here we go and boom we're a lot Graham great to see you again nice to meet you I mean we were just talking about your new book America before that there's two versions of it there's one version and then there's a newer version that's a barnes & noble version that's specific to Barnes & Noble that has an extra whole chapter in it that's correct yeah yeah and so they can get that at Barnes & Noble I'm just trying to keep bookstores alive man I think it's really important and that's that's one of the reasons that I did this because because I I had finished the book and then Barnes and Noble came to me through my publishers and and said they would like to do a special edition of the book but in order to do that I needed to write them some extra material and and I had a lot of material that I hadn't put in the book and I thought well this is an opportunity to put that out there beautiful so if people want that it's a little bit different and there's a small gold well okay so first of all my website Graham Hancock com has a page about America before and the link to the Barnes & Noble Edition is there as well as the link to the standard edition which is on Amazon and iTunes and all kinds of all kinds of other places so Graham Hancock comm and the America before page the link to the Barnes & Noble Edition is right there alright there it is so how was this before we even get into what is it go to talks and events okay we're on the Graham hunt website I'll go to books books go to America before bamm-bamm go to United States you can see Amazon mods and there's Barnes & Noble special edition special edition click on that there you go and then the e-book as well the label the audiobook which I read myself X is available there that if you scroll down oops I shouldn't be there damn pop-ups damages I am so happy you read it yourself I get angry when someone else reads someone who I'm like come on he can talk yeah I enjoy reading my books myself and and what I've what I've learned from feedback I get from audiences at presentations is people like me doing that oh yeah for sure yeah yeah and a hundred percent it's just weird when someone else is talking in your voice like a man I know you you know that I write fiction as well as the unsession yeah and the one thing I can't read is my fiction really well yeah because fictions requires accents you read need an actor to read a fiction book who can get into the different characters but for a nonfiction book like American before it's very straightforward for you just to read it myself I agree I'm a tremendous Stephen King fan but when I read Stephen King's books where he reads them or listen to him when he reads them they're terrible he's awful at it should should read there of their own novels I think that's it that's a job for foreign actor oddly enough I've just been reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series yeah very near the end of the seventh volume of that yeah I'm just a giant fan of his but when he reads it he reads it like he's just reading it yeah it's like oh this is rough it's hard to get behind anyway America before so there's the give us a website there's there's details about the book there's a page where there are links to the book and also the other thing I would like to take this opportunity to mention is I'm in America and Canada for the next seven weeks and I'm going to be doing something like 25 presentations in something like 20 American cities and then three Canadian cities in in Vancouver Montreal and Toronto and that's all on the talks and events page of my website so if anybody wants to come along and meet this old man in person I will be Alvie doing those events I know doing these are theatres and do you allow Q&A cycle absolutely absolutely I allow I allow Q&A so I encourage that I I feel as an author that frankly speaking I'm nothing without my audience I owe my audience my readers big time and what I try to do at events is to give back as much as I can so if people want to take pictures with me I am absolutely up for that I don't understand why anybody wouldn't want to do that but it's fun it's kind of fun and what people want to come to the desk where I'm signing and ask me personal questions I'm ready to do that sometimes on the British book tour which I just finished I was behind in the in the event space for four hours after the event finished Wow signing and taking and taking pictures but it's a joy it's a really opportunity for me to interact with with with the people who actually make my work matters that's fantastic beautiful so what inspired this I know there's there's always been you first of all we should just say for people who don't know you have been at the front of the line for decades talking about these lost civilizations and I from reading your work I mean I think I first read your work in the 90s you exposed me to a lot of these what were at the time controversial ideas that have now been substantiated by actual evidence particularly gobekli tepe and i mean the the the all the water erosion stuff on the Sphinx and I've since had dr. Robert Schoch on the podcast to talk about that as well but all this stuff was at one point very controversial and now far less yes I mean whatever traditional academics and traditional historians that are trying to against archeologists that we're trying to resist they've let go a lot of that they've had to with things like Gobekli tap they've had to because the evidence has overwhelmed them and gobekli tepe is an excellent example prior to the discovery and excavation of Quebec the Tepe which is a site in Anatolia in Turkey it was the view very firm view of archaeologists that there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere on earth and when I say megalithic I mean literally big stones stone circles huge constructions nothing like that before at the very very earliest 6,000 years ago and they would point to sites in for example Malta a site called gigantea which is about 5,800 years or this that that's the oldest megalithic architecture in the world and they could understand how that was because these were agricultural societies they generated surpluses you could free up people who could become specialists in architecture in astronomy in geometry and they could apply their skills to the construction of these sites but what they never considered possible was that a society that was hunter-gatherers would have created a gigantic megalithic site and then suddenly gobekli tepe is discovered it dates to eleven thousand six hundred years ago it's more than five thousand years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world and it is in the center where there had been no previous evidence of agriculture but the moment go back in Tepe appears agriculture appears as well and this is just something that's really hard for archaeology to explain they've suddenly got five thousand years of missing of missing history that they've just never taken into account and what I see them doing is largely avoiding the problem rather than getting getting to grips with it directly and in fact there have been there have been a great number of changes in the last twenty years which which have worked generally in favor of the arguments that I've that I've proposed well I'm so happy for you because I know that for a long time you were out there on your own okay a lot of these theories very very much so and and also subjected to the most the most blistering and deeply unpleasant criticism from from the archaeological fraternity and from their friends in the in in the media like how dare this journalist proposed that history might be different than that we might have a forgotten chapter in the human story it was regarded almost as offensive that I would put this material out there and archaeologists felt it was their responsibility to show the public that I was full of [ __ ] and that was and that was the whole way my work was was greeted and in to a certain extent still is greeted by archaeologists but things have changed central to my work was the notion of a global Cataclysm roughly twelve thousand five hundred twelve thousand eight hundred years ago there was it made sense to me in 1995 when I wrote fingerprints of the gods but there was no compelling evidence for a global Cataclysm then I just had all the evidence seemed to point to that time and a massive global event and then from 2007 onwards you know more than a decade after I wrote fingerprints of the gods we get a group of more than 60 major scientists who are seriously proposing that the earth was hit by multiple fragments of a giant comet twelve thousand eight hundred years ago and that this caused a huge rise in sea level and extinctions of megafauna 's they are not saying that it also wiped out a lost advanced civilization of prehistory I'm saying that yeah but but what what has changed is that we now have compelling hard scientific evidence I'm not saying every scientist accepts it it's the nature of science to dispute findings but we have a group of 60 major figures who have seriously proposed this in all the leading mainstream journals and it's changed the balance of power in this in this argument because one thing that they used to say is Hancock can't be right because there was no glow Cataclysm you know twelve or thirteen thousand years ago well now we know there was and there are various explanations for it so that's moved things along and the other thing that's changed a lot is the attitude of the man in the street to Authority that has changed back in the 90s authority figures were the gatekeepers they controlled everything of an authority figure in a discipline like archaeology said Hancock is completely wrong he's made all this stuff up that would generally be believed not by everybody but by the majority of people today to have a mainstream authority figure say that to me is actually an advantage because people are so distrustful of authority and rightly so because we've been lied to by authority figures in all fields for so long the [ __ ] has been so enormous that people are finally waking up but we can't trust what authority figures say and I think we can thank the internet for that we can thank the internet you I'm sure you've seen the more recent evidence of a crater that they just discovered like fairly recently in Greenland yes enormous it's an enormous crater it's 18 miles wide it had not been discovered before because it's under ice it's under a lot of ice at the end of the Ice Age Greenland was one area which never lost its ice covered completely whereas North America everywhere north of Minnesota was covered in ice a mile sometimes two miles deep Europe the same northern Europe but Greenland kept its ice whereas the other parts of the world lost their ice at the at the end of the Ice Age and what's interesting about Greenland is there's already evidence of comet impact in Greenland which goes back to papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 that they found what are called impact proxies in Greenland in other words nano diamonds Carbon spherules are not evidence of a lot of platinum and an iron was found in a layer in the ice dated to twelve thousand eight hundred years ago but the next development that you're absolutely right and this was just a few months ago was the discovery of this humongous crater in Greenland and an evidence that it was caused by an iron impactor of some kind now dating of it I would be irresponsible to say that that crater definitely dates to 12 thousand eight hundred years ago because the work has not been done to prove that yet but what I can say and what the specialists who have explored and excavated the crater are saying is that it's recent they can say for sure that it happened during the last ice age under it under the crater is nothing but massively disturbed and destroyed and completely wrecked ice from the ice edge from the Pleistocene above it is smooth perfect ice from our epoch which is called the Holocene which began about eleven thousand six hundred years ago so all the evidence suggests that this created dates to that period between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago but to absolutely confirm that more work needs to be done but it's part of a growing pattern the Younger Dryas impact scientists they they call themselves that they call this the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and it's because there was a period in in the Earth's geological history that geologists call the Younger Dryas which lasted for 1,200 years from twelve thousand eight hundred to eleven thousand six hundred years ago it's a very mysterious period we see all the megafauna dying off suddenly and rapidly we see rises in sea level we see huge collapse in global temperature it's a it's a cataclysmic epoch and and what what what is becoming clearer and and clearer is that the evidence that a comet behind it was behind it is it is extremely strong and as more and more evidence comes in we realize how widespread it was so they found evidence of the impacts as far south as Antarctica now previously they were focused very much on North America now as far south as Antarctica as far east as Syria this was truly a global a global event and and it changed the world and I think and it's my case that it wiped our memory of a previous episode of human civilization that right at the epicenter of this Cataclysm was a civilization that we would regard as advanced not a simple hunter-gatherer civilization which was utterly wiped out in this cataclysmic event and I should say for anyone who's really fascinated right now please maybe pause and go listen to the one that the two that you did with Randall Carlson yes where really goes into depth about the impact the evidence of these impacts the evidence of the very quick demise of the ice age and what may have resulted in all these floods that you read about in the epic of gilgamesh that you read about a Noah's Ark and that all these things are probably tales that of stories that people passed down from generation to generation that survived this time yeah because we now know that at that time between 12 thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago truly global cataclysmic events involving rapid rises in sea level yea did occur and suddenly the the worldwide tradition of a of a global flood stops being just a myth and starts being a memory the own account of real events it's been my privilege to work very closely with Randall Carlson yeah he's around is absolutely amazing he is a total genius he's also a gentle giant and such a kind generous spirited person it's a joy to work with him and every minute spent with him is in education I had the privilege of travelling across the channel scablands in Washington State with Randall and seeing things through his eyes really opened my eyes to the scale of this disaster you know you could look at these giant boulders called glacial erratics and they just look odd sitting there in the landscape but when you really consider how they got there that they got there in icebergs the size of oil tankers that were carried on floods that were at least 500 up to a thousand feet deep that were tearing through the channeled scablands literally ripping the landscape apart then the icebergs would ground on valley sides the flood waters would receive the icebergs would be left there giant icebergs and as they melted away they revealed the rocks that they hadn't chained that were caught up within them and they're scattered all over the landscape and you look at that and you think anything that was underneath that twelve thousand eight hundred years ago is gone completely there can't be anything left of it at all utterly utterly destroyed and I would encourage people that are interested in this too please watch the youtube videos of it because Randall provides all sorts of video and photographic evidence where you can take a look at the landscape and you get a perspective of how immense this destruction was yeah it's it's really it's really important to to see that because it's easy enough to talk about floods and and cataclysms but actually to see its effect on the landscape directly is it has an emotional and emotional impact I felt I felt emotional traveling traveling across the channel scablands real realizing that this was was the heart of an event that changed the world completely and the evidence continues to build I have in America before I've not gone over old ground that I went over in magicians of the gods that we covered in the various interviews and podcasts in which it's really a good idea that people take a look at but I what I have done is added the new information published since 2015 which further supports the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and the notion that multiple fragments of a giant comet hit the earth and and created a absolute global catastrophe so what was the motivation behind creating this book America before it's a curious mixture of things I have been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 25 years that was the essence of my book fingerprints of the gods that was published in 1995 that there has been a huge forgotten episode in human history I continued to follow that in a series of other books and by the time I got to 2002 when I published a book called underworld that followed seven years of scuba diving on continental shelves looking for structures that were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age I really felt I'd done it I felt I'd walked the walk I'd put put out to the public a massive body of information and I thought my role in this is over and I can breathe a sigh of relief because it's hot in this particular kitchen and I can go do something else and I ended up writing a book about psychedelics I ended up writing supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind about the role of psychedelics in in the origins of the of the human story but then new information started to come out that touched on the lost civilization idea and I couldn't just stand by and ignore that information that's why I published magicians of the gods in 2015 and then as I was researching that book I became aware of something I hadn't realized before that there's a mass of new information from the Americas specifically from the Americas which completely rewrites the story of human history that the Americas have been misrepresented for a very long time by archeology and archaeologists will be annoyed with me for saying that they have a way of forgetting their own arrows of saying oh well we knew that all along it wasn't it wasn't the case but the fact of the matter remains that for best part of 50 years from the 1960s through until about 2010 American archeology was locked in a dogma that they actually had a name for which was Clovis first that they invented a name for a culture they called them the Clovis culture we don't know what they called themselves they were hunter-gatherers they first appear in the archaeological record thirteen thousand four hundred years ago and they vanished from the archaeological record twelve thousand six hundred years ago and for a very long time it was maintained adamantly that these were the first Americans that no human being touched the soil of the Americas until thirteen thousand four hundred years ago just animals but no human beings present at all and any archaeologists who attempted to dispute that dogma and I used the word deliberately there should be no room for dogma in science but any archaeologists who challenged that would face severe problems with his or her career they would be mocked and humiliated at conferences like an archaeologist called Jax Hank Mars from from Canada who excavated in the in the in the Yukon humiliated at conferences insulted accused of making stuff up their research funding would be withdrawn basically to challenge Clovis first was the end of your archaeological career so naturally very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis first what was this gentleman in the Yukon was he's called Jacques sank Mars and interestingly the Smithsonian just in 2017 did a big kind of Maher culpa big admission about this that everybody had got things wrong that Jack sank Mars had been ruined by the Clovis first Lobby but he'd been right all along the site he excavated in the Yukon was reacts cavae today 2017 and every single thing he said was correct even though they had just sneered at him where was he he was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s he's still alive he's still alive