Jason Hartman hosts Graham Hancock to discuss his latest book America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization. They also touch on his best-selling book Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence for Earth’s Lost Civilization. He illustrates why there was a settlement in the Americas long before we were taught. The conversation goes into how advanced technology helped civilizations, especially lost civilizations. Hancock gives us an overview of the American archaeologists’ Clovis First model.
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Jason Hartman 1:00
It’s my pleasure to welcome the mega best selling author Graham Hancock to the show. He’s the author of several books, including America before the key to Earth’s lost civilization. Graham, welcome. How are you? I’m good. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. It’s good to have you. You’ve got a tremendous body of work. I mean, you were a correspondent for The Economist and traveling around Africa and just doing all sorts of research and reporting. It sounds Icahn
Graham Hancock 1:26
Well, that’s right. Until the late 1980s, I was very much involved in current affairs. And my last journalistic job was as East Africa correspondent for The Economist. So I was based in Nairobi, in Kenya and traveling around East Africa. That’s where I bumped into a really intriguing and interesting story that became my first book on a historical mystery. Neighboring Kenya is Ethiopia, which was very much on my beat. And central to Ethiopian Christianity is the belief that they possess the Lost Ark of the Covenant. And this struck me as a fascinating story even from a current affairs point of view. But as I began to investigate it, and realize that every single one of the 20,000 churches in Ethiopia has a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in its holy of holies. As I realized that there was a community of Ethiopian Jews practicing Old Testament Judaism, I began to realize that there might be something to this claim. And I set out to investigate it eventually published a book in 1992, called the sign of the seal, a quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. And that was really the beginning of my adventure in exploring historical mysteries, and investigating them as an investigative journalist does. My focus shifted from current affairs to the remote past, but the investigating techniques remained the same
Jason Hartman 2:48
grim? How many books have you authored?
Graham Hancock 2:50
I would say that it’s around 20 years,
Jason Hartman 2:53
You’ve lost count? And how many languages are your books in no more than 30 languages? Fantastic. Tell us what you have found, you know, let’s talk about your latest book, of course, in, you know, the lost civilizations and why America is such a part of that.
Graham Hancock 3:11
First of all, it’s part of a logical progression. For me, my best known book, by far was published in 1995. And it’s called fingerprints of the gods, still very much in print and fingerprints of the gods makes the case for a lost civilization of the Ice Age, a civilization that was brought to an end in a global Cataclysm, roughly 12,500 years ago, since that book was published in 1995, a number of things have happened. First of all, I was subjected to an enormous amount of really hateful attacks from archaeologists and from their friends in the media, for even suggesting that archaeology might have missed an important part of the human story. But secondly, over the last 20 plus years, more and more evidence has begun to come in supporting the basic case that I make that we’re missing a huge chapter of the human story. And this evidence has come in from all over the world. A very important development was the discovery in Turkey, of a site called gobekli. tappy. This is a gigantic megalithic site. It’s a kind of Stonehenge, but it’s about 20 times larger than Stonehenge. And it’s nearly 6000 years older than Stonehenge. And it’s just impossible to explain in terms of current models of history. It suggests the possibility that after the cataclysm that brought the last ice age to an end, there were people who had advanced knowledge and advanced skills, who attempted to pass those on to the hunter gatherers, who also lived in the world at that time. Another hugely important development, again, based entirely on mainstream science, is the evidence that a really massive Cataclysm did indeed Strike the earth in the window between 12,000 811,600 years ago. And again, this is based on the work of more than 60 major scientists, mainly in the field of geology. It’s called the younger Dryas impact hypothesis. And they are suggesting that the cataclysm, which nobody disputes the world, passed through between 12,000 811,600 years ago, was sparked off by fragments of a disintegrating comet, which hit what was then the North American ice cap, because this was during the Ice Age and unleashed unbelievable Cataclysm. across North America, the scars of which can be seen in the channel scab lands in the Pacific Northwest, for example, and, and indeed, in the Carolina bays in in South Carolina, as well. And the dating of this Cataclysm. And again, this is now based entirely on mainstream science is 12,800 years ago. So it’s very much in the same window that I originally proposed back in 1995. And because the evidence has been turning very much in my in my direction, ideas that might otherwise have been abandoned 20 years ago, because of the ferocity of the attacks upon them have resurfaced, and now people are realizing Hang on. Maybe Hancock was right about that, after all, yeah, and the area where the most exciting new information is coming in is from the Americas. And that’s why I’ve written this new book to look at all the evidence from the Americas that relate to this issue of a lost civilization. Fantastic.
