Translator: Hélène Vernet
Reviewer: Heba Alshrbagy I've been called
a "tail spinner," a "wordsmith," in the promotions for this TED talk, but I'm not spinning any tails today. I'm going to be presenting before you
facts based in science and History, and I'm going to leave you to take a call
for yourselves on what this all means. We all know this gentleman
as Alexander the Great. Everyone is familiar with him. But did you know that there is absolutely
no archaeological evidence to prove that Alexander the Great existed? That's not in history books. Everything we know about this man comes from the writings
by three historians who lived between 150 and 400
years after Alexander died: Strabo, Arrian and Plutarch. But Alexander is not
mythology; he is History. So, I'm going to explore some unanswered
questions from the Mahabharata which I've been researching
now for about 12 years. I'm not going to give you answers, but I'm going to give you some thoughts which I hope will challenge
you to be curious about what could be and what is. Here's the first question:
Did the Mahabharata actually happen? The events in the Mahabharata
which is not just the Kurukshetra war - that's just 8,800 shlokas - or verses - out of the one lakh shlokas
in the Mahabharata - did all the events described there happen? It's a very common question. Did the fantastic weapons we hear about
in the Mahabharata, actually exist? And if they did, how did these people,
over 5,000 years ago, have that kind of science and technology? And then, the question that led me
on my journey, as a fiction writer: Are there scientific explanations for some of the things
we read about in the Mahabharata? This is a big one which I'm actually
currently researching: Were there giants in the time
of the Mahabharata? We hear about the Devas
and the Asuras and the Rakshasas, these enormous beings
of gigantic stature ... Were they real? Let's explore this, but I'm going to start
by taking you on a tour of the world. We're going to talk about some
unexplained mysteries and then come back to the Mahabharata. I'm going to start with Egypt. The Great Pyramid is one of the most
famous monuments in the world. It is 457 feet high as it stands today, the equivalent size of a 45-storey building. We are told by history books
that it was built in about 2550 BC by a pharaoh called Khufu,
as a tomb for himself. Now when the Great Pyramid
was built, it was locked. This is its original entrance which was only discovered
maybe about 50 or 60 years ago. It was concealed, hidden away
by the wall of rock which you can see is scattered
around the entrance today. So, no one could enter
the pyramid after it was built. It was closed and sealed. In 800 AD, the governor of Cairo, a gentleman called Mohammed Al Mamum,
decided he wanted to go inside. Why? Because he believed
if a pharaoh was great enough to build a 45-storey tomb for himself,
he must have a lot of treasures inside. So, Al Mamun and his men
tunneled into the Great Pyramid using what is today called
"the robbers entrance." Tourists enter the Great Pyramid
today using this entrance. But to his great shock and disappointment,
when they reached inside, they found absolutely nothing. The walls were bare, no inscriptions. Unlike all the Egyptians tombs
he would discover, there were no inscriptions on the walls. There was no mummy
and there was no treasure. He must have been a very sad man. Now, this is the lower hole,
the robbers' entrance; the upper one is the original entrance; so you can see what I'm talking
about, a close-up of these. What is also very interesting
about the Great Pyramid is the maze of passages
and tunnels inside. And you can see
that if this was built as a tomb, they'd have had a one heck of a time carrying the Pharaoh's body
up these passages because none of them
are on a straight line. They are all at crazy angles. Let's look at some of the angles.