yeah yeah well I think he's vindicated you know and it's kind of it's kind of nice to be vindicated that there's almost a place in folklore folklore for the firm for the individual who is scorned and humiliated you know by by others but who turns out to be to be right and he and he was right but my point about this is that what it meant was since it was the dogma that Clovis was first that they oldest dates were thirteen thousand four hundred years ago there seemed to be no logic to archaeologists in digging deeper you know how it is with archaeology that the the upper levels are the youngest and the deeper you go the older it gets that's why we say Upper Paleolithic for the late Ice Age and lower Paleolithic for further late Stone Age and lower for the older Stone Age and the feeling was no need to dig below the clovis layer because we already know that there were no human beings then before that and then a few archaeologists I've mentioned Jack's on Mars but but another is Al gujiya from the University of South Carolina who excavated a site called topper in South Carolina now topper is an incredibly rich Clovis site it's full of their tools their points they made these special special flint points that we used as arrowheads and Spears great Clovis site he finished excavating the Clovis level and then he did something that was supposed not to be done he decided to dig deeper and he carried on Deeping down digging down and there was a layer of about a meter and a half of barren soil and then beneath that more human artifacts and they finally date those back to more than 50 thousand years ago and then in 2017 published in nature by Tom de Maury who's the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum and a bunch of other very high-level paleontologists published in nature magazine evidence for human presence in North America 130,000 years ago now this has really put the cat amongst the pigeons now if humans were depressed North America a hundred and thirty thousand years ago and archaeologists have been telling us for fifty years that they were only present from 13,000 years ago that's ten times as long that we've had humans in North America capable of doing stuff and the archaeological dogma has prevented any search what they were doing and we'll until very recently what was the evidence from 130,000 years ago okay so what it's not the let me be clear about this because because this is this is something that is often misrepresented in in my views it is not the evidence for an advanced civilization that we find 130,000 years ago in America the evidence that we find is evidence for human presence and what they were doing was very much stone age stuff it's a mastodon it's a Mastodon skeleton that was that was excavated it was actually found by accident during road construction near near San Diego and and an archaeologist was attached to the road construction crew and immediately stopped construction and they investigated it thoroughly and what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it that they decided not to publish at the time because what they found was evidence that those Mastodon bones had been cracked open by human beings using tools and that the marrow had been extracted that one tusk had been left standing upright in the ground and another had been left beside it that femur had a femur of the animal had been taken away completely from the site and there was assemblages of instruments that were used to smash and break the bones and the conclusion of the team was that only one kind of creature could have done that work using tools on a mastodon and that's human beings that's classic classic human behavior so this sets the goal posts in a totally different place suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for a hundred and thirty thousand years we already know that a dogmatic approach of archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago and what it does is it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing hundred thousand plus years we need to be looking at it hard of course the immediate reaction has not been to go looking for stuff in the other hundred thousand years most archeologists have responded by saying this is impossible it can't be it can't be so but that's precisely what they said - Jacque sank Mars who said that humans were in Bluefish caves in the Yukon twenty-five thousand years ago and it's precisely what they said to our Goodyear who said humans had been at topper fifty thousand years ago and they were both right and I believe that Tom Demery and his team you don't get a big article published in nature unless it's already pretty solidly based and pretty much peer reviews it has produced a reaction I would be wrong to say that it's universally accepted it's very much challenged what is intriguing what is the challenge the challenge fundamentally comes from we archeologists know that there were no human beings in the Americas that far back to put it in perspective it's about sixty thousand years before the first evidence of human beings in Europe it's about sixty thousand years before the first evidence of human beings in Australia and this is just evidence or the first human beings yes we have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence extremely difficult to find you know sometimes we imagine that archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal material though they're not and they're not I mean the whole this is one of the ironies the whole Clovis first Dogma you would think that they had masses of material to work with they did have the tools but in terms of skeletal remains just one just one single skeletal remains from now one of the things that Michael Shermer had sent me was this dispute that perhaps the bones had been cracked open by the excavation material yeah I see excavation machines I saw Michaels email email last night and I I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to engage with this subject and that's his job he's a professional skeptic and and it's his role to do so but what he what he misses out it's true that a new paper has been published which raises questions over the what's called the cerruti Mastodon site which is the site that Tom Desmarais at San Diego Natural History Museum excavated and what's interesting since I can since Michael took the trouble to write the questions can I just sure I just read you something that I responded to on this sure which is that to the microphone oh yeah yeah bass basically this this this paper was in no way a refutation of the original paper in nature as a matter of fact the gentleman who wrote that paper never even looked at the archaeological remains that are in that now in the San Diego Natural History Museum what it is what he based it on is reference I'm quoting from the abstract of the paper itself reference to a freeway right-of-way map and construction plans Contemporary Road building practices and worksite photographs available on the Internet in other words the site was not visited they simply looked at secondary references they did not look at the archaeological material and they ignored the entire argument of Tom dem RA and his colleagues who had already addressed that issue they didn't look at the bones they did not look at the bones when you when you break a fresh bone it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone and Tom dem array and his team specifically ruled out road making machinery as responsible for this breaking pattern because they actually carried out experiments on modern elephants deceased elephants and they broke their bones and the kind of fracture that you get in a fresh green bone is completely different from the kind of flexure you get in a in a in a fossilized bone so unfortunately this paper pays pays no attention to that it just looks at road plans and says there was road work there it must have been done by road work and it's very sloppy very weak and it's certainly not the answer we can expect ongoing debate and that is that is healthy but this is not a strong case at all so this points to the first evidence that we found and is there any effort underway to try to uncover more evidence that from a similar type well I'm I'm going to cite Tom Tom decorated the chief paleontologist the San Diego Natural History Museum that's what he would like to see he makes the point to me I interview him I spent a day with him at the Natural History Museum he was very generous with his time I did an extended interview and I quote from it in in America before and his wish is that archeologists instead of spending all their time trying to find ways to dismiss and get rid of his findings his wish is that they would spend a little bit of that time looking at deposits older than thirteen thousand four hundred years and even being willing to go back as far as a hundred and thirty thousand years that's that's would be a proper scientific response here is a thorough body of work put forward by a very senior group of scientists who hesitated before they put they had the information back in the 1990s but it wasn't until refined dating techniques later than in the 21st century that they finally work sure what they had and that they published it in in nature in 2017 it's it's it's an it's an important study and and I think what's going to happen is that we're going to find much more evidence of a very ancient human presence in the america americas and that's what tom Demery thinks as well and as he points out if we don't look then we're never going to find if we allow dogma to stop us looking and saying oh it's impossible that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago so we want mother to look what a failure of science that is and to spend all the time instead trying to get rid of the evidence that doesn't fit the current paradigm but so fascinating that just as fortuitous discovery during a construction site could change the way people perceive things yes you've got a wonder how much of that stuff is on how deep it they have to go to find these Mastodon bones well so this is a this is a road cut that's being made so those it be does it be pretty deep down 10 15 feet down the grader is going through and flattening them it varies from place to place depending on on soil deposition the stratification the stratification of the soil but what the key the key point is that what you need to do is go deeper than 13,000 400 years ago and you need to do so with dedication and vigor and and with some kind of funding and at the moment archaeology doesn't doesn't see the point of that if the paper in nature by Tom Demery was alone if there were nothing else than that I wouldn't place so much trust in it but I've spent a lot of time during the researching of this book with archaeologists who dig dig deep dig deeper and what those archaeologists all confirm is that there have been human beings in the Americas for tens of thousands of years and it's not surprising that that can be pushed back to 130,000 years ago because part of the argument about the peopling of the Americas has to do with a place that we now call the Bering Straits between Alaska and Siberia which during the Ice Age were at times a land bridge they exposed because of because of lowered sea levels but migrants who cross that land bridge from Siberia on many occasions over periods of tens of thousands of years would find themselves confronted then by the North American ice cap which oddly wasn't at the tip of Alaska but began further in so there was living space in a bit of Alaska but you couldn't get through the ice mountains these these literally ice mountains - 2 miles deep covering the whole of North America and preventing access to the unglaciated parts of America the thing is that what happened around 13,000 four hundred years ago there had been a period of global warming and the ice sheets began to melt and a corridor opened up between what's called the cordelia and ice sheet and the Laurentide ice sheet the two major ice keeps in North America and it's thought that the migration came through that corridor well the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between a hundred and forty thousand years ago and 120 thousand years ago there was an episode of global warming an ice-free corridor opened up and the same opportunity to enter the Americas was there at that period than it was at the later period and Tom Demarest point and mine is that we have to pay much more attention to that early appeared and that's really why I've gone ahead and and written this book is to try to put before a broad general audience hopefully in language that makes sense and an assembly of all the latest information that casts doubt on the story we've been told because my goodness if archaeology is wrong about the story of the peopling of the Americas if it's radically wrong as it now appears to be then our whole understanding of human history has to change it's not just the history of the Americas it's the history of the entire world it has been an absolute article of faith amongst archeologists that civilization began in the old world and indeed I have a I have a book in my library called history begins at Sumer and it's by Samuel Noah Cramer a very renowned archaeologist and it's a good book actually but the argument is that this is where civilization began in the culture that we call the Sumerians in Mesopotamia between the Tigris the Euphrates rivers and that it began about 6,000 years ago and that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world and has nothing to do with the new world at all because the new world was populated so late this is this has been the this has been the argument and this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change that the Americas this enormous landmass resource rich bountiful in in every way south of Minnesota south of the ice cap vast land areas that are that a bountiful getting the South Amer Central America South America the Amazon just huge areas of land that were very very offered great potential for human occupation Dogma has said there were no humans there now the first bits of evidence are coming out that says there were humans there and if that's the case then we must consider the possibility that the story of civilization might have begun in the Americas not in the old world at all it might be a new world invention not another invention some of the more fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently about these channels and pathways that they've found in the Amazon that could not have been created any other way but by humans to creating irrigation humans creating like it peers like grids like a city grid definitely the Amazon is a colossal mystery and it's one of the subjects that I explore in depth in America before first of all to give some basic figures the Amazon basin is huge the Amazon basin is seven million square kilometres in area and within it five and a half million square kilometres remains almost entirely unstudied by archeologists and that's the five and a half million square kilometres that is still covered by dense rainforest and to put that into perspective five and a half million square kilometres is the size of the entire Indian subcontinent so it's like saying we've done world archaeology but we've just ignored India you know we've done world archaeology but we just ignored the Amazon it's the same in the same argument five and a half million square kilometres the view was again there was a dogma there was a preconception human beings couldn't have flourished in the Amazon it's a it's not a resource-rich area the soils are poor it's a difficult area challenging to get to very far from the Bering Straits so the view was that humans hadn't entered the Amazon until about a thousand years ago and then gradually little by little that view has begun to change and it's begun to change because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soya bean farms and and cattle ranches and in that cutting down process has emerged things that shouldn't be there at all for example evidence that large cities flourished in the Amazon enormous cities which were larger than the there was a Spanish explorer who went down the Amazon River system in 1541 to 1542 he was the first European to cross the entire length of South America from west to east along the Amazon he reported seeing incredible cities advanced arts and crafts millions of people a thriving culture and hundred years later when other Europeans got into the Amazon they couldn't find these cities so they said oh Francisco Orianna that was his name made it all up it was just a it was just a fantasy and then in the last decade as the clearances of the Amazon have proceeded we've begun to see the traces of those cities what happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity to it there was a massive die-off the cities were deserted within a 50 years they were completely overgrown by the jungle and that's why they would not seen by the explorers who came in a hundred years later but now the junk is being cleared those cities are emerging and we can say that a city like London which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century there were cities of that size all over the Amazon huge numbers of them and a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people what yes 20 billion this is the the latest evidence from the Amazon and then you ask yourself how did they do that how did they feed 20 million people in the Amazon because it's a fact rainforest soils are poor is one of the reasons these soya bean farms a really stupid idea because once you clear the rainforest the land is largely unfertile and you can't grow stuff on it for very long so how did they feed all these people the answer was they invented a soil and that soil has a name it's called Terra Preta archaeologists referred to it as Amazonian dark Earth's or Amazonian black earth it's a man-made soil it's thousands of years old it's full of microbes that are not found in the joining soil it's based around biochar and you can take a handful of eight thousand year old Terra Preta and you can add it to barren soil and that soil will instantly become fertile it's highly sought-after in the Amazon and it explains how they fed these people there was science in the Amazon to create this well this is something that's not understood it's still not understood by sole experts to this day as to how that was done but it's one of many intriguing evidences pieces of evidence of much higher development in the Amazon that it has been given credit for and of a kind of science in the end Jimmy's got an image of it up there so this is it Wow exactly and so was that done by burns did these controlled burns they did they one way that it was achieved was was to do wet burning of middens they would be they would be burned and smolder they wouldn't burn fiercely which just produces charcoal they would they would burn and smolder and and that but what is called biochar would result and that's part of the fertility of the soil but the mystery is the microbial content of this soil which is completely different from the microbes in neighboring soils and that's remains unexplained so did they what are the theories composting some sort of advanced compost it's some sort of some sort of advanced composting but again what has not been explained is the mat is the microbial content of these soils so they're there first of all is an issue of how two things how large populations get fed in the Amazon and evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could support large populations with the invention of Terra Preta secondly new evidence previously not recognized the Amazon is basically a garden the Amazon is a man-made rainforest there are certain trees like Brazil nut trees or the ice cream bean tree which are food crop which are very very valuable and they dominate the the tree regime in in the Amazon there was what referred to as hyper dominant species in other words people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees which they then cultivated and grew so the whole thing is not simply a wild pristine rainforest it's a very ancient man-made environment and emerging from that man-made environment as well as evidence of large cities large populations and this mysterious dark earth are huge geometrical structures and again I go into this at length in America before because I love this mystery we have in the UK structures that are called hinges I lived in the city of Bath and about 30 miles away there's a beautiful site