[Applause] thank you thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen for for being here today and gratitude to you for reading me for supporting my work it makes all the difference I can't tell you how much I appreciate it really it means the world to me my daughter Shanti who for the last several years has been a high-powered lawyer in New York has decided to follow her heart because her real calling is for healing and she's a healer and she has moved to Bath just in the last few weeks our family are gathering around us and shouty is also a singer and I have asked Shanti to set the tone with a with a song that is very appropriate to the presentation I'm going to give it'll just be a few moments it's called waiting for an angel and one thing I'll add the guitar that Shanti is playing was my guitar I started my writing career writing songs at the age of 16 and this guitar goes back to actually to 1965 and I have now gifted it to Shanti and I'm so pleased that she's going to be playing it here [Music] one together [Music] Wow [Music] in July angel take me out so I can fly [Music] [Music] stupid in my angels [Music] so see kind to a stranger [Music] I'm Jojo Oh [Music] is [Music] stupid in my angels in my day [Music] [Music] I [Music] Bravo Thank You Kathy thank you thank you very much chanting so ladies and gentlemen here we go I'll make a couple of preliminary remarks I'm going to be but it's just impossible with a huge subject like this for me to cover all of it in a talk so I've had to be a bit selective one of the things I'm going to be talking about today is a very curious connection that that exists between the religion of ancient Egypt and the religion that was practiced by Native Americans in the Mississippi Valley and I in case I forget to say it at the right point in the talk I want to say it now I am NOT suggesting or claiming that this was some kind of ancient Egyptian missionary expedition to the Mississippi Valley and nor am i claiming that it was a missionary expedition from the Mississippi Valley to ancient Egypt I think these similarities are the result of a legacy shared by both cultures a legacy that was passed down from a remote common source and that is indeed memorialized in their myths and and traditions the second point I want to share is that actually religious ideas are and religious thought are an amazing vehicle for carrying information and ideas down time through the future they persist when many other aspects of culture fade away we can say in in terms for example of the Abrahamic religions Christianity Judaism and Islam if we go back to the time of Abraham and era the child 'is we're going back at least 4000 years so these ideas that are still current in our society day today have origins at least 4000 years old perhaps older than that so it's not a crazy idea to think that notions can be carried ideas can be carried and replicated within religious systems well I promise you the whole talk isn't gloomy that this is this is a question that sooner or later everybody has to ask themselves especially when you get to the grand old age of nearly 69 you do begin to ask yourself this question what does happen to us when we die we don't know professor Richard Dawkins the author of The Selfish Gene is convinced that we are just meat robots total accidents of chemistry and biology and evolution and that there is no such thing as the soul that of course is not a scientific statement we have not done the experiments and the tests to prove that there is no such thing as a soul that's an opinion that's a in a way that's a religious faith to say that there is no life after death there is no such thing as the soul I happen to believe we are souls incarnated in human bodies we're here in this theater of experience to learn and to grow and to develop I had a brush with death in 2017 this is in the Iuh in Bath I was in an induced coma for 48 hours following a set of massive epileptic seizures and my wife Santa was was told that I would die so I had a I had an angel who who came and rescued me and that was my wife's aunt and that's why I've asked Shanthi to sing to sing this song it's also given me cause to think about the mystery of life and death something that in our society we push to one side but that the ancients considered very deeply we're looking here at the oldest religious writings of ancient Egypt these are the ancient Egyptian pyramid texts and they are so called because they are written inside pyramids of the 5th and 6th dynasty at Saqqara in Upper Egypt and they are translated into English Faulkner's edition of the ancient Egyptian pyramid Texas particularly highly recommended they're the earliest of a body of literature of which the most familiar to us is the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead this entire body of ancient scriptures is all interconnected they're conveying the same essential ideas and those ideas concern the afterlife destiny of the soul the ancient Egyptians believed that there was a so like a parallel dimension another realm in which into which our consciousness enters after death as we leave our physical bodies behind and they called that realm the Duat we might translate that as the netherworld or the Otherworld and the god Osiris my wife's anther took this photograph in the temple of dendera in Upper Egypt the god Osiris was seen as the lord of the afterlife kingdom the lord of the Duarte's and when the ancient egyptians looked up at the sky at night and saw the constellation of Orion the constellation of Orion was for them the celestial image of the god Osiris and the constellation of Orion was conceived of as a kind of portal through which the soul would travel to reach the Milky Way which the ancient Egyptians called the winding waterway and then would make a journey along the winding waterway and their be confronted by challenges and trials and ordeals that we have brought upon ourselves in the lives that we have lived on the left the Pyramid of unas in saqqara fifth dynasty with the Pyramid Texts on the side on the right the Great Pyramid of Giza this is Santos shot this deliberately as a double exposure the Great Pyramid of Giza which is completely unencrypted there are no religious writings inside it at all but what's intriguing about the entire Giza complex including the River Nile is the way that it mirrors a particular region of the sky and that region of the sky is exactly the region of the sky that the ancient Egyptians believed our souls travel through after death this was the Duat the constellation of Orion the Milky Way and the constellation of Leo rising in alignment with the gaze of the Sphinx now I'm not saying whoever made this majestic site actually put the Nile River there but I am suggesting that the site was chosen for that reason this sky ground mirroring as above so below and a final point on this because of the wobble on the Earth's axis the positions of the stars in the sky changed out the ages and what we're looking at is not the sky above Egypt in 2500 BC when the pyramids are supposed to have been built but the sky above Egypt roughly between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago between ten thousand eight hundred BC and 9600 BC and this builds on the Orion correlation of my great friend and colleague an absolute genius Robert Bauval the author of the Orion mystery so what we have at Giza although there are no texts what we have is a an experiential three-dimensional model of the Duat of the afterlife realm how does the soul of the earthly deceased ascend to the Duat well it's through that portal in Orion and this is made very clear because there is a narrow shaft cut through the body of the Great Pyramid and it targets exactly the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt and it's accepted by Egyptologists that this star shaft or or soul shaft was the means of a sent a symbolic symbolic means of assent for the soul to leap up to the portal in the constellation of Orion and then to transit to the Milky Way and begin that hazardous and challenging afterlife journey I did not expect when Santa and I came to Moundville in Alabama in the Mississippi Valley that I would encounter an almost identical religious system very little is left of the ancient North American monuments more than 90% of the structures that were documented in the 19th century are now completely gone and of the less than 10 percent that remain the majority had been vandalized and destroyed we are however looking at a bit of what's left of Moundville and I was astonished to discover as I went around the museum here and started talking to the experts that here is a symbol it shows a hand with an eye in it except that's not an eye and the hand was the way that the Native Americans saw the constellation of Orion so I'll just read what what the noticeboard actually says in Marvel Museum as a group the knotted serpents and the hand and I are believed to be a representation of the night sky the serpents of the ropes that joined the earth and sky in the palm of the hand is the portal or doorway through which the spirits of the dead can ascend the path of souls or Milky Way in their extended journey to the realm of the Dead the gateway or portal between the celestial realms and the earth disk was symbolized and artistically rendered as an open hand with an eye on its palm we know this hand as part of the constellation of Orion once the portal was crossed the souls of the Dead began their journey by walking along a road or ribbon of light the Milky Way and indeed it was called the path of souls in Native American tradition and thus over time Marvel became in the minds of the people not only the symbolic gateway to the realm of the Dead but also its material either the materialized image of that sacred domain and that we argue is exactly what the Giza monuments are as well there a materialized image of the sacred domain through which the soul travels after death diagrammatically the ancient Native Americans saw Orion's belt as the wrist of that hand and other stars formed the fingers and thumbs and the portal is actually the Orion Nebula which lies directly beneath the belt stars and a number of really excellent scholars have worked together to crack the code of the Mississippian ideas we they did not have a written language they expressed everything in symbolism but fortunately there are a number of Native American tribes who have carried the ideas of Moundville down and working with them and with the symbolism the croud code has been cracked and and it is understood that the portal in the hand must be entered by a leap that the soul of the deceased must leap up to that portal in the constellation of Orion and thence begin its journey along the Milky Way George Langford one of the leading scholars in the group who'd been working on the Missis bein symbolic code draws our attention to the fearsome image of a brain Smasher usually a woman whose task is to destroy memory and humanity by removing or smashing the brain there are in fact repeated references to the brain Smasher in Native American tradition and menacing female figure usually called the brain Smasher or the brain taker and her role is the annihilation and permanent destruction of unworthy souls of the Damned on the afterlife journey so I was very intrigued by this scene in the ancient Egyptian book of what is in the Duat one of those texts that I that I showed you where we see and I've expanded the key