-called security.
02:11:19.000We feel somehow we're making ourselves more secure by having these incredible weapons and spending trillions of dollars on them.
02:11:27.000But the cosmos doesn't give a fuck about any of that.
02:11:30.000The cosmos is out there with these giant objects which have a far greater explosive power than all the nuclear...
02:11:40.000Weapons stored on Earth at the present time.
02:11:42.000The Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jupiter in 1994, had a total calculated explosive power of 300 gigatons.
02:11:51.000If you took the entire nuclear arsenal of the world today and blew it all up at once, it would yield 6.4 gigatons.
02:11:58.000So these objects are producing catastrophic results on a scale that far beyond anything that we ourselves could do with nuclear weapons.
02:12:06.000It'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.
02:12:23.000It's our responsibility as a human species to do so.
02:12:26.000And one of the challenges – it's not the only challenge.
02:12:28.000There are many, many other challenges.
02:12:30.000One of the challenges is to pay attention to our cosmic environment and to realize that the cosmos can intervene.
02:12:39.000Cataclysmically in the human story and that the torrid 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.
02:12:52.000And the ancients were very good at paying attention to the sky.
02:12:56.000We 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.
02:13:08.000It is within the limits of our technology.
02:13:11.000It 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.
02:13:25.000It is very odd that we have this infantile nature, even as grown adults and world leaders, that we do like to ignore imminent danger, as long as it hasn't affected us in the past.
02:13:39.000There's no real moment we can point to other than Tunguska.
02:13:44.000In, you know, photographic history, modern history, where you could take pictures of things, where we had a giant impact.
02:13:49.000If 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.
02:13:58.000That 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.
02:14:11.000And the Tunguska object is estimated to be between 60 and 190 meters in diameter.
02:14:35.000It 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.
02:15:07.000It says like 100 years later, there's still no trees.
02:15:10.000And 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.
02:15:20.000So 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.
02:15:33.000There's a denial of the role of cataclysms in the human story.
02:15:37.000And there is even a word for that in science, and it's called uniformitarianism.
02:15:43.000And 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.
02:15:51.000So 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.
02:16:01.000That'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.
02:16:20.000Of course, no cosmic event could have made the dinosaurs extinct.
02:16:23.000They spent 10 years taking that ridicule until they found the crater in the Gulf of Mexico.
02:16:28.000Since then, the whole scientific community has accepted that the course of life on this planet was radically changed.
02:18:10.000Well, I guess a lot of people haven't.
02:18:11.000But first of all, let's take the Neanderthals.
02:18:14.000For a long time it was held that the Neanderthals were stupid, primitive subhumans, shambling, lacking symbolism.
02:18:21.000Turns out that that's not true at all.
02:18:23.000The latest scientific evidence on the Neanderthals is that they were symbolic creatures, that they did do art, that they were, in every sense, human.
02:18:30.000And they were, in every sense, human because anatomically modern humans interbred with Neanderthals.
02:18:36.000You can't interbreed with another species.
02:20:02.000You have to get permission, and you have to state in advance where you're going to be stopping off at.
02:20:08.000So what I found, and I just did so through the internet, was a local guy called Sergei Kurgin, who had a little tour business in Siberia, in the city of Novosibirsk.
02:21:12.000So there was a lot of things about Russia that surprised me.
02:21:15.000Denisova Cave is a fascinating, beautiful place to visit.
02:21:19.000It's another example of a missing chapter in the human story that is beginning to be pieced together.
02:21:24.000It'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?
02:21:46.000They left behind certain physical objects which are extremely hard to explain.
02:21:52.000One of them is a green stone bracelet that And that bracelet is in the form of a torque, which was therefore slipped on sideways onto the hand.
02:22:04.000And a hole has been drilled through the bracelet.
02:22:08.000And from that hole, it's been possible to reconstruct that a pendant was hung.
02:22:12.000Then 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.
02:22:30.000This is thought to be 40,000 or 50,000 years old.
02:22:33.000There is not supposed to have been any such technology in that period that was capable of drilling with a stable fixed drill.
02:22:43.000So 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.
02:22:54.000And the suggestion has been, were they making skin boats, for example, to use to navigate?
02:22:58.000That would explain how they managed to get themselves to Australia, which is where the largest amount of Denisovan DNA is.
02:23:08.000So 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 should be.
02:23:18.000Those 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 very odd, and it suggests that the Denisovans We're certainly not shambling subhumans.
02:23:35.000Can you find out what year they discovered the Denisovans?