called Avebury and another more famous site called Stonehenge and what a henge is is a ditch which has been dug deep and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch when people first saw these structures they wondered if they'd been built for defense but then it became obvious they hadn't been built for defense because if you want to create a moat you put it outside your embankment not inside your embankment so a henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it that it can be circular it can be square and in the UK and other parts of Europe it often contains stone circles megalithic stone circles as well but the henge itself is entirely an earthwork what we find in the Amazon are thousands of henges that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared area of the jungle and others that have been identified for the first time with lidar lidar technology is being employed in the Amazon it's non-destructive you can see what's under the trees what is lidar light imaging and detective radar they mounts laser beams down into the jungle is a whole pattern of them you need helicopters and they but it doesn't damage the rainforest and you can strip away and see what's see what's there if this isn't too much about diversion let me give you the example of guatemala guatemala is a small country if I remember correctly it's not much more than a hundred thousand square kilometers in size it is filled with intriguing Mayan ruins everybody has heard of t-carr what archaeologists didn't know was that literally within walking distance of Tikal surrounding that whole area were more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified and these have all been identified by lidar in a country that's just a hundred thousand kilometres in area so you have to ask yourself in that five and a half million square kilometers of the Amazon if lidar technology could be applied comprehensively what would we find beneath there and the evidence already is extremely tempting and extremely tantalizing and I'm intrigued by these huge geometrical figures which involve primarily circles and squares and they are classic hinges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments they're extremely geometrical for example you can find an octagon surrounding a square at a place called jakku saw in the Amazon you can find a square perfectly enclosing a circle now that is an exercise called squaring the circle that are archaea are our academics have given to the Greeks they said the Greeks were the first person people who perform that exercise but now we find in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks what are the dates the earliest dates that have been found in these sites now are about three and a half thousand years old about three and a half thousand years old but the evidence is that the sites have been constantly remade and what intrigues me is what remains in that five and a half million square kilometers that has not been investigated yet we are just I think looking at the edges of a mystery the archaeologists involved who are mainly from Finland and also from Brazil feel the same they're their estimate is that there are thousands of these structures remaining in the jungle and they're open as to how old they may ultimately prove to be the investigation needs to be done but what's fascinating about them is this very powerful geometry and astronomy so a number of the sites are perfectly aligned to true north true South true East and true West I'm not talking about magnetic north I'm talking about true astronomical north to do that there's only one way to do it and that's with with astronomy so that tells us that astronomers were at work in the Amazon the geometry is very complex and very precise that tells us that people with geometrical skills were at work in the Amazon and thirdly the scale of the sights of hundreds of meters gigantic earthworks on the scale of hundreds of meters tells us that this was highly organised project that was undertaken on a very large scale or by very large numbers of people it's a wonderful mystery and and it deserves much further much further attention and I'm yeah that's jackals are exactly the squares squaring the circle so you can see the outside embankment and then inside it is the square ditch and then there's another embankment inside that and a circle and a circle inside that they've made a road right through that road yeah you know because because there's no respect for there's no respect for the ancient for the ancient world unfortunately there's another one wow that's incredible so they found the the stuff that they found in the Amazon what imaging technology were they using to find initially initially it was entirely found because areas of the rainforest had been cleared economic interest said we want to make a cattle ranch here or we want to make a soya bean farm here so we're gonna clear the rainforest in the process of clearing the rainforest they start discovering these earthworks that had previously been completely overgrown by the jungle then the next step was to say what can we what could we do to find out more about this obviously they don't want to destroy more jungle and luckily we have a technology which is which is lidar as I mentioned which uses radar and using lidar they've been identified able to identify many more of these sites and then to get to the sites without destroying the jungle and to begin excavations on them and to find that they go back in the cases of the ones that have been explored so far at least three thousand years this is an intriguing development completely unexplained in our understanding of the Amazon and what it suggests is a heritage of extremely ancient knowledge you don't wake up one morning and you know create a perfectly geometrical square or circular earth work that's perfectly aligned to true north south east and west on an enormous scale there has to be a background to that there's to be a reason for doing it and the evidence says none of these sites were lived in there's no habitation refuse found and whatsoever they were they we don't know what they were used for I make the case in America before that they're connected to a system of ideas which is found all around the world which which is to do with death and the afterlife destiny of the soul and I go into the issue of ayahuasca in in this book because I first of all I ask is itself another example of Amazonian science as you and I and many of the listeners and viewers know the active ingredient of ayahuasca is DMT dimethyltryptamine but dimethyltryptamine is not normally accessible through the doubt we have to smoke it or vape it to get that rocket ship to the other side of reality and the journey lasts what 1012 minutes not much more than that and sometimes sometimes quite a lot less what ayahuasca does is it makes DMT available through the gut the reason it's not available through the gut is because of an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase that's which is off DMT on contact the ayahuasca vine which is one of the two ingredients of the ayahuasca brew the other ingredient is leaves that contain DMT the ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor which switches off the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT to be accessed orally which produces a rather different journey from the smoke to vape DMT trip is a much longer journey it's four or five hours it allows you to integrate and to and to interrelate with the strange landscapes in which you find yourself amongst and the entities that you encounter I'm not making any claims about the reality status of those entities but what I am saying and it's a fact is that people who work with DMT and ayahuasca do encounter what they construe to be entities who who communicate with them intelligently so somebody in the Amazon out of a hundred and fifty thousand different species of plants and trees selected two that are not psychoactive on their own but when put together create an extraordinary visionary brew and ayahuasca means the vine of the dead and what it's connected to in South American religious and spiritual thinking is what happens to us when we die and the Takano who are an Amazonian people who work regularly forth ayahuasca I mean the Takano actually will give a teaspoonful of ayahuasca to a newborn infant they feel ayahuasca is so important that there is a hidden realm around us which we are not normally aware of and we need to be aware of it and ayahuasca is an important part of that in their ayahuasca journeys the Takano shamans experience visions and they will then come back to an alert normal problem-solving state of consciousness and they will paint and depict their visions and what's intriguing and I go into it in the book is that quite a number of the Takano paintings of the other world of the afterlife realm of the entrance to the other world are geometrical and they look exactly like the geoglyphs so I'm beginning to wonder whether these geoglyphs were part of a system of spiritual ideas concerning what happens to us after death and what we need to do in this life to ensure a beneficial outcome and oddly enough that same system of ideas is found in the Mississippi Valley in the Amazon it involves particularly ayahuasca and the belief that the ayahuasca journey takes you to the afterlife realm and a journey along the Milky Way in the Mississippi Valley the mound builder sites up and down the Mississippi Valley particularly Moundville in Alabama exactly the same system of religious ideas associated with geometrical constructions that on death the soul they're very specific ascends to the constellation of Orion transits from the constellation of Orion to the Milky Way makes a journey along the Milky Way which they call the path of souls and encounters challenges and ordeals where the soul must account for the life that it has lived then we go to Egypt and what do we find the same system of ideas the soul must rise up to the constellation of Orion there's a narrow shaft cut through the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza which targets directly the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt widely accepted as a star shaft or a soul shaft the soul would rise up through that shaft get to the constellation of Orion which stands by the banks of the Milky Way it would then transit to the Milky Way which the ancient Egyptians called the winding waterway and it would make a journey along the Milky Way where it would be confronted by challenges and ordeals very similar idea to the Takano very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley as far as we know none of these cultures were in contact with one another either we're dealing with a huge unbelievable extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas or we're looking at the legacy that was inherited in all of these different places from a remote common ancestor and and I believe that that's what we're looking at what do we think the people from the ancient Mississippi Valley though that culture what do we think they were using if they weren't using ayahuasca or do we think they that's what they were using well that's that's that's an interesting question whether whether visionary substances are the only way to get into altered states of consciousness and and I would say they are definitely not of course there are visionary substances which which are used in Native American vision vision quests I've I've had the privilege of peyote ceremony with the Native American church I've never done that what is a lot like I loved it actually I thought I thought it was I thought it was amazing it wait it doesn't overpower you in the way that DMT or ayahuasca does it's it's it's much gentler it's much more you feel much more integrated and connected with with with nature your thought processes are quite quite clear it felt it felt just like a very beautiful and healing experience and I love the ceremony that I mean I'm inside a teepee with with 30 or 40 other people and they're there there are specific roles that are assigned to those different individuals one will keep the door and other will be responsible for the fire which is a work of art in itself just gazing into that fire and the glowing the glowing embers is enough to induce an altered state of consciousness on its own incredible drumming which which drives your state of consciousness into a kind of peak peak experience this is a technology for accessing other levels of experience and other levels of reality and it's clear that the Native Americans had a number of advanced technologies in this area the Sun Dance doesn't use a substance but it uses austerity it uses pain to drive an altered state of consciousness the objective in every case seems to be let's just for a while get our cell out of the narrow rigid frame of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness we all need that it's incredibly useful hunter-gatherers need it just as much as people in in cities need it but it's not the only state of consciousness available to human beings and maybe that's one of the big mistakes that we're making in our culture and was not made in in shamanistic societies that dad is a really interesting breakdown that maybe that is one of the big mistakes we're making in our culture when people point to the problems that we have in this country one of the problems we have is our inability to connect with each other yeah or to recognize that it we're all sharing the space and time together instead wanting to uphold our own religious or ideological ideas as being the only one way to get going yeah the only one way to get through and one of the things that I found these psychedelic experiences it really makes ideologies seem if not preposterous at the very least insignificant in comparison to human experiences absolutely the experience of camaraderie and friendship and and love it you realize like oh this is what's important this is what is really about not not enforcing your ideas or pushing them on other people and forcing people to behave the way you behave they instead love and think about religious ideas which caused so much division so much chaos so much hatred so much fear so much suspicion in the world today is it really what we want to do as human beings simply to accept a package of ideas that were believed in by our ancestors to accept them whole without question as absolute fact which we regard as such authoritative fact that in some cases we're willing to be deeply unpleasant to people who hold different views or perhaps even kill them we've had this you know this recent event in in in in Sri Lanka a primarily a religiously motivated terrorist event it happens it happens all over the world people feel so convinced that the inherited package of ideas that they had nothing to do with creating and that they have never questioned they're so convinced that those ideas are right that in extreme cases they're actually prepared to kill other human beings who hold different ideas they they so insecure in their own in their own beliefs that that they're prepared to go to that level of actually murdering another human being who holds they're so threatened by the other beliefs that other human beings hold so it's an abnegation of our responsibility as human beings we should be questioning things we should not be accepting packages of ideas intact fully formed and using them to drive the way we behave towards one another that was part of the human story but we need to move on from that and it's a very dangerous situation in a very complex modern world with billions of human beings on the planet to have these kind of energies been generated where certain groups of people are saying we are absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong we are superior you are inferior this is a very very dangerous path that we're that we on and it needs to be changed personally I know this is not a comment that will go down well with many people but I am strongly opposed to nationalism I don't I don't see any virtue in nationalism it is an accident of birth which nation you were born in it was nothing that you did for your own merit you didn't earn that you were born by accident in in a particular nation why should we automatically feel that other people who were born by accident in that particular nation have something special in common with us and that we together are a group who are much more important than other groups of people I've been privileged to spend my life traveling around the world living with communities all over over the world and one thing that really comes across to me strongly it's it should be a cliche and yet it's not is that we are all one family that humans are intimately interconnected all around the world that you can go to the remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the same hopes the same fears the same dreams that we have in industrialized cities shared by the hunter-gatherers in the in the middle of the Amazon so our similarities as human beings and what we share in common at the emotional level and the level of love and at the level of heart are far more important than our differences that are defined by the nation or the political group in which we in which we grew up in and when I when I say I'm against nationalism I need also to make clear that does not mean and I hope I'm not taken out of context by others who are listening to this that does not me I'm in favor of world government I detest governments that's another thing we need to grow out of we don't need governments anymore if we have them they should have a very minimal role in our society I think it's possible for the human race to relate as one family without leaders and governments who are exploiting the worst aspects of our character the lowest common denominator of our society deliberately encouraging fears and hatreds and suspicions what responsible leaders should be doing is encouraging love and unity and their failure to do that in my view disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely and that's why I've often said I would not I would like to see a situation in which no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he or she has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca that would be the condition don't even bother applying for the job you haven't done this and we have to be there where you have it and we have to be we want to see that you're drinking every drop and we want an experienced shaman present who's really gonna guide you through the through the journey and I suspect that that would be a transformative experience for many of our political class and that they would start to question why they do what they do why they exploit fears in order to magnify their own position they'd start to question that and to wonder about a different destiny for Humanity but that's a dream I guess it's not gonna happen it's very very very well said and I couldn't agree more my hope is that at what you were saying and what we were discussing earlier about how the Internet is sort of eroded our faith in many institutions as being the only or the primary source of knowledge that I hope that that takes place globally in terms of the way we view government yeah and that we do and that your idea of like I love what America stands for and what America stands for is kind of a nation that's where people go to you know this is one of the more insidious problems with this idea of building walls and keeping people out making it incredibly difficult to get here the reason why I'm here is because it was pretty easy to get here yeah that's why I'm here that's not the essence of America a free open society to come here and do better yes that's the whole idea behind it and I would hope that this idea of being able to just if you want to do matter you can anywhere in the world yeah this could eventually spread out yes this is my hope I believe it can spread out and and you know I see many signs of hope in in in America America has become a big part of my life not just because I wrote this book but because I have children who are now living in America I have a son and daughter-in-law who live in LA I have another son and daughter-in-law who live in Boston America I'm British but America has become a very central part of my life and it's a fascinating an amazing country and it's been my privilege to travel thousands of miles across America across many many many different states and I I love this country it's a it's a it's an amazing place only in America could