Joe Rogan Experience #1284 - Graham Hancock

here we go and boom, we're live,

graham

, it's nice to see you again, nice to meet you, joe, um, and we were just talking about your new book, America, before that, there's two versions, there's one version and then there's a newer version that's a barnes noble version that's specific to barnes and noble that has a whole extra chapter that's right yeah yeah and so you can get it on barnes noble I'm just trying to keep the bookstores alive , man, I think it's really important and that's and that's a. One of the reasons I did this was because I had finished the book and then Barnes and Noble came to me through my publishers and said they would like to do a special edition of the book, but to do it I needed to write to them. some extra material uh and I had a lot of material that I hadn't put in the book and I thought, well, this is an opportunity to publish it beautifully, so if people want it to be a little different than what it is a little Well, well, first of all, my website graeme

hancock

.com has a page on 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, iTunes and all kinds of all kinds of other places, so

graham

hancock

.com and the america before page, the link to the barnes noble edition is there, there it is, so what is this before we can get into what is it?

Go to talks and events okay we're on graham hancock's website go to books go to america before the boom bam there it is go to the states you can see the amazon bonuses and there's a special edition of barnes and noble special edition click on that there you have it and then the ebook is also available the audiobook that I read myself is available there so if you scroll down oops that shouldn't be there damn popups I'm so happy to that you read it yourself. I get angry when someone else reads someone I'm like, come on, him.

I can talk, yes, I enjoy reading my books and what I've learned from the feedback I get from audiences at presentations is that people like me do that, oh yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, one hundred percent, it's just weird when someone else does it. talking in your voice like, hey man, I know you're not Graham, you know I write fiction in addition to the ad, yeah, and the only thing I can't read is my fiction real good, yeah, because fiction requires accents, you really need an actor . read a fiction book that can delve into the different characters, but for a non-fiction book like america before it's very easy for me to just read it myself, I agree, I'm a big Stephen King fan, but when I read the books by Stephen King, he reads them or listens to him when he reads them they are terrible he is terrible at that I don't think a novelist should read his own novels I think that's the job of an actor, strange as it may seem, I've just been reading the Stephen King's Dark Tower series, yes, very close to the end of the seventh volume.

Yeah, I'm just a big fan of his, but man, when he reads it, he reads it like he's just reading it. Yeah, it's like, oh, this is hard. Anyway, it's hard to back up, um, America before um, so they give us information on the website, there are details about the book, there is a page where there are links to the book and also the other thing that I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to mention is that I'm in the states and canada for the next seven weeks and I'm doing something like 25 shows in something like 20 american cities and then three canadian cities in vancouver, uh, montreal and toronto, and that's all in the talks and events page of my website, so if anyone wants to come and meet this old man in person, I will.

I'll be doing those events and are you doing them in theaters? Do you allow questions and answers like how absolutely absolutely do I allow it, do I allow it? I encourage you that, as an author, I feel that, frankly, I am nothing without my audience. I owe my audience a lot to my readers and what I try to do at events is give back as much as I can so that if people want to take pictures. with me I'm absolutely down for it, I don't understand why anyone would want to do that, but it's fun, it's fun and when people want to come up to the desk where I'm signing and ask me personal questions, I'm ready.

To do that sometimes on the UK book tour I just finished, I was delayed in the event slot for four hours after the event ended. Wow, signing and taking and taking pictures, but it's a pleasure, it's a real opportunity for me to interact. with the people who really make my work matter, that's fantastic, beautiful, so what inspired this, uh, I know there's always been good, first of all, we should say that for people who don't know that you've been at the front of the line, um over the decades of talking about these lost civilizations and reading your work, I mean, I think I first read your work in the '90s, you exposed me to a lot of these ideas that at the time were controversial and which have now been supported by real evidence, particularly gobekli.

Teppy and I mean all the water erosion stuff on the sphinx and I've since had Dr. Robert Shock on the podcast to talk about that too, but all of these things were at one time very controversial and now much less so, yeah . I mean whatever the traditional academics and historians are trying to guess, as archaeologists, that we are trying to resist, they have let go of a lot of things, they have had to deal with things like gobekli, they have had to do it because the evidence has The overwhelmed and returned to tepe is an excellent example before the discovery and excavation of gobeklitepi uh, which is a site in anatolia in turkey, the very firm opinion of the archaeologists was that there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere on earth and when I say megalithic, I literally mean big stones, stone circles, huge constructions, nothing like that before, at least, six thousand years ago and they pointed out sites in, for example, Malta, a site called Gigantea that is approximately 5800 years old and that It is the oldest megalithic architecture in the world and they could understand what that was like because they were agricultural societies, they generated surpluses, people could be released who could become architectural specialists in astronomy and geometry and they could apply their skills to the construction of these sites, but what never considered possible was that a hunter-gatherer society would have created a gigantic megalithic site and suddenly it is discovered that gobekli tepe dates back 11,600 years and is more than 5,000 years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world and is in the center where there had been no previous evidence of agriculture, but the moment gobekli tepe appears, agriculture also appears um and this is something that is really difficult for archeology to explain, suddenly they have 5000 years of lost history that they have lost.

It's just never taken into account and what I see them doing is largely avoiding the problem rather than addressing it directly and in fact there have been a lot of changes in the last 20 years that have worked. In general, I am in favor of the arguments I have proposed. I'm very happy for you because I know that for a long time you were alone with many of these theories. He was also subjected to the most scorching and deeply unpleasant criticism from the archaeological fraternity and their friends in the media, such as how dare these journalists propose that history could be different or that we could have a forgotten world? chapter of human history it was considered almost offensive for me to publish this material and archaeologists felt it was their responsibility to show the public what I was full of and that was it and that was how my work was received and to some extent it is still welcomed by archaeologists, but things have changed.

Central to my work was the notion of a global cataclysm approximately twelve thousand five hundred twelve thousand eight hundred years ago. It made sense to me in 1995 when I wrote fingerprints of the gods, but there was no convincing evidence of a global cataclysm, so just all the evidence seemed to point to that moment and a massive global event and then, from 2007 onwards, more than one Decade after I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, we get a group of more than 60 leading scientists who seriously propose that the Earth was hit by multiple fragments of a giant comet 12,800 years ago and that this caused a huge rise in sea level and the extinction of megafaunas, they don't say that it also wiped out a lost advanced civilization from prehistory, I'm saying that, um, but what has changed is that we now have solid and convincing scientific evidence, I'm not saying that all scientists accept it, It's the nature of science to question findings, but we have a group of 60 senior figures who have seriously proposed this in every major journal and have changed the balance of power in this argument because one thing they used to say is that Hancock can't have reason because there was no global cataclysm, you know? 12 or 13,000 years ago, well now we know that there were and are various explanations for it, so that moved things forward and the other thing that has changed a lot is the attitude of the man in the street towards authority which changed in the 90s.

The figures were the guardians, they controlled everything, if an authority figure in a discipline like archeology said that Hancock is completely wrong, he has invented all these things that, in general, not everyone, but most People today would believe that a conventional authority figure said that. For me it's actually an advantage because people are very distrustful of authority and rightly so, because authority figures in all fields have lied to us for so long. It's been so huge 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 yes, I'm sure you've seen the latest evidence of a crater that they just discovered like recently in Greenland yes, huge, it's a huge crater um, 18 miles wide, it hadn't been discovered before because it's under ice, it's under a lot of ice at the end of the ice age, Greenland was an area that never lost its ice sheet completely, while North America, all northern Minnesota was covered in ice.

A mile, sometimes two miles deep, Europe, the same Northern Europe, but Greenland kept its eyes while the other parts of the world lost their eyes at the end of the ice age and the interesting thing about Greenland is that already There is evidence of a comet impact on Greenland, whatever. Let's go back to the papers published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences in 2013 that found what are called impact indicators in Greenland, in other words, nanodiamonds and carbon spherules and evidence was found of a large amount of platinum and iron in a layer in the ice dated about 12,800 years ago, but the next event that you are absolutely right about and this was just a few months ago was the discovery of this huge crater in Greenland and the evidence that it was caused by an impactor iron of some kind that now dates back to him.

It would be irresponsible to say that this crater definitively dates back to 12,800 years because the work has not yet been done to prove it, but what I can say and what the specialists who have explored and excavated the crater say is that it is recent. we can say with certainty that it happened during the last ice age below the crater there is nothing but hugely altered, destroyed and completely destroyed ice from the Pleistocene ice age above there is smooth and perfect ice from our time which is called Holocene which began about 11,600 years ago, so all the evidence suggests that this crater 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 is part of a growing pattern of younger dryers. uh impact uh scientists, they call themselves, they call this the youngest dryas impact hypothesis and it's because there was a period in the geological history of the earth that geologists call the youngest dryas that lasted twelve hundred years, from twelve 1800 to 116600 years ago it's a very mysterious period we see all the megafauna die suddenly and we rapidly see rises in sea level we see a huge collapse in global temperature it's a cataclysmic time and what what what is becoming clearer And the most clear thing is that the evidence that a comet was behind it is extremely strong and as more and more evidence comes in we realize how widespread it was, which is why they found evidence of impacts as far south as Antarctica now. before.

He focused a lot on North America, now in the south, Antarctica, and in the east, Syria. This was truly a global event and it changed the world and I think, in my case, it erased our memory of a previous episode of humanity. civilization that right at the epicenter of this cataclysm was a civilization that we would consider advanced, not a simple hunter-gatherer civilization that was completelywiped out in this cataclysmic event and I should tell anyone who is truly fascinated right now to please pause and continue. Listen to the one that he did with Randall Carlson where he really goes into depth about the impact, the evidence of these impacts, the evidence of the very rapid disappearance 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 in noah's ark and that all of these are probably tales of stories that people pass down from generation to generation and that survive this time, yes, because now we know that at that time, between 12,800 and 11 years ago 600 years ago, truly catastrophic global events occurred that involved rapid rises in sea level and suddenly the world's tradition of a global flood ceased to be just a myth and began to be a memory, an account of real events.

It has been a privilege for me to work closely with Randall Carson. Yes, he is absolutely amazing. He is a total genius. He is also a gentle giant. and he is such a kind and generous spirited person, he is a pleasure to work with and every minute I spend with him is an education. I had the privilege of traveling through the Scablands Channel 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 rocks called glacial erratics and they look strange there in the landscape, but when you really consider how they got there, they got there on icebergs the size of oil tankers that were transported. floods that were at least 500 to a thousand feet deep that were tearing at the channeled scapulae, literally tearing up the landscape, then the icebergs would crash into the sides of the valley, the flood waters would recede, the icebergs would be left, they are giant icebergs and , as they melted, they revealed the rocks that were in chain, that were trapped inside them and are scattered all over the landscape and you look at that and think that everything that was underneath 12,800 years ago is completely gone, it can't be left some of it completely destroyed and I would encourage people interested in this to watch the YouTube videos because Randall provides all kinds of video evidence and photographs where you can take a look at the landscape and you'll get a perspective of how immense this destruction was, yeah , it's really important to see that because it's quite easy to talk about floods and cataclysms, but actually seeing their effect on the landscape, directly, has an emotional and emotional effect.

Impact I felt, I felt emotional traveling through the channels, the lands of the gap, realizing that this was the heart of an event that changed the world completely and the evidence continues to accumulate that I have in America before that I haven't covered some ancient ground that I went over the wizards of the gods that we cover in the various interviews and podcasts where it's actually a good idea for people to take a look, but what I've done is added the new information released since 2015 which further supports the impact of the younger Dryas. The hypothesis and notion that multiple fragments of a giant comet hit the Earth and created an absolute global catastrophe.

So what was the motivation behind creating this book? America before it is a curious mix of things. I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for the longest time. For more than 25 years, that was the essence of my book The Fingerprints of the Gods, which was published in 1995, that there has been a great forgotten episode in the history of humanity. I continued to follow him in a series of other books and when I got to 2002, when I published a book called Underworld that followed seven years of diving on continental shelves in search of structures that were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last age of ice.

I really felt like I had made it. I felt like I would walk the walk. I made a huge amount of information available to the public and I thought my role in this was over and I can breathe a sigh of relief because it's hot in this particular kitchen and I can do something else and I ended up writing. a book about psychedelics. I ended up writing supernatural meetings with humanity's ancient masters about the role of psychedelics in the origins of human history, but then new information started emerging that touched on the idea of ​​lost civilization and I couldn't.

I didn't sit back and ignore that information, which is why I published Wizards of the Gods in 2015 and then while researching that book I realized something I hadn't realized before: there is a lot of new information of the Americas, specifically the Americas. america that completely rewrites the history of humanity that the americas have long been misrepresented by archeology and archaeologists will be mad at me for saying that they have a way of forgetting their own mistakes by saying well, we already knew it from the beginning It wasn't well, but the fact of the matter remains that for most of the 50 years, from the 1960s until about 2010, American archeology was locked into a dogma that they actually had a name that was clovis first.

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 appear for the first time in the archaeological record thirteen thousand four hundred years ago and disappear from the archaeological record twelve thousand six hundred years ago and for a long time. It was firmly held that these were the first Americans that no human beings touched the soil of the Americas until 13,400 years ago only animals but no humans present and any archaeologist who tried to dispute that dogma and I use the word deliberately there should be no room for dogma in science, but any archaeologist who challenged him would face serious problems with his career would be mocked and humiliated at conferences like an archaeologist named jackshank mars from canada who dug in the yukon humiliated at conferences insulted accused of making things up uh his funds of research would be withdrawn basically to challenge Clovis first was the end of his archaeological career so naturally very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis first what was this gentleman? in the yukon, what was this?

His name was Jack Sank Mars, and interestingly enough, the Smithsonian only in 2017 made a big sort of maya culpa, a big admission about this that everyone had been wrong, that Jack Sank Mars had been ruined by the first Clovis lobby, but he . He had been right all along the site he excavated in the Yukon was re-excavated in 2017 and everything he said was correct even though he had just been made fun of and what year it was, he was digging in the 1980s in the 1990. he's still alive, he's still alive, yes, he's bitter, well, I think he's vindicated, you know, and it's a nice thing to be vindicated, there's almost a place in folklore for the individual who is scorned and humiliated, you know , By others. but who turns out to be right and he and he was right, but my point about this is that what it meant was that since it was the dogma that Clovis was first, that the oldest states were 13,400 years ago, it didn't seem there is logic.