part of it here we see a goddess standing with her hands stretched out towards a man who's kneeling before her and what that man is doing in fact is he's smashing out his own brains with a hatchet at least it looked like that to me and I looking at the scene I I didn't feel that the goddess was trying to stop him doing that it felt more like she was exerting will or force to to make him do that but I needed to be sure and needed to know if that was what it was all about at all and since I don't read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs I went to the British Museum and I got an expert at the British Museum to translate these hieroglyphs for me I did not explain to her why I wanted them translated I simply said I want a direct translation of those hieroglyphs and in due course she came back to me Louise Ellis Barrett and this is the translation she gives she lives referring to that goddess she lives from the blood of the Damned and from what these gods provide her the barre soul who belongs to the Damned the demolishing one who cuts the Damned to pieces so it appears that in ancient Native America and in ancient Egypt we have a female figure who is a literally a brain Smasher or a brain taker there is a star in the constellation of cygnus called which stands at a fork in the Milky Way and in the ancient Native American tradition this this star was was seen as a as a figure of a bird often manifested as some kind of wrapped or and this bird had the power to stop the further progress of the soul on the journey along the Milky Way and the soul would have to entreat with that bird and and request it to to open the way oddly enough in ancient Egypt exactly the same role is played by a different kind of bird these traditions adapt to local circumstances and the bird in ancient Egypt is an ostrich not an or an otter a raptor but the soul declares hail to you ostrich which is on the bank of the winding waterway opened my way that I may pass there are monstrous winged serpents in the ancient Egyptian netherworld and there are monstrous winged serpents in the ancient American netherworld as well and here is another Challenger on the path of souls in the ancient American netherworld he's called the underwater Panther clearly a feline figure of some sort this is just a little clay figure of the underwater panther that has survived I'm struck by its resemblance to the Great Sphinx of Egypt I and my colleagues have always maintained that the Great Sphinx is more than 12,000 years old and that originally the Great Sphinx had the head of a lion that it was a fully layer 9 Monument but that the head was recarved during the period of dynastic Egypt into this human form probably because the head was very damaged at that time so I note the position of the four paws on the underwater panther and on the Great Sphinx and I note the way that the turret the tail curls around the back and I can't help feeling either this is some extraordinary coincidence or there is some deep-seated connection between these ideas amongst ancient Native Americans there was a hero deity on the path of souls and the role of that deity was to represent the triumph of life over death and they called him the Birdman and he's depicted here carved on a whelk shell and he has the head and beak of a hawk and a human body oddly enough exactly the same role was played in ancient Egypt by the god Horus and the god Horus has the head and beak of a hawk and the body of a human being amongst the skiddy poorni who were not a Mississippi Valley people amongst the skiddy poorni there was and until their culture was almost completely destroyed by the radical progress of anglo-saxon so-called civilization there was amongst the skiddy poorni a ritual functionary who was called the chief of the astronomers the skiddy Pony were particularly interested in the Stars and the chief of the astronomers is interestingly matched by a figure given exactly the same name in ancient Egypt the chief of the astronomers he was the high priest of Heliopolis which was the cult center of the Giza pyramid and just as the Scooby Pony chief of the astronomers where where it wears a robe embossed with stars so also does the ancient egyptian chief of the astronomers and furthermore that robe embossed with stars you can see from the the leopard head here it was in fact a leopard skin that was covered with with stars and in some cases in mortuary rituals the priests would wear a leopard skin and that leopard skin the spots on it in themselves were thought to represent the stars so it's intriguing that amongst the skiddy poorni the same function was played by the skin of a wildcat and it's spots were thought to represent the stars and a newborn child would be wrapped up in the skin of the wildcat to show that it was embraced by the stars again I feel these these connections become harder and harder to explain by coincidence let's jump over to the Amazon rain for of South America where the purpose of the portal for the soul is served by a very powerful visionary broom called ayahuasca in our society we refer to such substances as hallucinogens I do not like the word hallucinogen because it carries a great deal of baggage it's a it implies that the visions received are trivial and not worthy that was not the view in the ancient world visions received in altered states of consciousness including dreams were regarded as valid paths to true knowledge it's very common in ayahuasca in the visionary state to see geometric patterns I speak from experience because I've had more than 70 sessions with ayahuasca myself since 2003 when I first traveled to the Amazon to drink it and here is the art of the Shipibo people of the peruvian amazon and you can see that this is their ayahuasca art they depicted after coming out of the altered state of consciousness and it shows these geometric patterns and the Takano of the amazon and other Amazonian people are their whole culture revolves around ayahuasca they regarded as so important that actually a newborn child is given a teaspoonful of ayahuasca on birth and the reason they do this is that they believe that we are surrounded by an invisible realm and that whether we like it or not that invisible realm is dealing with us and we need to be proactive in dealing with it our society of course denies any such possibility here we see a 2-car no shaman they call them the pious guiding his son through an ayahuasca experience helping him navigate the infinite terrain of the other side and after the shamans come out of the visionary state of consciousness they will frequently depict their visions on any surface available here we see a shaman depicting his geometric visions on sand on the bank of the Amazon River everybody in the Chicano community may drink ayahuasca but when important work is to be done a group of shamans will gather together and they will drink enormous quantities of ayahuasca and by the way ayahuasca means the vine of the Dead or the vine of souls they will drink enormous quantities of ayahuasca until they feel they are ascended to the Milky Way and that isn't easily done it's something that has to be learned it's a skill The Apprentice may only get a foot or two off the ground but eventually he will be able to soar up to the heavens in a single soaring flight and reached the zenith I'm quoting here from Gerardo right shall doormat of his book the shaman and the Jaguar he's one of the great anthropological experts on the cultures of the Amazon and here's another of his book beyond the Milky Way and he is he reproduces in it a depiction of the entrance to the other world as depicted in Takano ayahuasca art the origin myth of the Takano is really rather interesting it sounds like some kind of deliberate and purposive mission to the Amazon in which people were deliberately settled in the Amazon what the Takano say is that they were their ancestors were brought to the Amazon by a group of supernatural beings and those supernatural beings included the daughter of the Sun and the figure who was called the helmsman because the helmsman steered the serpent canoe in which those first settlers were brought and these so called supernaturals taught the first settlers where they would find places that they could build their villages where there would be good hunting where they could make fields and and propitious sites for for housing and then the supernaturals left and the Takano were left to themselves in the Amazon and instructed to forever remember those so-called supernaturals and their teachings they sound a lot more to me like people than like supernaturals oddly enough the same story is told that the temple of horus at edfu in Upper Egypt but from a different perspective in the temple of horus at edfu in Upper Egypt written between the inner and outer enclosure walls we can find an astonishing body of texts called the ed foo building texts and these ed for building texts deeply inscribed on these walls this is this is what they what they look like we're told in the inscriptions which again have been translated we're told in the inscriptions that they were based on much older source documents that there had been documents written on animal skins which were falling apart and in order to preserve them the priests inscribed them deeply into the walls of the temple of horus at edfu and what those texts do is they speak of an island which was called the homeland of the primeval ones and they tell us that was that it was destroyed in a great flood and that flood was precipitated by some object coming down from the sky a snake called the great leaping one who assaults the homeland of the primeval ones and pierces it and then it swallowed up in a gigantic flood but we're told that there were survivors and that some of those survivors came to Egypt and built primeval mounds up and down the land which were to be the site of all future temples and pyramids to be built in in Egypt and they also tell us that those survivors traveled all over the world they didn't just confine their work to Egypt they traveled everywhere and there's a special word for their wanderings around the world and their project was to reconstitute or resurrect their lost former world or mayor may I dare to say their their lost civilization this project wasn't only pursued in Egypt but in many other lands and I would suggest that one of those lands was the land that we now call South America and specifically the Amazon the Amazon basin is really huge it covers more than 7 million square kilometers of which still today despite tragic clearances of the rainforest five and a half million square kilometers remain by dense rainforest and almost no archaeology has been done in those rainforest covers areas of the Amazon at all I don't understand how archaeologists can claim to have a complete picture of the human past when we know that 27 million square kilometres of land were swallowed up by rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age when we know that the Sahara Desert was Green during the Ice Age and is arid and barren today and when an area larger than the entire subcontinent of India the Amazon jungle has hardly been subjected to any archaeological study at all I'm not saying none but very little and it's understandable it's a very challenging very difficult environment to work in well here's a sensational headline as we would expect from the Daily Mail where Aborigines the first Americans native tribes in the Amazon