we see happening what has happened with cannabis you know the the fact that at a at a local level individuals have got together mobilized petitions organized votes and changed the law changed the law define literally stuck a finger up at central government and said [ __ ] off this is none of your business what I do with my consciousness in the inner sanctum of my own life is not the business of the state that's a very American feeling it's it's something that you don't find often in other countries where the state is granted much more power and much more authority than it perhaps should be Americans are naturally questioning of government authority and that has that as what has led to the legalization increasing legalization of cannabis which is going to change the world in lots of ways but then ironically at the same time see the thing about democracies is that in order to get things done in a democracy you need to persuade people of your point of view so information becomes very important in in democracies and the information can be abused people can be mislead with information they can be told that what they're receiving is the truth whereas in fact it's not the truth and you can end up with a kind of dictatorship that the people have given their assent to on the basis of false information and frankly I'd rather have a real dictatorship which is which is out in the open and clear rather than one that has been subtly manipulated into position through manipulating the the views of the of the voters but I am and remain enormous ly encouraged by America it may seem like a trivial issue but the fact that state by state cannabis is being legalized and that is resulting from a grassroots movement that this enormous change has been made it's ironic it's strange that at the federal level even though what eight states now totally legal for recreational 23 24 states legal for for medical use that at the federal level it's still a Schedule one control control drug this is a huge state of dissonance that exists in America is going to have to put it right what it says to me is that people can change things people can get together at the local level and they can make a better world because there's no doubt that the cannabis laws were vicious and wrong and cruel and evil and ruined people's lives for decades and it's people who've changed that it's not government this change that it's the people at the grassroots level America is a country where that can happen and I remain encouraged about about the role of the American people while often in despair about the role of the American state yeah I'm encouraged as well and you know what's interesting Ben and Jerry released something yesterday which is really are on 4/20 I should say which was talking about the drug laws in this country and and talking about how many it's really really opening this the the idea of like how unjust these laws were and how many of these laws targeted people of color and how many people who are white people have profited off of this and how many people are still in jail for crimes that they committed you know air-quote crimes yeah that are no longer crime that are no longer crimes yeah and this is ridiculous and these these records should be expunged they should because I see that California has made some steps in that direction there's been some expunging of records well we can only hope that also what what opens up next is psilocybin is now going to be on the ballot absolutely and when that opens up I mean what you really think marijuana is a gateway drug well guess what it is if psilocybin gets in yes because psilocybin can legitimately change the world yes account it really I mean I think marijuana can change the world and I really you think that cannabis is changing people's perceptions and making people more calm and friendly and yeah and even the what they talk about with paranoia I welcome that and the reason why I welcome that is I think people are entirely too cocky yeah the life we live is bizarre as you could ever imagine that book and we're just accustomed to it because it's our day to day it for granted yeah marijuana removes those blinders and it really makes you understand that this is a strange strange life and these a lot of these pitfalls and problems that we have in our society or due to fear and they're due to the ignorance and they're due to this this lack of connection with each other and cannabis and many of these other psychedelic drugs they encourage this connection with each other I think what we need it's certainly what we need and and and it's an aberration in human culture that we've created a society that demonized these substances and that made them illegal it's a relatively recent thing it's really just the last the last hundred years it's a it's a tiny part of the human story and yet we were so arrogant as a society that we could set aside thousands of years of human tradition and experience and wisdom working with the plant medicines we just set it aside turn them into criminal substances and say we know everything what a what a huge and stupid mistake that is on cannabis as a quote-unquote gateway drug it absolutely is in this sense that the legalization of cannabis is going to open the doors to as you say to the legalization of psychedelics because what's happening is that the population is completely waking up to the fact that they have been bullshitted and lied to about cannabis for the best part of a century and once that dawns on people the the realization at a direct personal level here's this herb I love I have been lied to systematically misinformed by central government about this about this herb that leads to questioning of everything that central government does and so in that sense it is a gateway to a questioning society the psychedelics are different in that in that psilocybin actually does lead you to question stuff it leads you to really ask questions about about everything about your role in the world about you as a person about how you relate to other people and about the whole system on this planet and that the beautiful gorgeous planet that we that we have and what we're doing to it that that also enters enters awareness so it arose confidence and authority and it also roads confidence and authority that doesn't have experiences that you've experienced actually that's the part of the problem is that these people that are holding people back from these psychedelic experiences they've never had them they've never they don't even know what they're rallying they're coming to it from a place of fear and Prejudice they're simply accepting stuff that they've been told without really thinking it through and and examining it and again it's a failure of what human beings should should be doing we have to get we have to get rid of this fear and ironically it's bad for them as well so bad for the people that are actually encouraging this these laws to be enforced yes it's bad for the is bad for the whole of the whole of society because it is healthy for a for a society where adults become self-realized individuals where they make their own responsible choices about their own lives where they don't say oh government must make this choice for me that's the next step for Humanity we start we need to start becoming our own leaders and making our own choices and that is that is what's being revealed now that we're getting to the skull beneath the smile of the war on drugs we're realizing that it's part of a big program of lying that has been about keeping people's minds closed down not wanting free thinking I've made this point several times but our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such our society will allow Big Pharma to make billions of dollars with drugs that alter consciousness like surak's hat and Prozac antidepressants which in my opinion having had some experience of them are amongst the most horrible drugs on the planet they are very harmful very dangerous drugs but they're completely legal and they're encouraged with our system likewise alcohol very dangerous drug causes fights causes drunk driving accidents leads to cirrhosis of the liver completely legal and open our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such it's against particular kinds of altered states of consciousness but lead to questioning of the existing control that's what's that's what's going on here here here well said and as you know I have my own story with with with cannabis yeah well you and I had a moment we had a moment which was which was quite a life-changing moment for me because if I may just rehearse a little bit of this for the audience in 2011 I had a series of ayahuasca sessions in which it was shown to me that I was using cannabis completely wrong that it had become a dominant force in my life that it was making me you're speaking about paranoia and I agree with your paranoia is a useful thing if only to overcome it that it was making me paranoid that it was making me suspicious that I approached everybody around me in a state of suspicion and I was shown this by ayahuasca and given a very strong message you need to quit cannabis what I didn't realize at the time is that the problem was not cannabis the problem was me that I needed to fix those aspects of myself before I could have a proper relationship with cannabis so after that ayahuasca session having smoked cannabis for decades literally 16 hours a day seven days a week I quit I quit for three years and then I'm on your show and we're sitting we're sitting opposite one another as we are now and you asked me a question are you still off the cannabis and that and I say well I'm thinking of dipping my toes back in the water at which point you produce a joint and we smoked it together first of all after three years your tolerance is way down on cannabis so I got really stoned I did listen to that interview back and somehow I held it together oh you held it together brilliantly you opened up and there was like a wave of information came pouring out of you yeah it was wonderful it was a liberation for me and what it said to me is it's time to go back to cannabis but perhaps in a different way it doesn't it I need a different relationship with this amazing medicine and and if I can forge that if I can make that different relationship happen then it can be a constructive and positive part of my life and I can say definitely that that has been the case and that's excellent and so it's all thanks to you Joe I probably would still be off cannabis if it hadn't been for that joint well I think people can develop these patterns of behavior that are destructive with anything whether it's with alcohol or cannabis or you know yes sex or anything people get to get in ruts yeah you know it doesn't mean that the cannabis is best means that you are on a bad mental path yes you know exactly and I mean I'm not encouraging it for everybody because some people genuinely biologically doesn't jive with them yeah yeah yeah the fundamental thing is we as I thought human beings need to take responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions yeah and we need not hand that responsibility over to governmental institutions especially when it concerns something as intimate and personal as our consciousness and my view is the ancient world had the right attitude to this kind of thing yeah and the modern world does not and that we can sit down and learn a lot from the ancient world a lot of people ask me you know Hancock you've been arguing that there's a loss there's been a lost civilization in the in the human story but what what sort of civilization do you think it was well one of the things I think is it was a civilization that used psychedelics I think it was a civilization that emerged from shamanism but did not stay at the hunter-gatherer stage but that took the essence of shamanism and integrated it into a very different kind of civilization from our own which pursued things in different ways a lot of archaeologists have said to me but we don't find any plastic bottles from the Ice Age that means there was no advanced civilization during the Ice Age well hang on maybe an advanced civilization might have decided never to get involved in plastic in the first place maybe there would have been a clear choice not to make plastic maybe they did things in completely different ways maybe they cultivated powers of the human mind that we dismiss and regard as completely completely unimportant you know whoo whoo yeah this is the thoughts about Egypt correct it's about about Egypt and and and about other things I mean the specific example I give is above the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid are five further chambers and these chambers are roofed and floored with granite beams that weigh about 70 tons each and there are hundreds of them and these 70-ton granite beams which to put in context Sunbeam is equivalent in weight to 35 large SUVs these 70-ton granite beams have been elevated to a height of more than 350 feet above the ground and carefully and precisely placed in position it is very hard for archaeologists to explain how that was done using purely leverage and mechanical advantage you can say or perhaps they built a ramp and and and hold the stones up the ramp but then you have to confront basic laws of physics you can't haul a stone weighing tens of tons up a slope that exceeds ten degrees then you start doing the calculation how long a ramp do I need with a 10 degree slope to get to 350 feet above the ground and the answer is you need a [ __ ] long ramp which should still be there because not it couldn't have been a sand ramp I would have collapsed under the weight of those stones it had to be as massive as the pyramid itself so this begins to seem like an absurd idea the the idea that is foisted on us by archaeology maybe the idea that they regard as absurd namely that psychic powers were cultivated by ancient civilizations that they could use powers of the human mind that we have allowed to lapse maybe that idea deserves further consideration we have gone down a path of leverage and mechanical advantage we're used to relying on machines but we hear anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic powers who can move things with their minds of people who have telepathic powers and our automatic reaction is to just dismiss all of that because science says it's impossible because science regards consciousness as as local to the brain and doesn't see how it can exert itself outside of that but maybe we should open up to those possibilities that we're dealing with a very different kind of culture that used techniques that we have allowed to lapse and maybe we could wake those techniques up again maybe the ability of human beings to do almost superhuman things is resident within all of us but sleeping well it's pure speculation that they use some sort of a telekinetic power but it's pure speculation but it's absolute that they did something that we don't understand if you think about the distance between us and the construction just a mod accepted construction dates of the Great Pyramid it's more than five thousand years ago we're close to five thousand years ago right parents supposed to be about four thousand five hundred years old yeah that's really old yeah you'd think that someone back then could do something that would perplex us today yeah with modern machinery yeah and that somehow or another they figure this out it's almost like what they had done was leave behind something that was so stupendous so monstrously impressive that it would transcend time yeah and that you would have to look at it even thousands and thousands of years later and say hey like this this defies conventional explanation this is not a simple and I've seen some of the conventional explanations of the construction of the pyramid and they conveniently neglect those chambers above the King's Chamber they do they conveniently neglect a lot of those massive stones yeah and it's because it's it's one of those things you just go oh I don't know what is this Jamie they're the they're the gems above the above the King's chambers and each one of those floors is is consists of a row of 70-ton granite blocks that have been raised 350 feet above the ground and not only that but brought from Aswan in the south of Egypt 500 kilometers south of the south of the Great Pyramid so if there's any time in history we could go in a time machine and go back and observe would that be the time I am just completely fascinated by the Ice Age and I say at the moment have you had one shot to go back and see what it was like in some place you wouldn't go to the construction of the Great Pyramids I think right now where I'd go is twelve thousand eight hundred years ago in the beginning of the Younger Dryas just to see because I think that's where the whole human story changes I think that's where we change tracks from one path to another path and following those cataclysmic events of the Younger Dryas between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago following those the signs of civilization that we see emerging are not the beginnings of civilization they're a restart of civilization that had existed before the Cataclysm and for that reason I would I would like to be present during that cataclysmic event if only to satisfy my self that it was indeed a comet you see the the one thing there's no dispute about anymore is that the Younger Dryas was a cataclysm you can't argue about that the the the megafauna that that died off the disruption of human activity that takes place at that time the huge climate changes this was a cataclysm by any standards where the argument still goes on is what caused the what caused the Cataclysm I vote strongly for comet multiple fragments of a comet hitting the North American ice cap and hitting Greenland as well but there are other researchers in the field like my colleague Robert Schoch who thinks that the Sun is more involved this is healthy this is very very healthy that there should we should be approaching this problem from many different perspectives and trying to figure out what the [ __ ] caused this extraordinary event that occurs at a pivotal moment in the human story the end of the Stone Age the beginning of the Mesolithic the end of the Ice Age the beginning of the current age of the earth and suddenly we see these signs of civilization appearing and in places like gobekli tepe those signs already include highly sophisticated knowledge and that's why I feel we really need to investigate the Amazon there are there are three places in the world which are really lacking in the investigation right now one of them is the Amazon five and a half million square kilometres very little archaeology done another is the Sahara Desert the Sahara Desert tough place to work I can understand why there's little archaeology done there but the Sahara Desert was Green during the Ice Age it had a completely different climate regime we should consider the possibility that missing parts of the human story are there and then under the continental shelves because sea level rose 400 feet these are three domains that archaeology has largely not investigated and and it has largely not done so they say well why would we spend the money on marine archaeology it's much better to spend it on looking for shipwrecks rather than looking for signs of a lost civilization because we archaeologists know there was no lost civilization so that's the argument for the resources there and the same the same with the Amazon and the same with the with with the Sahara Desert places in the very places in the world that those amongst us who are charged with the responsibility of interpreting the past have not looked at are the very prices we should be looking at I had a thought once while I was under the influence and it was a thought that one day computational powers will reach a point where they will be able to take into consideration all of the objects on earth and what we know about the history and vividly recreate the past through through computation to the point where you could actually know who did what when people did things and that I mean I don't even know if this would be physically today certainly not be possible but with the exponential increase in computational power and technology and innovation that one day will reach a point where you'll be able to watch you'll be able to see what happened yeah and they'll be able to recreate what happened exactly and that this would be something that would be I mean it's