02:23:37.000Jamie, can you Google that real quick?
02:23:39.000I want to say it's in the 2000s, but I mean, imagine that human beings have been around for this long, here we are in 2019 and within the last decade or so, they figured this out.
02:23:50.000Yeah, we're discovering new stuff about ourselves.
02:23:53.000We're discovering that our story is much richer, much more textured, much more layered than we thought it was.
02:24:29.000The fact that this is only being discovered now, and that it's an incredibly important, I mean, it completely rewrites the story of our ancestry.
02:24:54.000Which have revealed the genome of the Denisovans and revealed the Denisovan connection to anatomically modern humans.
02:25:00.000The fact that we're only finding this out now, 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?
02:25:11.000Let's stop being so arrogant, so sure of ourselves, so confident in our findings.
02:25:16.000Let's keep an open mind and see where it takes us.
02:25:20.000That's the main message that I have from all of this.
02:25:28.000I'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.
02:25:40.000And I'm critical of it specifically and explicitly because of the dominance of the Clovis first model for so long, which prevented the I have to say, archaeologists like to insult me by calling me a pseudoscientist.
02:25:58.000I 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.
02:26:14.000What I'm hoping the book will do in the long run is that it will lead to more attention being focused on the Americas.
02:26:22.000This is a very neglected area of the world as far as deep and ancient archaeology goes.
02:26:29.000The recent history of the Americas has been relatively well studied, but the deep and ancient history has not been well studied.
02:26:37.000And I think America is going to contain revelations for us about our story and about our past.
02:26:44.000And 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.
02:27:02.000There's got to be a large landmass with enormous resources and the ability for population to grow and for those resources to be mobilized.
02:27:10.000And 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.
02:27:19.000That here we have a giant continental landmass with extraordinary resources that has just been ruled out of the story of human civilization.
02:27:27.000But 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,
02:27:43.000the 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.
02:29:03.000Mounville doesn't even exist then, but 600 years later it is created and it manifests the entire set of ancient Egyptian ideas.
02:29:12.000Clearly it did not get that as a result of direct transmission from ancient Egypt unless they were time travelers.
02:29:17.000The 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.
02:29:27.000And the characteristics of that civilization, the shamanistic heart of it, the use of altered states of consciousness, the focus on those – We're good to go.
02:29:55.000But then you can go back to Poverty Point in Louisiana, which is 2,700 years old.
02:30:02.000You can go to Watson Break in Louisiana, which is 5,500 years old.
02:30:07.000You can go to sites like Conley, which are 8,000 years old.
02:30:10.000The system keeps on going back and disappearing back into time.
02:30:14.000And I think the most fruitful new work on exploring the origins of civilization is going to occur counter-intuitively.
02:30:22.000In the Americas, the very last place on earth that archaeologists have ever thought to look.
02:30:27.000What do mainstream archaeologists, what do they think caused those drill marks in the Denisovan bracelets?
02:31:16.000They'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— I didn't realize how out-of-place it was.
02:31:40.000We have forgotten so much more about ourselves than we remember.
02:31:44.000And what the process of history and archaeology should really be about is a process of We shouldn't be imposing our ideas of what we should have been on the past.
02:31:55.000We should allow the past to speak for itself.
02:31:58.000And when it does so, it speaks eloquently.
02:32:02.000One of the sites that we visited and explored for America before was Serpent Mound in Ohio.
02:32:12.000I don't know if you've ever been there, Jamie.
02:32:29.000You see the head end of Serpent Mound there?
02:32:31.000So, 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.
02:32:44.000And she flew the drone up 400 feet above Serpent Mound and we sat it up there watching the sun set.
02:32:50.000And what happens on the summer solstice, and you can only see it perfectly with a drone.
02:32:55.000There's pictures of it in the book here.
02:33:00.000You can see it from ground level, but you get up 400 feet, you really get it.
02:33:04.000The head of that serpent is pointing directly at a niche in the distant hills through which the sun sets.
02:33:11.000On the summer solstice, on the longest day of the year.
02:33:14.000So it's a sky-ground alignment, a perfection that is taking place there.
02:33:20.000It'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.
02:33:34.000And 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.
02:33:47.000That kilometer-long axis targets exactly the rising point of the sun on the winter solstice.
02:33:55.000One 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.
02:34:07.000That's when sky and ground unite in majesty at that place.
02:34:13.000But one of the mysteries of Serpent Mound concerns how old is this mound really?