Jason Hartman 6:31
So does this hold? You know, there are many theories about how the human population was more advanced or as advanced as we are at one time. I mean, we have all of these structures on earth. And all of these things from the past that cannot be explained. Nobody really knows how the pyramids were built. Does your theory help explain some of this? I hope so. Yes. Okay. First of
Graham Hancock 6:57
all, I’m very familiar with the Great Pyramid. I’ve climbed it five times. It is the most incredible structure in the world. And there has not yet been any satisfactory explanation for how it was built. I keep seeing nonsensical headlines where Egyptologists claim that the blocks were slid into place on wet sand, for example, well, that
Jason Hartman 7:19
kind of works at ground level, but it doesn’t work. 350 feet above the ground when when the rocks or their stones are 16 tonnes or something right.
Graham Hancock 7:29
In fact, in the case of the slabs above the so called king’s chamber in the Great Pyramid, they’re actually 70 tons each. Wow. And there are hundreds of these blocks.
Jason Hartman 7:37
Incredible. Yeah, I mean, I’ve been there, I was there in 1995. I’ve been on the pyramids too. So I know. It’s just an it’s an amazing thing to see. It really is. So people talk about what’s hard for us to relate to possibly, is that the last civilization was advanced, but advanced in a different way that we can understand the technology was different than what we think of is technology.
Graham Hancock 8:02
Any thoughts on that? That’s very much my view. However, to be clear, there were some ways in which this civilization was advanced in the ways we are. One example is in the form of ancient maps, which have survived. In many cases. These were maps that were copied from older source maps in the 1500s, the 1400s, the 1600s of our era. An example is the famous Peary Rhys map, which was created by a Turkish Admiral called Pirie recent 1513. But he tells us on his own handwriting on the map, that he based it on more than 100 older source maps and that these maps had been rescued from the Library of Alexandria in Egypt before it was burned down and had been carried off to Constantinople, which we now call Istanbul, where Piri Reese happened across these maps. The thing is that the information preserved in those older maps and copied onto his 1513 map shows the world as it looks during the last ice age number one, and number two, it shows the world with very accurate relative longitudes, and longitude is a technical and scientific problem, which our civilization did not solve until the end of the 18th century. So maps of the world, as it looked during the Ice Age with highly accurate relative longitudes suggest a level of technology in our terms, that was at least as good as our technology at the end of the 18th century. And that in itself to say that there was a civilization on the planet in the ice age when our ancestors are supposed to have been nothing more than Stone Age hunter gatherers, who were capable of exploring and mapping the world at a level that we could not match until the end of the 18th century. That is an indication of a level of technology that we can understand. But there are many aspects of technology from the ancient world that we can’t understand. One of those aspects we’ve just touched on which is The construction of the Great Pyramid, it’s not just those huge blocks of stone in the Great Pyramid, it’s also the fact that the Great Pyramid functions as a scale model of the earth, that if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply by 43,200, which is not a random number, it’s a number generated by a key motion of the Earth itself, you get the polar radius of the earth. And if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by the same number, you get the equatorial circumference of the earth. So the Great Pyramid is a scale model of our planet. And a very accurate scale model of our planet on a scale generated by a key motion of the Earth itself, which is called the precession of the Earth’s axis, which unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years. So what the Great Pyramid is telling us is that whoever made it and whenever it was made, and we know it was thousands and thousands of years ago, they had a complete knowledge of the size and nature of the earth. And for the same reason, they placed the Great Pyramid on the latitude 30 degrees north, which is one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole, they wanted us to know that they knew the dimensions and character of our planet. And this is a level of knowledge that is far ahead of anything that is supposed to have been available at that time. That’s amazing. That’s amazing.