impossible for us to imagine that someone would be able to do that right now yeah but that one day with technology as it gets more and more advanced and we will reach some sort of a some innovation or some sort of an invention that will allow us to go back and see literally see what what happened how things were done technologies is changing our whole understanding of the past and what your envisaging is perfectly possible we will we will come to a time if 100 years 500 perhaps less if if we don't you know first destroy ourselves entirely as a civilization we will come to a time where our cleverness and our techniques will allow a much wider opening up of the past than has presently happened but it is already happening one of the areas of science that I go into in America before is genetics and and DNA this is an area of science that was not much informing archeology until about the 1990s but since the 2000s has become very important in archeology because the technology has been developed where ancient DNA can be extracted and tested and you can actually genotype an entire individual from DNA that maybe fifteen twenty thousand twenty thousand years old and this new technology of genome sequencing and DNA is another factor that is raising huge question marks over the past of the Americas and one of the issues I go into in this book is the presence in the Amazon rainforest of a very specific clearly identifiable pattern of DNA which is only found in one other place in the world and that is in Australasia in Papua New Guinea and amongst Australian Aborigines it's Australasian DNA now South American not only in South America but in the depths of the Amazon rainforest amongst tribes who have only been contacted in the last 20 or 30 years and furthermore although skeletal remains are rare it has been found in ancient skeletal remains that are close to 11,000 years old in the Amazon so that tells us that this DNA signal has been in the Amazon for at least 11,000 years the geneticists think that it came to the Amazon during the last ice age and this raises a huge mystery because the peopling of the Americas is supposed to have occurred from Siberia across the Bering Straits down through that ice-free corridor into North America down through North America into South America into Central America and finally into South America if that was the whole story then we would find this DNA signal in North America and in Central America we would not find it only in the Amazon when I talked to some of the leading geneticists about this but specifically SK professor SK Willis live at the University of Copenhagen there's been the lead author in a number of major studies of ancient DNA and I asked him what do you make of this Australasian DNA in in the Amazon and and he said honestly we don't have a proper explanation for it at the moment but what he did say is that the most parsimonious explanation he used that specific word the most parsimonious explanation is that a group of people during the Ice Age crossed the Pacific Ocean and settled up and ended up in South America and settled in the Amazon and brought their DNA with them that would account perfectly for the DNA data and when a scientist says the most parsimonious explanation what that scientist is saying is he likes that explanation then is a simple direct clear explanation of the DNA mystery but then he added however it doesn't make practical sense and I asked him well why doesn't it make practical sense and he said because the archaeologists tell me that no human population was capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age at which point it was natural for me to say do you really trust the archaeologists and he said well in science we do trust the work of other scientists we don't really question it we don't really investigate it that's their side of the their side of the business and and my view is that that is rather than rather than accept rather than taking this weird anomalous Australasia and DNA signal in the in the in the heart of the Amazon as something to be explained away and as something to be the for it to be denied that it could be connected to a voyage across the Pacific Ocean maybe it's the first compelling evidence that voyages were taking a place across the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age and maybe we should be opening up that whole issue for exploration and again I think I lost a lost civilization is the best answer and that near the end of the Ice Age when when the Younger Dryas Cataclysm unfolds it's not an overnight thing it's very bad twelve thousand eight hundred years ago there's about 1200 years of horror I don't think this civilization went down in a single day and night I think there were survivors I think bits of it were left I think their project was to restart civilization and I suggest very strongly that where they tried to mount that project was amongst the hunter-gatherers who coexisted in the world with them at that time we ourselves are an advanced civilization at least that's what we call ourselves and we coexist in the world with hunter-gatherers it's not an odd idea that an advanced civilization that hunter-gatherers should coexist and there is separation between us and the Amazonian hunter-gatherers there are tribes in the Amazon that are uncontacted and that we that we don't know even exist if a catastrophe on the level of the Younger Dryas were to occur today I don't think that our civilization would make it through we are the spoilt children of the earth we are just used to having everything laid on you know the supermarket shelves are groaning with with food we can get food delivered to our homes we have roofs over our head we have shelters we have clothes everything is taken for granted I guess you're an exception but very few people in modern Western culture know how to survive they don't have survival skills they don't know how to hunt they don't know how to gather they don't know how to grow crops because they've handed that responsibility over to others we live in a society that's highly segmented and specialized and different people specialize in different things but nobody has the vast general survival skill that a hunter-gatherer has so in a global Cataclysm actually at first counter-intuitively the people who would survive it would be the hunter-gatherers and an advanced civilization would be smart if there were survivors to seek refuge amongst hunter-gatherers to make that the place where they might try to start restart their civilization and that's why I think that this Australasian DNA signal in the Amazon may be part of the evidence for a sort of outreach effort that was being made by a lost civilization seeing the disaster coming down on it and realizing that something needed to be done well it's fascinating to me that the geneticists would rely on the archaeologists being that the geneticists have the actual DNA they can examine where the archaeologists are piecing things together yeah tiny bits of information over the entire landscape and then you consider how much information they don't have access to that's in the ground exactly I I strongly resist the idea that archaeology is a science I I don't think it should be described as a science what do you think it should be described it's more like a kind of philosophy it's it's it's a it's an attempt to interpret the past based on rather flimsy and limited evidence and what you find in that interpretation is that the preconceptions of the individuals involved are being imposed upon the evidence which then turns out to support their preconceptions and that's not a scientific way of doing things assigned way of doing things is testing testing hypotheses and false seeking to falsify them and seeing if they if they if they work out so the problem is drawing these conclusions and being too rigid with these conclusions that's on the further evidence that's that's my view yeah that archaeology has been has been much too rigid and and and that there's a there's a climate of fear in archeology I don't mean to pick particularly on archaeologists here I think this is generally true across other disciplines as well these days academics are driven by the need to publish research papers that's what they build their careers on if they can get a paper on their bit of research published in nature or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences etc that's good for their careers but then you confront the gatekeepers in those publications who regard any archaeological idea that is not part of the mainstream accepted consensus with great suspicion and are most most reluctant to to you know to publish to publish that information now what is the mainstream when archaeologists talk about seafaring humans when what what do they date that - well there's the big raisins yes the great seafaring adventure that is accepted by archaeology is called the Polynesian expansion and it's a remarkable story and that occurs roughly 3,000 to 3,500 years ago and those Polynesians were amazing ocean navigators they could they could cross distances of thousands of kilometres with pinpoint accuracy I mean it's not an accident that the Polynesians found Easter Island fighting Easter Island is a really challenging project Easter Island is 2,000 miles from the coast of South America it's 2,000 miles from the nearest other Island which is Tahiti it's just a little speck in the middle of the ocean but the Polynesians found it and settled there and appear to have brought a reproductively viable population there and appear to have made voyages back and forth but that was 3,000 to 3,500 years ago that was not 12,000 800 years ago and this is this is where archaeology's adamant position that ocean voyages was begun by the Polynesians and that there was no your ocean voyages before that I think needs to be strongly questioned and it needs to be strongly questioned in the light of this DNA evidence from the Amazon rather than rejecting the evidence and temp should be made to consider what that might mean well it's interesting because we know that the Egyptians had boats yeah and so what I mean if there were boats 4,500 years ago why do we think that they didn't try them out in the ocean that doesn't make any sense especially if there existed a thousand years prior which is also possible archaeologists wouldn't argue that the Egyptians had boats but but that is that is still within the the framework of accepted history it's the notion of a global navigating culture in the Ice Age that archaeologists can't swallow it's a subject that I've kept on coming up against over a number of years I think the best evidence for it is ancient maps which show the world as it looked during the last ice age I first explored this in fingerprints of the gods and I've touched on the mystery again and I haven't an appendix on the subject in in in this book because I think these are very important we're talking about maps that were drawn roughly between the 1300s and the 1700s in other words in relatively recent history however these maps were largely based on much older source maps which they copied and we can say that for sure because one of the famous maps is the piri Reis map which was created by a Turkish Admiral called piri Reis in the year 1513 actually only a corner of his map has survived it was originally a world map we now just have a bit that shows the east coast of South America and North America and the west coast of Africa piri Reis writes in that map that it is in his own handwriting that he based it on more than 100 older source maps some of which had come from the Library of Alexandria in other words that maps had been when the Library of Alexandria had been destroyed in the 4th century idea whenever it was some of its contents had been rescued and brought to Constantinople which became the Turkish capital and piri Reis had access to those maps and he incorporated information from those maps on his maps as well as incorporating more recent navigational information and this is one of a whole category of maps which are extremely hard to explain all of them based on all their source maps now lost all of them incorporating extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes latitude is not that difficult to technological feat but longitude is a difficult technological feat longitude involves a chronometer it involves knowing the time at the place you began your voyage and the local and local noon as well and calculating the difference between them you need a chronometer that will keep accurate time at sea with the motions of a ship and it's just a plain fact that our civilization did not invent such a chronometer until the late 18th century before that we didn't know what longitude were we were at and ships were constantly sailing unexpectedly into coastlines that they thought were hundreds of miles further away so the discovery of the technique to do longitude was a major civilizational advance its presence in maps based on much older source maps that actually showed the world as it looks during the last ice age suggests that somebody during the last ice age was mapping the world and had mastered the technique of calculating longitude classic example of these maps and I make a point of this is what's called the Pinkerton world map which was drawn in the year 1818 and it was based on the latest navigational information at that time I reproduced that map in the in the book what's missing from the map entirely missing is Antarctica there's just a hole at the bottom of the world there's nothing there and the reason there reason there's nothing there there's another there's another Pinkerton map that that shows that the the reason that you need to find one that's centered on Antarctica the reason the reason that Antarctica is not there is that our civilization hadn't discovered Antarctica in 1818 so they couldn't authentically put it on a map in 1818 actually we discovered it in 1819 and that's when it starts appearing on modern maps the problem is that Antarctica repeat appears repeatedly on these much older maps and it appears in the right place and a bit bigger than it is today but very much as it looked during the last ice age so what all of this suggests to me is that the world was mapped and explored by a global seafaring culture with a level of technology that was at least equivalent to ours at the end of the 18th century during the Ice Age wasn't there also a map of Greenland that showed it underneath the ice yes there are and and and and another intriguing thing I met I mentioned the piri Reis map just now shown on the piri Reis map lying off the east coast of North America is a large island with a row of megaliths like a road of megaliths running up the middle of it that Island is in the exact place of the Grand Bahama banks and yeah it is but can I point it out to you because we're sure okay that's great that you can bring this up Jamie that's amazing so this island is sitting there off the southeast coast of North America look at the way these two draw things back then too and and what you see running down the middle of it is this road like feature of megaliths yes I see right there yeah mm-hmm thing is there was a long period of my life when I I did a lot of scuba diving and I was looking at at underwater structures and one of the sites had tithed on was the Bimini Road which is in the Grand Bahama banks mhm and the Bimini Road is exactly where that island is and that here's the issue I don't care whether the Bimini Road is natural or man-made for me the mystery is that it is shown above water on that map and the last time it was above water was thousands and thousands of years ago so for me this is all evidence that we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that our ancestors had achieved a level of technology where they could explore and map the world's oceans we shouldn't dismiss that we don't know what those stones are or how they were created but boy do they look artifacts Yonaguni and you're looking at now but the back to that image Jimmy did the last image that we were just looking at look at I mean that looks so man-made and and you can see it is rather like the the pattern that's shown on the on the island in the in the map how deep is that today oh it's not very deep it's about 20 feet there's but we think that that was above water obviously was definitely above water during the last ice age when it when it finally went underwater may have been as late as eight or nine thousand years is there anything else compelling that's in the immediate area that seems to indicate that there was some sort of a man-made structure well nobody's looked for it and the whole effort of archeology has been to dismiss the significance of the Bimini Road how would they dismiss that well they say it's just a mean they say it's totally natural come back to that image again this is the odd you go back to that image that we just saw yeah yeah sure somebody who spent a lot of time diving on the Bimini Road I can tell you I absolutely do not think it's natural I think it's a man-made structure but the argument is that it's a kind of beach rock that forms in these blocky formations as beach rock does form in Bakke formation but here I believe that the beach rock has been used as a construction material but I repeat the key issue is not whether the Bimini Road is man-made or not and the key issue is that it features on a map above water and that is a dating project that tells us that somebody was mapping that bit of the world when it was above water and go back that takes us back a very long a long way into the past though the one that you just pulled up you know look at that one it's a stunning place it's animate this amazing site it's just like the odds of that being in that order with those uniformly sized rocks for how long is that Oh hundreds of feet it's a huge it's actually shaped like a letter J it's a giant underwater structure it's really really an enormous thing and very very beautiful to dive on and there's lots of very gentle sweet nurse sharks down there that you can play with this so that looks much more like random that's more random a bit a bit bit of it do look more random mmm and bits of it look highly constructed I would not I would not seek to to claim that the Bimini Road is absolutely man-made mine claim about the Bimini Road is it's really [ __ ] weird that it appears on a map above water yeah a map that was drawn in 1513 based on older source map now when they found that ancient Greek computer thing and what is our mechanism yes yeah again that testifies to a lost navigational skill that we have not taken account of it's incredibly complex and it took a long time for them figure out what that even is yeah what do they think that is now it tracks the movements of the planets it's a it's a navigational device it's it's a geared cogged system that allows you to track the passage of time and figure out where you are it's it's some kind of navigational device it's not fully understood in how old is that I think that goes back to Greek times I'm guessing here because Greek times are not of great interest to me but I'm thinking around about 500 BC so at least 2,000 years old 2,000 plus and we know that there had to be more than one of these things yes you can't you can't have something like that without without a vast effort behind it human beings were working on creating this geared and cogged machinery that that reflected the powers that are recreation so that's a recreation one of those don't look so you buy that dude fine bookmark that we need one right there right next to the plasti cells and so such a thing is a cultural artifact which doesn't just appear out of nowhere it hasn't it has to have a context it has to have a background and again my suggestion would be perhaps a secret technology it's very odd that very few of these have been found and it may be that ship owners and navigators in Greek times were extremely careful about who they shared this technology we're course it may be they may it may have been as top secret as you know nuclear power is in in in our world today how that makes sense but the fact is that then we have to it exists it's real it's there yeah and then we must consider what's behind it what what led to that is that just the latest manifestation of something that that goes much more deeply back into human human culture and I think that is I think I suppose my main my main message is that we have a so far untold backstory that we're concentrating entirely on the front story and the