Here is the full transcript of Graham Hancock’s talk titled “Is The House of History Built On Foundations of Sand?” at TEDxReading conference.
British writer and journalist Graham Hancock’s talk, “Is The House of History Built On Foundations of Sand?”, challenges conventional historical narratives by suggesting that a global cataclysm around 12,800 to 11,600 years ago significantly impacted human civilization. He explores evidence supporting the existence of advanced prehistoric civilizations, such as the sudden rise in temperatures ending the Younger Dryas and the mysterious megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.
Hancock questions the accuracy of current archaeological timelines, proposing that these findings could indicate a much older origin for sophisticated human societies than previously thought. He draws connections between these events and the myth of Atlantis, as well as the precise dating of catastrophic events that align with Plato’s accounts. Hancock’s presentation encourages a reevaluation of human history, suggesting that much of what is accepted might be based on incomplete or incorrect foundations.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s consider an extraordinary possibility. Could there be a lost civilization lurking as yet undetected somewhere far back in remotest prehistory? Could the myths of a former golden age brought to an end by an immense global cataclysm be true?
Plato provides the archetype with the story of Atlantis, for which he’s the earliest surviving source. He describes Atlantis as having advanced architecture, advanced agriculture, advanced shipbuilding technology and seafaring skills, and advanced social and political organization. It was once a beautiful and generous culture but in time it became arrogant, cruel, and materialistic.
The Fall of Atlantis
In a ringing phrase that should remind us of the behavior of advanced technological societies today, Plato tells us that it ceased to carry its prosperity with moderation. As though in punishment for this hubris, the universe slapped Atlantis down in a single dreadful day and night of fire, earthquakes, and flood. It was swallowed up by the sea and vanished. Mankind had to begin again like children, with no memory of what went before.
The view of historians and archaeologists is that Plato made the whole story up. Today, anyone who takes Atlantis seriously can expect to be accused of archaeological fantasy or worse, of a fraud. Archaeologists have worked out timelines to construct what I call the “House of History.”
Skepticism and Science
These timelines, showing slow steady evolutionary progress, are used to argue that there’s no room in our past for an advanced prehistoric civilization like Atlantis or for a cataclysm big enough to have wiped it out. But new science, not yet taken into account by historians and archaeologists, should give us pause for thought. As we’ll see, there’s now growing recognition that an extinction-level global cataclysm unfolded very recently, right in the foundation of the House of History, between 20,800 and 11,600 years ago.
Could this newly discovered cataclysm be connected in some way to the cataclysm of earthquake, flood, and fire that Plato tells us destroyed Atlantis? Cataclysmic events shake and reshape the world and allow new stories to emerge. Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs were wiped out in a global cataclysm.
Evolutionary Aftermath
If their line survives at all today, it may be in chickens and other birds. But at the same time, a little shrew-like creature, the ancestor of the mammalian line, was skulking in the primeval forests going nowhere. Once the dinosaurs were cleared out of the way, however, that shrew began to evolve, and 65 million years later, here we are, the new rulers of the world.
So, at the risk of oversimplification, what happened 65 million years ago was so huge that it turned dinosaurs into chickens and shrews into human beings. It’s now universally agreed that the cataclysm was caused by a six-mile-wide chunk of rock from outer space hitting the earth at about 70,000 miles an hour. Scientists are divided on whether the culprit was an asteroid or a comet, but whether asteroid or comet, it left a distinct fingerprint in the earth.
The KT Event
A layer of ash and soot marking the KT Boundary, the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary, that is filled with iridium, carbon microsphere yolks, nano diamonds, melt glass similar to Trinitite, and other minerals subjected to huge temperatures in excess of 2,200°C, the boiling point of quartz, across enormous areas of the Earth’s surface. These are the characteristic chemical signatures of a colossal cosmic impact. Nothing else can account for them. They’re referred to as “impact proxies.”
Luis and Walter Alvarez were the father-son team who revealed the true nature of the KT event. For more than a decade, they were subjected to quite vicious attacks from other scientists who refused to accept the evidence of the impact proxies. Only when the crater left by the impact was found deeply buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico, did the criticism cease.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
The Alvarez’s case for a cosmic impact and related extinction 65 million years ago is now regarded as confirmed. Keep this in mind while I introduce you to the work of another group of highly credentialed scientists. There are more than 30 members of their team. Their leading lights shown in this slide include Jim Kennett, Allen West, Richard Firestone, James Wittke, and Albert Goodyear.