found to be most closely related to Indigenous Australians this is one of those cases where the science is even more sensational than the headlines and the science was published in Nature in the scientific magazine nature a highly respected source and it presents genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas it was long held that there was only one founding population and that their route was up through Siberia across the Bering Straits which were a land bridge during the Ice Age when sea levels were lower into North America down through North America Central America and finally into South America but genetics has thrown a curveball into this analysis because it turns out that a group of people in the Amazon jungle number of tribes in the Amazon jungle are closely related at the genetic level to Melanesians and Australian Aborigines - let's call them Australasia and that would be fine if we found traces of that DNA in North America and Central America but we don't we only find it in the Amazon jungle and that challenges the notion that the only route of migration was through the Americas in this way because if that were the case we would expect to find traces of that DNA throughout the Americas not limited to the Amazon jungle and furthermore we know from a 2018 paper in the journal Cell we know from that paper that this DNA signal in the Amazon is very old it's not recent it's very rare to find skeletal remains that go back more than 10,000 years let alone 12 or 13,000 years but a skeleton has been found in the lagoa santa area of Brazil in the Amazon it is dated to ten thousand four hundred years ago and it contains that same Australasia and DNA signal that is found surviving amongst peoples in the Amazon today so that tells us that that signal reached the Amazon at least ten thousand four hundred years ago and given that so much of the Amazon has not been excavated and that these remains often don't survive at all it's safe to assume that it got there quite a bit before that the experts themselves say that the anomalous genetic signal must have reached South America in the Late Pleistocene and that's just a fancy word for the ice age so that it reached South America near the end of the last ice age so that's the the mystery the Bering Straits do not seem to be involved in getting this DNA to the Amazon jungle now one might reasonably ask did the DNA start here and move there but the answer to that is probably not because that DNA signal is very powerfully represented here and less strongly represented here so it looks like it originated there and it'll looks like somebody crossed the Pacific Ocean during the last ice age I got in touch with Professor SK Willis live at the University of Copenhagen one of the world's leading geneticists who's been behind quite a number of these studies the lead author on a number of these studies and I asked him about this and he admitted you know nobody has a good explanation for the Australasian Australia Melanesian signal everything that's put forward is speculative and he suggested a number of possibilities but amongst them he listed the following someone holding this signal comes into the Americas not through burying year but crossing into South America across the ocean based purely on the genetic data this is the most parsimonious explanation but it does not make practical sense two points there when a scientist says the word parsimony he's saying he likes that idea more elaborate and complicated your theory the less likely it is to be true the simpler and more direct the theory the more likely it is to be true that's the principle of parsimony in science but then the second part of his statement but it does not make practical sense I asked him why and he said well look we have to rely on the work of other experts and the archaeologists who are the expert in ancient cultures tell me that nobody was capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age it was just impossible yes they did across the Pacific Ocean during the Polynesian expansion getting even to Easter Island but that was 3,500 years ago not ten twelve thirteen thousand years ago at the end of the Ice Age and I don't blame him professor Willis lived for relying on archaeologists it's normal in science to rely on the good quality of work done by other scientists but I would raise a huge question mark over whether archaeology is a science at all and in fact there's quite a bit of contradictory evidence which suggests that somebody was traveling the world oceans during the Ice Age and indeed mapping the world and I went into this in my 1995 book fingerprints of the gods there are a number of maps that have survived what these maps all have in common is they were drawn roughly between the 1400s and the 1700s they do incorporate the latest navigational knowledge of that time but where that wasn't available they relied on earlier source maps and those earliest source maps often in a very bad condition of not subnautica and this is one of those maps the world similar world map and we can see a greatly extended Southeast Asia leading down to Australia here not at all as it looks today but very much as it looked when sea levels were 400 feet lower at the last glacial maximum twenty one thousand three hundred years ago here's the island the islands of Japan and the principal islands of Honshu Kyushu and Shikoku are three islands today but during the Ice Age they were all joined together Kyushu and Shikoku were joined to Honshu and oddly enough the earliest of Japan that survived into Western tradition the 1424 peace igano chart shows Shikoku and Kyushu as part of the island of Honshu as they were indeed during the Ice Age this is the pinkerton world map from 1818 it's a good map based on the latest scientific knowledge of the time but as you will observe something is missing from the picture and that is Antarctica and the reason Antarctic is missing from the picture is that our civilization didn't discover Antarctica until 1819 and that's why it's not on a map of 1818 but if you go back to those earlier maps based on even oldest source maps you'll find Antarctica in the right place all over those maps maps even drawn by merket or based on on earlier source maps and they show Antarctica a bit bigger than it is today but much as it looked during the Ice Age I could show you dozens of similar images from those maps here is the canopy map of 1489 again based on ancient source maps now lost and what we what we see is the Sahara Desert filled with an enormous river channel and with lakes highlighted in in the color green oddly enough a 2015 radar survey of mauritania shows that such a river channel did once exist in the Sahara Desert pretty much in exactly the place that is indicated on that 1489 map it was there during the Ice Age but it dried up subsequently and the area of course is completely desert today here's a 15:13 map of the British Isles and lying just to the west of Ireland is a little island which is labeled hi Brazil hi Brazil is still there but you have to go diving in order to see it today this bathymetric map shows that an island of exactly the right size and shape lay exactly where it's indicated on this 1489 map and it stayed there until roughly 13,000 years ago when rising sea levels covered it so it's an anomaly that it appears on this map either it's an extraordinary coincidence or somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age the piri reis map is perhaps the most famous of these maps it was once a world map but all that survived of it is a corner which shows the west coast of africa the east coast of South America going down towards Antarctica here and the east coast of North America piri reis was a Turkish Admiral he tells us in his own handwriting on the map that he based it on more than 100 older source maps and what's interesting about it I won't get into the controversy about Antarctica in this case what's interesting to me about it is this island shown off the east coast of North America roughly off Florida and I've blown it up here and on this island we can see what looks like a road or a row of megaliths running up the middle of the island and that island is positioned exactly where Bimini is positioned today and I have dived on that spot and what you see underwater is the Bimini Road a gigantic road of megaliths and I actually don't care whether the road is natural or man-made what intrigues me is that it's documented on this map this map is documenting a feature that was lost above water during the last ice age so to go back to the Amazon it does at first seem like a an unlikely setting to find science but there is science in the Amazon for example more than a hundred and fifty thousand different species of plants and trees in the Amazon what an incredible source of biodiversity this place still is to this day but if you want to make the visionary brew ayahuasca you need to put two of those plants and trees together you need to take the leaves of this bush which is called Jacques Runa in the Amazon and the leaves contain substantial concentrations of I'll have to use that word the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and that is dimethyltryptamine DMT for short however DMT is not an orally active substance and the reason that it's not orally active is because there's an enzyme in our gut called monoamine oxidase that switches off DMT on contact so you could drink a tea made of hundreds of these leaves and all you'd get is a bellyache you wouldn't get a visionary experience of at all but if you cook those leaves together with the ayahuasca vine you get a truly powerful visionary broom which will take you on a journey that will last between four and six hours in the West people consume DMT largely by smoking it it by it bypasses the gut and enters directly into the brain and it produces it's like a rocket ship to the other side of reality the journey lasts about ten minutes and you really don't know what's happened to you when you come back it's very difficult to integrate the experience but with ayahuasca you have an experience that lasts from four to six hours and allows you to process the visions so the mystery is that this vine contains a mono amine oxidase inhibitor it's which is off that enzyme in the gut and I would say we're looking at science there trial and error just doesn't do it you can't go with through a hundred and fifty thousand different species of plants and trees to find these two which are useless on their own but put together produce profound visionary experiences and the same is also true of neuromuscular poison curare which actually is the basis of modern Western anesthesiology these days we use a synthetic form but it was the real breakthrough in anesthesiology came from kirari and we learnt that from the Amazonian peoples curare contains eleven different substances none of which are active on their own but they all have to be brought together and in the cooking of them the fumes can be lethal so it's a very complicated process and one wonders how and why it was done well I'm showing these Nazca line pictures here you can see the nazca spider and it's identified as a species of Amazonian spider called mininum and ant spider and down here probably not so clear in this light is the monkey of Nazca with its prehensile tail it's a characteristic of new world monkeys old world monkeys don't share it new world monkeys have prehensile tails and it's just a fact that in