Look at the Grand Gallery. This has a ramp today which you can
see at the base of the photograph. This ramp enables us to climb it, but
when it was explored about 150 years ago, there was no ramp, and you can see
how difficult it is to walk by yourself, forget about carrying a corpse with you. Most of these tunnels I've showed you,
the network of tunnels, most of them are about
2.5 or 3 feet in height, like this one over here, and this one over here, which means you have to crawl on your
hands and knees to get through them - not a great job if you're carrying
a Pharaoh's mummy around. So the question really is: why? Why was this 45-storey building
built 5,000 years ago locked away with all these passages,
three chambers, and interestingly, tunnels from the King's Chamber
that opened up to the sky, like this? This is where it opens up
in the north face of the pyramid. From the Queen's Chamber,
there are two tunnels which were explored about 15 years ago. This is a National Geographic capture
where you can see the tunnels are blocked. So why build them? Unanswered. There are lots of speculation,
but I'm not into speculation today. The Sphinx is another fabulous mystery. We are told that the Sphinx was built
by the Pharaoh Khafre who was Khufu's son, and therefore build about 2500 BC. For a very long time,
this was accepted History. You can see how big the Sphinx is by looking at the size
of the human being next to it. This is just the shoulder, the neck
and the head of the Sphinx. It's an enormous structure. Here's another shot which shows you
the size of the Sphinx. In the 1990s, a professor of geology
at Boston University, Dr. Robert Schoch, came along in the scene and asked the Egyptologists
a very interesting question. He said, "How do you know
that the Sphinx was built in 2500 BC?" The fascinating answer was:
"Well, we actually don't know. We think it was built in 2500 BC
because you can't date stone. If you would you date it, it would be
billions of years old, right? So, Robert Schoch,
being a scientist, said, "Not good enough for me,
I'm going to run some geological tests." And his tests shocked the world because what his tests showed
was that the erosion you can see on the Sphinx and on the walls
of the enclosure surrounding the Sphinx were caused by heavy rainfall,
and we know for a fact it has not rained heavily in Egypt
after about 5000 or 6000 BC, which means the Sphinx could not
have been built in 2500 BC. It had to be older than 6000 BC, probably even eight, nine,
10,000 BC, we don't know, but it is an old monument,
and the question then is: who built it? We were all cavemen and cavewomen
in those days, right? We were using stone tools. We didn't have
the technology and the science to build a massive structure
like this... Yet, somebody did. Let me take you now to Stonehenge
in the United Kingdom. I visited this as a tourist
about 12 years ago, but only while I was researching
for my last book, did I actually spend two weeks
researching this deeply on site. And I discovered something
about this that blew my mind: 70-ton blocks of stone put upright and 70-ton blocks of stones on top. The stones lying flat
on top are also 70 tons. The first question is: in 2400 BC, which is the officially accepted
date for this, how did they do it? How did they lift these stones
30 feet into the air and put them on top with this
complex engineering involved here. This is called a "mortise
and tenon joint" in carpentry - in modern carpentry,
but they obviously knew it. Each of the upright stone has
these two projections called "tenons." The mortise holes of the stones
on top fit onto them, so it locks the stone in place. And if you look carefully,
there are a tongue and a groove joint, like a jigsaw puzzle,
on the sides of the stones. So not only do you have to lift the stones,
but once one fits - that's great - the second stone has to fit the tenon, the mortise tenon joint has to fit
as well as the tongue and groove joint, and you're standing here,
pulling it 30 feet in the air, with possibly only ropes
to help you achieve this. In the 1950s, they reconstructed
Stonehenge using cranes, but in 2400 BC, they did not have cranes. How did they do this? Here you can see the mortise holes. Here's a shot of one of the tenon projections. Here, if you look very carefully, you can see the tongue of a stone
on this stone that is flat on top. Let me take you to Wales. This is a fascinating place;
when I saw it, again it blew my mind because magical things happen here,
and I'll tell you just one of them. This is supposed to be a burial chamber
at a place called Bryn Celli Ddu, The entrance of this chamber
faces northeast. Every year between December and April,
the sun rises in the northeast - it rises in the northeast in winter
in the Northern Hemisphere. It shines through this entrance and illuminates a stone pillar
which is inside the chamber. Now, it's no big deal, right? The interesting thing is that the stone
chamber is where the blue line is. It's not in line with the entrance, so, obviously, light from the Sun
is reflecting off the walls of the chamber and illuminating the pillar,
and you can see it's reflective. It's quartz-lined rock. Here's the magic: I don't know if you can see,
there are grooves cut into the rock. Here's a close-up;
you can see it clearly now. So here's what happens: Every day, starting from December,
the Sun shines in through the passage and illuminates a different notch every day. It climbs from the base
of the pillar in December to the top of the pillar in April. This, my friends,
is a 5,000-year-old calendar. Just by looking at
which notch is illuminated, you know the day of the year in winter
between December and April. Built in 3000 BC, we are told
by the archaeologists. Five thousand years ago,
how could they build a parabolic mirror, which is what the walls
of the chambers are? How could they do something
like this? It's amazing. Unanswered questions. Now some very interesting
theories were advanced, about twenty years ago,
when I started researching this. One of the pioneers in this
is a gentleman called Graham Hancock. He and other people of his ilk