back story is missing very largely missing from the picture and what I've tried to do is to fill in bits of the backstory do you have anything in this book about the omics no not really I I mentioned I mentioned them briefly explored the Olmec mystery in considerable depth did he explain that to people maybe in fingerprints of the gods yes so it's considered to be the earliest high culture of Central America everybody's heard about the Aztecs everybody's heard about the Maya but before the Aztecs and before the Maya there were a culture who are referred to as the Olmecs again we don't know what they called themselves that's what the Aztecs called them they called them the Olmecs and it means the rubber people because they rub a producing area of of Mexico they worked in giant megalithic constructions that what they're most famous for is these huge carved human heads which can be on a scale of up to 20 to 25 tonnes in weight and and which have curious features which have been interpreted variously as Polynesian African don't look like classic Native American features but one of the things one of the things I've realized is that there is no classic Native American feature that Native Americans are a very have a very complex genetic story with very many different elements brought into it and we shouldn't be necessarily surprised by the supposedly non-native American look what maybe we think those helmets were that they were wearing nobody knows because no physical example of such a helmet has ever been found just like no physical example of an Egyptian pharaohs helm a crown has it has ever been found all we see is the stone the stone reproductions of them do they universally were these helmets they actually pretty much all wear these helmets in in in in the Olmec stonework there's another fascinating figure from La Venta one of one of the Olmec sites which is the earliest ever image of a plumed or feathered serpent the feathered serpent is a famous icon in Central America Quetzalcoatl who's the the god of peace the bringer of civilization who is associated for example with the famous pyramid of kukulcan which is just another name for Quetzalcoatl at Chichen itzá on the spring equinox a shadow effect creates the image of a serpent coiling down the stairway and joining with the carved head of the serpent oh the Bears the the image from La Venta that's the earliest image of a plumed serpent in the Americas and sitting in the middle of it and I made a big deal out of this because I think it is a big deal in magicians of the Gods sitting in the middle of it is this human figure who's holding this strange bag in his hand and it's just a fact that those identical bags are found in ancient Sumer in the hands of individuals who were considered to be civilization bringers and they also show up on pillar 43 at gobekli tepe I call them man bags and in that case it gobekli tepe we know there at least eleven thousand six hundred years old so I wonder if we're looking at a sort of badge of office of a group of civilizer x' who travelled around the world trying to bring back to life a lost civilization and passed down I deploy a concept in this book that I actually got from Richard Dawkins Richard Richard Dawkins is the author of the book called The Selfish Gene and he's not one of my favorite people because he's a he's a materialist reductionist and he doesn't believe in spirit or or any mystery in life that were just accidents of chemistry and beer and biology he also has no psychedelic experience and he said no I did challenge him at a public event two to go to go have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca yes at once oh just once but he has an excellent out because and sadly he's had that he's had a stroke so he has a good excuse for not for not doing that but he is a clever man and one of his concepts that he's introduced into human culture is the concept of the meme we're off of I think familiar with that where genes are physical reproductive mechanisms they reproduce themselves down the generations they replicate they multiply they're passed on from one individual to another memes are cultural objects cultural ideas that are passed on and replicate and reproduce themselves and what I see right across the Americas and right across the old world as well is a set of memes that involve the sky that involved the ground that involve geometry that involve notions of life after death and I think the only way to explain these is that they have been inherited from an earlier culture in some way connected with the ancestors of all of these all of these cultures I think that's what we're looking at in the Amazon we're looking at a meme which was deliberately created once you mobilize a population to start creating huge geometrical structures you are also facilitating many other possibilities that an organized population allows I think that's what happened at gobekli tepe I think that's why they created the megalithic site there to mobilize the local population of hunter-gatherers to give them a project to do to engage them and in the process of engaging them to teach them the skills of Agriculture which were which which are fundamental to to any concept of of civilization and it's weird the way agriculture just suddenly appears in in gobekli tepe and there's huge agricultural mysteries in the Amazon as well may I share a couple of these mysteries with you before you do that though can you pull up that image from gobekli tepe of pillar was a pillar 43 pillar 43 in enclosure D I would like to see that that guy holding that bag that is its that the bags are in a row along the top of the pillar it's pillar 43 in an enclosure D that Gobekli Tepe is there an image of that online that's available okay here we go yeah there's so there's the bag in a row in a row along the top it's the same sort of square shaped bag with a curved handle that you find on the earliest image of the pillar of the feathered serpent and that you find no you have to go above that Jamie just a little bit higher up the pillar those max right Yeah right it right at the top there it's odd that this symbol crops up in in many different cultures and tends to be associated with mainstream interpretation of those present there is no mainstream interpretation of those banks that's my interpretation of those banks which I which I freely confess that's how that's how I read them I'm intrigued by the anomaly that the similar bagging turns up in the hands of the Quetzalcoatl finger and turns up in Mesopotamia repeatedly in in the hands of the individual so called the AB kallu the the magician's of the gods the beginner bringers of civilization and the plume serpent Quetzalcoatl was it's an Aztec card right and questa è questo qui tollis an Aztec is an Aztec but but the Aztecs acquired him from earlier cultures the very fact that an image of the plumed serpent is given such priority in Olmec culture tells us that that system of ideas was present during Olmec times which takes us back at least to 1500 BC probably quite a bit earlier than that where's the Aztecs are 1500 AD so there's 3000 years between the Aztecs and the Olmecs and that same system of ideas is running through all of those cultures and the Mayans had a name for it as well kukulcan and what do you think that plumed serpent was I think he's it's very clear from from the accounts that have survived that what he's associated with her two things in particular one of them he's a God of peace he's not a war god and the and the other thing that he's primarily about is giving the gifts of civilization this is what you human beings need to know in order to move on to the next level that is that is the function and the role of Quetzalcoatl and it's there are very similar we could refer to them as civilizing heroes who are found in other cultures and other locations or cyrus in egypt plays that role as a bringer of civilization there's hardly a culture in the ancient world that doesn't remember a time far back in remote prehistory when some kind of supernaturals or advanced human beings and I prefer the latter that some kind of advanced human beings were involved in a project to disseminate civilization I mentioned the Takano in the Amazon who who are big drinkers of of ayahuasca the Takano have a fascinating origin myth they say that they're ant the origin myth states specifically that their ancestors were brought to the Amazon they were brought to the Amazon by a group of supernaturals who included the daughter of the son and an individual called the helmsman who steered the serpent canoe in which this settlement mission in the Amazon was was performed and what these so-called supernaturals did was they brought the ancestors of duquan Oh to the Amazon and they showed them the best places settle the best places where they where they might find hunting the best places where they might create a village the best places for agriculture and then they left but they left them behind one gift and that gift was ayahuasca that's the story of the origin myth of the Takano and it sounds to me rather like the other side of the story of that DNA signal in the Amazon that a group of people were deliberately settled in the Amazon by human beings who they chose to regard as a supernatural that's that's what makes sense of it to me when I interrupted you to talk about Quetzalcoatl when what were you about to say I'm in California I've been smoking dope yeah we were talking about different things in the Amazon should we rewind and figure out exactly the surfing Cod you're talking about before Quetzalcoatl before that I have another question the Olmecs did you were talking about the genetics of these people that live and Native Americans that they vary widely but the Olmecs seemed to have very similar features the thick lips the big noses why do we think that is well this is part of a curious mystery that is not unconnected to the genetic mystery it's been known by archeologists for quite a long time that there are anomalous skulls in parts of Brazil which appear to show very strongly Polynesian or African features very much like the features that we see on the on the Olmec heads and a number of archeologists who got into trouble with their colleagues for this have used that to argue many years ago 3040 years ago that that the settlement story of the Americas is much more complicated than we've you know then we then we've realized and and what the what the DNA is doing is it's telling us that there was something really weird happened happened with settlement they you see what happened with those African or Polynesian looking skulls was that they were tested for DNA when DNA technology was not as advanced as it is today and what that DNA showed was that they were more closely related to modern Native Americans than they are to any other people in the world so the notion that there was some connection with Polynesia or Africa was dismissed but now that we have very firm evidence of an Australasian genetic signal of Australian Aborigines Papua New Guinea Melanesians with those kind of features now that we have the genetic evidence that that is found in the Amazon we have to go back to that old evidence and and reconsider it Wow yeah I would love to find out what that is that they've always fascinated me then the Olmecs it's always been such a strange image the the large heads with new helmets on them and how do they universally look like that I mean they although all of the features are very very similar very very similar always with the helmet and almost always I won't claim that every single Olmec head has a helmet oh because I think I've seen one that didn't it's quite a while ago since I explored the the Olmec area but what's fascinating about them is they are they are supposedly the first high civilization of Central America that they create structures on a massive scale that you can see connections between them and the later the later Maya that whole mystery of the Mayan calendar was clearly inherited from the Olmecs it wasn't something the Maya made up the rmx used that same symbolism so the Mayan calendar is actually an Olmec calendar and if we then consider the possibility that the Olmecs may just be the latest that the earliest surviving manifestation of that calendar it could go back much further than that do you plan on having any debates with people that opposed these ideas well it was interesting on your very show Joe - to have the debate that involved Michael Shermer who's the editor of the skeptic magazine and some colleague of his who came in on mine yeah who I got a bit annoyed with and myself and my great friend and colleague the genius Randall Carson and I felt that that was a very useful debate I felt that it's possibly the first time that those of us on the alternative side of the argument about history where were given an opportunity really to put our evidence forward and to confront so-called skeptics well it's so cold that's what he calls himself Michael Shermer with this evidence and yeah obviously I'm biased but I I don't feel that he fielded the situation particularly well I don't think mainstream archeology came out of that looking really good I think it came out of that looking rather ignorant and and uninformed and and a man like Michael Shermer who is a professional skeptic cannot begin to match the knowledge of a man like Randall Carson who has devoted his whole life to walking the walk of the geology of the end of the Ice Age in in in North America and that showed on on that debate so I think the debate was worth doing I think it showed that the alternative side isn't just wishy-washy stuff out there on the fringes of things that there are those of us working in this field who are using really solid information and who are who our project is to rewrite history and we're not going to do that with slight information it has to be solid information I think we had the opportunity on your show to to say that that that solid information is there I'm not claiming it was a complete victory for the alternative site Michael Shermer is a smart guy and he put forward some good arguments too and there were constructive aspects of that debate which I which I appreciated I'd like to see much more engagement and much more positive approach I wish the skeptics welcome to their skepticism but I wish they'd be less hateful less less full of derision less less despising well they're so defensive with their ideas and and so and so defensive with their ideas when the possibility is there for for a constructive debate you know well what's interesting to me is that as this evidence piles up and it seems to be continuing to pile up as more like the these impact sites and more of this ancient civilization material gets unearthed it's almost instrum yeah it's officer and this is how this is how paradigms shift I mean everybody's familiar with the concept of a paradigm shift and there's a book called the structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn which outlines what a paradigm shift is where an established model in some discipline of science that has been in control of people's thinking for a very long time suddenly falls apart and it doesn't fall apart suddenly what happens is that there's an accumulation of evidence which that model cannot explain that paradigm cannot explain it it seemed like a great paradigm at one point but then it doesn't explain this and then it doesn't explain like like the paradigm that says that megalithic architecture is only six thousand years old and that the first megalithic architecture was in Malta that can't explain the massive megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey five thousand five hundred years before that it's evidence like that the slow accumulation of evidence that the existing system cannot explain that ad eventual point no matter how strongly the advocates of the existing system hold on to it no matter how determined they are in their defense no matter what dirty tricks they may choose to deploy to undermine their opponents sooner or later the evidence overwhelms them and the paradigm goes down and you have a new way of thinking and that that is the story of science and it is a story that I think I think we're at a tipping point in our understanding of the past of the human species I am NOT saying that I am 100 percent right I believe that what what I'm doing that's worthwhile is I'm asking questions about the past that haven't been asked enough I'm putting archaeologists on the spot and and demanding that they explain themselves I don't I don't claim that I'm right I'm offering an alternative theory and my objective is to get people to think for themselves to think about this stuff and not to accept the voice of authority as that as the sole medium of truth that's that's what I've tried to do have you had any archaeologist review any of this work and changed their opinions no no I haven't but what I what I have found and I found it interestingly during the research trips for America before is a younger generation of archaeologists who in the field and they are quite different from the older generation of archaeologists who were running the whole scene 25 years ago now we have a very different younger generation a younger generation that has been exposed to open-minded thinking that has been exposed to the Internet that itself as part of the general pattern of the younger generation is suspicious of authority I'm meeting young archaeologists on sites for example I met a couple of really amazing young minds on a site called Blackwater draw in Arizona New Mexico where where the one of the first Clovis sites the the young archaeologists I met there were incredibly open mind and really willing to consider extraordinary possibilities about the past and privately admitted to me that they'd read my books well that's where I get the hope I get the hope in this young generation that is growing up with the internet that does understand that there's a lot more out there than just what they're being taught in schools yes yeah this is this this is where the where the hope lies and it lies in in every area and it's white one of the one of the intriguing things that has happened with me and your show is an important part of this is that when I go around giving public events doing a public presentation of my work the demography of the audiences is extremely interesting and this is true whether I'm giving the talk in Britain whether I'm giving it in Canada whether I'm giving it in America part of the audience are older people who read me in the 1990s who got onto my work with fingerprints of the gods in 1995 and they've stuck with me and they've carried on reading my work but another part of the audience are a very big part of the audience consists to a large extent of young people most of whom are men but there are women amongst them as well and what those mainly young men come up to me and say at the end of the event is we first encountered your work on Joe Rogan's show and it completely opened our minds it changed it I've had so many young men say this has changed my life and then I ask myself well why should a different take on the past change people's lives why should people feel that their lives have been changed by a different take on the which I add they would not know about unless you'd had the good grace to bring me on that on on your show this these ideas would not be known but they are known because of the amazing outreach of your show and the answer to that question why does it why does it change a person's life is that once we realize that we have been misinformed about our past that everything that we've built our idea of who we are upon and of where we're going as a culture may be founded on falsehoods and perhaps even deliberate lies once that is realized then all the questions about the nature of the society we live in become open and and people young people are feeling the need to take an independent path not to not to follow the path that has been set down for them by previous generations and in some way and I'm very gratified to hear this the fact that I'm an elder now I'm 69 next next birthday the fact that I look great thank you the fact that I as an elder have consistently pursued an independent past part have been willing to put up with the [ __ ] that's been thrown at me over the years but have stuck to my guns and have continued to add new information to the dosia of information that I put forward that is and I'm encouraged to see this that's found as inspiring by younger people and what