Graham Hancock
Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.
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Korrents What they believe 25 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
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That an advanced civilisation existed in the Ice Age is a hypothesis offered to answer the puzzles of prehistory, not something anyone has proved — and it is worth inquiring into anyway.
It’s often said that I’m claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I’m putting forward to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Göbekli Tepe was not the beginning of monumental building but the summation of a whole regional culture that was already under way before it.
It’s clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually in a way, the end of this process.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The same afterlife journey along the Milky Way turns up in cultures too distant in space and time to have shared it, so it is an inheritance from one remote common source rather than a coincidence.
And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
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The worldwide flood traditions record the Younger Dryas, not local floods that storytellers mistook for global ones.
I’m not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur, and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the ice age.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is serious multidisciplinary science, not the lunatic fringe its opponents call it.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short, is not a lunatic fringe theory as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It’s the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archeology and including oceanography as well.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
A cosmic impact can be established from its proxies alone without a crater — that is exactly how the dinosaur extinction was first argued.
Luis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater. And for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn’t produce a crater.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Science explains the Younger Dryas freeze by the Gulf Stream shutting down but never explains what shut it down, and a comet impact is the elegant answer.
But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The Younger Dryas was triggered not by one impact but by hundreds of airbursts from a fragmenting comet whose debris stream the Earth still crosses twice a year.
So the suggestion is that it wasn’t one impact, it wasn’t two impacts, it wasn’t three impacts, it was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
His case does not rest on the impact hypothesis: what is load-bearing is that the Younger Dryas happened at all, whatever triggered it.
In a sense, it’s not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I’m saying, it’s the Younger Dryas that’s central to what I’m saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger, something caused it.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Calling the lost civilisation advanced means only that it could calculate longitude, not that it built machines.
And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I’m referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I’m not saying that they were building steam engines. I don’t see any evidence for that.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Somebody was mapping the world during the last Ice Age, which is why medieval Portolan charts carry accurate longitudes and an Antarctica nobody had seen.
I don’t think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age, but that doesn’t mean that they had our kind of tech.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The Great Sphinx and the megalithic temples beside it date to about 12,500 years ago, thousands of years before dynastic Egypt.
We are pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least, does date back to 12 and a half thousand years ago and with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx and the Sphinx temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The three Great Pyramids are a Fourth Dynasty renovation and enhancement of much older structures already standing on the Giza plateau.
But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older and that when we look at the three Great Pyramids, we are looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The Sphinx was originally lion-headed as well as lion-bodied, and the pharaoh's head it wears is a later re-carving of a ruined lion's.
And actually the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Megalithic architecture plus astronomy is a deliberate message system: Giza encodes a date in a language any astronomically literate future culture can read.
It uses massive megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture which is sufficiently literate in astronomy will be able to decode.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The Great Pyramid was never a tomb — it is a curiosity device built to make later cultures investigate it.
But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it 6 million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Nobody knows how the Great Pyramid was built: neither ramps nor wet sand can lift seventy-ton granite blocks three hundred feet into the air.
But that is not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King’s Chamber and the floor of the chamber above it, and the roof of that chamber, and the floor of the chamber above that, and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Archaeology's hostility to him is territorial defence of a profession, and it grew with the size of his audience rather than with anything in his evidence.
I think it’s partly territorial. I cannot speak of all archeologists, but some archeologists feel very territorial about their profession. They do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders have a large platform.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Publicly condemning a heterodox idea makes the public more likely to believe it, because trust in experts has collapsed.
Actually by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view, because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
The absence of Ice Age shipwrecks is no evidence against Ice Age seafaring: no boat survives from the settlement of Australia either, and nobody doubts that happened.
And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia, and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either. But that doesn’t mean that that thing didn’t happen.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
If a lost Ice Age civilisation existed, its traces lie in the Sahara, the Amazon and the drowned continental shelves — the habitable places archaeology has barely looked at.
The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. That, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. Of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity and was the earliest form of science.
I think that shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
A society that lets its government dictate what experiences a person may have inside their own consciousness cannot call itself free.
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
Anybody running for head of state should have to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first, and most of those who did would no longer want the job.
If I had the power to do so, I would make it a law, an absolute law, that anybody running for a powerful political position, particularly if that position is president or head of state in any kind of way, that that person has to undergo the ayahuasca ordeal first.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
That there is no soul is an assumption of science rather than a finding: no experiment has ever shown that the light simply blinks out.
The general view of science, I think, is that we’re accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There’s no more of us. There’s no such thing as the soul. But that’s not a proven point. There’s no experiment that proves that’s the case.
Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History | Lex Fridman Podcast #449 Said 16 Oct 2024
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