used a lot of science to create a theory saying that there
was an ancient global civilization, that had advanced science and technology and was washed out
by a global flood 12,000 years ago. Interestingly, recent discoveries have
provided fascinating evidence for this. So in 10,900 BC, we now know
a comet hit the Earth. It shattered into fragments
and hit the Earth at different points which is now marked by what's called
the "Younger Dryas boundary," and melted the ice cap. The ice age was anyway getting over. Sea levels rose causing a global flood. Volcanoes erupted;
ash filled the atmosphere. For 1,300 years,
temperatures dropped sharply as you can see, I'll just show you. These animals in North America
went extinct altogether. One of the biggest mysteries, until this discovery was made
about the comet hitting the earth, was why these animals all disappeared
at the same time 12,000 years ago. This is a report from an ice core
from the Greenland ice cap which shows that 15,000 years ago,
there's a spike in temperature. The ice age is ending and then suddenly, the temperature plummets
below what it was during the Ice Age. That is when the comet hit. One thousand three hundred years later,
the temperature returns to normal. Another fascinating discovery made in 2008 -
I don't know if you've heard of this - this archaeological team working
in Russia in a cave called Denisova, discovered a tooth, a big tooth. The surface area of this tooth
is about two and a half times that of our teeth, a human tooth. So they thought this must belong
to a large now extinct animal, like some of the ones I just showed you, and they sent it for DNA testing
to try to figure out who it belonged to. Imagine their shock
when the DNA test came back saying that this tooth belonged
to a human being, a human species which we did not know
existed until this tooth was found, not Homo sapiens which is what we are -
Homo sapiens sapiens - but they had to give it a new name,
they called it the "Denisovans." I'm going to share
three amazing discoveries which you'll find in the scientific
reports about the Denisovans over the last nine years. The first is that all the people living
today in the geographical areas covered by the Green Land,
which is quite substantive, all of us have Denisovan DNA; 2.4% of our DNA
is Denisovan DNA, this is a fact. The second interesting thing
was this bracelet. The Denisovans lived about
30 to 40 thousand years ago. This bracelet is about
30 to 40 thousand years old. We believe it was made by the Denisovans. I'm not going to dwell
on the beauty of the bracelet, but focus on that small hole
at the side of the bracelet which is one millimeter in diameter -
very small, very fine. The scientists who ran
physical tests on this hole say that it could have been made,
and I quote from the report: "it could have been made
only using a high-speed drill," otherwise the stone would have shattered. A high-speed drill 30,000 years ago? This was also mind-blowing: Just like we have Denisovan DNA,
the Denisovans have DNA belonging to another human species
which we have not yet discovered. There are still mysteries out there
waiting to be solved. There're still discoveries
waiting to be made, if we are curious enough
to challenge our existing beliefs and look for the evidence. Science is opening up the way now. I'm going to now come back
to the Mahabharata's unanswered questions, and I hope I'm going to leave you
with thoughts, not answers but thoughts... that will lead you to curiosity
to learn more about this. Did the events described in the
Mahabharata actually happen? There is absolutely
no archaeological evidence to prove that the events
of the Mahabharata happened. There is also no archaeological evidence
to prove that Alexander the Great existed. Is it possible that the weapons described
in the Mahabharata actually existed? Did they have the scientific knowledge
to create those kind of weapons? Can there be a scientific basis for some of the things
described in the Mahabharata? We can't say for sure. What we do know for sure
is that 30 to 40 thousand years ago, there were people who we didn't
know about until now. There were people who had
some kind of technology. We don't know what it was, but they did. We know that they had
engineering techniques, like this one and the one
at Bryn Celli Ddu, to create complex buildings,
some of which we can't do today. We could not build a Great Pyramid
today if we wanted to. The Sushruta Samhita written in 1000 BC is a manual on brain surgery,
and one of its techniques called the "flap technique"
of plastic surgery, is still in use today,
in the 21st century - a 3,000-year-old text. I found this very interesting
while researching: The sulbasutras written
in the first millennium BC, first date of what we now know
as the Pythagoras theorem. They used geometry; and the
square root of two is defined. Let me very quickly show you. In those days, in the
Vedic age, we had altars. We didn't have temples, we had altars. This is one example:
four levels - A, B, C, D; each level had a different type
of brick, hence A-B-C-D; 196 bricks. It could not have been made
without the use of geometry. This is the Baudhayana
Sulbasutras' definition of the Pythagoras theorem;
it is there. And the square root of two
is pretty close to our modern value. Were there really giants
in the Mahabharata? Denisovans must have been
a pretty big people. I'm not saying they are the people
in the Mahabharata, but it's interesting. So I'm going to end here
and like I said, I hope I've given you enough
to challenge your thoughts and look for more. Thank you.
Very disappointing, not sure where he is talking, but he missed some seriously easy points to show a global communication if not travel. The construction methods in Egypt, Peru, Japan, Easter Island, Russia, China, Europe, etc. Done, that proves it for me.
We know these people had the same exact construction methods with stones that are hundred of tons. Because we have planes and fly all over the world looking at the same techniques - that we can't duplicate now but somehow the pre-dynasty Egyptians and pre-Myan civilizations and many more knew how.