They initially joined forces to investigate a mystery of the closing millennia of the last ice age. The last glacial maximum, if you look at the chart, was reached 21,000 years ago. After that, temperatures began to warm. But then suddenly, with ice sheets still two kilometers deep on top of North America and northern Europe, there was a striking and dramatic plunge in temperatures, a short sharp deep freeze that lasted from roughly 20,800 to 11,600 years ago.
Unraveling the Mystery
This period of extreme and anomalous cold is known to geologists as the “Younger Dryas.” The mystery is, what caused it?
It turns out that precisely at the Younger Dryas boundary, there’s a layer of ash and soot in the soil referred to as the “black mat,” distributed across a vast area of the Earth’s surface and filled with abundances of the same impact proxies that bear witness to the KT event. Unlike the KT event, however, the Younger Dryas cataclysm is astonishingly recent: just 12,800 years ago.
Initially, the team put the event at 12,900 years ago, but with subsequent research, that date has been refined down to 12,800 years ago. This is the first paper published by the Younger Dryas impact team. It appeared in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in October 2007. The headline speaks for itself: “Evidence for extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and Younger Dryas cooling.”
Mainstream Recognition
I’ll show you a few more of the team’s papers just to make the point that this is mainstream peer-reviewed science we’re dealing with here, not the lunatic fringe. PNAS 2009, “Shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in Younger Dryas boundary sediments.” “Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago.” Evidence from Mexico. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores. “Evidence for deposition of ten million tons of impacts burials across four continents 12,800 years ago.”
Here is the Journal of Geology, September 5, 2014: “Nano diamond rich layer across three continents consistent with major cosmic impact 12,800 years ago.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2015, the evidence presented in this paper rules out any possibility that the impact proxies in the Younger Dryas layer were laid down gradually, say over periods of hundreds of years. The Bayesian chronological analysis shows that the cataclysm was unleashed synchronously in a geological instant, effectively, a single dreadful day and night.
Moreover, the evidence tracks the fingerprint of the cataclysm across more than 50 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface. Multiple ball lights, thought to be fragments from a giant disintegrating comet, came in on a trajectory from northwest to southeast. The primary impacts were on the North American ice cap, then still more than two kilometers deep.
Concluding Evidence
There were further impacts on the northern European ice cap. And the furthest east evidence for the impacts, as so far been traced, is Syria. Because the primary impacts were on the North American ice cap, it’s been difficult to find craters since the craters were transient, excavated in two-kilometer-deep ice that has subsequently melted away. Despite the abundant evidence of the impact proxies, the absence of craters has exposed the team to the same kind of attacks that Luis and Walter Alvarez suffered.
In the last couple of years, however, craters have been identified in areas beyond the edge of the former ice cap or where the ice cover was thin. These craters are the final pieces of the puzzle that should settle the debate. Twelve thousand eight hundred years ago, multiple fragments of a giant disintegrating comet hit the Earth, with the epicenter of the cataclysm on the North American ice cap. Why did the impacts 12,800 years ago cause the worldwide plunge in temperatures witnessed at the beginning of the Younger Dryas?
The best explanation is that floods of icy meltwater released by the heat and kinetic energy of the impacts flowed off the North American ice cap and into the Atlantic Ocean, where they interrupted the Gulf Stream, a key element of the central heating system of our planet, hence the sudden and dramatic cooling.
Why did the Younger Dryas end equally suddenly 11,600 years ago with a dramatic rise in temperatures? As long ago as the 1980s, the British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle became intrigued by the sudden temperature rise at the end of the Younger Dryas. He proposed the comet impact in an ocean as the agency, producing not only tidal waves but also sending a vast cloud of water vapor into the upper atmosphere where it shrouded the Earth, creating a greenhouse effect large enough to account for the dramatic warming.
It’s possible that further fragments from the debris stream of the same disintegrated comet that hit the Earth 12,800 years ago were involved in the events of 11,600 years ago as well. Astronomers calculated that this comet originally entered the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago and began to break up into multiple fragments. These spread out along the course of its orbit to form a torus of lethal debris that crosses the orbit of the Earth and has interacted catastrophically with human history on more than one occasion in the past 13,000 years.
The End of the Younger Dryas
The science on what caused the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago is not as complete as the science on the beginning of the Younger Dryas. Whatever the agency, however, the facts on the ground are not in dispute. The Younger Dryas did end abruptly 11,600 years ago. Global temperatures soared, and the remnant ice caps very rapidly collapsed into the sea, causing a dramatic pulse of sea level rise nominated by geologists as “Meltwater pulse 1B.”