For archaeologists, when you go deeper, you know how it happens with archaeology: 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 the late and lower age of onset. for the oldest stone age and the feeling was that there was no need to dig below the clovis layer because we already know that there were no humans there before that and then some archaeologists that I mentioned, jack sunk mars, but another is al gudyer from the university of south carolina uh who excavated a site called topper in south carolina now topper is an incredibly rich clovis site it's full of his tools his tips made these special flint points that were used as arrowheads and spears a large clovis site finished excavating the clovis level and then did something that wasn't supposed to be done, decided to dig deeper and kept going deeper digging and there was a layer of about a meter and a half of barren soil and then below that more artifacts humans and finally dated them to over 50,000 years ago and then in 2017 they were published in Nature by Tom Demare, who is the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, and a group of other very senior paleontologists published in the journal Nature evidence from humans. presence in North America 130,000 years ago, this has really put the cat among the pigeons now, if humans were present in North America 130,000 years ago and archaeologists have been telling us for 50 years that they were only present since 13,000 years, that's 10 times as long as we've had humans in North America able to do things and archaeological dogma has prevented any search for what they were doing until very recently, what was the evidence for 130,000 years ago? years?

Well then, what isn't it? I want to be clear about this because this is something that is often misrepresented in my opinion: it is not evidence of an advanced civilization that we found 130,000 years ago in America, the evidence that we found is evidence of human presence and what they were doing it was very stone age it's a mastodon it's a mastodon skeleton uh that's what was excavated it was actually found by accident during highway construction near san diego um and an archaeologist was assigned to the construction team of the highway and immediately stopped construction and they investigated it thoroughly and what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s that they decided not to publish at that time because what they found was evidence that those mastodon bones had been opened by humans using tools. and that the marrow had been extracted that one tusk had been left standing on the ground and another next to it that a femur of the animal had been completely removed from the site and that there were sets of instruments that were used to crush and break the bones and the conclusion of the team was that only one type of creature could have done that job using tools on a mastodon and that's humans, that's classic human behavior, so this puts the targets in a totally different place. suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years, we already know that a dogmatic approach to archeology has refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago and what it does is generate an engine of demand that "We have To look at those more than one hundred thousand years that are missing, we have to look at it carefully, of course, the immediate reaction has not been to look for things in the other hundred thousand years, most archaeologists have responded by saying that this is impossible.

It may not be so, but that is precisely what Jacques Mars was told, who said that humans were in bluefish caves in the Yukon 25,000 years ago, and it is precisely what Al Gudye was told, who said that humans had been in the top 50. 000 years ago and they were both right and I think Tom Demare and his team don't publish a great paper in nature unless it's already pretty solidly based and there's a lot of peer review, it's produced a reaction that I would be wrong to say. Whether it is universally accepted is highly contested, but it is intriguing what the challenge is, the challenge fundamentally comes from the fact that we, archaeologists, know that there were no human beings in America that far back, to put it in perspective, it was about 60,000 years ago. of the first evidence of Humans in Europe uh, it was about 60,000 years before the first evidence of Humans in Australia and this is just evidence of the first Humans.

Yes, we have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence. It's extremely hard to find, you know? sometimes. We imagine that archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal material. No, they're not, so they're not. I mean, this is all one of the ironies of the first Clovis dogma. You would think they had masses of material to work with. They did it. I have the tools, but in terms of skeletal remains, there is only a single skeleton left now. One of the things that Michael Shermer had sent me was this dispute that perhaps the bones had been opened by excavation material.

Yes, other excavation machines. I saw Michael's. I sent an email last night and I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to engage with this topic and that is his job, he is a professional skeptic and it is his role to do so, but what is lost is that a new article has been published that raises questions about what's called the saruti mastodon site, which is the site that Tom Demare excavated at the San Diego Museum of Natural History and what's interesting, as I can, since Michael took the trouble to write the questions. Can I be sure I can?

I just read to you something that I responded to in this sure, which is the microphone, although yes, basically, this, this document, was in no way a refutation of the original document in nature, in fact, the gentleman whowrote that document. I didn't even look at the archaeological remains now in the San Diego Natural History Museum. What was it based on? It is a reference. I am quoting the abstract of the article, a reference to a highway right-of-way map and construction plans. contemporary road construction practices and workplace 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 Demere and his colleagues who had already addressed that topic. problem, they didn't look at the bones, they didn't look at the bones when a fresh bone is broken, it has a characteristic type of spiral fracture that does not occur when a fossilized bone is broken and Tom Demaray and his team specifically ruled they pointed to the construction machinery of roads as responsible for this breaking pattern because they actually carried out experiments on modern elephants, deceased elephants and broke their bones and The type of fracture that occurs in a fresh green bone is completely different from the type of fracture that occurs in a fossilized bone, so unfortunately this document does not pay attention to it, it only analyzes the road plans and says that there was work on the road. there it must have been done by road works, I think it is very sloppy, very weak and certainly not the answer we can expect in the ongoing debate and it is healthy, but this is not a strong case at all, so this points to the first evidence that we found and there is some effort underway to try to uncover more evidence that, from a similar time, well, I'm going to quote tom tom demerit, the chief paleontologist at the national history museum in san diego, that is what you would like to see.

He makes it clear to me that I interviewed him and spent a day with him at the national history museum. He was very generous with his time. I did an extensive interview with him and I quote him in the United States, before, and his wish is that archaeologists instead of spending all their time trying to find ways to discard and dispose of their finds, his wish is that they spend a little of that time looking at deposits over 13,400 years old and are even willing to go back as far as 130,000 years. That would be an adequate scientific answer.

Here is a complete set of work presented by a group of high-level scientists who hesitated before publishing it. They had the information back in the 1990s, but it wasn't until dating techniques were refined later in the 21st century that they were finally sure of what they had and published it in Nature in 2017. It's an important study and I think what's going to happen is that we're going to find a lot. more evidence of a very ancient human presence in America and that's what Tom Demery thinks too and as he points out he, if we don't look, we'll never find if we let dogma stop us from looking and saying oh.

There's no way humans were in America 130,000 years ago, so we won't bother looking at what a failure of science that is and instead we'll spend all our time trying to get rid of the evidence that it doesn't fit reality. . current paradigm, well it's so fascinating that just as a chance discovery during a construction site could change the way people perceive things, you just have to wonder how much of that is underneath, I mean how deep did they have to go to find these mastodons? The bones are fine, so this is a road cut being made, so they would be pretty deep, 10 or 15 feet deep where the grader goes through and when you flatten them out, it varies from place to place depending on soil deposition and stratification. the stratification of the soil, but what is the key, the key point is that what you have to do is go deeper than thirteen thousand four hundred years ago and you have to do it with dedication and vigor and with some type of financing and at least In the time when archeology doesn't see the point in that, if Tom Demaray's nature article stood alone, if there was nothing more to it than that, I wouldn't trust it so much, but I've been there for a while.

During the research for this book, I spent a lot of time with archaeologists who dug deeper and what all of those archaeologists confirm is that there have been humans in the Americas for tens of thousands of years and it's not surprising that that can go back as far as 130 thousand years ago. because part of the argument about the people of America has to do with a place that we now call the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia that during the ice age was sometimes a land bridge that was exposed because of the sea levels dropped, but the migrants who crossed that land bridge from Siberia on many occasions over periods of tens of thousands of years would then find themselves confronted with the North American ice sheet which, curiously, was not at the tip of Alaska, but began further in, for There was living space in a little piece of Alaska, but you couldn't get through the ice mountains, these literally two-mile-deep mountains of ice that covered all of North America and prevented access to the non-glaciated parts of America. .

The thing is that what happened around the year 13 400 years ago there was a period of global warming and the ice sheets began to melt and a corridor opened between what is called the mountain range and the ice sheet and the ice sheet Laurentide the two most important ice cubes in North America and are believed to have migrated there. through that corridor because the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago there was an episode of global warming, an ice-free corridor opened and in that period there was the same opportunity to enter America as there was in the later period and the point in Tom Demery's mind is that we need to pay a lot more attention to that earlier period and that's really why I went ahead and wrote this book to try to present it to a broad general audience. hopefully in language that makes sense and a compilation of all the latest information that casts doubt on the history we have been told because, my goodness, if archeology is wrong about the history of the peopling of the Americas, if it is radically wrong wrong as it seems now.

To be then, our entire understanding of human history has to change, it is not just the history of the Americas, it is the history of the entire world, it has been an absolute article of faith among archaeologists that civilization began in the old world and In fact, I have a book in my library called History Begins in Sumeria and it's by Samuel Noah Cramer, a very renowned archaeologist and it's actually a good book, but the argument is that this is where civilization began in the culture that We call Sumerians in Mesopotamia among the Tigris. and the Euphrates Rivers and that it began about 6000 years ago and that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world and has nothing to do with the new world because the new world was populated so late. has been the argument and this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change that the americas this enormous land mass rich in resources in every way south of minnesota south of the ice sheet vast areas of land that are abundant enter in central south america America, South America, the Amazon, large areas of land that were offered great potential for human occupation.

Dogma has said that there were no humans there. Now the first evidence is coming out that says there were humans there and if that's the case, then. We must consider the possibility that the history of civilization began in America and not in the old world. It could be a new world invention and not an old world invention. Some of the most fascinating evidence from South America has recently come to light. about these uh canals and roads that they've found in the Amazon that couldn't have been created any other way than by humans absolutely creating irrigation, humans creating like they look like grids, like a city grid, definitely, the Amazon is a colossal mystery and it is one. of the topics that I explore in depth in America first of all to give some basic figures the Amazon basin is enormous the Amazon basin has an area of ​​seven million square kilometers um and within it five and a half million square kilometers uh it remains almost completely unstudied by archaeologists and that is the five and a half million square kilometers that are still covered by dense rainforest and to put that into perspective, five and a half million square kilometers is the size of the entire Indian subcontinent , so it's like saying we've done global archaeology. but we have simply ignored India, you know, we have done world archaeology, but we have simply ignored the Amazon, it is the same, the same migrant, five and a half million square kilometers, the view was again, there was a dogma, there was a preconceived idea about human beings. couldn't have flourished in the Amazon, it's a non-resource rich area, the soils are poor, um, it's a difficult area, hard to get to very far from the Bering Strait, so the opinion was that humans hadn't entered to the Amazon until about a thousand years ago and then little by little that view has started to change and it has started to change because of the tragic logging of the Amazon because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soy farms and cattle ranches and In that process of reduction things have emerged that shouldn't be there at all, for example, evidence that great cities flourished in Emerson, enormous cities that were larger than there was a Spanish explorer who descended the Amazon River system in 1541. to 1542. the first European to cross all of South America from west to east along the Amazon, reported seeing incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving culture, and a hundred years later, when other Europeans entered the Amazon, they couldn't find. these cities then said oh francisco orianna that was his invented name everything was just a fantasy and then in the last decade as the cleanups of the Amazon progressed we have begun to see the traces of those cities What happened was that the Spanish brought smallpox to the Amazon.

Smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity. There was a massive death toll. The cities were deserted in 50 years. The jungle covered them completely and that is why they were not seen by the explorers who arrived 100 years later, but now the jungle is being cleared, those cities are emerging and we can say that, in a city like London, which had a population of approximately 50,000 inhabitants in the 16th century, there were cities of that size. Throughout the Amazon there are large numbers of them and a possible total Amazon population exceeding 20 million people. Yes, 20 million. This is the latest evidence from the Amazon and then you wonder how they did it.

How did they feed 20 million? people in the Amazon because it is a fact that the rainforest soils are poor, it is one of the reasons why these soybean farms are a really stupid idea because once the rainforest is cleared, the land is largely measure infertile and you can't grow things in it for a long time, so how did they feed all these people? The answer was that they invented a soil and that soil has a name called terra prata. Archaeologists refer to it as Amazonian dark lands or Amazonian black earth. It is a man-made soil. It is thousands of years old.

It is full of microbes that are not found in the adjacent soil it is based on biochar and you can take a handful of eight thousand year old terraprater and you can add it to a sterile soil and that soil will instantly become fertile, it is highly sought after in the Amazon and explains how they fed these people there was science in the atmosphere how they created this well this is something that is not understood to this day soul experts still do not understand how that was done but it is one of the many pieces of evidence intriguing pieces of evidence of much highest development in the Amazon for which he has been given credit and from some kind of Indian science jamie has a picture of that up there, so this is it, this is a water turtle, yes, yes, wow, exactly, and that was also done by burning.

Did they use control? They burned they did, one way it was accomplished was, uh, was wet burning, um of middens, they would be burned and smoldering, they wouldn't burn fiercely, which only produces charcoal, they would burn and smolder, and that, that. The result would be called biochar and that is part of the fertility of the soil, but the mystery is the microbial content of this soil, which is completely different from the microbes of neighboring soils and that remains unexplained, what are the theories about the composting some kind of advanced system? composting some type of advanced composting, but again what has not been explained is the microbial content of these soils, so, first of all, there is a question of how, two things, how the large populations in the Amazon feed and the evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could sustain large populations with inventionof the terra prata.

Second, new evidence not previously recognized. The Amazon is basically a garden. The Amazon is a man-made rainforest. There are certain trees like Brazil nuts or ice beans, which are food crops that are very, very valuable and dominate the tree regime in the Amazon. They are what are known as hyperdominant species, in other words, people. Those who lived in the Amazon for thousands of years selected certain trees which they then cultivated and cultivated, so the whole thing is not just a pristine, wild rainforest, but a very ancient man-made environment emerging from that man-made environment. man, as well as evidence of large Cities with large populations and this mysterious dark land are huge geometric structures and again I looked at this in detail in America before because I love this mystery that we have in the UK, structures that are called henges um.