the Amazon monkeys are an important source of protein in the diet of Amazonian peoples and they hunt monkeys by shooting them with bows and arrows here's the problem your monkey is 200 feet up a tree if you shoot it with an arrow that is not tipped with curare you may kill it but what it's going to do is it forces it's going to wrap that prehensile tail around a tree bark branch and lock onto it tight and suddenly dinner is 200 feet above you hanging from the top of a tree you want dinner on the ground that's why they created curare because curare paralyzes the muscles and the monkey cannot wrap its tail around the trees and it drops straight to the ground and dinner is served as well as these Amazonian creatures on the Nazca plateau there's also a great deal of geometry and we will come back to that Francisco de Orellana was the first European to cross the entire length of the Amazon jungle and he did so between 1541 and 1542 it was not his intention he set out with a group of about 20 or 30 men in a boat they were going they had established a base camp they were looking for El Dorado as a man a fact they left most of the expedition in the base camp and they set off to hunt and to bring back food to the expedition but the Amazon disagreed and it carried that boat more than 4000 kilometers all the way through the Amazon and all the way until they finally ended up in the Atlantic Ocean and thence made their way back through Mexico on that journey Oriana and his men reported seeing enormous cities and they reported seeing huge populations and evidence of advanced arts and crafts a hundred years later when other Europeans started to make their way into the Amazon they couldn't find any trace of those cities and they came to the conclusion that Orianna and his team had made the whole story up it was kind of fantasy but it wasn't the fantasy they were absolutely right the reasons those cities had gone is that the Spanish introduced smallpox into the Amazon and that smallpox the local people had no immunity to it there was a massive die-off of the populations the cities were deserted they were overgrown by the jungle and 100 years later nobody could see them anymore we can see them today because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon these lost garden cities are beginning to emerge from the Amazon and the evidence now and I go into it in detail in the book is that these cities had populations that were substantially larger in many cases than the cities of the greatest cities of Europe at that time very big cities an estimated total population in the Amazon of 20 million people before the Spanish conquest how could that possibly be so rainforest soils are not very fertile they are fertile on the surface but it's all caused by the leaves falling to the to the ground in a kind of mulch under the surface they're not fertile the Amazonians were able to support themselves support large populations because they actually invented a soil and that soil we can trace its origins back at least to 8,000 years ago I'm convinced it goes back much further if only more archeology were done but there are eight thousand year old patches of Terra Preta and you can still take a handful of that Terra Preta and you can add it to completely barren soil and it will turn that soil fertile and make it productive again in very quickly and it does so because it's full of microorganisms that are not found in other neighboring soils and it's also based on biochar and these sites of Terra Preta are still sought out by peoples in the Amazon today it's entirely an anthropogenic man-made soil it is not a natural soil in the Brazilian state of Acre in the southwestern Amazon we find again emerging from the cleared areas of the jungle enormous geometrical geoglyphs very similar in many cases to those of the Nazca plateau here's an example from a place called Jaco saw in the Amazon where we see a huge square earthwork on a scale of hundreds of meters and another square earthwork surrounding a circle here we see an octagon surrounding a square here at Ramada Kappa Tara we see a very large circle and a smaller circle joined together a square in a circle at presenta Atlantica oh and the the site of taquinho this hugely complex earthworks site the larger of the two squares measures 210 by 210 meters and that presenter piranhas and severe in ocala sands we have sets of squares that are perfectly aligned to true north true south true east and true west to do that you need astronomy you need people who are masters of astronomy you him we use magnetic compasses today but they really they don't show you true north they show you about 11 degrees off off true north to get true north requires astronomy and it's quite stunning to find this evidence of accurate astronomy and geometry in the heart of the Amazon jungle here's a very complex earth work it's called fazenda colorada a couple of photographs of it here and here a diagram of the whole site these roads are modern roads that have been cut through the site but one ancient road is there and what drew my attention to this site was this bit of it which if we rotate it looks very similar in design to the entrance to the other world as picked it in Takano ayahuasca art and since it's from the limited archeology that's been done it's clear that nobody ever lived in these sites there is no habitation refuge at all they appear to have been ceremonial sites and I wonder if they were connected to that same quest for life after death that we find traces of in Egypt and in the Mississippi Valley certainly there's a lot of geometry in the ancient Egyptian afterlife realm squares pyramids circles and so on and so forth in the Amazon as well as the huge earthworks there are also megaliths there are indeed megalithic stone circles this one at regular on day only quite recently discovered has become known now as the Amazonian Stonehenge and the tilt on the stones is deliberate it is not a result of the site collapsing these stones were very carefully braced into position in order to do something special to focus on a particular moment of the solar year there are key moments the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere the Sun rises furthest north of East the winter solstice the Sun rising furthest south of East and the equinoxes when the Sun rises perfectly due east what the Reg or grande site does is it targets the winter solstice sunrise this stone uses a shadow effect to target the entire path of the Sun throughout the whole day of the winter solstice and I repeat it isn't an accident that it's sloped it is deliberately carefully wedged into position even the stones that are lying on the ground are there deliberately because the laterite beneath them was carefully hollowed out and they were placed into that between stones 1 & 2 there's a hole drilled in stone 1 it shows us stone 2 and the Sun will sit exactly in that gap in stone 2 as it rises at dawn on the winter solstice of course Stonehenge is another source tichel site all of us I'm sure in this room have been to Stonehenge since it's very very nearby and here's how it works at Stonehenge if you stand the high sarsen stones 16 and look north of East at the heel stone at dawn on the summer solstice you will see the Sun rising in direct alignment with your view behind the heel stone as though the heel stone is like the sight on the barrel of a gun and in fact the alignment is reciprocal because if you stand at the heel stone and look at sarsen stones 16 at sunset on the winter solstice you will find that the alignment also works then so it targets sunrise on the summer solstice sunset on the winter solstice here is the Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt the whole massive kilometer long axis of the Temple of Karnak is designed to celebrate the marriage of earth and sky and that marriage takes place at dawn on the winter solstice when the Sun rises directly down that kilometre long axis and sits on top of this gateway right at the end of the axis this is what you see if you get up illegally on the back of the Great Sphinx you see the back of the Sphinx's head of course if you were there on the summer solstice the Sun would rise over here winter solstice the Sun would rise over here south of East but if you get up there on the equinoxes when the Sun rises perfectly due east you can see the particular marriage of earth and sky that is being celebrated by the great sphinx because it gazes directly at the Rising Sun on the equinoxes same happens at Angkor Wat in Cambodia very carefully-designed place yourself on the central causeway look directly at the central tower be there an hour or so before dawn and then you'll see the Sun come up and it'll rise up the side of the central tower until it sits exactly on the top of the central tower lighting up the whole place like a fairy tale Kingdom celebrating the marriage of earth and sky as above so below now let's go to North America this is Serpent Mound in Ohio very obvious why it's called Serpent Mound because there's a serpentine mound here Santa was able to get this photograph with a drone that she positioned for hun feet above the site Serpent Mound is built on a natural Ridge and that natural ridge you can see it in diagrams here has a pronounced twist to the left which the head and jaws of the serpent also mirror and you can see it again in lidar with all the vegetation stripped away there's the Serpent Mound and there's the natural ridge on which it stands and it turns out that the ancients had spotted something very intriguing this was a place where ground whispered naturally to sky because that natural Ridge is oriented to the point of sunset on the summer solstice and seeing ground speaking to sky so intimately the ancients decided to celebrate that moment and they created Serpent Mound on top of that Ridge interestingly enough we've only known this for about the last year the here stern and the sarsen stone at Stonehenge were always there their natural features they were not brought from the Barbara downs they stood on that site always and the reason that the sarsens were brought 20 or 30 miles to Stonehenge was to celebrate that natural marriage of earth and sky the alignment to the solstices between sarsen stone 16 and the heel stone and that's exactly the same thing that's happening at Serpent Mound that here we have a ridge earth speaking to sky let's celebrate it let's monumental eyes it with Serpent Mound so this is what happens at sunset on the summer solstice you see the head of the serpent it seems to be seeking out the Sun and then as the Sun begins to go down you get it more clearly this beautiful alignment between earth and sky and silence falls over the scene and the majesty of the site just overwhelms you going north from Serpent Mound there are two interesting geometrical sites one of them is called high bank works and the other is called Newark earthworks I don't have time today to get into detail on high bank works but I want to draw your attention to one thing high bank and Newark are 60 miles apart they both contain as well as many other features including a great square and multiple other circles they both contain a combination of an octagon and a circle the Octagon circle combination at high Bank is oriented at exactly 90 degrees to the Octagon Circle combination at Newark and to do that across 60 miles is really a remarkable feat of surveying and setting out and geometry and we can't deny it