Is it a coincidence that 11,600 years ago, the date of Meltwater pulse 1B, is also the date that Plato gives for the destruction and submergence of Atlantis? Let’s double-check Plato’s date. The story he tells us was passed down to him through his family line from his ancestor, the famous Greek lawmaker Solon, who visited Egypt around 600 BC, and their claim to have been told the story of Atlantis by priests, in the temple of Neath at Sais in the Delta.
Plato’s Account and Modern Science
Solon asked the priests when the disaster occurred, and they replied matter-of-factly, “9,000 years ago.” Remember that this was in 600 BC, and of course, 9,000 years ago in 600 BC is 9,600 BC in our calendar, in other words, 11,600 years ago, the precise date that modern geological science puts on Meltwater pulse 1B and a sudden global rise in sea level. If Plato made the whole thing up, as historians tell us, then he was astonishingly on the money with 21st-century science, linking a global flood cataclysm to the date of 11,600 years ago. And something else, the same precise date is now being cited by archaeologists as a highly significant one, the date at which the invention of both megalithic architecture and agriculture occurred, apparently for the first time, in the world.
The place where this happened was Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. And here I am at Göbekli Tepe with the late professor Klaus Schmidt who discovered the site and began excavating it for the German Archaeological Institute, from the second half of the 1990s onwards. He’s telling me three things. First, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe exposed in the excavations were not covered by natural sedimentation over the course of ages. Instead, after being used for about a thousand years, they were deliberately and meticulously buried beneath an artificial hill of earth and rubble.
Indeed, the very name “Göbekli Tepe” in the Turkish language means “pot-bellied Hill.” Secondly, it’s this sealing of the site with no contamination by later cultures that allows archaeologists to be sure of the date of Göbekli Tepe’s foundation, 11,600 years ago, which makes it 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and about 6,000 years older than the very oldest megalithic sites hitherto recognized anywhere on Earth. Thirdly, up to 50 times as much as has already been excavated at Göbekli Tepe still waits to be brought to light. Ground-penetrating radar has revealed that hundreds and hundreds of giant megalithic pillars still lie buried, making this not only the oldest but also the largest megalithic site on Earth.
And yet, it just seems to pop up out of nowhere with no background and no evidence of the evolution of the necessary architectural skills. Strangest of all, the German Archaeological Institute also suspects that Göbekli Tepe functioned as a center of innovation from which knowledge of agriculture was distributed to a
population that hitherto had consisted only of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Rather than a sudden mysteriously precocious invention 7,000 years ahead of its time, what happened at Göbekli Tepe looks to me much more like a transfer of technology from the survivors of a lost civilization who already knew how to work megaliths on a grand scale and who already fully understood agriculture.
Reevaluating Human History
Prior to the excavation of Göbekli Tepe, we would have had no context to understand the newly discovered megalithic sites shown in this slide. It’s submerged to a depth of 40 meters beneath the Mediterranean and was last above water more than 9,000 years ago. We don’t know how long the site stood there before the rising seas covered it. Since the early 1990s, question marks have been raised over the age of the great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. Egyptologists think it’s about 4,500 years old, although there’s not a shred of inscription evidence to support this date.
Independent researcher John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, professor of geology at Boston University, have made a case that the sphinx must be much older than that, based on its distinctive pattern of erosion. Schoch argues that the Sphinx was subjected to a very long period of heavy rainfall, and such rains have not fallen in Egypt in the past 5,000 years. Indeed, to find the kind of heavy rains in Egypt that could have cut these deep vertical fissures characteristic of precipitation-induced weathering, you have to go back to the climatic disturbances of the Younger Dryas, between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
The Sphinx and Göbekli Tepe: Connected Mysteries
When Schoch and West first put their case forward, it was dismissed by Egyptologists on the grounds that no other megalithic sites in the world date back to that period. But that was in 1992, when you could still say such things. Subsequently, in the second half of the 1990s, excavations began at Göbekli Tepe, proving it to be 11,600 years old. Needless to say, if you can make Göbekli Tepe, you can make the Sphinx. The two sites aren’t even that far apart.
So, in summary, I suggest, though most of the later construction is of high quality, that the edifice of our past built by historians and archaeologists stands on foundations that are likely to prove defective and dangerously unsound. An extinction-level cataclysm occurred on our planet between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. The event was global in its consequences, and it affected mankind profoundly. Because the scientific evidence that proved it happened has only begun to emerge since 2007, and because its implications have not yet been taken into account at all by historians and archaeologists, we are obliged to contemplate the possibility that everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization could be wrong. Thank you.