I live in the city of Bath and about 30 miles away. away there is a beautiful site called Avebury and another more famous site called Stonehenge and what a henge is is a ditch that has been dug deep and then an embankment has been raised out of the ditch when people first saw these structures. They asked if they had been built for defense, but then it became obvious that they had not been built for defense because if you want to create a moat, you place it outside your embankment, not inside your embankment, so a henge is a move. of land consisting of a deep moat with a large outer embankment may be circular may be square and in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe often contains stone circles also megalithic stone circles, but the hinge itself is entirely a movement of land what we found in the Amazon there 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 used in the Amazon it is not destructive you can see what what's under trees, what is lidar light imaging and detection radar, they bounce laser beams off the jungles, a whole pattern of them, you need helicopters and them, but they don't damage the rainforest, and you can strip naked and see what there is there, if this is so.

It's not much fun, let me give you the example of Guatemala. Guatemala is a small country, if I remember correctly, it is not much more than one hundred thousand square kilometers and is full of intriguing Mayan ruins. Everyone has heard of Tikal. What archaeologists did. What I didn't know was that, literally, just a short distance from Tikal, surrounding that entire area, there were more than 60,000 structures that had not been identified and all of them had been identified by lidar in a country that is only one hundred thousand kilometers in area, so you need to know Ask yourself in those five and a half million square kilometers of the Amazon, if lidar technology could be applied comprehensively, what would we find under there?

The evidence is already extremely tantalizing and extremely tantalizing and I am intrigued by these huge geometric figures that mainly involve circles and squares and are classic henges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments, they are extremely geometric, for example, you can find a octagon that surrounds a square in a place called jacosa in the amazon, you can find a square that encloses it perfectly. a circle now, that is an exercise called squaring the circle that our scholars have given to the Greeks, they said that the Greeks were the first people to perform that exercise, but now we find in sites dated in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks.

What are the dates? The oldest dates that have been found at these sites are now around 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 those five and a half million square kilometers that have not yet been investigated. I just think we're looking at the edges of a mystery. The archaeologists involved, who are mainly from Finland and also Brazil, feel the same way in their estimates. is that there are thousands of these structures that remain in the jungle and it is not known how old they may be.

You need to do some research, but what's fascinating about them is this very powerful geometry and astronomy, so several of the sites are perfectly aligned with true north, true south, true east, and true west, I'm not talking of magnetic north, I am talking about true astronomical north, to do it there is only one way to do it and that is with astronomy, that tells us that Astronomers were working in the Amazon, the geometry is very complex and very precise, which tells us that people with geometric skills were working in the Amazon and, thirdly, the scale of the sites of hundreds of meters, gigantic earthworks on the scale of hundreds of meters, he tells us. tell us that this was a highly organized project that was carried out on a large scale by a large number of people, it is a wonderful mystery and deserves much more attention, and yes, that is Jacob exactly the square that squares the circle so you can see the outer embankment and then inside is the square ditch and then there is another embankment inside that and a circle and a circle inside.

It's crazy that they made a path through that modern path, yeah, you know, because there's no Unfortunately, there's no respect for the ancient, for the ancient world, and there's another look at that wow wow, that's amazing, that's how they found the things they found in the Amazon, what imaging technology they were using to find all of this initially. It was initially found in its entirety because areas of the rainforest had been cleared. The economic interests said we want to do a cattle ranch here or we want to do a soybean farm here, so we're just going to cut down the rainforest in the process of cutting down the forest. rainforest, they start to discover these earthworks that had previously been completely covered by jungle, then the next step was to say what can we do to find out more about this, obviously they don't want to destroy more jungle and fortunately we have a technology that is lidar, as I mentioned, using radar and using lidar, they have been identified able to identify many more of these sites and then get to the sites without destroying the jungle and start excavations on them and find that going back in the cases that have been Explored so far at least 3000 years ago, this is an intriguing development completely inexplicable in our understanding of the Amazon and what it suggests is a heritage of extremely ancient knowledge that you won't wake up to one morning. and you know, creating a perfectly geometric square or circular earthwork that is perfectly aligned with true north, southeast and west on a huge scale, there has to be a background for that, there has to be a reason for doing it and the evidence is none of these sites.

They were lived in there is no room uh trash was found in them, whatever they are, we don't know what they were used for, I claim that in the United States they were previously connected to a system of ideas that is found throughout the world. which has to do with death and the destiny of the soul in the afterlife, and I enter the topic of ayahuasca in this book because, first of all, ayahuasca is in itself another example of Amazonian science, like you, I and many of your listeners and viewers know that the active ingredient in ayahuasca is DMT, dimethyltryptamine, but you can't normally access dimethyltryptamine through the gut, we have to smoke it or vaporize it to get that rocket to the other side of the world. reality and the journey lasts as long as it lasts. 10 12 minutes not much more than that and sometimes much less what ayahuasca does is it makes the dmt available through the intestine.

The reason it is not available through the intestine is because of an enzyme in the intestine called monoamine oxidase and it deactivates DMT. on contact, the ayahuasca vine, which is one of the two ingredients in the ayahuasca drink, the other ingredient is leaves containing dmt, the ayahuasca vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that deactivates the enzyme in the intestine and allows access to dmt orally, which produces a trip quite different from the trip of smoked or vaped dmt it is a much longer trip it is four or five hours it allows you to integrate and interrelate with the strange landscapes in which you find yourself and the entities you encounter I am not making any statements about the state of reality of those entities, but what I am saying and it is a fact is that people who work with dmt in ayahuasca encounter what they interpret as entities that communicate with them intelligently, so someone in the Amazon comes out.

From 150,000 different species of plants and trees he selected two that are not psychoactive on their own but when combined create an extraordinary visionary brew and ayahuasca means the vine of the dead and what it is connected to in the religious and spiritual thought of South America. Sur uh is what happens to us when we die and the Tucanos, who are an Amazonian people who regularly work with ayahuasca, I mean, the Tucanos actually give a teaspoon full of ayahuasca to a newborn, they feel that ayahuasca is So important that there is a hidden realm around us that we are usually not aware of and we need to be aware of it, and ayahuasca is an important part of that.

On their ayahuasca journeys, Tukano shamans

experience

visions and then return to a normal, alert problem-solving state of consciousness and will paint and depict their visions and what is intriguing and what I discuss in the book is that a good number of paintings Otherworldly toucans from the afterlife realm of the entrance to the otherworld are geometric and look exactly like geoglyphs. So I'm starting to wonder if these geoglyphs were part of a system of spiritual ideas about what happens to us after death and what we must do in this life to ensure a beneficial outcome and, interestingly, that same system of ideas is found in the mississippi valley in the amazon particularly involves ayahuasca and the belief that the ayahuasca journey takes you to the realm of the afterlife and a journey along the milky way in the mississippi valley the mound building sites above and down the mississippi valley particularly moundville in alabama exactly the same system of religious ideas associated with geometric constructions that at the death of the soul are very specific ascends to the constellation of orion transits from the constellation of orion to the milky way takes a trip through the milky way which they call the path of souls and finds challenges and tests where the soul must give an account of the life it has lived then we go to egypt and what we find the same system of ideas the soul must rise to the constellation of orion there is a narrow axis cut into the south side of the great pyramid of giza pointing directly to the lowest of the three stars in orion's belt, widely accepted as a stellar axis or a soul axis, the soul would rise through that axis and would reach the constellation of orion which is located next to the shores of the milky.

In this way he would then transit to the Milky Way that the ancient Egyptians called the sinuous channel and would take a trip along the Milky Way where he would face challenges and tests, an idea very similar to the Tucano, an idea very similar to the Mississippi Valley, as far as We know, none of these cultures were in contact with each other, or we are looking at a huge, incredible, extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas, or we are looking at the legacy that was inherited in all these different places from a remote place. common ancestor and I think that's what we're looking at, what do we think the people of the ancient Mississippi Valley that culture, what do we think they were using if they weren't using ayahuasca or do we think that's what they were using?

Use well, that's an interesting question about whether visionary substances are the only way to enter altered states of consciousness and I would say they definitely are not, of course there are visionary substances that are used in Native Americans. vision vision missions I've had I've had the privilege of the peyote ceremony uh with the Native American church um I've never done that what does it look like? I loved it actually I thought it was I thought it was It was incredible, it doesn't take over you like dmt or ayahuasca do, uh, it's much gentler, it's much more, you feel much more integrated and connected with nature, your emotional processes.

Thoughts are quite clear, I felt it, I just felt it. It's a very beautiful and healing

experience

and I love the ceremony where I'm inside a tipi with 30 or 40 other people and there are specific roles that are assigned to those different individuals, one will hold the door. another will be responsible for the fire, which is a work of art in itself. Simply looking at that fire and lighting the embers is enough to induce an altered state of consciousness with its incredible drumming that takes your state of consciousness to a kind of maximum experience, this is a technology to access other levels of experience and other levels.of reality and it is clear that the Native Americans had a number of advanced technologies in this area, the sun dance does not use a substance, but uses austerity. pain to drive an altered state of consciousness the goal in all cases seems to be for us to step out for a time from the narrow and rigid framework of the alert and problem-solving state of consciousness that we all need to be incredibly useful hunter-gatherers need it As much as people in cities need it, but it is not the only state of consciousness available to human beings and perhaps that is one of the big mistakes that we are making in our culture and that was not made in shamanic societies.

Really interesting analysis that maybe that's one of the big mistakes we're making in our culture when people point out the problems we have in this country. One of the problems we have is our inability to connect with each other, yes, or to recognize it. We all share this space and time together and instead want to defend our own religious or ideological ideas as the only way forward, yes, the only way to get ahead and one of the things that I have found with these. psychedelic experiences, it really makes ideologies seem, if not absurd, at least insignificant compared to human experiences, absolutely the experience of camaraderie and friendship, and I love it, you realize that oh, this is the important thing, this is what is, what is really important. about not imposing your ideas or imposing them on other people and forcing them to behave like you, but rather loving and thinking about the religious ideas that cause 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 to simply accept a package of ideas that our ancestors believed in? Accept them in their entirety without a doubt as an absolute fact that we consider such an authoritative fact that in some cases we are willing. being deeply unpleasant to people who have different views or maybe even killing them, we've had this, you knowrecent event in in in in sri lanka mainly a religiously motivated terrorist event happens happens all over the world people feel so convinced that the inherited package of ideas that they had nothing to do with creating and which they have never questioned are so convinced that those ideas are correct and that in extreme cases they are actually prepared to kill other human beings who have different ideas.

They are so insecure about their own beliefs that they are prepared to go to that level of murder. another human being who else is so threatened by the other beliefs that other human beings have, so it is an abnegation of our responsibility as human beings, we should question things, we should not accept packages of ideas intact and fully formed and use them to push The way we behave towards each other was part of human history, but we have to leave that behind and it is a very dangerous situation in a very complex modern world with billions of human beings on the planet to generate this kind of energy. where certain groups of people say we are absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong, we are superior, you are inferior, this is a very, very dangerous path we are on and it needs to be changed personally, I know this is not the case. a comment that will be welcomed by many people, but I am firmly opposed to nationalism.

I don't see any virtue in nationalism. It is an accident of birth which nation you were born into. It was nothing you did on your own merit that you didn't earn by being born by accident 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 together we are a group that are much more important than other groups of people. I have had the privilege of spending my life traveling the world living with communities all over the world and one thing that really stands out to me is that it should be a cliché and yet it isn't. is that we are all one family that humans are intimately interconnected throughout the world that you can go to the most remote area of ​​the Amazon rainforest and find the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams that we have in the industrialized cities shared by the hunter - gatherers in the middle of the Amazon so our similarities as human beings and what we share in common on an emotional level and on a level of love and on a heart level are much more important than our differences that are defined by the nation. or the political group that we grew up in and when I say that I am against nationalism, I must also make it clear that that does not mean and I hope that others who are listening do not take me out of context.

To this that does not mean that I am in favor of the world government, I hate governments, that is another thing that we must overcome, we no longer need governments, if we have them, they should have a minimal role in our society, I think it is It is possible for the human race to relate as a family without leaders and governments that are exploiting the worst aspects of our character, the lowest common denominator of our society, deliberately fostering fear, hatred and suspicion. What responsible leaders should be doing is fostering love and unity and their failure to do so completely disqualifies them from the leadership role in my opinion and that is why I have often said that I would not like to see a situation where that no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he has first had 12 ayahuasca sessions that would be the condition don't even bother applying for the job if you haven't done this and we have to be there while you have it and we have to be we want to see that you are drinking every drop and we want an experienced shaman present to really guide you along the journey and I suspect that would be a transformative experience for many members of our political class and they would begin to question why they do what they do. why they exploit fears to magnify their own position, they would start to question it and wonder about a different destiny for humanity, but that's a dream, I guess it's not going to happen.

It is very, very, very well said and I cannot agree. Rather, my hope is that what you were saying and what we were discussing before about how the Internet has somewhat eroded our faith in many institutions as the sole or primary source of knowledge, I hope that that takes place globally in terms of the the way we view government, yeah, and we do your idea that I love what America represents and what America represents is kind of a nation that people flock to. You know, this is one of the most insidious problems with this idea of ​​building walls. and keeping people out by making it incredibly difficult to get here the reason I'm here is because it was pretty easy to get here yeah that's why I'm here that's the essence of America a free and open society come here and do it better, yeah.

That's the idea behind it and I hope this idea of ​​being able to do it, if you want to do it better, you can do it anywhere in the world. Yes, this could eventually be extended. That's my hope. I think it can be extended and um. You know, I see a lot of signs of hope in America. The United States has become a big part of my life, not only because I wrote this book but because I have children who now live in the United States. I have a son and a daughter-in-law. law who lives in Los Angeles I have another son and daughter-in-law who live in Boston America I am British but America has become a very central part of my life and it is a fascinating and amazing country and it has been my privilege to travel thousands of miles across of the United States through many, many different states and I love this country, it is an incredible place, only in the United States could we see what happened with cannabis.