Jason Hartman 11:17
Would it be possible to build the pyramids today, with the equipment we have in the technology we have? Is that even possible today?
Graham Hancock 11:25
I think it could be done? It would be fabulously expensive. And any CEO would immediately ask why do we want to spend all this money creating this thing I mean, the the the human willpower and skill and effort that went into this construction. And by the way, I forgot to mention it’s also oriented to truenorth within three sixteenths of a single degree that’s almost atomic level precision, in the alignment of the Great Pyramid to true north. And when you remember that it weighs 6 million tons, and has a footprint of 13 acres, you’re dealing with a really inexplicable level of technology. Likewise, if we go to the Americas fascinating sites that I report on in my new book, America before, in Ohio, for example, we have two very interesting sites. One is called high bank works, and the other is called Newark. These are both earthwork sites, gigantic constructions made of earth. And both sites incorporate multiple geometric figures on a very large scale, a scale of thousands of feet. But what they share in common is two particular figures. And those figures are a combination of an octagon, and the circle, again, on an enormous scale. the fascinating thing is that although there is 60 miles between Newark and highbank, they were able to orient these two fingers, the octagon circle combinations in both sides, they were able to orient them at precisely 90 degrees to each other. And to do that across a distance of 60 miles. It’s been staring us in the face for centuries. But it’s only now that the measurements have been done that we realized how incredibly sophisticated and accurate these ancient builders were. And we don’t know how they did it. Yes, we could do it today. But with the level of technology that is attributed to our ancestors, they’re not supposed to have been able to do things like that. Likewise, in Peru, the incredible megalithic sites of sacsayhuaman and Cusco where you have walls made of just enormous blocks of stone, weighing hundreds of tons each each block is a different shape from the others. They’re all interlocked in three dimensions. It looks as though they had a technology to soften stone to mold it. And then to set it into place.
Jason Hartman 13:36
Wow. That’s incredible. That is really incredible. Talk to us about you know the real history of America, if you would, or the Americas, I should Well,
Graham Hancock 13:46
this is a really important point because who is it who serves us in terms of interpreting our past to us? It’s the discipline of archaeology primarily that does this historians deal with written documents from the last few thousand years. But when we want to go back 1020 30,000 years or more, it’s archaeology that we entrust with the task. And there’s been a problem with American archaeology, which is that until very recently, really less than five years ago, it was the adamant position of all mainstream American archaeologists that there had been no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago. And they had identified a culture, which they call the Clovis culture. It’s named after a town in New Mexico. As a matter of fact, they call it the Clovis culture. We don’t know what they call themselves, and they are supposed to have been the first Americans who entered America 13,400 years ago from Asia. What’s happened in the last five years is that this whole model, which has been referred to as the Clovis first model, has been completely discredited and overthrown. It held the past of America in a vise like grip for the better Part of 60 years from the 1960s through until just about five years ago, but it now has completely unraveled. And big institutions like the Smithsonian, like nature magazine are accepting that that model was completely wrong that archaeologists have misinformed us that human beings have been in the Americas much longer than 13,000 years. Just to give you a couple of examples, bluefish caves in the Yukon 25,000 years ago topper in South Carolina, 50,000 years ago excavated by Professor, our good year of the University of South Carolina, the Cerruti mastodon site, just south of San Diego, published in Nature on the 26th of April 2017 130,000 years ago, 10 times as old as archaeologists previously, adamantly insisted human beings had been in the Americas. And this raises enormous problems. Because if humans have been in the Americas for 130,000 years, that’s twice as long as humans were in Europe, and twice as long as they were in Asia, and the Middle East. And our whole story of the origins of civilization is now up for grabs. It’s possible that civilization did not originate in the so called Old World, as we’ve been taught, it’s possible that it originated in the new world, the notion that civilization is an old world invention is very much based on the idea that human beings have been present in Europe and in the Middle East for 60 or 70,000 years, and very much based on the idea that there had been no humans in the Americas before about 13,000.