it's a fact it's there this 90 degree alignment this is what you see this is a 1934 aerial photograph of the circle octagon combination at Newark and those parts that still survived are now largely contained within a private Country Club including an 18-hole golf course which promotes itself has quote unlike any other in the world it is designed around as prehistoric Native American earthworks that come into play on eleven of the holes well I have to say at one level I find it very disturbing that this ancient sacred site is now a golf course but at another level I welcome it because it's preserved that site if that site hadn't been taken over by a private Country Club you can be absolutely sure it would have been plowed under and turned into agricultural land so at least something is left and you can get a sense of the scale of it from these shots inside that private Country Club interesting comparison between the octagon circle combination at Newark and another octagon circle combination in the Amazon another feature of New York is the so-called Great Circle or fairground circle as it used to be called because they once put a fairground inside it it's got a diameter of 365 point nine meters I put beside it Avebury here nearby to us which has a diameter of 347 point four meters both Avebury and the Great Circle at Newark are true henges a henge is an earthwork and a hare that what characterizes a henge is a ditch and an embankment and in the case of Altru henges the embankment is placed outside the ditch that's why we can say immediately these sites were not used for defense because if you want to make a moat why you're going to put it outside your embankment not inside your embankment you can get a sense of the embankment at Avebury here and even better in this aerial photograph there's the ditch that runs all the way around Avebury and there's the embankment on the outside of it and I'm sure many of you have done the walk along the chalk path on the on the embankment and some very spooky mysterious trees here I have to say like something out of Tolkien very few of the stones are left but this is a true henge and so are the North American earthworks and the Amazonian earthworks ramal Doka Patara that's a true henge with the embankment outside the ditch and here in jocose ah we have a square embankment with a ditch inside and its surrounding a circle this is the project that the ancient Greeks called squaring the circle and which is too often attributed only to the ancient Greeks a similar site existed in Pike County Ohio it was mapped in 1848 but it's now been swept away by economic development in the region and interestingly enough just last year a square the remains of a square formation was found inside the southern of the two inner circles of a brewery so it seems the same exercise was being replicated there the perimeter of Newark's great square on the left is exactly equal to the circumference of the great circle in the center and another feature at Newark the observatory circle has an area exactly equal to the area of the Great Square this alone tells us we don't need any further information geometers and setting out engineers highly skilled were at work in the creation of these Native American earthworks this is such a complicated story that I'm not going to go into it in great depth but we all know the Sun has its stopping points on the horizon we call them the solstices the Sun stops still on the summer solstice stays roughly in the same place for two or three days and then starts to move back like a pendulum swing along the horizon same on the winter solstice the moon has its stopping points too and those stopping points are spread out over a cycle of exactly eighteen point six years most of us are not aware of this today why should we be we live in light polluted cities we can hardly see the skies at all but if you were the ancients and you studied the skies you would notice this phenomenon and there are key moments the maximum and minimum extremes in each case of the moon's range along the horizon and it turns out that the octagon circle combination at Newark targets every single one of these key moments in the 18.6 year cycle of the moon and the the map the majesty of it is the maximum northern moonrise where the moon rises in direct alignment with the principal axis through the circle and the Octagon let's move to Cahokia in Illinois this is called monks mound because a bunch of Trappist monks lived on it in the 19th century and grew vegetables there we don't know what the ancients called it and here it's it's the largest pyramid in the Americas north of Mexico and here the focus of intent and observation was the Sun this is a solar aligned site a city of the Sun just as Helia polis was a city of the Sun this model will show you how Cahokia looked in its prime there's monks band and off to the left of it is a woodhenge and again many of us will be aware that there was also a woodhenge at Stonehenge and because the postholes have been found and undated archaeologists are able have been able to reconstruct the woodhenge of Cahokia and it turns out that the central center post threw an equinox marker post targets the Rising Sun on the equinox and also the summer solstice and the winter solstice are targeted and this is the effect you get on the day of the equinox with the Rising Sun targeted through woodhenge so I think it's fair to say that were people in ancient Native America with advanced surveying geometrical and astronomical skills and they put those skills to work in the creation of enormous monuments lark most of which have tragically been swept away how far back can this system be traced how much is left that allows us to begin to guess how old it might be well we can go back to 1430 BC which is about a hundred years before the Pharaoh Tutankhamen took the throne in Egypt when this mound that Poverty Point in Louisiana was created it's poetically known as mound a and it's the second largest earth work in North America after monks mound it's 2,500 years old approximately but the key feature of the site are these geometric ridges and a thorough archeo astronomical study has been done by one of the great scholars in this field William remain and what he demonstrates is that these ridges align to key moments in the year the summer solstice sunset the equinox sunset the winter solstice sunset the summer solstice sunrise the equinox sunrise and the winter solstice sunrise and not only that as we go south from Poverty Point we come to a place called lower Jackson Mound a few miles to the south and lower Jackson Mound is much older than Poverty Point it dates to 3500 BC 5500 years old and yet the makers of Poverty Point were not only aware of it but they used it as the anchor of their whole site because the three principal mounds of Poverty Point are lined up precisely north-south with lower Jackson Mound Watson break is again about five and a half thousand years old it's an oval of mounds and the game the archaeo-astronomer gary and the equinoxes are all targeted by watson break that's what the whole site is about and there's geometry in these lower Mississippi Valley sites 60 degree equilateral triangles are found in a great many of them and we can trace the story back as far as Conley which is securely dated to between 7,500 and 8,000 years ago how much older the story goes back beyond that we cannot responsibly say what we can say is it's at least as old as 8,000 years and given the massive destruction of the Native American earthworks I would say the chances of it being vastly older than 8,000 years are very high certainly in the Amazon there is a cosmically align site which is firmly dated to 13,000 years ago and that's Pinal doe pilau in the Amazon jungle and I I won't go into the details it's all as all in the book but it's carefully designed to target the winter solstice and it there's even a calendar inside it which marks off the 18 to 20 days before and after the Solstice and the equinoxes are also targeted at that site so we would be wrong to conclude that these marriages of heaven and earth this connection of sky and ground this idea this meme if you like we would be wrong to conclude that it is limited to the old world because clearly it's found all over the new world as well and we have been taught that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world that that view is very firmly embedded in our own cultural arrogance living in the old world and there's a very good book actually called history begins at Sumer by Samuel Noah Noah Cramer which attributes the whole origins of civilization to Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization and and says that it all began here between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers certainly nobody was until very recently has been open to consider the Americas as a place where civilization might have begun and that's that goes part partly back to the long-held view of geneticists now challenged by the new evidence from the Amazon that there was a single common and relatively recent origin for Native Americans and that they came across the Bering Straits when the Bering Straits were a land bridge that explanation no longer holds because of that Australasian DNA in the Amazon and this is the idea that it just doesn't make sense anymore now that we don't have a DNA trail in North and Central America and here's something else this is new scientists from the 26th of March 2013 migration mystery who were the first Americans I just read a little bit of it not so long ago there was a simple and seemingly incontrovertible answer to the question of how and when the first settlers made it to the Americas some 13,000 years ago a group of people from Asia walked across a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and headed south and those people have been named by archeologists the Clovis culture we do not know what they called themselves but this is the name that archaeology has given to these people and they made these very distinctive Clovis points with with fluting in them both arrowheads and spearheads the Clovis first paradigm that humans had first entered the Americas around thirteen thousand four hundred years ago that the Clovis culture was the first Native American culture became a kind of dogma in archaeology and that's one of the reasons why I disregard archaeology as a science because there's no room for dogma in science archeologists who defied that dogma see in archaeology the stuff near the surface of the gritter of the earth is the most recent and the deeper down you go the older it gets that's why we say Upper Paleolithic for the recent part of the Stone Age and lower Paleolithic for the oldest part of the Stone Age in this case the dogma was and it held for more than 50 years that there was no point in any archaeologists digging below the Clovis level because archaeology had established that there were no human beings in the Americas before Clovis and in fact archaeologists who challenged that doctrine like Jacque sank Mars who expert excavated bluefish caves in the Yukon and found evidence of humans there 24,000 years ago those archaeologists had their careers ruined I'm not speaking figuratively they were literally ruined their research funding was withdrawn they were mocked and humiliated at conferences there they were just shut up by the archaeological community and as the semester has recently admitted rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence the fine steered first off fierce opposition and a bitter debate quote one of the most acrimonious and unfruitful in all science according to nature for Jack sank Mars it was a brutal experience it effectively ruined his career and ruined his life but he was right human beings were at bluefish caves in the Yukon twenty-four thousand years ago and a detailed re-studied at the site in 2017 has confirmed that and today as the Smithsonian admits decades later the Clovis first model has collapsed and it continues to collapse because the dates keep on getting pushed back back beyond 24,000 years ago back in the case of topper in South Carolina to more than 50,000 years ago I went and met our Goodyear the archaeologists who dared to dig deeper than Clovis and who just like Jax hunt Mars suffered terrible damage to to his name and his reputation in this career from the hyena like attacks of other archaeologists but again he was right he took me to topper there's the Clovis level and I'll just had an instinct really he felt I'm actually not going to stop digging once I've reached Clovis it's a very big Clovis site I'm gonna carry on digging I'm gonna go deeper and he went deeper and lo and behold he found evidence of humans present at topper fifty thousand years ago and then we have this in nature in April 2017 the cerruti Mastodon site excavated by the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum Tom Desmarais a sight that shows evidence of human presence a hundred and thirty thousand years ago that's more than a hundred and fifteen thousand years earlier than Clovis and I went and met Tom Demery at the San Diego Natural History Museum and like anybody else who suggested an earlier date for the peopling of the Americas he has suffered the most unpleasant and vicious attacks mainly from archaeologists because he's threatening them they have somehow missed this that human beings were in the Americas for more than a hundred thousand years before they said and Tom de maras evidence is compelling the attacks on him will continue but he spent a day with me he showed me that evidence in great detail again I set it out at length in the book and I'm convinced he's absolutely right he's not documenting the presence of an advanced civilization in North America 130,000 years ago this is typical Upper Paleolithic behavior this is this is a group of humans who scavenged a Mastodon skeleton who scavenged the the corpse of a mastodon and they broke open the bones and they extracted the marrow and left evidence of their of their presence there what is important about that finding is that it raises a big question mark over our entire notion of the prehistory of the world because if the Americas have been inhabited by humans for a hundred and thirty thousand years more than twice as long as Europe and ten times as long as previously supposed then everything changes suddenly we have a vast resource rich landmass with a hundred and thirty thousand years of human prehistory of which only the last thirteen thousand years have been documented because of the archaeological dogma that there was no point in looking deeper and and goodness knows what was happening here in that time that that so far just nobody has cared to look for it could have been the location of hitherto unrecognized advances and developments in the story of civilization one of the reasons that archaeologists have missed it has to do less with the dogma and more to do with a global Cataclysm that occurred between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago and that global Cataclysm is referred to in geology as the Younger Dryas it's a very peculiar climate episode that unfolded between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago this site Murray Springs is one of the last Clovis sites and and what we see here is a mammoth being excavated and in the shoulder blade of that mammoth was found a Clovis point dated to twelve thousand eight hundred years ago but that was exactly the time that the Clovis culture disappeared and it was exactly the time that the mammoths and the mastodons and the megafauna all became extinct and we now begin to understand why and it's to do with this peculiar line that you see in this exposed wash here it's peculiar line that's referred to as the black mat which was draped like shrink-wrap over the top of the remains of Eloise and at the base of the black mat are some very distinctive chemical and mineral signatures which include iridium and nano diamonds here a closer look at the black matte iridium nano diamonds platinum melt glass Carbon spherules those nano diamonds are created by the shock and heat of a cosmic impact when you find all of these impact proxies together in one place in abundance it's really hard to explain them any other way than a cosmic impact and as a result of this a group of more than 60 scientists since thousand two hundred and seven have been advocating what is still a very controversial hypothesis and that is called the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and they are suggesting that this black mat and the impact proxies within it bear witness to the impact on the North American ice cap of several large fragments of a disintegrating comet let me just take you to the dinosaurs for a moment because we do know now that the dinosaurs became extinct as a result of a cosmic impact nobody disputes that and indeed the KT event or the KPG event as it's now known is marked by a layer in the soil exactly like the Younger Dryas black mat and it contains exactly the same impact proxies at the base of the layer and Luis and Walter Alvarez the father-son team who originally made this discovery were quite satisfied with the impact proxies which have found all over the world they couldn't explain them in any other way except a cosmic impact but their colleagues didn't like it and they were turned upon and they suffered ten years of bruising attacks before they found the crater deeply buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico the Chicxulub crater and now it's fully accepted that it was a cosmic impact that made the dinosaurs extinct so I'm showing you a picture of dinosaurs and a chicken here and that's because these are world-changing events so well changing that they almost literally turned dinosaurs into chickens because the birds are all that's left of the dinosaurs clade skulking around in the primeval forests 65 or 66 million years ago was this little shrew like creature one of the early mammals and the mammals were going absolutely nowhere in a world ruled by the dinosaurs but when the cosmos swept the dinosaurs out of the way or turn them into chickens the mammals were able to evolve very rapidly and to occupy niches that had previously been closed off to them which is why we can now say today meet your 65 million year old mother we are all the descendants of that curious true like creature and we would not be here the human race would not be here if it were not for that cosmic impact 65 or 66 million years ago NASA tells us that such world-changing events only occur once every 100 million years ago and I have to say how nice of the universe to be so Germanic in its timekeeping that we can actually set our clocks by it and if NASA is right in this anodyne explanation then we today have nothing to worry about because the last impact was 65 million years ago and we can't expect another one for 35 million years why should we care but a number of scientists the late Sir Fred Hoyle Chandra Wickramasinghe Victor Clube Bill Napier astronomers feel very differently I'll come on to their work in a moment this is a mass of factsheets and it's explaining what meteor showers are we've all seen meteors I'm sure everybody's heard of the Perseids the Orionids Leonids the torrents every meteor stream is in fact the remnant of a dis integrated comet every single one of them when we see those meteors we're seeing bits of what was formerly a large comet that has broken up into multiple fragments often dust sized which come through into our atmosphere and burn up and nASA says look don't worry because they're usually very small from dust particle to Boulder sized and it's a curious thing that there isn't a single ancient culture in the world in which the appearance of a comet in the sky was regarded as good news it was always regarded as bad news why would that be well comet shoemaker-levy 9 which hit Jupiter in 1994 was certainly bad news for Jupiter comet shoemaker-levy 9 broke up into 21 fragments comets do this because they are lumps of rocky and sometimes iron material bound together with ice and when they enter the inner solar system that ice begins to melt and they break up into into multiple fragments that's what happened to comet shoemaker-levy 9 those 21 fragments bombarded the surface of Jupiter leaving scars in some cases larger than the earth itself the total explosive power is estimated at 300 Giga tons if you were to take the entire nuclear arsenal of the world today and blow it all up at once it would yield 6.4 Giga tons these are truly massive events and this is the moment where I always like to say thank you Jupiter for taking one for the team because Jupiter is the guardian of our planet and it does sweep up most of the Comets that come through but very occasionally a big comet gets through into the inner solar system and it looks like that happened this is the basis of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis it looked like that happened with the extinction of the megafauna between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago an extinction that was global but that was very heavily focused centered upon the Americas here is Bill Napier he's the professor of astrobiology at Cardiff University this is a paper he published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in July 2010 and it's called Paleolithic extinctions and the torrid complex his argument massively reinforced since then is that the torrid meteor stream through which the earth still passes twice a year is the remnant of a former giant comet that entered the inner solar system from the Oort cloud or the Kuiper belt deep space about 20,000 years ago a comet that may have been as much as 100 miles in diameter and as it entered the inner solar system on an earth crossing orbit it began to break up as Komets do and it's debri stream began to widen and extend all the way along its orbit and then twelve thousand eight hundred years ago some of the big fragments in the torrid meteor stream hit the earth and caused the Younger Dryas Cataclysm and the extinction of the megafauna this is what the torrid meteor stream looks like diagrammatically it's this huge tube of debris we know that there are still large objects in it the most famous of them is called comet Encke II and comet Encke II is about five kilometres in diameter and comet Encke II is a fragment of that original giant comet likewise Commodore Giotto comet Rooney key and nineteen of the brightest near-earth objects are in the torrid meteor stream and the Earth's orbit passes through the orbit of the torrid meteor stream twice a year in June and in November and I liken it rather to strapping on a blindfold and crossing an eight-lane motorway and just hoping that we don't meet any traffic or if we do that it would be a motorcycle rather than a truck it's called the torrid meteor stream because it appears to emanate in the region of the