You know, the fact that at the local level people have together we mobilized petitions, we organized votes and we changed the law, we changed the law, they definitely, literally, pointed the finger at the central government and said this is none of your business. What I do with my conscience in the inner sanctum of my own life is not a matter of the State. It is a very American sentiment, it is something that is not often found in other countries where the State is given much more power and much more authority than is usually the case. Which maybe it should be.

Americans naturally question the authority of government and that's what you have. led to legalization, increased legalization of cannabis, which is going to change the world in many ways, but, ironically, at the same time, the thing about democracies is that to get things done in a democracy you have to persuade the people from their point of view, so information becomes very important in democracies and information can be abused, people can be deceived with information, they can be told that what they are receiving is the truth, when It's not really the truth and you can end up with a kind of dictatorship where the people have given their rise based on false information and, frankly, I would rather have a real dictatorship that is open and clear rather than one that has been subtly manipulated to position itself by manipulating the opinions of voters, but I am and continue to be enormously encouraged by America, it may seem like a trivial matter, but the fact that state by state is legalizing cannabis and that is the result of a grassroots movement that has been this enormous change.

It's ironic, it's strange that at the federal level, even though eight states are now totally legal for recreational use, uh 23, 24 states are legal for medical use, at the federal level it's still a schedule one control drug, this is a huge state of dissonance that exists and the United States is going to have to fix it. What it tells me is that people can change things, people can come together at the local level and they can make a better world because there is no doubt that the laws about cannabis were cruel and wrong and cruel and evil and they ruined people's lives for decades and it's the people who have changed, it's not the government that has changed, it's the people at the grassroots level.

The United States is a country where that can happen, and I remain encouraged by the role of the American people. although I often despair about the role of the American state, yes I am also encouraged and you know it's interesting, ben and jerry posted something yesterday that is really on 4 20, I should say it was talking about the drug laws in this country and and talking about how many is really opening this up to the idea of ​​how unjust these laws were and how many of these laws were directed at people of color and how many white people have benefited from this and how many people are still in jail for the crimes they committed, ya you know, air date, crimes, yes, that are no longer crimes that are no longer crimes, yes, and this is ridiculous, these records should be expunged, they should be fully accountable.

I see that California has taken some steps in that direction. some records have been expunged, well we can only hope that what opens up next is psilocybin, it will now be on the ballot and when that opens up, I mean do you really think marijuana is a gateway drug, guess what it is. if psilocybin comes in, yes, because psilocybin can legitimately change the world, certainly, it really does. I mean, I think marijuana can change the world and I really think cannabis is changing people's perceptions and making them calmer and friendlier, and yeah, and even what they talk about. about paranoia, I appreciate it and the reason I appreciate it is because I think people are too cocky, yeah the life we ​​live is as strange as you can imagine in a book and we're just used to it because it's our day . day you take everything for granted, yes, marijuana takes those blinders off and really makes you understand that this is a strange and strange life and that a lot of these obstacles and problems that we have in our society are due to fear and ignorance and are It's because of this lack of connection to each other and cannabis and a lot of these other psychedelic drugs encourage this connection to each other, which I think is certainly what we need and it's an aberration in human culture that we've created a society. that demonized these substances and made them illegal.

It's something relatively recent. Actually, it's just the last hundred years. It's a small part of human history and yet we were so ar

rogan

t. As a society, we could put aside thousands of years of tradition, experience and human wisdom working with medicinal plants, we just put it aside, turn them into criminal substances and say we know everything, what a big and stupid mistake that is. cannabis as a gateway drug, in quotes, it is absolutely in this sense that the legalization of cannabis is going to open the doors, as you say, to the legalization of psychedelics, because what is happening is that the population is completely waking up to the fact That I have been lied to and lied to about cannabis for the better part of a century and once people realize, on a direct personal level, here is this herb that I love.

The central government has lied to mesystematically wrong about this weed that carries. to questioning everything that the central government does and, in that sense, it is a gateway to a questioning society, psychedelics are different in that psilocybin actually causes you to question things, it causes you to really ask questions about everything related to your life. 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 the beautiful, wonderful planet that we have and what we are doing to it, that also enters and enters consciousness. so it erodes trust and authority and it also erodes trust and authority that don't have experiences that you've experienced exactly.

That's part of the problem is that these people who are holding people back from these psychedelic experiences have never had them. they've never had they don't even know what they're gathering they come from a place of fear and prejudice uh they're just accepting things that they've been told without really thinking about it and and and looking at it again it's a failure of what human beings should do we have to get rid of This fear and, ironically, it's bad for them too, it's bad for the people who actually encourage these laws to be enforced. tax yes, it is bad for the entire society because it is healthy for a society where adults become self-actualizing individuals where they make their own responsible decisions about their own lives where they don't say oh The government should make this decision for me, that's the next one step for humanity that we begin, we must begin to become our own leaders and make our own decisions, and that is what is being revealed now that we are getting to the skull beneath the smile of the The war on drugs we are realizing which is part of a great program of lies that has consisted of keeping people's minds closed, not wanting to think freely.

I have made this point several times, but our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such. society will allow big pharma to make billions of dollars off consciousness altering drugs like the antidepressants cerosat and prozac, which in my opinion, having had some experience with them, are among the most horrible drugs on the planet, they are very harmful, very dangerous.drugs but they are completely legal and are encouraged by our system in the same way alcohol very dangerous drug causes fights causes accidents drunk driving leads to cirrhosis of the liver completely legal and open our society is not against altered states of consciousness as such, it is against particular types of altered states of consciousness that lead to questioning the existing control system that is what is happening here here well said and as you know I have my own history with cannabis yes and well , you and I had a moment where I had a moment that was a life-changing moment because if I may rehearse a little of this for the audience, in 2011 I had a series of ayahuasca sessions in which I was shown that I was using cannabis completely wrong that it had become a dominant force in my life that it was making me you are talking about paranoia and I agree with you paranoia is a useful thing if only to overcome it that it was making me paranoid that it was making me suspect that I approached everyone around me in a state of suspicion and ayahuasca showed me that and gave me a very strong message: you must quit cannabis.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the problem wasn't cannabis, the problem was me, I needed to fix those aspects of myself before I could have a proper relationship with cannabis, so after that I asked for a session after 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 across from each other like we are now and you gave me a question, do you still not use cannabis? And I say, well, I'm thinking about getting my toes wet.

Back in the water, at which point he produces a joint and we smoke it together first, after three years, his tolerance to cannabis is very low, so I got very high. I listened to that interview and somehow I stood my ground, oh you. You held it brilliantly, you opened up and it was like a wave of information came pouring out of you. Yes, it was wonderful, it was a liberation for me and what he told me is that it is time to get back to cannabis, but maybe in a different way. Either way, isn't it? I need a different relationship with this amazing medicine 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 definitely say that that has been the case, it's great and all thanks to you Joe, I'd probably still be out of cannabis if it wasn't for that joint.

Well, I think people can develop these patterns of behavior that are destructive with anything, whether it's alcohol or cannabis. or you know, yeah, sex or whatever people have, they become routine and you know it doesn't mean cannabis is bad, it means you're on a bad mental path. Yes, you know exactly and I mean, I'm not encouraging it. all because some people genuinely biologically disagree with them yes, yes, yes, the bottom line is that we, as adult human beings, must take responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions, yes, and we do not need to hand that responsibility over to institutions governments, especially when it comes to something as intimate and personal as our conscience and my opinion is that the ancient world had the right attitude towards this kind of thing and the modern world did not, and that we can sit down and learn a lot from the ancient world, a lot people.

Ask me, you know, Hancock, you've been arguing that there is a loss, there has been a lost civilization in human history, but what kind of civilization do you think it was? Well, one of the things I believe is that it was a civilization that used Psychedelics. I think it was a civilization that emerged from shamanism but that did not remain in the hunter-gatherer stage but rather took the essence of shamanism and integrated it into a type of civilization very different from ours, which pursued things in different ways for a long time. Archaeologists have told me, but we didn't find any plastic bottles from the ice age, that means there was no advanced civilization during the ice age.

Well, wait, maybe an advanced civilization could have decided to never get involved with 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 consider completely unimportant, you know, yeah, these are the thoughts about Egypt, right, it's about of Egypt and and about other things, I refer to the specific example that I give is that above the king's chamber in the great pyramid there are five more chambers and these chambers have a ceiling and floor with granite beams that weigh about 70 tons each and There are hundreds of them and these 70 ton granite beams which, to put into context, a 70 ton beam is equivalent in weight to 35 large SUVs.

These 70 ton granite beams have been raised to a height of over 350 feet above the ground and carefully and precisely placed in their present position. It is very difficult for archaeologists to explain how that was done using purely leverage and mechanical advantage. You can say, "Oh, maybe they built a ramp and held the stones on the ramp, so you have to face the basic laws of physics, you can't carry a stone." weighs tens of tons on a slope that exceeds 10 degrees, then you start calculating how long I need a ramp with a 10 degree slope to get to 350 feet above the ground and the answer is that you need a long ramp that should still be there because no, it couldn't have been a sand ramp, it 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 idea that is imposed on us. by archeology perhaps the idea that they consider absurd, that is, that psychic powers were cultivated by ancient civilizations, who could use powers of the human mind that we have allowed to expire, perhaps that idea deserves greater consideration, we have followed a path of leverage and mechanics. plus, we're used to relying on machines, but we hear anecdotal reports of people who have telekinetic powers that 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. um.

This is because science considers consciousness to be local to the brain and does not see how it can be exercised outside of it, but perhaps we should open ourselves to those possibilities that we are dealing with a very different type of culture that used techniques that we have allowed May it expire and maybe we can awaken those techniques again, maybe the ability of humans to do almost superhuman things lies within all of us, but sleeping well is pure speculation that they use some kind of telekinetic power, but it's pure speculation. but it is absolute that they did something that we don't understand if you think about the distance between us and the construction, just the modern accepted construction dates of the great pyramid, it was over five thousand years ago or close to five thousand years ago.

It's supposed to be about four and a half thousand years old, yes, that's very old, it's incredible to think that someone back then could do something that would stump us today with modern machinery, yes, and that one way or another they realized it. that this is almost like what they had. What was done was to leave behind something that was so stupendous, so monstrously impressive, that it would transcend time, yes, 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 It's not simple and I.

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 huge stones and it's because it's one of those things that you just say, oh no. I don't know what this jamie is, it's the chambers above the king's chambers and each of those floors consists of a row of 70 ton granite blocks that have been raised 350 feet above the ground and not only that, but It was brought from Aswan in southern Egypt, 500 kilometers south of the great pyramid, so if there is ever a time in history where you can go in a time machine and come back and watch, would that be the time? ?

I'm completely fascinated by the ice age right now. If you had a chance to go back and see what it was like somewhere, you wouldn't go to the construction of the great pyramids. I think right now I would go to 1200. Years ago, at the beginning of the youngest dry ass, ah just to see because I think that's where all of human history changes. I think that's where we change tracks from one path to another and follow those cataclysmic events of the youngest dryers between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago after that, the signs of civilization that we see emerging are not the beginnings of civilization, They are a reboot of the civilization that had existed before the cataclysm and for that reason, I would like to be present during that cataclysm. event, if only to convince me that it was indeed a comet, the only thing that is no longer disputed is that the younger dryas was a cataclysm, they can't, they can't argue about that, the megafauna, that, that, die.

Outside of the disruption of human activity that took place at the time the enormous climate changes this was a cataclysm by any standards where the argument still continues is what caused the cataclysm I strongly vote for the comet multiple fragments of a comet hitting the north American ice sheet and also hits Greenland, but there are other researchers in the field, like my colleague Robert Shock, who think the sun is more involved, this is healthy, this is very, very healthy, we should approach this problem from many different perspectives. and trying to discover what caused this extraordinary event that occurs at a crucial time in human history the end of the stone age the beginning of the mesolithic the end of the ice age the beginning of the current era of the earth and suddenly I see These signs of civilization appear and in places like Gobekli Tepe those signs already include highly sophisticated knowledge and that is why I feel that we really need to investigate the Amazon.

There are three places in the world that are really missing from research right now. One of them is the Amazon, five and a half million square kilometers, very little archeology has been done, another is the Sahara Desert. The Sahara Desert is a difficult place to work. I can understand why little archeology is done there, but the Sahara Desert was green. during the ice age had a completely different climate regime, we should consider the possibility that missing parts of human history are there and then under the continental shelves because sea level rose 400 feet.These are three domains that archeology largely has not and largely has not investigated, they say.

Well, why would we spend money on marine archaeology? It's much better to spend it looking for shipwrecks rather than looking for signs of a lost civilization, because we archaeologists know that there was no lost civilization, so that's the argument for resources there and the same thing. The same with the Amazon and the same with places in the Sahara desert, in the same places in the world that those among us who have the responsibility of interpreting the past have not looked at, are the same prices that we should look at. I once had a thought while I was under the influence and it was a thought that someday computational powers will reach a point where they will be able to take into consideration all the objects on earth and what we know about history and vividly. recreate the past through computing to the point where you could actually tell who did what when people did things and I mean, I don't even know if this would be physical today, it certainly wouldn't be possible, but with the increase exponential in computing power and technology. and innovation that one day will come to a point where you will be able to look, you will be able to see what happened and you will be able to recreate exactly what happened and that this would be something that would be impossible for us.

Imagine that someone would be able to do that right now, yes, but that one day with technology, as it advances more and more, we will reach some kind of innovation or some kind of invention that will allow us to go back and see. literally see what happened how things were made technology is changing our entire understanding of the past and what you are imagining is perfectly possible we will come to a time if 100 years 500 maybe less if we don't know First we completely destroy ourselves as a civilization we will come to a moment in which our intelligence and our techniques will allow for a much broader opening up of the past than has currently happened, but it is already happening in one of the areas of science that I delve into in the United States.