Jason Hartman 16:32
There you know, it Graham, it begs the question, is there some, I mean, you’ve endured a lot of, frankly, hate of people attacking your your theories and so forth. What’s at stake here? Is there a political correctness issue? Or what’s going on? What’s the big deal? Or does everybody just want to be right about their own theories? What’s happening?
Graham Hancock 16:53
I think what we’re witnessing in archaeology, and particularly in American archaeology, but it affects the whole world, as a matter of fact, is what is called a paradigm shift, that we have been stuck with a particular body of ideas for a very long time. And that body of ideas has now been discredited. It’s very normal. There’s actually a book written about this by Thomas Kuhn. It’s called the structure of scientific revolutions. And in this book, it’s a famous book. And he goes into how knowledge progresses in science, and it doesn’t progress gradually and slowly, it progresses with revolutions. And when a revolution occurs, it turns out that there’s a background to it. And that background is a lot of information that was not explained by the previous theory, which had been dismissed by those who held the previous theory. And then more information comes in which the previous theory can’t explain. And that’s dismissed as well. But then more information comes in and it gets harder to dismiss it. And then more comes in and more comes in. So what we’re looking at is an accumulation of evidence that cannot be explained by the so called Clovis first model. I don’t think it’s sinister. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy I don’t think we’re being deliberately lied to. I think it’s the same across all of sciences. If you get a group of powerful individuals who have invested their career in a particular model of how things are, they find it very disconcerting to be presented with evidence that suggests everything they’ve done is wrong, right, Fox, and they will fight tooth and nail to protect the existing paradigm. But eventually, as the information that contradicts that paradigm begins to accumulate, they start looking daft, insisting that their old ideas correct. And we’ve reached that point in American archaeology now, where they’re admitting that the old model they work with is a complete failure. It’s totally wrong. We have to rethink everything. And we have to open our minds to the possibility that humans may have been in the Americas for twice as long as they were in Europe or the Middle East, and therefore that civilization itself could have originated in the Americas.
Jason Hartman 18:57
Yeah, it’s really interesting that that happens in so many arenas of life, you know, people just don’t like being challenged. And you don’t know you’ve got a lot of investment in their their belief system, right? No, they
Graham Hancock 19:09
don’t. And it’s very normal. And it’s human behavior. And science does have a self correcting mechanism, which is that eventually, as more and more new information comes out, the old idea gets cast away. And we’re witnessing that happening in American archaeology. Now, the question is what comes next? Because the key issue is that between 13,000 years ago, at 130,000 years ago, there are huge amounts of deposits all over the United States that have simply never been investigated. Because until So recently, archeologists believe there was no point in investigating them, because their theory convinced them that there were no human beings in the Americans until 13,400 years ago. So we’ve got a huge areas of America that have simply not been investigated by archaeology. And then on top of that, we have evidence for a giant global capitalism. If we North America was the epicenter, which unfolded between 12,000 811,600 years ago.