what better gift could an old guy hope to leave to the world than a younger generation who feel inspired by that person's work to change the world well I'm very very thankful that I could introduce people to you because your first book that I read of you fingerprints of the gods changed my view of the world I mean I remember putting that book down after I was finishing going wow like if he is right like this whole thing is a mess yeah a complete mess because our idea of who we are is very much founded in our idea of who we were and and one of I think one of the mistakes that's made in our civilization is that we are very conceited we're very big headed and we tend to review the view the whole story of history as though it's a project that leads to us that we're what it's all about and I think what is what is how can I put it undermining of the existing system about a new take on the past is the notion that we're not what it's all about at all that there may have been an earlier civilization that reached a high level of advancement perhaps different from ours but nevertheless an advanced civilization which was just taken out of the story completely by a global Cataclysm then we suddenly we suddenly realized that in a way we're here accidentally that it's not been a process that's been all about us and and that if we've been misinformed about how we got here then we need to get the truly information about about what's going on so so these are in a way profoundly revolutionary ideas they do they do lead people on a path of inquiry that leads to questioning of everything and our fears that you were just discussing earlier about how soft we are in comparison to past civilizations in terms of like our ability to live off the land that's one aspect that bothers me but one of the big ones that bothers me is the fact that everything is digital all of our information is stored on hard drives you bet and if that goes down there's not much left you have paper books and and you know a few thousands of years imagine what would be left yeah we would lose all of our advancement well I can I can speak to this at a personal level there was a time when I was an excellent map reader and I I I could navigate anywhere with with maps you know my wife Santa and I did huge journeys in Mexico back in the early 1990s in really cheap hire cars with maps and we found our way everywhere without any problem today I can hardly use a map the skill of using a map has elapsed within me why because of GPS GPS technology has come along and it's and it always tells me where I am and being a bit lazy I just accept that that technology but then I had cause to ask myself this just the other day supposing GPS supposing all those satellites go down and there's no GPS is the hole the hole all industrialized human race is going to suddenly be lost all those uber drivers who don't know their way from A to B and who rely entirely on their GPS is they won't know they won't know where they're going and it's and it's true with digital data the digit digital data unlike unlike print data is very fragile and requires programs in order to access and interpret it that are much more complicated than simply cracking the code of a lost language I mean the programs vary between different phone platforms a varied computer platforms it's just it's so fragile and it's so I mean I don't know if there's any precautions that have been taking place to preserve this information in case of like what Robert Schoch described a coronal mass ejection or something clear down all the satellites yeah no I don't think I don't think preparation has been made and I don't and I don't and it's very clear that that preparation is not being made for the risk of another cosmic impact and again a point that I'd like to make about this is that we are it we are in a sense in a place where history can repeat itself that there are certain cycles at work the work on the comet impact twelve thousand eight hundred years ago has very clearly and specifically identified the debris trail of that comment and that debris trail is the torrid meteor stream and it's called the torrid meteor stream because it appears to emanate from the region of the sky in which the constellation of Taurus sits it doesn't it's within our solar system it's an optical illusion the torrid meteor stream is a giant complex of debris it is 30 million kilometres wide what you had was an original comet that might have been a hundred to two hundred kilometres in diameter a small moon which fragmented and broke up into multiple multiple parts and those parts began to spread out along the whole orbit of the torrid meteor stream and to widen the whole thing widened so it's like a giant tube of debris and the evidence and the argument is that twelve thousand eight hundred years ago several large bits of that debris fell out of the torrid meteor stream and impacted with the earth the problem is that the torrid meteor stream still exists and our planet still passes through it twice a year and those passages take place in June and in November and each passage takes 12 and a half days and the same group of scientists who are who are looking at the evidence for the impacts twelve thousand eight hundred years ago are deeply concerned that we may face future impacts from the torrid meteor stream that there are still large objects up there this is not theory this is a fact there's a comet up there called comet Encke II which is part of the torrid meteor stream it's a large fragment of the original giant comet comet Encke II has a diameter of I don't know five or five or six kilometres there's there's nineteen recognized huge objects within the torrid meet history in calculations indicate that there may be as much as 200 asteroids within the torrid meteor stream of a diameter of a kilometer or more which would have catastrophic effect if they if they hit the earth and responsible astronomers regard the torrid meteor stream as the greatest collision hazard facing mankind at the present time and it's not something that we need to fall into despair about because it's perfectly within the level of our technology to do something about it what could they do well to give you an example commercial interests are looking right now and the technology is there to mine asteroids we can go to asteroids if the if the commercial interest is high enough we can go to them we can mine them we can extract minerals we can bring them back to the earth the same technology would allow you to move asteroids or comets fragments you don't want to blow them up with a nuke that would be a really bad idea that would that would turn one large object into multiple smaller objects which could cause equally massive devastation and and would be very difficult to predict where that devastation was going to fall what you want to do is to nudge them and move them out of a dangerous orbit into into a less dangerous orbit and and and the evidence is in the next thirty years we are going to be passing through dangerous filaments of the toward meteor stream and if we were smart we would be devoting some resources to protecting our cosmic environment just as where there are many issues that we need to devote resources to unfortunately the one that's most attractive to politicians at the moment is warfare we devote limitless resources to technologies of mass destruction there really is no end to the amount that we're prepared to spend on that in terms of our so-called security we feel somehow we're making ourselves more secure by having these incredible weapons and spending trillions of dollars on them but the cosmos doesn't give a [ __ ] about any of that the cosmos is out there with these with these giant giant objects which have a far greater explosive power than all the nuclear weapons stored on earth at the present time the comet shoemaker-levy 9 which hit Jupiter in 1994 had a total calculated explosive power of 300 Giga tons if you took the entire nuclear arsenal of the world today and blew it all up at once it would yield 6.4 Giga tons so these objects are producing catastrophic results on a scale that far far beyond anything that we ourselves could do with nuclear weapons it's time we spent a bit less time and money on weapons of mass destruction and a bit more on looking after this beautiful garden that we call the earth and there is our home and it will be the home of our children and our children's children I'm a grandfather now I feel passionately about this we need to look after this planet it's our responsibility as a human species to do so and one of the challenges it's not the only challenge there are many many other challenges one of the challenges is to pay attention to our cosmic environment and to realize that the cosmos can intervene cataclysmically in the human story and that the torrid meteor stream in particular may have been a hidden hand in human history that there may have been other impacts in the last 13,000 years that affect have affected and changed the course of humanity on this earth and the ancients were very good at paying attention to the sky we ourselves have amazing tech to study the sky but for some reason we're ignoring this problem of cosmic impacts and that's incredibly irresponsible because as I said a moment ago it is a solvable problem it is within the limits of our technology it would require a global cooperative effort to sweep our cosmic environment clean but it could be done and a sigh product of that global cooperation might be a friendlier more nurturing more loving more positive human community it is very odd that we have this infantile nature even as grown adults and world leaders that we don't we do like to nor imminent danger as long as it hasn't affected us in the past yes there's no real moment we can point to other than Tunguska in you know photographic history or modern history where you could take pictures of things we had and if I can if I can pause you on that very point the evidence is compelling that the Tunguska event was an object that fell out of the torrid meteor stream that happened at the peak of the bethe turrets in June 1908 the it is extremely likely that that Tunguska object came from the torrid meteor stream because we were passing through the torrid media stream at exactly that time and what the Tunguska object is estimated to be between sixty and a hundred and ninety meters in diameter so it's not a very big object it's not a kilometer scale object it's it's it's it's big but it's not that big it doesn't even hit the earth it it's an air burst it explodes in the sky above fortunately an uninhabited area of Siberia but the devastation is huge it wasn't even noticed for some years afterwards until scientific teams went in and studied the area and discovered that 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometers had been completely flattened by that air burst and to put that in context 2,000 square kilometres is the size of London so anybody who knows London is aware that there's a ring road around London called the m25 if that air burst had taken place over central London everything of London out as far as the m25 would have been gone completely is that what it looks like today pretty close like hundred years later there's no trees and whites that were taken in the early nineteen which which revealed the extent of this of this damage so it's just stupid of us not to pay a bit more attention to this especially when we have the tech to actually do something about it we have that that nature though when it comes to climate change as a curious denial there's a denial of the role of cataclysms in the human story and there there is even a word for that in science and it's called uniformitarianism and and this is a particular philosophy of science where the view is that everything as we see it in the world today is how things have always been so if we don't see cataclysms today and they're not playing a major part in our story today then there weren't cataclysms and they didn't play a major part in our story in the past that's why although it's before the time of human beings when the evidence that the dinosaurs were made extinct by a comet or an asteroid first came out luis and walter alvarez the father-son team who were behind that science were ridiculed man their colleagues and they were told it's absolutely absurd of course no cosmic event could have made the dinosaurs extinct they spent ten years taking that ridicule until they found the crater in the Gulf of Mexico since then the whole scientific community has accepted that the course of life on this planet was radically changed by a cosmic impact and you know I like to joke about it but it was a cosmic impact that was big enough literally to turn dinosaurs into chickens because that's what's left of the time so life is you know the birds and at the same time skulking in those primeval forests is this little mammal and it looks a bit like a shrew 65 million years ago going nowhere the dinosaurs ruled the earth then the cosmos intervenes the dinosaurs are swept out of the way and what happens the mammals start to evolve very rapidly and they start to occupy niches that were previously closed to them and the bottom line is we would not be here the human species would not be here we would not be having this conversation if the dinosaurs had not been made extinct 65 million years ago so these are world-changing events and my argument is that such a world-changing event occurred between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago and it's high time we paid more attention to it is there any evidence that there was other species of human beings that existed in the America's like we're finding in Russia and there's many of them that are being discovered all over the world now these subspecies human beings yeah this is an issue that I go into in in America before and what first drew me into it was Denisova cave in Siberia I think everybody's heard of the Neanderthals and these days I think everybody's heard of the Denisovans as well a lot of people have a lot of well I guess a lot of people haven't but but first of all let's take the Neanderthals for a long time it was held that the Neanderthals were stupid primitive subhumans shambling lacking symbolism turns out that that's not true at all the latest scientific on evidence on the Neanderthals is that they were symbolic creatures that they did do art that they were in every sense human and they were in every sense human because anatomically modern humans interbred with Neanderthals you can't interbreed with another species they they clearly were human beings but they looked rather different from us and that's why certain populations in the world today still have three to five percent of Neanderthal DNA then in Russia in Denisova cave they find a single pinky bone from a little finger and they do the DNA testing on it they're able to get a complete genome from it and what they discover is this isn't in the and earth all this isn't an anatomically modern human being this is another human species who they named the Denisovans they think they're more closely related to Neanderthals than they are to anatomically modern humans but they're clearly another human species and they also interbred with anatomically modern humans and Denisovan DNA survives interestingly enough it survives predominantly in Australasia in Papua New Guinea and amongst Australian Aborigines so as part of the research for this book I went to Denisova cave I had an amazing actually just incredible trip to Russia I hadn't hadn't expected it to be like that at all Siberia I mean America is vast but my god crossing Siberia this is endless rolling plains you know this just vast area how much cross we took a car well you can't travel independently in Russia it's very difficult you have to get you have to get permission and you have to state in advance where you're going to be stopping off that so what I found and I just did so through the internet was a was a local guy called Sergey Coogan who had a little tour business in in in Siberia in the city of Novosibirsk I got in touch with him he found a translator who would translate my emails and I said we want to make this journey to Denisova cave and can you set this up for us and get all the permissions and and he did and so we flew into Novosibirsk Sergey and his translator who turned out to be a Russian student who spoke good English joined us and we did this immense journey across Siberia oh it took us three days to get to to get to Denisova cave three days three days of driving every day so I'm stopping off along the way incredible hospitality of the of the Russians that we were were amongst very independent people people who are living out there in the wilderness and who actually do do know how to survive it's the first time I've ever drunk milk fresh from the cow literally milked right out of the cow and poured down my throat I was it was delicious and a cream I mean thick cream there was a lot of things about Russia that surprised me Denisova cave is a fascinating beautiful place to visit it's another it's another example of a missing chapter in the human story that is beginning to be pieced together it's obvious now that we were not alone that there were multiple other human species who were human enough to interbreed with us and leave leave DNA and this Denisovan species was only discovered in like was it 2000 so I'm very recently the 2007 it's a very it's a very recent discovery and and is it behind our hmm did they leave behind art better than that they they left behind certain physical objects which are extremely hard to explain one of them is a green stone bracelet and that bracelet is in the form of a talk which was therefore slipped on sideways onto the hand it's not a full ring and a hole has been drilled through the brace it and from that hole it's been possible to reconstruct that a pendant was hung then the archeologists there it is then the archaeologists started to take a look in detail at the drill marks on that hole and what they discovered was a huge anomaly that that was drilled with a stable fixed drill and it was drilled at extremely high speed it's a this is thought to be 40 or 50 thousand years old there is not supposed to have been any such technology in that period that was capable of drilling with a stable fixed drill and yet there it is and there it appears so there there are also incredible very fine needles bone needles that the Denisovans made very long ones which suggests that they were stitching very heavy stuff together and the suggestion has been were they making skin boats for example to use to navigate that would explain how they managed to get themselves to Australia which is where the largest amount of Denisovan DNA survives today there's one of those there's one of those needles so that there are indications of strangely out of place technology amongst the Denisovans which is twenty thirty thousand years earlier in the human story than it than it should be those kind of needles that kind of bracelet you could expect to find them in what archaeologists call the Neolithic but to find it in the Paleolithic is very puzzling and very odd and it suggests that the Denisovans were certainly not shambling sub-sub humans that they were refined creatures can you find out what year they discovered the Denisovans Jamie can you google that real quick I don't want to say it's in the 2000s but I mean imagine that human beings have been around for this long here we are in 2019 and within the last decade or so they figured this out yeah we're discovering new stuff about ourselves we're discovering that our story is much richer much more textured much more led than we thought it was it's not a simple story it's a very complicated story and we ourselves are a hybrid species we are we are the result of interactions with all kinds of different looking human beings and the end the end result is ourselves so it's not just that we carry Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA in a sense we are in the end of and Denisovans you know and have that there they are part of the anatomically modern human human heritage so you make a good point the fact that this is only being discovered now and that it's an incredibly important I mean it it completely rewrites the story of our ancestry the notion the note in 1917 70s okay where the real work that's been done in Denisova cave has been done in the 2000s from from 2006 2007 all genetics that's when the major papers have been 2008 there have been published yeah which of which