Before it is genetics and DNA. This is an area of ​​science that did not provide much information to archeology until about the 1990s, but since the 2000s it has become very important in archeology because technology has been developed by which the Ancient DNA and in fact a whole individual can be Genotyped from DNA that can be 15 20 000 20 000 years old and this new genome and DNA sequencing technology is another factor that is raising big questions about the past of the Americas and one of the topics that I will address in this book is the presence in the Amazon rainforest of a very specific and clearly identifiable DNA pattern that is only found in another place in the world and that is in Australasia in Papua New Guinea and among the Australian aborigines It is DNA from Australasia, now South America, not only in South America, but also deep in the Amazon rainforest, among tribes that have only been contacted in the last 20 or 30 years and, furthermore, although skeletal remains are rare, Have been found.

In ancient skeletal remains that are about 11,000 years old in the Amazon, that tells us that this DNA signal has been in the Amazon for at least 11,000 years. Geneticists think it arrived in the Amazon during the last ice age and this. poses a huge mystery because the peopling of the americas is supposed to have occurred from siberia through the bering strait down through that ice-free corridor to north america to north america to south america to central america and finally to south america if that was the whole story then we would find this DNA signal in North America and in Central America we wouldn't find it just in the Amazon and I spoke to some of the leading geneticists about this, but specifically Professor Sk Willis Lev from the University of Copenhagen, who has been the lead author of a number of important studies on ancient DNA and I asked him what do you think of this Australasian DNA in the Amazon and he told me honestly that we don't have an adequate explanation for it at this time. moment, but what he said is that the most parsimonious explanation that 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 and ended up in South America and settled in the Amazon and brought their DNA with them that would perfectly explain the DNA data and when a scientist says the most parsimonious explanation what that scientist is saying is that he likes that explanation, but it is a simple, direct and clear explanation of the mystery of DNA , but then added, however, it is not practical. sense and I asked him why it doesn't make practical sense and he said because archaeologists tell me that no human population was able to cross the Pacific Ocean during the ice age, at which point it was natural for me to say: do you really trust it? the archaeologists and he said, well, in science we trust the work of other scientists, we don't really question it, we don't really investigate it, that's their side of the business, um and my opinion is that that's instead of instead of excepting Instead of taking this strange, anomalous DNA signal from Australasia in the heart of the Amazon as something to be explained and something to be denied, it could be connected to a voyage across the Pacific Ocean, perhaps the first compelling evidence that voyages were made across the pacific ocean during the ice age and maybe we should open that whole topic up to exploration and again I think a lost civilization is the best answer and that near the end of the ice age when the cataclysm unfolds younger dryas it's not something overnight it's very bad twelve thousand eight hundred years ago there were about twelve hundred years of horror I don't think civilization collapsed all at once day into night I think there were survivors I think they were left pieces of them I think their project was to restart civilization and I strongly suggest that where they tried to set up that project was among the hunter-gatherers who coexisted in the world with them in 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 is not a strange idea that an advanced civilization and together must coexist and there is a separation between us and Amazonian hunting. As there are tribes in the Amazon that are isolated and we do not even know that we exist, if a catastrophe occurred today at the level of the youngest dryas, I do not think that our civilization would succeed, we are the darlings of the earth, we are used to having everything on top, you know, the supermarket shelves are full of food, we can have food delivered to our homes, we have roofs over our heads, we have shelters, we have clothes, it's all taken for granted.

I guess you're an exception, but very few people in modern Western culture know how to survive. They have no survival skills. They don't know how to hunt. They don't know how to collect. They don't know how to farm. Because they have handed that responsibility over to others, we live in a society that is highly segmented and specialized and different people specialize in different things, but no one has the vast overall survival skill that a hunter-gatherer has in a global cataclysm in reality. at first. -intuitively, the people who would survive would be the hunter-gatherers and an advanced civilization would be smart if they were survivors and sought refuge among the hunter-gatherers to make that the place where they could try to start restarting their civilization and that's why I think This DNA signal from Australasia in the Amazon may be part of the evidence of some kind of outreach effort that a lost civilization was undertaking as it saw the disaster looming over it and realized something needed to be done right.

It's fascinating to me that the geneticists would trust the archaeologist, since the geneticists have the actual DNA and can examine where the archaeologists are putting things together, yes, little bits of information about the entire landscape and then you consider how much information they don't have access to. . on the ground exactly as much as I firmly resist the idea of ​​archeology being a science. I don't think it should be described as a science. How do you think it should be described? It's more like a kind of philosophy. It's more of a kind of philosophy. I try to interpret the past based on fairly flimsy and limited evidence and what you find in that interpretation is that the preconceptions of the individuals involved are imposed on the evidence that later turns out to support their preconceptions and that is not a scientific way to do it. things, a scientific way of doing things is to test hypotheses and false ones, try to falsify them and see if they work, then the problem is drawing these conclusions and then being too rigid with these conclusions, more evidence, that's my opinion, yes. that archeology has been too rigid and that there is a climate of fear in archaeology.

I don't particularly want to bother the archaeologists here. I think this is true generally in other disciplines and these days academics are driven by the need to publish research papers, that is what they build their careers on, if they can publish a paper on their research part in the nature or in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences, etc., that's good for their careers, but then you face the gatekeepers of those Publications that consider any archaeological idea that is not part of the mainstream accept the consensus with great suspicion and they are very reluctant to publish that information now.

What is the mainstream? When archaeologists talk about seafaring humans. They date that too well, there are the great Asians, yes, the great maritime adventure that archeology accepts is called the Polynesian expansion and it is a remarkable story that occurs approximately three thousand or three thousand five hundred years ago and those Polynesians were incredible oceanic navigators. Could they cross distances of thousands of kilometers with millimeter precision? I mean, it's no accident that the Polynesians found Easter Island. Finding Easter Island is a really challenging project. Easter Island is two thousand miles off the coast of South America. It is two thousand miles from the The nearest other island, which is Tahiti, is just a small speck in the middle of the ocean, but the Polynesians found it and settled there and seemed to have brought a reproductively viable population there and seem to have made voyages back and forth, but that was from three thousand to three thousand five hundred years ago, which was not twelve thousand eight hundred years ago, and this is where archeology's inflexible position that ocean voyages were pioneered by the Polynesians and that they were not There were important oceanic voyages before, I think it needs to be strongly questioned and it needs to be strongly questioned in light of this DNA evidence from the Amazon, rather than rejecting the evidence, you should try to consider what that might mean.

It's interesting because we know that the Egyptians had ships, yes, and what do I mean? There were ships 4,500 years ago, why do we think they were not tested in the ocean? That doesn't make any sense, especially if they existed a thousand years earlier, which is also possible. Archaeologists would not argue that the Egyptians had them. ships, but that's still within the framework of accepted history, it's the notion of a global sailing culture in the ice age that archaeologists can't swallow, it's a topic I've come across continually for a number of years. , I think the best evidence for this is ancient maps that show the world as it looked during the last ice age.

I first explored this in Fingerprints of the Gods and touched on the mystery again and have an appendix. We will discuss the topic in this book because I think they are very important. We are talking about maps that were drawn approximately between the years 1300 and 1700, in other words, in relatively recent history; However, these maps were largely based on much older source maps than Copied and we can say this for sure because one of the famous maps is the Piri Reese map, which was created by a Turkish admiral named Pirie Reese in the year 1513. Actually only one corner of his map has survived, it was originally a world map that I now only have a bit of showing the east coast of South and North America and the west coast of Africa.

Pirrie Reese writes in that map that, in his own handwriting, it was based on more than 100 older source maps, some of which had come from the Library of Alexandria - in other words, the maps had been when the Library of Alexandria had been destroyed in the 4th century, the idea being that some of its contents had been rescued and taken to Constantinople, which became the Turkish capital, and Pirie Reese had access to those maps and incorporated information from those maps into his maps, as well as incorporated more recent navigation information and this is one of a whole category of maps that are extremely difficult to explain, all of them based on older source maps that have now been lost tocomplete.

They incorporate extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes. Latitude is not that difficult a technological feat, but longitude is a difficult technological feat. Longitude involves a stopwatch, it involves knowing the time at the place where you started your journey and also the local noon and calculating the time. To differentiate between them, you need a chronometer that keeps accurate time at sea with the movements of a ship and it is an obvious fact that our civilization did not invent such a chronometer until the end of the 18th century, before we did not know what length they were and Ships were constantly sailing unexpectedly toward shores they thought were hundreds of miles farther away, so the discovery of the technique for determining longitude was a major civilizational advance.

Its presence on maps based on much older source maps that actually show the world as it was. Looks during the last ice age suggest that someone during the last ice age was mapping the world and had mastered the technique of calculating longitude. A classic example of these maps and I emphasize that this is what is called the Pinkerton world map, which was drawn in the year 1818 and was based on the most recent navigation information at that time. I reproduced that map in the book. What is missing on the map. Antarctica is completely missing. There's just a hole at the bottom of the world.

There is nothing there and the reason. there's nothing there there's another one there's another Pinkerton map that shows that the reason you'll need to find one that's centered on Antarctica the reason Antarctica isn't there is because our civilization hadn't discovered Antarctica in 1818 like that that they couldn't authentically put it on a map in 1818. In fact, we discovered it in 1819 and that's when it started showing up on modern maps. The problem is that the representation of Antarctica appears repeatedly on these much older maps and appears in the correct place. a little bigger than it is today, but very similar to what it looked like during the last ice age, so what all this suggests to me is that the world was mapped and explored by a global maritime culture with a level of technology which was at least equivalent to ours in the late 18th century, uh, during the ice age, wasn't there also a map of Greenland that showed it under the ice, yes, there is and, uh, another intriguing thing, I mean , I mentioned the Piri Reese map which is now shown in the piri reese map which is located off the east coast of north america it is a large island with a row of megaliths like a megalith road running down the middle um that island is in the exact location of the grand bahama banks uh and and uh it's it's in this yeah, it is, but I can point it out to you because you're not sure it's, it's there, it's there, okay, this thing, okay, right here, it's great that you can mention this, Jamie, that's awesome, so this.

The island is located there off the southeast coast of North America, look at the way they used to draw things back then too and what you see running down the middle is this road-like feature of yeah, I see right there, yeah, now the The thing is, it was a long period of my life where I did a lot of diving and I was looking at underwater structures and one of the places I was diving was the bimini road which is on the Grand Bahama Banks and the road bimidi is exactly where that island is and here is the problem, i don't care if the bimini path is natural or man made to me the mystery is that it is shown over the water on that map and the last time it was over the water was thousands and thousands of years ago, so to me all of this is evidence that we should not rule out the possibility that our ancestors had reached a level of technology that allowed them to explore and map the world's oceans, we should not rule out which is there, so we don't know what those stones are or how they were created, but wow, do you see them in Japan?

We're looking at it now, but let's go back to that image, Jimmy. I made the last image we were looking at, look, I mean, it looks so man-made and you can see it's more like the pattern shown on the island on the map, how deep is that today? It's not very deep, it's about 20 feet, but we think it was over water. It was definitely over water during the last ice age. When it finally submerged, it may have been as late as eight or nine thousand years. Is there anything more convincing? that's in the immediate area which seems to indicate that there was some kind of man made structure, well no one has looked for it, uh, and the whole effort of archeology has been to rule out the meaning of the bimini tunic, why would they rule out that?, they say.

It's just amazing, they say it's totally natural, come on, let's go back to that picture again, listen, but this is the uh, let's go back to that picture we just saw, yeah, are you sure you're someone who spent a lot of time? Diving time on the bimini road. I can tell you that I don't think it's natural at all. I think it's a man-made structure, but the argument is that it's some kind of beach rock that forms in these blocky formations. Yes, beach rock is formed in the form of blocks. but here I believe that the rock from the beach has been used as construction material, but I repeat, the key question is not whether the bimini path is artificial or not, the key question is that it appears on a map above the water and that is a dating. project that tells us that someone was mapping that part of the world when it was over the water takes us very, very far into the past, the one that you just put out, you know, look at that, it's an impressive place, it's incredible Amazing view, it's like the odds are in that order with those uniform sized rocks first.

How tall are you? Oh, hundreds of feet. It's huge. It actually has the shape of the letter j. It is a giant underwater structure. It's really a huge thing. and it's very very beautiful to dive and there are a lot of very cute and sweet nurse sharks down there that you can play with so it looks a lot more random it's more random some bits look more random and some bits look highly. built, I wouldn't, um, I wouldn't try to claim that the bimini road is absolutely man-made. My statement about the bimini path it's really strange that it appears on a map over water, yes a map that was drawn in 1513 based on older source maps now when they found that ancient Greek computer thing, um what is that called Antikythera mechanism?

Yes, yes, again, that attests to a lost navigation skill that yes, that we have not taken into account, incredibly complex and took them a long time. Find out what that is, yeah, what do you think it is now? um it tracks the movements of the planets it's a navigation device it's a toothed system that allows you to track the passage of time and find out where you are Is it some kind of navigation device? It is not completely understood and how old is it? I think it goes back to Greek times. I guess here because the Greek era isn't of great interest to me, but I'm thinking about 500 BC.

So at least 2000 years, 2000 more and we know there had to be more than one of these things. Yes, you can't, you can't have something like that without, without a lot of effort behind it, human beings were working to create this. machinery with gears and gears uh that mirrored the pattern oh that's a recreation that's a recreation yeah can you buy one of those? Looks like you bought that guy, nice marker, we need one right there, right next to the plastic cells, so there. a thing is a cultural artifact that doesn't appear out of nowhere it has to have a context it has to have a background and again my suggestion would be maybe a secret technology it is very strange that very few of these have been found and it is possible that the owners of Ships and sailors in Greek times were extremely careful about who they shared this technology with, of course it may have been as top secret as you know nuclear power is in our world today and it makes sense, but the fact is that then we have to exist, it's real, it's there, yes, and then we have to consider what's behind it, what led to it, it's just the latest manifestation of something that goes back much deeper to being human. culture and I think I think my main message is that we have a hitherto untold backstory that we are focusing entirely on the main story and the backstory is largely missing from the picture and what I What I have tried do is fill in bits of backstory.