02:34:22.000And there have been arguments that there are 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.
02:34:32.000There's another group of archaeologists, in my view, who've done much more thorough work, who attribute it to the Adina culture.
02:34:40.000The thing about which goes back to 2,300 years ago or so, there's evidence for an earlier construction enterprise.
02:34:46.000It looks like the site has been continuously reconstructed and remodeled, as we would do with any sacred site.
02:34:53.000If it begins to wear down, you remodel it.
02:34:55.000And then you get later organic material being introduced to the site that may give you the impression that the site is only that old.
02:35:02.000What's intriguing about Serpent Mound is it stands on a natural ridge.
02:35:07.000And 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.
02:35:19.000Somebody, a long time ago, noticed that natural orientation, and they decided to monumentalize it.
02:35:26.000Here was a place where earth whispered to sky, the earth in her own nature, We're good to go.
02:35:53.000And what I found researching this book is that Serpent Mound is not alone in that respect.
02:35:59.000A lot of people are puzzled by Stonehenge in England.
02:36:04.000Stonehenge is built on Salisbury Plain, and there are two kinds of big megaliths at Stonehenge.
02:36:11.000One of them are called sarsens, and the other are called the bluestones.
02:36:15.000The bluestones, we know for sure, were brought a long way.
02:36:18.000They were brought from Wales to Stonehenge, a distance of about 150 miles.
02:36:22.000The sarsens are found in abundance on a place called the Marlborough Downs, which is about 20 miles from Stonehenge.
02:36:30.000But until very recently, it was thought there were no sarsens on Salisbury Plain at all.
02:36:35.000And archaeologists couldn't understand why Stonehenge wasn't built on the Marlborough Downs, where the big sarsen stones, the 20 to 30 ton megaliths, were available locally and didn't have to be brought there.
02:36:47.000Very 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.
02:36:59.000And 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.
02:37:20.000They went to huge lengths 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.
02:37:30.000But initially, what they were celebrating was a natural union of heaven and earth.
02:37:35.000And that brings us to the notion of as above earth.
02:37:38.000So below, that we are connected to the cosmos, that it is part of our heritage.
02:37:43.000We in modern cities forget the cosmos exists.
02:37:46.000We have all kinds of tech that can look at astronomy, astronomy programs.
02:37:51.000We can all do that, but actually looking at the stars is something that's very difficult for people who live in cities to do.
02:37:59.000We're cut off from the notion that it is sacred, that it matters to the human creature.
02:38:03.000And what the ancients seem to have done is to realize how vital that connection is and to memorialize it and to celebrate it and to draw our attention to the intimate connection between ground and sky.
02:38:16.000Yeah, light pollution sort of fuels our infantile existence in a lot of ways, right?
02:38:21.000Because it doesn't constantly remind us that we're a part of this great thing.
02:38:25.000Yeah, light pollution is a huge factor.
02:38:29.000It's very easy to forget that we live in a universe.
02:39:18.000Which is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Rick Strassman's work.
02:39:23.000You presented his film, DMT, The Spirit Molecule.
02:39:27.000And on my upcoming speaking tour, I'm going to be doing an event with Rick on the 14th or 15th of May in Sedona.
02:39:34.000I think it'll be the first time that Rick has spoken publicly for quite a while.
02:39:38.000Rick has a colleague called Andrew Gallimore.
02:39:41.000Who 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,
02:40:12.000Imperial 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 I think we're good to go.
02:40:54.000Or are we dealing with some other level of reality that we haven't encountered yet?
02:40:58.000I 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.
02:41:12.000When 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.
02:41:23.000However, it is affected by another factor, which is a slight nod on the axis of the earth.
02:41:36.000And the axis of the Earth nods back and forward over a cycle of about 41,000 years.
02:41:42.000And that does adjust the position of sunrise on the horizon over a very long period of time.
02:41:51.000And 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 Mound.
02:42:07.000It would be possible to refine that and actually say astronomically the precise date on which Serpent Mound must have been first created to precisely target the rising sun on the equinox.
02:42:19.000On that note, we just did three hours.
02:43:57.000With this book that I have managed to pull the veil back a little bit on those mysteries.
02:44:04.000And if we're really coming to the end of our – is it really three hours?
02:44:08.000If 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.
02:44:14.000I'm doing three events in Canada, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto.
02:44:19.000And I'm doing something like 17 or 18 events in the United States.
02:44:23.000I'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.
02:44:32.000Every state in the US is as big as the entire British Isles, you know.