have revealed the genome of the Denisovans and revealed the Denisovan connection to to anatomically modern humans the fact that we're only finding this out now that we that we told the story of our past and weren't aware of this raises the question how much else in the story of our past is there that we are not aware of let's stop being so arrogant so sure of ourselves so confident in our findings that's been more tentative let's keep an open mind and see and see where it takes us that's that's the main message that I have from from all of this and I think and I hope that this will be an effect of this book I'm not I'm not kidding myself that the archaeologists are going to jump on board overnight particularly so since I'm very critical of American archaeology in this book and I'm critical of it specifically and explicitly because of the dominance of the Clovis first model for so long which prevented other research taking place and I have to say archaeologists like to insult me by calling me a pseudo scientist I can't think of anything more pseudo scientific than the Clovis first doctrine which locked American archaeology for 50 years in a particular framework which we now know was totally wrong nothing good about it at all a complete mistake what I'm hoping the book will do in the long run is that it will lead to more attention being focused on the Americas this is a very neglected area of the world as far as deep and ancient archaeology goes I'm it's the recent history of the Americas has been relative well studied but the deep and ancient history has not been has not been well studied and I think America is going to contain revelations for us about our story and about our past and I'm serious when I when I suggest that America is the most plausible and the most likely home base for a lost civilization if you're going to propose a lost civilization you need there are certain preconditions you need a you can't have it on a small island there's got to be a large landmass with enormous resources and the ability for population to grow and for those resources to be to be mobilized and what I suddenly realize you asked earlier why I why I started to write this book at all is what the new evidence is pointing to is that the Americas have been wrongly neglected that here we have a giant continental landmass with extraordinary resources that has just been ruled out of the story of human civilization but once we take account of the fact that there was a giant Cataclysm over North America twelve thousand eight hundred years ago once we start looking as I do in America before at the incredible deep in-depth similarities between for example the religious system of ancient Egypt and the religious system of the Mississippi Valley then you realize that you're into a into a global mystery here and that the answer to that mystery may not at all be in the old world and may very much be in the in the Americas see it's odd I mentioned Marvel earlier on it's kind of odd that we should find what is essentially the ancient Egyptian religion manifesting in the symbolism of Moundville the ascent to Orion that transit to the Milky Way the journey along the Milky Way very these are very specific and idiosyncratic ideas and what makes it doubly odd is Marvel isn't that old Marvel as a site is about a thousand years old ancient Egypt had already been gone completely from the world for at least 600 years before Marvel was created the end of ancient Egypt there's Marvel and what we're looking at in the foreground is mound B and we're looking at mound a the in the in the distance and a complete circle of mounds what what is odd about it is we find this system of ancient Egyptian ideas in Marvel 500 years after ancient Egypt has gone from the world the Romans the the Romans were the end of ancient Egypt by 400 AD ancient Egypt is gone Marvel doesn't even exist them but 600 years later it is created and it manifests the entire set of ancient Egyptian ideas clearly it did not get that as a result of direct transmission from ancient Egypt unless they were time travelers the only way I think it could have got it is as a result of a legacy passed down from a much earlier civilization that had been influenced and affected many different parts of the world and the characteristics of that civilization there's the shamanistic heart of it the use of altered states of consciousness the focus on those are amongst the reasons that I would suggest that America is the place that we should be looking and the big mysteries are in the areas that were so devastated at the end of the last ice age up in the north of North America the channeled scablands in particular and then the Mississippi Valley the whole story of the Mississippi Valley yes Moundville is a thousand years old but then you can go back to Poverty Point in Louisiana which is 2700 years old you can go to Watson break in Louisiana which is five thousand five hundred years old you can go to sites like Conley which are 8,000 years old the system keeps on going back and disappearing back into time and I think the most fruitful new work on exploring the origins of civilization is going to occur counter-intuitively in the Americas the very last place on earth that archeologists have ever thought to look where damn what do mainstream archeologists what do they think caused those drill marks and the Denisovan bracelets it not really explained it the the Russian the Russian archaeologists who published the report on that are them are themselves mystified by it and they realize that it's dynamite it's an it's an explosive discovery it's a it's an out of place technology and so they're trying to explain how come fixed stable drilling which we thought was introduced first in the in the lithic maybe seven eight thousand years ago how come that is now found in a site that's forty or fifty thousand years old that's how all those bracelets oh yeah absolutely those bracelets are forty thousand under may they may have been older there's there's those recent research suggests suggesting that they may go back sixty-five to seventy thousand years that they're extremely ancient and therefore and therefore they're incorporating an out-of-place technology which doesn't fit with the timeline of history that we realize how out of place at one very very out of place very very very odd feature that we have here so what this says to me is that we as a species and I've this I guess this is kind of my pet phrase we are a species with amnesia it's my favorite phrase which we have forgotten so much more about ourselves than we remember and what the process of history and archaeology should really be about is a process of remembering we shouldn't be imposing our ideas of what we should have been on the past we should allow the past to speak for itself and when it does so it speaks eloquently one of the sites that we visited and explored for America before was Serpent Mound in Ohio I don't if you've ever been there you know I've heard of it though it is an amazing Jaimee's from ohio you ever be there Serpent Mound there's that there's an aerial view that is crazy here's the thing beautiful you see the head end of Serpent Mound there so Santa and I went there at the summer solstice in 2017 we were there on June 21st 2017 and my wife's antha is a photographer and we acquired a drone for this specific purpose and she flew the drone up 400 feet above Serpent Mound and we sat it up there watching the sunset and what happens on the summer solstice and you can only see it perfectly with a drone there's pictures of it in the in the book here what happens on the summer solstice you can see it from ground level but you get up 400 feet you really get it the head of that serpent is pointing directly at a niche in the distant Hills through which the sunsets on the summer solstice on the longest day of the year so it's a it's a sky ground alignment a perfection that is that is taking place there it's a beautiful it's a beautiful thing to see to watch that Sun majestically sinking down into the horizon and see this awesome figure of the serpent gazing directly of at it with its jaws open almost as though it's about to about to swallow the Sun and then we remember that there are other sites around the world which are also aligned to key moments of the of the solar year aligned to the winter solstice for example the Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt that kilometer long axis targets exactly the rising point of the Sun on the winter solstice one of the interesting things about serpent mound and I urge anybody listening to this go visit Serpent Mound and especially go there on the summer solstice because that's the moment that's the marriage of heaven and earth that's when sky and ground unite in in majesty at at that place but one of the the mysteries of Serpent Mound concerns how old is this mound really how far back does it go and there have been arguments that that there are as a group of archaeologists who would like it to be just a thousand years old and they attributed to a culture called the fort ancient culture there's another group of archaeologists in my view have done much more thorough thorough work who attributed to the Idina culture the thing about which goes back to 2300 years ago or so there's evidence for an earlier construction enterprise it looks like the site has been continuously reconstructed and remodeled as we would do with any sacred site if it begins to wear down you remodel it and then you get later organic material being introduced to the site that may give you the impression that the site is only that old what's intriguing about Serpent Mound is it stands on a natural ridge and that natural ridge and this is entirely an accident of heaven and earth that natural ridge the head end of it if you like is naturally oriented to the summer solstice sunset somebody a long time ago noticed that natural orientation and they decided to manya mentalize it here was a place where earth whispered to sky the earth in her own nature looked directly at the place on the horizon where the Sun was setting this was a highly significant place this place matted so they then created serpent mound on top of it they memorialized it they turned it into a into a special special place that human beings had had hand in making to honor the marriage of heaven and earth and what I found researching this book is that Serpent Mound is not alone in that respect a lot of people are puzzled by stonehenge in england stonehenge is built on Salisbury Plain and there are two kinds of big megaliths at stonehenge one of them are called sarsens and the other are called the blue stones the blue stones we know for sure were brought a long way they were brought from Wales to Stonehenge a distance of about 150 miles the sarsens are found in abundance on a place called the Marlborough downs which is about 20 miles from Stonehenge but until very recently it was thought there were no sarsens on Salisbury Plain at all an archeologist couldn't understand why Stonehenge wasn't built on the Marlborough Downs whether whether big sarsen stones the 20 to 30 tonne megaliths were available locally and didn't have to be brought there very recent research 2018 research has provided the answer that two of those sarsens were naturally in position all the time at Stonehenge and they are sarsen stone 16 and the heel stone and if you stand behind sarsen stone 16 and look at the heel stone at dawn on the summer solstice you see the Sun rising in direct alignment with the view and the heel stone is like the site on the barrel of a rifle targeting the Sun and that was there naturally earth was speaking to sky the ancients saw that they decided this was sacred they went to huge lengths to bring the sarsens the rest of the sarsens from the Marlborough downs to create the big stone circle at Stonehenge and then to put the blue stones inside it but initially what they were celebrating was a natural union of heaven and earth and that brings us to the notion of as above so below that we are connected to the cosmos that it is that it is part of our heritage we in modern cities forget the cosmos exists we have all kinds of tech that can look at the astronomy astronomy programs we can we've all do that I'm actually looking at the Stars is something that's very difficult for people who live in cities to do where we're cut off from the cosmos we're cut off from the notion that it is sacred that it matters to the human creature and what what the ancients seemed to have done is to realize how vital that connection is and to memorialize it and to celebrate it and to draw our attention to the intimate connection between ground and sky yeah light pollution sort of fuels our infantile existence in a lot of ways right because it doesn't constantly remind us that we're a part of this great thing yeah light light light pollution is a huge factor it's very easy to forget that we live in a universe very easy to forget that very easy to believe that it's just about these cities that we live in and the and the intimate concerns of our of our daily lives but we in fact we're part of something much much bigger and my god I mean it's it's a mystery enough to be born a human being at all yes you know just to be alive is is an extraordinary mystery yes to have the ability to to love to to feel emotions to understand beauty to be moved by by a symphony all of all of these things we take for granted but actually they're deeply mysterious we don't really know what we are or or who we are and which is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Rick Strassman 'he's where you you presented his film DMT the spirit molecule and on my upcoming speaking tour I'm going to be doing an event with Rick on the 14th or 15th of May in Sedona I think it'll be the first time that Rick has spoken publicly for quite a while rick has a colleague called andrew Gallimore who teaches at the university of okinawa in japan and rick and andrew have together developed a technology for releasing DMT into human volunteers in a very slow drip that will keep them in the dmt state if they wish for hours on end and and the intention the intention is to use this technology to explore and map the DMT realm when do I sign up as soon as possible it's very close Imperial College it looks like Imperial College London is going to deploy this technology in further research into DMT and that that research is not going to be purely and simply into the therapeutic potential of a psychedelic which is very important research to do it's going to be an investigation into the nature of reality using a psychedelic the mysterious nature of reality and it is art and you know this from personal experience that when you get plunged into that DMT realm it is so different from the realm of our daily daily world filled filled with geometry filled with these sprightly intelligences completely internally coherent how can that be you know generated by the brain or are are we dealing with some other level of reality that we haven't encountered yet I think that ancient cultures and in particular my lost civilization were deeply involved in exploring the mysterious nature of reality and used the plant medicines as part of that process when it comes to the serpent mound where the head points in the summer solstice is that take into account the precession the equinoxes in terms of position of the summer solstice Sun on the horizon is not affected by the precession however it is affected by another another factor which is a slight nod on the axis of the earth an odd but not a wobble not a wobble a nod and and it's called mutation and the the axis of the earth nods back and forward over a cycle of about 41,000 years and that can that does adjust the position of sunrise on the horizon over a very long period of time and it would in theory if this idea can be taken seriously enough it would in theory be possible to use very precise observations using the latest modern tech not simply being up there in a drone and seeing the general connection between the position of the Sun on the horizon the head of serpent mound it would be possible to refine that and actually say astronomically the precise date on which Serpent Mound must have been first created to precisely target the Rising Sun on the equinox well on that no we just did three hours did we buy I would I would ask your listeners and viewers while we're talking about Ohio don't forget about Newark and highbank these are two incredible amazing absolutely stunning gorgeous geometrical sights it's sad but one of them is preserved within a private golf course Oh No however it's not so sad because if it hadn't been preserved within a private golf course it would be gone completely more than 90% of the Native American earthworks that were documented in the 19th century are gone now they've been plowed under for agriculture that's another part of our missing story there we're looking at Newark see that octagon and circle combination that's repeated at another site called highbank which is 60 miles away and the octagon circle give me a large image of that so you see all four layers that would it actually that's what actually looks like that's a graphic based on it well the octagon circle combination in the top left of the image are best preserved the other bits are not so well preserved and the reason the Octagon circle are best preserved is cause they're in a private Golf Club where otherwise they would have been plowed under the interesting thing is that that octagon circle combination is 60 miles from high bank but there's another octagon circle combination there and it is oriented that precisely 90 degrees to that one that speaks of high science in the Mississippi Valley a very very very long time ago there's so much to explore and so much to investigate and so much to inquire into an America it's just an incredible land and its mysteries have been hidden from us and I'm hoping with this book that I have managed to pull the veil back a little bit on those mysteries and if we're really coming to the end of our thesis it really three hours if we're really coming to the end of our three hours can I repeat I would love to see readers of my books at my events I think three events in Canada Vancouver Montreal and Toronto and I'm doing something like 17 or 18 events in the United States I'm just speaking continuously right the way across the US I wish I could visit every state in the US but my goodness this is an enormous country every state in the u.s. is as big as the entire British Isles you know but I'm in visiting as many as I am I'm going to be giving Illustrated presentations I'll be signing books afterwards I'll be taking pictures I would like to meet my readers and please check out my website Graham Hancock com look at the talks and events page and you'll see where all these events are occurring over the next seven weeks we're on the 22nd of April today I will not leave North America until the 5th of June well I hope I see you again then dissin thank you so much you're a treasure and this book is I can't wait to get into it America before and the audiobook is available now as well yeah the audio books available I'll read it yeah thank you so much Graham it's always a pleasure having you here I really really appreciate you thanks for having back on Joe Graham Hancock ladies and gentlemen bye [Applause] [Music] [Music]
So glad Graham thoughts are still so brilliant and clear. was not sure if he could keep up with older podcasts after his stroke(s) - but Graham delivered again. In all his episodes there are moments when I just have to jump up out of my chair because of those powerful words.
GRAHAM HANCOCK I FUCKING LOVE YOU
Always a pleasure to listen to those two speak
Yaaaaaaay
Graham was on Joe Rogan again, yesterday! Amazing!
First time I heard of him was on JRE, so im glad he's back after I watched all his videos a dozen times. Just appeared on my Youtube feed and I came here to share.
Are there any archeologists here that pursue GH's research and not feel concerned about their credibility as a professional? If so I commend you.
When he talked about Serpent Mound, I was there one day before him, so bummed I was so close to accidentally running into him.
Because of this JRE I've been consumed by his thoughts. I am currently listening to Graham Hancock read Magicians of the Gods. Only an hour in and its mind bending.
This is the first time herd them speak. I then went back to the playlist and found 4 more ... At that moment I was the happiest man alive!
So good <3