Do you have anything in this book about the Olmecs? No, actually, no, really, um, I mentioned, I mentioned them briefly, uh, I explored the Olmec mystery, uh, in considerable depth, can you explain that to people, maybe in the fingerprints of the gods, uh, yes, then it is considered the oldest high culture in Central America. Everyone has heard of the Aztecs. Everyone has heard of the Mayans, but before the Aztecs and before the Mayans there was a culture referred to again as the Olmecs. I don't know what they called themselves, that's what the Aztecs called them, they called them Olmecs and it means rubber people because in that rubber producing area of ​​Mexico they worked on giant megalithic constructions for which they are most famous are these.

Huge carved human heads that can weigh between 20 and 25 tons and have curious features that have been variously interpreted as Polynesian Africans, do not look like classic Native American features, but one of the things I have noticed is that there is no classic Native American characteristic, that Native Americans have a very complex genetic history with many different elements and we shouldn't necessarily be surprised by supposedly non-natives. Look American, what do we think those helmets they were wearing were? No one knows because no physical example of such a helmet has ever been found, nor has any physical example of an Egyptian pharaoh's helmet.

A crown has never been found. All we see is the stone. stone reproductions of them wear these helmets universally almost everyone wears these helmets in Olmec stone work there is another fascinating figure from Laventa one of the Olmec sites which is the oldest image of a plumed or plumed serpent, the plumed serpent is a famous icon in Central America, Quetzalcóatl, the god of peace, the bearer of civilization, associated, for example, with the famous um pyramid of Kukulcán, which is just another name for Quetzalcóatl in Chichén Itzá, where at the spring equinox creates a shadow effect. the image of a snake coiling up the ladder and joining with the carved head of the snake, there is the lavender image which is the oldest image of a tufted snake in the Americas and sitting in the middle and I made a big fuss. of this because I think it is a big problem for the magicians of the gods, sitting in the middle is this human figure holding this strange bag in his hand and it is just a fact that those identical bags are found in ancient Sumer in the hands . of individuals who were considered carriers of civilization and also appear on pillar 43 in gobekli tepi.

I call them man bags and in that case we at gabelli tepe know that they are at least 11,600 years old, so I wonder if we are looking at some kind of insignia of office of a group of civilizers who traveled around the world trying to revive a lost civilization and passed on, I implement 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 is not one of my favorite people because he is a materialistic reductionist and he doesn't believe in spirit or no mystery of life, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology, he also has no psychedelic experience and he said no, I challenged him at a public event to go have a dozen ayahuasca sessions and still take acid once once, oh, just once would be enough, but he has a great exit because unfortunately, he has had, he has had. a stroke, so he has a good excuse for not doing it, but he is a smart man and one of his concepts that he has introduced into human culture is the concept of the meme, I think we are all familiar with that word, genes are reproductive physical. mechanisms are reproduced throughout generations are replicated are multiplied are transmitted from one individual to another memes are cultural objects cultural ideas that are transmitted, replicated and reproduced and what I see throughout the United States and throughout the old world There are also a set of memes that involve the sky, that involve the ground, that involve geometry, that involve notions of life after death and I think the only way to explain them is that they have been inherited from a previous culture that was of somehow connected. with the ancestors of all these cultures, I think that's what we're seeing in the Amazon, we're seeing a meme that was deliberately created once you mobilize a population to start creating huge geometric structures, you're also facilitating many others possibilities that an organized population allows, I think that's what happened in Quebec Litepe, I think that's why they created the megalithic site there to mobilize the local hunter-gatherer population and give them aproject to do to involve them and in the participation process. teach them the skills of agriculture that are fundamental to any concept of civilization and it's strange the way agriculture suddenly appears in Quebec Tepe and there are also huge agricultural mysteries in the Amazon.

Can I share a pair? of those mysteries with you before doing that, can you get that image of gobekli tepe from the pillar? Was it a 433 in the compound? I'd like to see that guy holding that bag. This is very funny. The bags are in a row. along the top of the pillar um it's pillar 43 inside in the enclosure d I would go back to tapi is there a picture of that online that's available? Oh, okay, here we go, yes, there's the bag, so there are the bags in a row in a The row at the top is the same type of square-shaped bag with a curved handle that you find in the picture more old feathered serpent pillow that you can't find.

You have to go above Jamie, a little higher on the pillar. Those bags, yeah, right at the top, um, it's strange that this symbol crops up in a lot of different cultures and tends to be associated with what the widespread interpretation of those is. There is no generalized interpretation of these banks. That's my interpretation of those bags. which I freely confess this is how I read them I am intrigued by the anomaly that the similar bag and appears in the hands of the figure of quetzalcoatl and appears in mesopotamia repeatedly um in the hands of the individual called the apkalu the magicians of the gods the beginner bearers of the civilization and the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl was an Aztec card, true and the equestrian mission is an Aztec is an Aztec god but the Aztecs acquired it from previous cultures the very fact that an image of the feathered serpent is given such priority in all of mech culture, which tells us that this system of ideas was present throughout all of mech times, which takes us back to at least 1500 BC.

C., probably much earlier, while the Aztecs are 1500 AD. C., so there are 3000 years. between the Aztecs and the Olmecs and that same system of ideas is present in all those cultures and the Mayans also had a name for it kukulkan and what do you think that plume snake was? I think it is very clear in the accounts that have survived that what it is associated with are two things in particular, one of them is a god of peace, not a god of war and the other thing is mainly about giving the gifts of civilization, this is what you human beings need to know.

To go to the next level, that is the function and role of Quetzalcoatl and they are very similar, we could refer to them as civilizing heroes found in other cultures and other places. Osiris in Egypt plays that role. As the bearer of civilization, there is hardly a culture in the ancient world that does not remember a time far back in remote prehistory when some kind of supernatural beings or advanced human beings and I prefer the latter, that some kind of advanced human beings were involved in a project to spread a civilization i mentioned the tucanos in the amazon who are big ayahuasca drinkers the tucanos have a fascinating origin myth uh they say that they and they the origin myth specifically states that their ancestors were brought to the amazon they were brought to the Amazon by a group of supernaturals that included the daughter of the sun and an individual called the helmsman who steered the snake canoe in which this A settlement mission was carried out in the Amazon and what these supposed supernaturals did was they brought the Ducano's ancestors to the Amazon and showed them the best places to settle, the best places where they could find game, the best places where they could create a town the best places for agriculture and then they left but they left them a gift and that gift it was ayahuasca wow that's the story of the toucan origin myth and it sounds to me more 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 humans to who they chose to consider as supernatural.

That's what makes sense to me. When I interrupted you to talk about Quetzalcoatl, what were they? you're about to say i can't remember i'm in california i've been smoking a lot of dope you know we were talking about different things in the amazon we should rewind and find out what we said yeah the snake god you were talking about uh before quetzalcoatl before that um I have another question the almex you were talking about the genetics of these um uh people who live among the Native Americans that vary widely but the Olmecs seem to have very similar characteristics the thick lips the wide noses why?

We think it's good, this is part of a curious mystery that is not unrelated to the genetic mystery. Archaeologists have known for quite some time that there are anomalous skulls in parts of Brazil that appear to show very Polynesian or African features. very similar to the features that we see on the Olmec heads and several archaeologists who got in trouble with their colleagues for this have used that to argue many years ago, 30 or 40 years ago, that the history of settlement in the Americas is much more complicated uh than we you know what we've realized and what the DNA is doing is uh it's telling us that something really strange happened with the settlement, you see what happened with those um Africans or skulls of Polynesian aspect was that they were subjected to DNA testing 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 to any other people in the world, so The idea that there was any connection with Polynesia or Africa was discarded, but now that we have very strong evidence of a genetic signal from Australasia, the Australian aborigines, Papua New Guinea, the Melanesians with those types of characteristics, now that we have the genetic evidence found in the Amazon, I have to go back to that old evidence and reconsider it.

Wow, yeah, I'd love to know what it is. I have always been fascinated by the Olmecs. It's always been such a strange image, the big heads with helmets and how. Are they seen that way universally? I mean, all the features are very, very similar, they are very, very similar and always with the helmets and almost always I won't claim that every Olmec head has a helmet because I think I've seen one that doesn't, it's been quite a while since I explored the Olmec area, but the fascinating thing about them is that they are supposedly the first high civilization in Central America creating massive scale structures that I can see connections between them and the later Mayans, the whole mystery of the Mayan calendar was clearly inherited from the Olmecs, it was not something the Mayans invented, the Olmecs used that same symbolism, so the Mayan calendar is actually an Almec calendar and if we then consider the possibility that the Olmecs may simply be the last surviving manifestation of that calendar.

It could go back much further. Do you plan to have any debates with people who oppose these ideas? Well, it was interesting on your own. Show Joe how to have the debate that involved Michael Shermer, who is the editor of skeptic magazine, and a colleague of his who connected, yes, who I got a little angry with and me and my great friend and colleague, the genius Randall . carson uh and and um I felt that that was a very useful debate uh um I felt that it was possibly the first time that those of us on the alternative side of the argument about history had the opportunity to really present our evidence and and confront the so-called skeptics, well , it's so cold, that's what he calls himself, my Michael Sharma, with this evidence and I'm obviously biased, but I don't think he handled the situation particularly well, I don't think mainstream archeology really came out of that aspect.

Well, I think it came from that rather ignorant and uninformed aspect, and a man like Michael Shermer, who is a professional skeptic, cannot even compare to the knowledge of a man like Randall Carson, who has dedicated his entire life. to walk the path of the geology of the end of the ice age in North America and that was demonstrated in that debate, so I think it was worth having the debate. I think he showed that the alternative side isn't just indecisive. things aside from the things that there are those of us who work in this field who are using really solid information and who are our project to rewrite history and we are not going to do that with little information, it has to be solid information I think we had the opportunity in your program to say that solid information is there.

I am not claiming that it was a complete victory for the alternative side. Michael Sherman is a smart guy and he made some good arguments too. There were constructive aspects of that debate that I appreciated. I would like to see a lot more commitment and a much more positive approach. I wish skeptics were welcome in their skepticism, but I wish they were less hateful, less full of ridicule, less. contemptuous well, they are so defensive about their ideas and so, so defensive about their ideas when there is the possibility of constructive debate. uh you know well what's interesting to me is that as this evidence accumulates and it seems to continue. accumulate as more like these impact sites and more material from this ancient civilization is unearthed, it's almost insurmountable, yes, it's almost, and that's how paradigms change.

I mean, everyone is familiar with the concept of a paradigm shift and there is a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn that describes what a paradigm shift is when an established model in some discipline of science that has been in Control of people's thoughts for a long time suddenly falls apart and does not fall apart. Suddenly what happens is that there is an accumulation of evidence that that model cannot explain, that paradigm cannot explain it, at one moment it seemed like a great paradigm, but then it does not explain this and then it does not explain like the paradigm that says that the Megalithic architecture is only six thousand years old and that the first megalithic architecture was in Malta that cannot explain the huge megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey 5,500 years earlier that is evidence like that the slow accumulation of evidence that the existing system I cannot explain that, at any given moment, no matter how tightly the defenders of the existing system cling to it, no matter how determined they are in its defense, no matter what dirty tricks they choose to use to undermine their opponents, sooner or later the evidence will overwhelms. and the paradigm falls and you have a new way of thinking and that is the story of science and it is a story that I think we are at a turning point in our understanding of the past of the human species.

I'm not saying I'm 100 right. I think what I'm doing that's worthwhile is that I'm asking questions about the past that haven't been asked enough. I'm putting archaeologists on the spot and demanding they explain themselves. I don't claim to be right. I am offering an alternative theory and my goal is to get people to think about these things for themselves and not accept the voice of authority as the medium of the soul of The truth is that is what I have tried to do. Has any archaeologist reviewed this work and changed their opinions about it? No, no, I haven't, but what I found, I found interesting during the research trips to the United States before, there is a younger generation of archaeologists who are in the field and they are quite different from the older generation of archaeologists who They were running the whole scene 25 years ago, of course, now we have a very different younger generation, a younger generation. who has been exposed to open-minded thinking who has been exposed to the Internet who, as part of the general pattern of the younger generation, distrusts authority.

I'm meeting young archaeologists at sites, for example, I met a couple of really amazing young people. minds in a place called um blackwater draw uh in um uh arizona uh new mexico where one of the first clovis sites was located. The young archaeologists I met there were incredibly open-minded and really willing to consider extraordinary possibilities about the past, and they admitted it privately. For me who had read my books well, that's where I have hope. I have hope in this young generation that is growing up with the Internet and that understands that there is so much more beyond what they are taught. schools yes, yes, this is where hope lies and it lies in every area and that's why one of the intriguing things that has happened to me and your program is an important part of this is that when you go around doing public events making a public presentation of my work the demographics of the audience are extremely interesting and this is true whether I am giving the talk in Great Britain, whether I am giving it in Canada, whether I am giving it in the United States A portion of the audience are older people who read me in the 1990s, who came to my work with the fingerprints of the gods in 1995 and stayed with me and continued reading my work, but another part of the audience is a very large people. part of the audience is largely made up of young people, themost of whom are men, but there are also women among them and what those men, mostly young, come up to me and tell me at the end of the event is that we first encountered his work on The Joe Rogan Show and we It completely opened his mind, it changed him.

Many young people said that this had changed my life and then I asked myself why a different view of the past should change people's lives. Why should people feel that their lives? They have been changed by a different view of the past which I add they would not know unless you had been kind enough to include me in your program. These ideas would not be known, but they are known because of the incredible scope of their program and the answer to that question, why does it change a person's life? is that once we realize that we have been misinformed about our past, all we have built is our idea of ​​who we are and where we are.

Our evolution as a culture may be based on falsehoods and perhaps even deliberate lies. Once this is understood, all questions about the nature of the society in which we live become open and young people feel the need to take an independent path so as not to follow the path that previous generations have set for them and somehow. way and I am very pleased to hear this the fact that I am older now I am 69 years old next birthday the fact that I look great, thank you for the fact that I, as an older man, have constantly pursued an independent past.

I've been willing to put up with what's been thrown at me over the years, but I've stood my ground and continued to add new information. the dossier of information that I presented and I am encouraged to see this that younger people find inspiring and what better gift could an elder hope to leave to the world than a younger generation who is inspired by that person's experience. Work to change the world. Well, I'm very grateful to be able to introduce you to people because the first book I read about your fingerprints of the gods changed my view of the world.