sky occupied occupied by the constellation of Taurus of course it's not coming from Taurus it's within our solar system but that's the radiant of the torrid meteor stream we pass through it in June we pass through it in November and the last object many astronomers are agreed on this that fell out of the torrid meteor stream caused an event known as the Tunguska event and that happened in June 1908 and it wasn't even a really big bit of the torrid meteor stream it's calculated to have measured between sixty and a hundred and ninety meters in diameter and it didn't even hit the earth on the 30th of June 1908 what it did was it blew up in the sky it was an air burst fortunately happened over an uninhabited area of Siberia it killed nobody but it flattened 80 million trees across an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers that is an area larger than London had that happened over London the whole of London as far as the m25 would have been utterly devastated and we might be paying more attention to the torrid meteor stream than we presently are so the astronomers have been looking at the sky and meanwhile the geologists behind the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis have been looking at the ground and here are some of the 60 scientists in what they now call themselves the comet research group James Kenneth he's a marine geologist professor at the University of California Santa Barbara Allen West's geophysicist Richard Firestone staff scientist nuclear science division Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory James whit ker is a geologist Albert Goodyear is indeed we met him at topper is a professor at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology all together there's more than 60 of them they're all mainstream scientists every single one of them they publish their work in mainstream peer-reviewed journals and they were initially drawn to it by a mystery and that mystery concerns the ending of the last ice age the last glacial maximum twenty one thousand three hundred years ago sea levels were four hundred feet lower than they are today there was no red sea there was no Persian Gulf Southeast Asia was vastly extended New Guinea was joined to Australia that's because all that extra water was frozen up on these ice caps on top of the northern continents and indeed into the south as well and then suddenly twelve thousand eight hundred years ago this is the mystery they were drawn to study the episode called the Younger Dryas begins and it begins with a collapse of global temperatures a sudden deep freeze after the world has been warming up for thousands of years and that deep freeze lasts for 1200 years and then eleven thousand six hundred years ago temperatures Rock it up again and during this period is precisely the period of the megafauna extinctions and it's after eleven thousand six hundred years ago after the end of the Younger Dryas that the whole story of human civilization as it's taught to us supposedly unfolds I don't expect you to read these papers I simply want to make the point that the scientists of the comet research group are mainstream figures and they are publishing in peer-reviewed journals this is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences it's their very first paper since then they've revised the date to closer to 12 thousand eight hundred years ago but the title speaks for itself evidence for an extraterrestrial impact twelve thousand nine hundred years ago that contributed to the megafauna extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling paper from 2009 shock synthesized hexagonal diamonds in Younger Dryas boundary settlements lungs delight is known on earth only in meteorites and impact craters and its presence strongly supports a cosmic impact event here's evidence of high temperature impacts and melt products here's evidence from Mexico evidence from the Greenland ice cores which are an incredible resource for studying ancient climate because ice has remained on Greenland where it didn't remain on northern Europe and North America evidence for the deposition of ten million tonnes of impacts fare eul's across four continents twelve thousand eight hundred years ago Journal of geology 2014 nano diamond rich layer across three continents consistent with major cosmic impact at twelve thousand eight hundred calendar years before the present this is the Younger Dryas boundary field as it was understood in July 2015 the epicenter is clearly North America but it extends into Greenland and it extends across into Europe evidence of those impacts in Europe and the furthest East at that time was Syria but research continues I mentioned the large platinum anomaly in the Greenland ice cores Chris Moore of the University of South Carolina did a detailed study of sites across North America and he found that same platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas onset in North American sedimentary sequences and this is a paper published in Nature scientific reports in March 2017 2018 Journal of geology extraordinary biomass burning episode and impact winter triggered by the Younger Dryas cosmic impact twelve thousand eight hundred years ago and another paper in the journal of geology also 2018 did the black mat impact airburst reach the antarctic because they have found evidence of those same impact proxies as far south as the antarctic it looks like the Younger Dryas boundary field is going to have to be greatly extended and the most recent paper 13th of March 2019 again in nature scientific reports sedimentary record from Patagonia southern Chile reports cosmic impact triggering of biomass burning climate change in megafauna extinctions twelve thousand eight hundred years ago the epicenter was around here between North America and Greenland and there is evidence for cataclysmic flooding across North America dated to the Younger Dryas between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago here's a map that shows the extensive scarring of what are called the channeled scablands in the Pacific Northwest of North America I just state in passing that if any civilization had happened to be based in this area before the flooding not a bit of it would be left for us to find today because this was truly epic scale this is a meteorite it's an iron meteorite and it was found in Oregon and it's a sacred to the Native American people of Oregon but he didn't come from Oregon it came from a hundred miles further north it came from the Canadian ice cap and it was carried in an iceberg on those floods from Canada into Oregon then the iceberg melted away leaving this 15 ton oriented iron right undated - exactly twelve thousand eight hundred years ago also dated to that period is this huge so-called glacial erratic five hundred feet above the valley floor at Wenatchee in the Pacific Northwest it's a really big thing I'm standing on top of it here for scale it's calculated to weigh 18,000 tons it came from Canada like that iron meteorite how did it get to to the Pacific Northwest of the United States a journey of more than 100 miles it got there in an iceberg the size of an oil tanker ice caps in chain and snatch up huge rocks and lock them in place and when that ice cap melts the icebergs are released carrying these rocks and in this case that flood that carried that iceberg must have been at least 500 feet deep above the valley floor it grounded on the valley side the flood waters receded quite rapidly and the iceberg was left in place melted away and revealed this huge rock and chained within it and it's not alone rocks on this giant scale carried their in enormous icebergs are found all over the Pacific Northwest this area is even called Boulder Park there's so many of them and we must try to envisage the kind of floods that could have caused this level of damage floods that were just lling with enormous icebergs that had whole forests ripped up by their roots within them that were mud and rubble in the basis of them highly erosive features erosive enough to create this fossilized waterfall called dry Falls in just two weeks the water at the bottom of dry falls is just rain water that has pooled there but twelve thousand eight hundred years ago a humongous flood poured over this and scoured out that waterfall and then stopped quite suddenly to get a sense of the scale if we put Niagara Falls in the picture you can begin to realize how big Dry Falls is Niagara Falls is still there the river is still creating it dry Falls twelve thousand eight hundred years ago the work of two weeks of flooding nature is fractal we we know that what nature does on a small scale it also does on a large scale so go to the beach watch the tide go out and you will see little current ripples on the beach and those ripples might be an inch high and few feet long but there are current ripples on the Camas Prairie in the Pacific Northwest that are on a completely different scale you can get a sense of it here will go closer that's a car for scale these current ripples are 50 feet high and 300 feet long and they testified to the most enormous flooding that passed through and then receded in that area and the story continues in Minnesota it continues in the Finger Lakes of New York State the latest science is saying these are not carved by glaciers these are the result of flooding there's evidence of huge impacts in the northeast of North America the craters are beginning to emerge again dated twelve thousand eight hundred years ago like the chorus all crater and just recently I'm sure many of you saw these headlines about a crater discovered in Greenland a crater that's 19 miles wide and that appears to be the result of a mile wide iron meteorite just 12 thousand years ago I would be irresponsible to tell you that that crater is twelve thousand eight hundred years old the science hasn't been done yet what we know is that underneath it is massively disturbed Pleistocene Ice Ice Age ice and what's above it is completely clean and undisturbed policy nice from our own period more work needs to be done to confirm that it is a twelve thousand twelve thousand eight hundred year old site I think it's going to turn out to be that but I will not claim that until the science has been done interestingly enough the site of that crater in Greenland you can see how closely connected it all is to North America the epicenter of the global Cataclysm that caused the Younger Dryas and gradually although they've been very controversial although they've faced a lot of opposition the work of the comet research group and their Younger Dryas impact hypothesis are being taken up by more and more scientists the summary is that twelve thousand eight hundred years ago multiple fragments of a giant comet impact the earth at least four of them were in the range of two kilometers in diameter with the impacts concentrated on the North American ice cap and the continued contiguous and I scan one question is why did the world get so cold at the beginning of the Younger Dryas the answer is because of all that meltwater that the shock and heat of the impacts flushed off the ice cap and into the Atlantic Ocean where it stopped the Gulf Stream dead in its tracks and the Gulf Stream is part of the global central heating system of our planet that whole glove thermohaline circulation overturning circulation stopped for 1,200 years and that's why the world got so cold the bigger mystery almost is why it got so warm eleven