Jason Hartman 20:06
Mm hmm. Any more thoughts before you go about the ancient technologies? You know, they these theories about how we had incredible technologies. Before we talked about that in this interview, I and you talk about softening stone, like, it’s just hard to comprehend, at least for me, what kind of technologies might have existed? We all just sort of think of technology is well, nowadays, computers and processors. And yeah, you know, before we thought about it as steam engines, and, you know, now we’re thinking about biotech and the brain and DNA technology. But correctly, it’s just hard to even understand, like, we have this view of what technology is I,
Graham Hancock 20:49
I think we have to stop looking at the past as though we’re looking in the mirror, and trying to find ourselves in it. And I think we have to look at the past as it is as a window, and keep an open mind as to what we see there. The skeptics who attack my work as pseudo archaeology will be laughing down their sleeves that what I’m going to say next, what I’m going to say next is simply this, that it’s possible that we have untapped human abilities and facilities, which we are not using in the modern world. For the last few thousand years, we have steadfastly marched down the route of leverage and mechanical advantage, and we have made machines to do work for us and that those have graduated from steam engines to all the latest technology that exists in the world today. And we’re used to doing things with machines. What we have to consider, I think, is the possibility that there may be latent faculties of the human mind. There’s huge amounts of anecdotal information for telepathy for telekinesis, for example, telekinesis the ability to move objects with the mind. Yeah, I think that we must consider the possibility that a lost civilization of prehistory, may have had a very different approach to technology from ours. And that this is why we find it so difficult to explain their technological feats, because we’re trying to explain those feats in terms of what we know, which is leverage and mechanical advantage. And skeptics have taught us to disbelieve in any mysterious human faculties like telepathy, or telekinesis, sure. And yet, we are wrong to close our minds entirely to that possibility. We don’t know exactly what we are or what we’re capable of as a species, everybody has had the experience of hearing the phone ring. And somehow knowing who’s at the other end, maybe,
Jason Hartman 22:37
maybe that’s just a minor, tiny example of a power of a facility that the human mind has, which we have allowed to lapse in the last few thousand years, but which a lost civilization of prehistory, may have polished up to a very high level of achievement? Sure, sure. And everybody’s had the the occurrence of pre cognitive dreams. Yeah, and also all sorts of things like that. I would certainly agree with you. But it would seem like there’d be certain people among us that really could use these faculties, you know, maybe some of us can’t, because we ignore it, or, you know, it requires practice or whatever. I mean, they’re obviously monks and people, you know, that engage in like, extreme meditational, boot abilities, and so forth. But I don’t know, it’s,
Graham Hancock 23:26
that’s, for example, Dean Raiden, PhD, who works with the Institute of noetic Sciences, who’s, who’s one of the scientists who’s taking a serious look at these faculties that the skeptics find so amusing. The notion that there might be real physical powers attainable through directly through the use of the human mind. And Dean Raiden, has done a great deal of experimental work on this, which supports it. But it’s not a popular subject in our materialist, reductionist science, the science that we have in the world today seeks to reduce everything to matter. Even consciousness is supposed to be just a kind of accidental byproduct of brain activity. We don’t know that that’s not a fact, that is just an opinion that science has, it may be that there’s much more to reality than simple matter, which can be weighed and measured and counted. And that while science is doing an excellent job of weighing and measuring and counting things, it may have its eye off another whole other kinds of ball, where we do not use physical means in order to move and manipulate matter. But we use the powers of the mind. And it’s just my suggestion that some of the extraordinary feats of the ancients, whether it’s those gigantic was at sacsayhuaman. Or there are those 17 blocks above the king’s chamber in the Great Pyramid, or indeed, the high precision alignments that we find in sites all around the world that these might be better explained as a result of the use of faculties that we ourselves are not familiar with today, but the fact that we’re not familiar with them, and the fact that a certain fraction of our Scientists doesn’t like them doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. And that there are people today who are still capable of deploying these faculties.
Jason Hartman 25:08
Yeah, very, very interesting. Graham, give out your website.
Graham Hancock 25:10
My website is Graham hancock.com. And the new book is America before the key to Earth lost civilization, and there’s loads of information on it on my website.
Jason Hartman 25:20
Fantastic. Yeah, the book looks fascinating. And then you’ve got such a big body of work, Graham, just out of curiosity, where are you located? Are you in Europe? Or where are you?
Graham Hancock 25:27
I live in the city of bath in the southwest of England. It’s about 100 miles west of London, and it’s cold bath because it’s the only city in England with a hotspring.
Jason Hartman 25:35
Well, Graham Hancock, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.
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