I mean, I remember putting that book down after I finished. Wow, like I'm right, this whole thing is a mess, yes, a complete mess, because our idea of ​​who we are is based largely on our idea of ​​who we were and one of, I think, one of the mistakes that is made in Our civilization is that we are very conceited, we are very stubborn and we tend to review the vision of all history as if it were a project that leads us to what it is about and I think, what is it? is, how can I say that it undermines the existing system about a new vision of the past?

It is the notion that we are not what it is 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 that has just been completely taken out of history by a global cataclysm uh, then we suddenly realize that in a way we are here accidentally and that it hasn't been a process that has consisted of everything. we uh and and if we've been misinformed about how we got here, then we need to get the real information about what's happening, so these are, in some ways, profoundly revolutionary ideas, they take people down a path of inquiry that leads to question everything and our fears that you were discussing earlier about how soft we are compared to past civilizations in terms of our ability to live off the land, that is one aspect that bothers me, but one of the big ones that bothers me is the fact that everything is digital, all our information is stored on hard drives, you can bet and if that fails there won't be much left, you have paper books and, you know, a few thousand years, imagine what would be left, yeah, we would lose all our advance, well, me.

Can I talk about this on a personal level? There was a time when I was an excellent map reader. I could navigate anywhere with maps. You know, my wife Santa and I took big trips in Mexico in the early 1990s for really cheap prices. I rented cars with maps and we found our way everywhere without any problem nowadays I can barely use a map, the ability to use a map has declined within me why thanks to GPS GPS technology has appeared and it is and always me It says where I am and Being a bit lazy, I just accept that technology, but the other day I asked myself this: suppose GPS goes down and there is no GPS, the entire industrialized human race will suddenly be lost. uh all those super drivers who don't know the way from A to B and who are completely dependent on their GPS, they won't know where they're going and it's true with digital data digital digital data. unlike printed data they are very fragile and require programs to access and interpret them that are much more complicated than simply deciphering the code of a lost language, I mean, the programs vary between different telephone platforms exactly, they vary on the platforms of computer, it's just that it's so fragile and it's so uh, I mean, I don't know if precautions have been taken to preserve this information in case of what Robert Shock described as the coronal mass ejection or something like that on all the satellites, Yes, no, I don't think so.

I don't think any preparation has been made and I don't do it and I don't do it and it's very clear that that preparation is not being done for the risk of another cosmic impact and again a point that I would like to highlight What we do with this is 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 12,800 years ago has very clearly and specifically identified the debris trail from that comet. comet and that trail of debris is the taurid meteor stream and it is called torrid meteor stream because it seems to emanate from the region of the sky in which the taurus constellation is located, it is not like that, it is within our solar system, it is a optical illusion, the torrid The meteorite stream is a giant complex of debris, it is 30 million kilometers wide, what there was was an original comet that could have been between 100 and 200 kilometers in diameter, a small moon that fragmented and It split into multiple parts and those parts began to spread. along the entire orbit of the torrid stream of meteorites and to widen it everything widened so that it is like a giant tube of debris and the evidence and the argument is that 12,800 years ago several large pieces of that debris fell from the torrid stream of meteorites and impacted with the earth the problem is that the torrid stream of meteorites still exists and our planet still passes through it twice a year and those passages take place in June and November and each passage lasts 12 and a half days and The same group of scientists who are analyzing the evidence for impacts from 12,800 years ago are deeply concerned that we may face future impacts from the conservative meteorite stream.

That there are still big objects up there. This is not a theory. It is a fact. There's a comet up there. called comet enki which is part of the torrid stream of meteorites it is a large fragment of the original giant comet comet enki has a diameter of I don't know five or five or six kilometers there are 19 huge objects recognized within the torid stream of meteorites calculations indicate There may be up to 200 asteroids within the meteor stream with a diameter of a kilometer or more, which would have catastrophic effects if they collided with Earth, and the astronomers responsible consider the torrid meteor stream to be the greatest collision danger facing the Earth. humanity. right now and it's not something we should despair about because it's perfectly within the level of our technology to do something about it.

What could they do well to set an example? Commercial interests are looking at technology right now. Is it there to mine asteroids? We can go to asteroids if the commercial interest is high enough. We can go to them. We can extract them. We can extract minerals. We can bring them back to Earth. The same technology would allow you to move asteroids or comet fragments. you don't want to blow them up with a nuke, that would be a very bad idea, it would turn one large object into multiple smaller objects, which could cause equally massive devastation and it would be very difficult to predict where that devastation is going.

To make them fall, what we want to do is push them and take them out of the dangerous orbit towards a less dangerous orbit and the evidence is that in the next 30 years we will be passing through dangerous filaments of the torrid stream of meteorites and if we were intelligent we would be dedicating some resources to protect our cosmic environment, just as there are many issues to which we must dedicate resources, unfortunately the one that is most attractive to our politicians at this time is war, we dedicate unlimited resources to mass technologies. destruction there really is no end to the amount we are willing to spend on it, in terms of our so-called security, we feel like we are somehow making ourselves safer by having these incredible weapons and spending billions of dollars on them, but the Al cosmos doesn't care about any of that, the cosmos is out there with these giant giant objects, uh, that have explosive power far greater than all the nuclear weapons stored on earth today, the comet Shoemaker Levy 9. that hit Jupiter In 1994 it had a total calculated explosive power of 300 gigatons.

If you took the entire nuclear arsenal in the world today and blew it up all at once, 6.4 gigatons would be produced, which is why these objects are producing catastrophic results on such a distant scale. Beyond anything we ourselves can do with nuclear weapons, it is time for us to spend a little less time and money on weapons of mass destruction and a little more on caring for this beautiful garden we call Earth and which is our home and It will be the home of our children and our children's children I am a grandfather now I feel passionate about this we have to take care of this planet it is our responsibility as a human species to do so and one of the challenges is not the only challenge there are many, many Other challenges One of The challenges is to pay attention to our cosmic environment and realize that the cosmos can intervene cataclysmically in human history and that the meteorite stream in particular may have been a hidden hand in human history that there may have been others.

Impacts over the past 13,000 years 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 incredible technology for studying the sky, but for some reason we are ignoring it. problem of cosmic impacts and that is incredibly irresponsible because, as I said a moment ago, it is a problem that has a solution, it is within the limits of our technology, it would require a global cooperative effort to clean up our cosmic environment, but it could be done and It is a secondary product. of that global corporation could be a friendlier, more protective, more loving, more positive human community, it is very strange that we have this childish nature, even as adults and world leaders, that we do not like to ignore imminent danger as long as it has not occurred .

It didn't affect us in the past, yeah, there's no real moment that we can point to other than Tunguska in photographic history, modern history, where you could take pictures of things if I can, if I can pause at that very point, the evidence is convincing. the tunguska event was an object that fell from the torrid meteor stream that occurred at the peak of the beta torrids in june 1908, so it is extremely likely that that tunguska object came from the torrid meteor stream because we were passing by the torrid stream of meteorites at exactly that time and the Tunguska object is estimated to be between 60 and 190 meters in diameter so it is not a very large object it is not a kilometer-scale object it is large but it is not that large It doesn't even hit the ground.

It's a blast of air that explodes in the sky, luckily over an uninhabited area of ​​Siberia, but the devastation is enormous and wasn't even noticed for a few years until scientific teams went in and studied the area and discovered that 80 million trees in 2000 square kilometers had been completely leveled by that air blast and to put this into context, 2000 square kilometers is the size of London, so anyone who knows London knows there is a ring road. around London called M25 if that Airbus had taken place over central London. all of london up to the m25 would have completely disappeared is that what seems today quite close quite close says that 100 years later there are still no trees, yes, and if you have them, you look up, you are Looking at the black and white photographs taken at the beginning of 1900 that revealed the extent of this damage, it is simply stupid of us not to pay a little more attention to this, especially when we have the technology to do something about it.

We have that nature, although when it comes to climate change there is a curious denial of the role of cataclysms in human history and there is evenThere is a word for that in science and it is called uniformitarianism and this is a particular philosophy of science where the view is that everything as we see it in the world today is as it has always been, so if we do not see cataclysms today and they do not play an important role in our history today, then there were none. They are not cataclysms and they did not play a major role in our history in the past, so although it was before the time of humans that evidence first emerged that dinosaurs were made extinct by a comet or an asteroid, um lewis and walter.

Alvarez, the father and son team behind that science, were ridiculed by their colleagues and told that it is absolutely absurd, of course, no cosmic event could have made the dinosaurs extinct. They spent 10 years assuming that ridiculous thing until they found the crater in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then the entire 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 to literally turn dinosaurs into chickens because that's what's left of the dinosaur line, you know the birds, yeah, and at the same time, lurking in those primeval forests, there's This small mammal and looks a bit like a shrew 65 million years ago, going nowhere, dinosaurs rule the earth and then the cosmos intervenes.

The dinosaurs are wiped out and what happens is that the mammals begin to evolve very quickly and begin to occupy niches that were previously closed to them and the conclusion is that we would not be here, the human species would not be here, we would not be here. I would be having this conversation if the dinosaurs had not gone extinct 65 million years ago, then 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 is high Once we pay more attention to it, is there any evidence that other species of human beings existed in the Americas like the ones we are finding in Russia and are there many of them that are being discovered around the world now these subspecies of human beings, yes , this is a topic that I have dealt with before in the United States and the first thing that attracted me was Dennis Over Cave.

In Siberia I think everyone has heard of Neanderthals and today I think everyone has heard of Dennis ovens too. a lot of people have it, well I guess a lot of people don't, but first of all let's take the Neanderthals, for a long time it was held that Neanderthals were stupid primitive subhumans that crawled around and lacked symbolism. Turns out that's not true at all the most recent scientific evidence about Neanderthals is that they were symbolic art making creatures that were human in every sense and they were human in every sense because anatomically modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, not They can interbreed with another species, they were clearly human beings, but they looked quite different from us and that is why certain populations in the world today still have between three and five percent Neanderthal DNA.

Then in Russia, in the Denisova Cave, they find a single pinky bone from a little finger and they do the DNA test on it, they are able to get a complete genome and what they discover is that this is not a Neanderthal, this is not a human being. anatomically modern, it is another human species whom they named. Denisovans believe they are more closely related to Neanderthals than to anatomically modern humans, but they are clearly another human species and also interbred with anatomically modern humans and Denisovan DNA survives, interestingly, it survives predominantly in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea. and among the Australian aborigines, as part of the research for this book, I went to Denisova Cave.

I had an amazing trip, really just amazing, to Russia. I didn't expect it to be like this at all. Siberia, I mean, America is vast. but my goodness, crossing Siberia, it's endless rolling plains. You know, this area is simply vast. How did you cross it? We take a car. You cannot travel independently in Russia. It's very difficult, you have to get it, you have to get permission and you have to indicate beforehand where you are going to stop, so what I found and I did it through the Internet was a local guy called Sergey Kugin who had a small tourist business in Siberia in the city of novosibirsk, i contacted him, he found a translator who would translate my emails and i told him we want to do this trip to dennis over cave and can you set it up for us? and I got all the permits and he did it, so we flew to Novosibirsk.

Sergey and his translator, who turned out to be a Russian student who spoke good English, joined us and we made this immense journey through Siberia. Oh, it took us three days to get it. to get to dennis over cave three days driving every day three days driving every day a few stops along the way incredible hospitality from the Russians we were among very independent people people who live in nature and who In fact, I do know how to survive. It's my first time drinking fresh milk from the cow, literally milked directly from the cow and poured down my throat.

It was delicious and the cream, I mean thick, thick cream, very, very, so there. There were many things about Russia that surprised me. Dennis Over Cave is a beautiful and fascinating place to visit. Is another one. It is another example of a lost chapter in human history that is beginning to be rebuilt. It's obvious now that we weren't alone. There were many other human species that were human enough to interbreed with us and leave DNA behind and this Denisovan species was only discovered in the year 2000, which is very recent, in the 2000s, it's a very recent discovery and they really got behind it.

Of art. Did they leave behind art better than that? They left behind certain physical objects that are extremely difficult to explain. One of them is a green stone bracelet and that bracelet is in the shape of a torque which therefore slipped sideways in the hand. It is not a complete ring and a hole has been drilled through the bracelet and from that hole it has been possible to reconstruct that a pendant was hung, so the archaeologists there it is, so the archaeologist began to observe in detail the drilling marks in that hole and what they discovered was a huge anomaly that was drilled with a stable fixed drill and drilled at an extremely high speed.

This is believed to be 40 or 50,000 years old, no such technology is supposed to have existed in that. period that was able to drill with a stable fixed drill and yet there it is and and and there it appears, so there are also incredible very fine needles, bone needles that the Denisovans made, very long ones that suggest that they were sewing very heavy things . together and the suggestion has been if they were making skinned boats, for example, to use for sailing, that would explain how they managed to get to Australia, which is where the greatest amount of Denisovan DNA survives. uh, nowadays there's one of those, there's one of those needles. so there are hints of a strangely out-of-place technology among the Denisovans, which is 20 or 30,000 years earlier in human history than what those kinds of needles should be, that kind of bracelets that you might expect to find in what archaeologists call it the Neolithic, but finding it in the Paleolithic is very puzzling and very strange and suggests that the Denisovans certainly would not have crawled around like subhumans, that they were refined creatures.

Can you find out what year Dennis Ovens were discovered? Jamie. Can you Google that reality? quick, I want to say it's the 2000s, but I mean imagine that humans have been around for so long here we are in 2019 and in the last decade they realized this, yes, we are discovering new things about ourselves . discover that our history is much richer, with more texture, with more layers than we thought, it is not a simple story, it is a very complicated story and we ourselves are a hybrid species, we are the result of interactions with all types of humans different in appearance.