thousand six hundred years ago and as early as the 1980s Sir Fred Hoyle who was then professor of astronomy at Cambridge University was proposing that the event of eleven thousand six hundred years ago was also caused by comet impacts and it would be fragments of the same comet that caused the disaster twelve thousand eight hundred years ago and fragments of which are still in circulation in the torrid meteor stream in that case eleven thousand six hundred years ago the impacts were on an ocean not on an ice cap the effect was gigantic tidal waves an enormous amount of water vapour thrown into the upper atmosphere a greenhouse effect and the sudden warming that we see eleven thousand six hundred years ago science at the beginning of the Younger Dryas is much better than the science at the end but whatever the agency one thing's sure the Younger Dryas did end abruptly eleven thousand six hundred years ago global temperatures soared and the remaining ice caps very rapidly collapsed into the sea causing a dramatic pulse of sea level rise nominated by geologists as meltwater pulse one be let me add that there was also a dramatic pulse of sea level rise at the beginning of the Younger Dryas twelve thousand eight hundred years ago and that is very puzzling because that is a period of freezing and normally you would expect the water to stay on the ice cap we need to look for an agency that could have released water at the same time as turning the world cold and a comet fits the bill perfectly we have meltwater pulse one be at the end of the Younger Dryas and this is the point where I need to ask was Turtle Island and that's the name that Native Americans give to North America could turtle island have been the fabled and mah much scoffed at lost continent lost civilization of Atlantis because that date eleven thousand six hundred years ago 9600 BC is precisely the date that Plato gives us for the destruction and flooding of Atlantis and I can show you how he gives it to us Plato appears to have got the story through his ancestral line through the Greek lawmakers so long who visited Egypt in 600 BC and was there told by the priests the story of Atlantis and how it had been destroyed by flooding and when Solon asked the priests Solon asked the priests when when did this happen when was Atlantis swallowed up by the sea when did it vanish and they answered rather a matter of factly 9,000 years ago that was in 600 BC that's 9600 BC that's eleven thousand six hundred years ago that is meltwater pulse one B if Plato made the whole story up as archaeologists claim he was astonishingly on the money with the latest scientific evidence about the end of the last ice age Plato tells us that Atlantis had advanced architecture advanced agriculture advanced navigational shipbuilding and seagoing skills advanced social and political organization we learned from him that it was formally a beautiful generous culture dedicated to the nature of spirit but he reports that Atlantis became arrogant it became cruel and conceited it ceased to carry its prosperity with moderation it began to impose its will and its power on other less technically able cultures around the world it developed a bad case of what the Greeks call hubris and the universe punished it with nemesis the universe slapped Atlantis down and this happened in a single dreadful day and night and what the Timaeus and Critias dialogues of Plato tell us is that those who survived it were the meek of the earth the herdsman the shepherds the hunter-gatherers they were the ones who survived not primarily the citizens of Atlantis but the the people who they had been imposing their will upon and those people did not have letters and thus it leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education and so you have to begin all over again like children and know nothing of what happened in ancient times so I think the very real possibility that's emerging from the work of the comet research group documenting a massive global Cataclysm involving flooding between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago requires us to reconsider the whole story of Atlantis the whole worldwide tradition of a lost civilization of remote prehistory maybe it wasn't just Clovis and the megafauna that were swept away and destroyed in that Cataclysm maybe we've lost a whole episode of the human story at that time and we will not recover it we cannot recover it if we have a Dogma that tells us that there were no human beings in America before thirteen thousand four hundred years ago unfortunately that Dogma is now being overcome very near the end of the talk now but I just want to say that if there's doubt about the origins of civilization there's also doubt about its future and that this figure of a hundred million year intervals between extinction-level events is complacent and irresponsible actually we're surrounded by a cat's cradle of earth crossing objects NASA tells us that not a single one of those that it has identified is going to hit the earth in the next hundred years and that's very reassuring but the problem is the ones they haven't identified and we keep seeing new ones that whiz by between the Earth and the moon that NASA didn't even know they were there until they pass us by and their numbers are estimated to exceed 100,000 potentially hazardous asteroids still awaiting discovery scientists are waking up to this and we seem to be getting wake-up calls from the universe I won't read these headlines but they all concern me missus from asteroids 2013 2014 2015 16 17 2017 again more in 2018 right the way through to 2019 this paper was published in March the 25th 2019 it documents an airburst over the Bering Straits that took place in December 2018 but wasn't noticed at the time because nobody was up there was caught on NASA cameras and we now that know that that took place on December the 18th 2018 two days left after the publication of this paper we learn of a giant asteroid just skimming past the earth on its closest ever approach but it is the asteroids circulating within the torrid meteor stream the fragmented debris of that giant comet that are regarded as the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time the astronomers and mathematicians working on this calculate that between one and two hundred asteroids of more than a kilometer in diameter orbit within the torrid meteor stream impact with any one of those would change the story of our civilization completely and it doesn't have to be gloom and doom this is not something that we just have to throw up our hands and say we can't do anything about this because we are a highly technological civilization and if we want to do something about this we can what it takes is the will what did we seem to want to do is to invest trillions of dollars and pounds in creating ever more ghastly and sophisticated ways to murder one another on a giant scale weapons of mass destruction no problem with budgets for that none whatsoever but budgets to preserve the Earth from the risk of a cosmic impact and from many other environmental risks that the world faces it's very hard to raise money for those for those budgets but the choice is there commercial interests are already looking at mining asteroids if you can mine an asteroid you can move it and maybe money shouldn't be the only motive maybe preserving this beautiful garden of a planet for our children and our children's children maybe we should realize that that's a much more important thing to do the choice is ours it does not have to happen again if you live in one of the great technological cities of the modern world you almost never see the stars light pollution cuts out the sky severs our connection with the universe but if you look down from a NASA satellite you can see here for example Northern Europe lit up like a golden string of jewels but down here is the Sahara Desert inhabited by hunter-gatherers it's completely dark because there's no electricity there and then the Midian desert again inhabited by hunter-gatherers a completely dark because there's no electricity there this is often taken as a symbol of the technical advancement of the industrialized societies but let's think about that a little bit go west and there's North America lit up like a string of jewels but there's the Amazon jungle completely dark because there's so little electricity there I'm actually in the state of Acre in the southwest and Amazon where those geoglyphs have recently been found due to clearances there are still tribes who remain uncontacted by our civilization they don't even know we exist goodness knows what they think when they see a herring helicopter circling overhead taking photographs of them they didn't may never knew about our culture before and suddenly there's these strange beings in flying machines overhead but we have to ask ourselves who would survive if something like the Younger Dryas Cataclysm would happen again in our day if those cosmic impacts were to strike the 21st century world who would survive it I do not believe that it would be the inhabitants of the advanced industrialized civilizations we are the spoilt children of the earth we are used to having everything at our fingertips the supermarket shelves stuffed to overflowing with food roofs over our heads clothes on our backs we can go anywhere in the world we lie we consider ourselves to be the masters of the universe but you stopped that food supply into the cities and it's a just-in-time food supply right now there's only two or three days food supply in any city you stop that food supply into the cities and I would suggest within a matter of weeks our much vaunted civilization would begin to fall apart the psychological trauma would be massive people would not be prepared for it in any way and very few of us there are exceptions but very few of us know anything about survival at all because we depend entirely on a complex interrelated network of skills who would survive who would survive would be the hunter-gatherers in the Namibian deserts in the Amazon rainforest because they're in the business of survival that's what they do every day they are absolute masters of survival they would weather such an incident with very little damage and it would be they and their descendents who would carry forward the human story and I like to imagine how it might be told twelve thousand years from now how there might be a myth but the archaeologists of that time would dismiss as complete nonsense how it was there was a myth that that they told of a time when there was an advanced civilization on this planet they were so advanced they were almost gods they had supernatural powers you know they could look at the little device and speak to one another even see one another on opposite sides of the planet they could fly around the earth they could send people to the moon but they became corrupt they became cruel they became conceited and big-headed they ceased to wear their prosperity with moderation they imposed their powers on other less powerful people around the world and the universe wouldn't put up with that the universe struck them down it's our choice let's make sure we're not the next lost civilization thank you thank you thank you very much thank you funky thank you so much
Great book!
Just finished it very good
Very thought provoking talk. What he said in the end really got me.
Garbage book as usual!! Always trying to take credit for other peoples achievements!