Beings and the end result is ourselves, so it's not just that we carry Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA in a sense, we are Neanderthals and Denis servants, you know, they are part of the anatomically modern human heritage, so you make a good point. the fact that this is just being discovered now and it's incredibly important, I'm serious, it completely rewrites the history of our ancestry the notion that the 1970s, the 1970s, oh, okay, the real work which was done in dennis over cave was done in the 2000s from 2006 2007 about the genetic examination that was when the most important papers of 2008 were published which revealed the genome of the Denisovans and revealed the connection of the Denisovans with humans anatomically moderns the fact that we are only discovering this now that We, who told the story of our past and were not aware of it, raises the question of how much more there is to the story of our past that we are not aware of.

Let's stop being so ar

rogan

t, so sure of ourselves, so confident in our findings, let's be more tentative, let's keep an open mind and see where it takes us, that is the main message I have from all of this and I believe and hope that this is an effect of this book. I am not fooling myself into thinking that archaeologists will unite overnight, especially since I am very critical of American archeology in this book and I specifically and explicitly criticize it because of the dominance of the Clovis first model for so long, which It prevented further research from being carried out and I have to say that archaeologists like to insult me ​​by calling me a pseudoscientist.

I can't think of anything more pseudoscientific than the first Clovis doctrine that locked American archeology for 50 years into a particular framework that we now know was totally wrong, there's nothing good about it, it's a complete mistake, which I hope the book achieves in the long term is that it will lead to more attention being focused on the Americas, this is a very neglected area. of the world when it comes to ancient and deep archaeology, the recent history of the Americas has been relatively well studied, but deep ancient history has not been well studied and I believe that America is going to contain revelations to let's be serious when I suggest that The United States is the most plausible and likely base for a lost civilization.

If you are going to propose a lost civilization, you need certain preconditions to exist. you need a, you can't have it on a small island, there has to be a large landmass with enormous resources and the ability for the population to grow and for those resources to be mobilized and what I suddenly realized, you asked before about What the reason I started writing this book is that what the new evidence points to is that America has been wrongly neglected, that here we have a giant landmass with extraordinary resources that has just been written out of the history of human civilization, but once we take into account the fact that there was a giant cataclysm in North America twelve thousand eight hundred years ago and once we begin to look, as I do before in America, at the incredible and profound similarities between, for example, the religious system of ancient Egypt. and the religious system of the Mississippi Valley, then you realize that you are into a global mystery here and that the answer to that mystery may not be in the old world at all and may largely lie in the Americas. it's strange i mentioned mountainville before it's a little strange that we find what is essentially the ancient egyptian religion uh manifesting in the symbolism of moundville the rise of orion transiting to the milky way the journey along the milky way very these are very specifics and idiosyncratic ideas and what makes it doubly strange is that moundville is not that old moundville as a site is approximately a thousand years old ancient egypt had already completely disappeared from the world for at least 600 years before mountville was created the end of the ancient egypt there's Mountainville and what we're looking at in the foreground is mount b and we're looking at mount a in the distance um and a full circle of mounds.

What is strange is that we find this system from ancient Egypt. ideas in mountainville 500 years after ancient egypt disappeared from the world the romans the romans were the end of ancient egypt in 400 AD. ancient egypt disappeared manville didn't even exist then, but 600 years later every set of ancient egyptian ideas was created and manifested they clearly didn't get it as a result of a direct transmission from ancient egypt, unless they were time travelers, the The only way I think it could have been obtained is as a result of a legacy passed down from a much older civilization that had influenced and affected many different parts of the world and the characteristics of that civilization, its shamanic heart, the use of altered states of awareness, the focus on them are some of the reasons why I would suggest that America is the place we should look for. andthe great mysteries are in the areas that were so devastated at the end of the last ice age in northern North America, the Channeled Scablands in particular and then the Mississippi Valley, the whole history of the Mississippi Valley, yes, Manville It is a thousand years old. old, but then you can go back to the poverty point in Louisiana, which is 2,700 years old, you can go to Watson Break in Louisiana, which is 5,500 years old, you can go to places like Conley, which are 8,000 years old, the system keeps regressing and disappearing in time and I believe that the most fruitful new work on exploring the origins of civilization is going to occur counterintuitively in the Americas, the last place on Earth where archaeologists have ever thought to look, where do they conventional archaeologists?

They believe they caused those drill marks on the Denisovan bracelets. They haven't really explained it. The Russian archaeologists who published the report on them are baffled and realize that it is dynamite, it is an explosive discovery. It's a misplaced technology and that's why they're trying to explain how come the fixed stable drilling that we think was first introduced in the Neolithic maybe seven eight thousand years ago, how come it's now found at a site that's forty or fifty thousand years, that's what all those bracelets are like, yes absolutely, those bracelets cost forty thousand dollars, they may have been older, there is recent research that suggests they may date back 65 to 70,000 years, they are extremely ancient and therefore, therefore We are bringing in some out of place technology that doesn't fit with the timeline of the story and we realize how out of place it was very, very out of place, very, very, very strange, characteristic we have here, so what does this tell me? is that we as a species and I have this, I guess this is my favorite phrase, we are a species with amnesia, it is my favorite phrase, we have forgotten a lot more about ourselves than we remember and what the process of history and the archeology.

It really is a process of remembering that we should not impose our ideas of what we should have been in the past, we should allow the past to speak for itself and when it does, it speaks eloquently. One of the sites we visited and explored in America before was the snake mound in Ohio. I don't know if you've ever been there. I know I've heard of him. It's amazing though. Jamie from Ohio. Will you ever be there? Yeah, Jamie and I were talking about it earlier. There's a second man, there's an aerial view of oh that's crazy, this is what you see, it's beautiful, you see the head of the snake mound there, so Santa and I went there on the summer solstice in 2017.

We were there on June 21, 2017. and my holy wife is a photographer and we acquired a drone for this specific purpose and she flew the drone 400 feet above the snake mound and we sat there watching the sunset and what is happening on the summer solstice and you can just see it perfectly. with a drone there are pictures of it in the book here uh, what happens on the summer solstice, you can see it from ground level, but you go up to 400 feet, you really get it, that snake's head is pointing directly at a niche in the distant hills across which the sun sets on the summer solstice on the longest day of the year, so it is a perfection of alignment of sky and ground that is taking place there it is beautiful it is a beautiful thing of seeing that sun sinking majestically towards the horizon and we see this impressive figure of the snake looking directly at it with its jaws open almost as if it were about to swallow the sun and then we remember that there are other places around the world that are also aligned with moments clue. of the solar year aligned with the winter solstice, for example, the Karnak temple in Upper Egypt, that kilometer-long axis points exactly to the point of sunrise on the winter solstice, one of the interesting things about the serpent mound and I urge anyone who will listen This is to go visit the serpent mound and especially go there on the summer solstice because that is the time when heaven and earth are married, that is when heaven and earth earth come together in majesty in uh in that place um, but one of the mysteries of the serpent mound concerns how old is this mound really?

How far back does it go back? There have been arguments that there is a group of archaeologists who would like it to be only a thousand years old and attribute it to a culture called the ancient fort. culture there is another group of archaeologists in miSee who has done much more exhaustive work and attributes it to the Adena culture, something that dates back to approximately 2,300 years ago. There is evidence of a previous construction company. It looks like the site has been continually rebuilt and remodeled as we would. With any sacred site, if it starts to wear out, you reshape it and then organic material is introduced into the site, which can give you the impression that the site is that old.

What is intriguing about the snake mound is that it sits on a natural ridge. and that natural ridge and this is completely an accident of heaven and earth that natural ridge, the head, if you will, is naturally oriented toward the summer solstice sunset. Someone a long time ago noticed that natural orientation and decided to monumentalize it here. a place where the earth whispered to the sky the earth in its own nature looked directly at the place on the horizon where the sun set this was a very significant place this place mattered so they created a mound of snakes on top of it they commemorated it they became a special place that humans had helped create to honor the marriage of heaven and earth and what I discovered in researching this book is that the snake mound is not alone in that sense, many people are baffled. by Stonehenge in England Stonehenge is built on Salisbury Plain and there are two types of large megaliths at Stonehenge, one of them is called sarsons and the other is called blue stones.

The blue stones that we know for sure were brought from very far away. Wales to Stonehenge a distance of approximately 150 miles. Sarsons are found in abundance at a place called Marlborough Downs, which is about 20 miles from Stonehenge, but until very recently it was thought that there were no sarsons on Salisbury Plain. An archaeologist couldn't. I understand why Stonehenge was not built on Marlborough Downs, if the Big Susan stones, the 20-30 tonne megaliths were available locally and did not have to be brought there. A very recent investigation from 2018 has provided the answer that two of those murderers were natural. in position all the time at Stonehenge and they are the saucin stone 16 and the heel stone and if you stand behind sars and the 16 stone and look at the heel stone at sunrise on the summer solstice you will see the sun rising in direct alignment with the sight and the stone of the heel is like the sight of the barrel of a rifle pointing at the sun and that was there, naturally, the earth spoke to the sky.

The ancients saw that they decided this was sacred. They did everything they could to bring the murderers to the rest of the murderers. the Marlborough Downs to create the great stone circle at Stonehenge and then 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 that as above, so down that we are connected to the cosmos that is part of our heritage we in modern cities forget that the cosmos exists we have all kinds of technology that can look at astronomy astronomy programs we can all do that but in reality looking at the stars is something that is very difficult for people who live in cities to do so we are isolated from the cosmos we are isolated from the notion that it is sacred that matters to the human creature and what the ancients seem to have done is to realize how vital that connection is and to commemorate it and celebrate it and draw our attention to the intimate connection between earth and sky, yes, light pollution fuels our childhood existence in many ways, because it does not constantly remind us that we are part of this great thing, yes, light pollution is a huge factor, it is very easy to forget that we live in a universe, it is very easy to forget that, it is very easy to believe that it is just about these cities that we live in the intimate concerns of our daily lives, but in fact we are part of something much more big and, my God, I mean it's enough of a mystery to be born as a human being, yeah, you know. to be alive is it is an extraordinary mystery yes having the ability to love uh to feel emotions um understand beauty to be moved by a symphony all these things that we take for granted but in reality they are deeply mysterious, we really don't know what we are or who we are and which is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Rick Strassmann's work.

You presented his movie dmt the Spirit molecula and on my next speaking tour I'm going to be doing an event with Rick on May 14 or 15 in Sedona. I think this will be the first time Rick has spoken publicly in quite some time. Rick has a colleague named Andrew Gallimore who teaches at Okinawa University in Japan, Rick and Andrew have together developed a technology to release dmt into human volunteers in a very slow drip that will keep them in the dmt state if they wish for hours and hours and the intention is to use this technology to explore and map the dmt realm when i enroll as soon as possible it is very close imperial college it seems that imperial college london is going to implement this technology in future research on dmt and that this research will not be pure and just in the potential therapeutic realm of a psychedelic, which is a very important investigation, it will be an investigation into the nature of reality using a psychedelic, the mysterious nature of reality and it's strange, and you know this from personal experience, that when you you immerse yourself in that realm of dmt it is so different from the realm of our everyday geometry filled world filled with these completely internally coherent vivacious intelligences, how can that be generated by the brain or are we dealing with some other level of reality that we haven't encountered?

However, I believe that ancient cultures and in particular my lost civilization were deeply involved in exploring the mysterious nature of reality and used medicinal plants as part of that process when it comes to the snake mound where the head points in the summer solstice. Does that take into account the procession of the equinoxes in terms of trend? The position of the summer solstice sun on the horizon is not affected by the procession, however, it is affected by another factor which is a slight movement of the head on the earth's axis. a nod but not a wobble not a wobble a nod um and it's called a mutation and the earth's axis moves back and forth over a cycle of about 41,000 years and that can adjust the position of the sunrise in the horizon over a very long period of time and in theory, if this idea can be taken seriously enough, in theory it would be possible to use very precise observations using the latest modern technology, not just be there in a drone and see the general connection between the position of the sun on the horizon and the head of the snake mound, it would be possible to refine that and tell astronomically the precise date when the snake mound must have first been created to accurately point to the rising sun at the equinox .

I just spent three hours. Shall we fly by? I would ask your listeners and viewers as we talk about Ohio, don't forget about Newark and High Bank, what are those? These are two incredible, amazing, absolutely stunning, beautiful, it's sad, but one geometric sites. of them is preserved within a private golf course oh no, however, it is not so sad because if it had not been preserved within a private golf course, more than 90 percent of the Native American earthquakes that were documented in the 19th century. They are no longer there, now they have been plowed for agriculture, that is another part of our lost history.

There we are looking at Newark, we see that combination of octagon and circle that is repeated in another place called High Bank, which is 60 miles away and the circle of the octagon returns. to that jamie gimme give me a big picture of that so you can see this uh an overlay or is that what it really is that's what it really looks like that's a graphic based on it well the circle octagon combination at the top left of the image is better preserved, the other fragments are not as well preserved and the reason the octagon circle is better preserved is because they are in a private golf club, otherwise they would have been plowed underneath.

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's oriented exactly 90 degrees to that one that talked about high science in the Mississippi Valley a long, long time ago. . There's a lot to explore and a lot to investigate and so on. There is a lot to research about the United States, it is simplyan incredible land and its mysteries have been hidden from us and I hope that with this book I have managed to lift the veil on those mysteries a little and if we are really going to reach the end of our are really three hours, oh my God, if we are really reaching At the end of our three hours, can I repeat?

I would love to see readers of my books at my events. I'm doing 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 talking continuously throughout the united states i wish i could visit every state in the united states but gosh this is a huge country every The state in the US is as big as all the British Isles, you know, but I'll visit as many as I do. I will give illustrated presentations. Then I'll sign books. I'll take pictures. I would like to meet my readers by visiting my website graemehancock.com.

Take a look at the talks and events page and you'll see where all of these events will be happening over the next seven weeks. Today we are April 22. I won't leave the north. America until June 5 oh well I hope to see you again and then listen thank you very much you are a treasure and this book I can't wait to read it in America before and the audiobook is also available now yes. the audiobook is available i read it thank you very much graeme it's always a pleasure to have you here i appreciate you very much thank you for welcoming me back to joe graham hancock ladies and gentlemen goodbye