Graham Hancock
speaker
786 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Graham Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's a very fine, very white sand. And it just goes on forever. And the dunes are sculpted and massive and huge. We had an amazing time there.
There's thousands of them. And what's amazing when you actually see the footprints is you can see the interactions between the human beings and animals. You can see that somebody is reacting to a giant sloth, which has suddenly turned around, and the person who's behind it suddenly turns around as well. Wow. Mammoth footprints overlaying human footprints and then human footprints overlaying those.
And it goes down for meters under the ground. So you have a very deep stratification of these impressions that have been left behind by our ancestors. and by animals that are now completely extinct. Mammoths and mastodons went extinct during the Younger Dryas, but there are their footprints from 23,000 years ago side by side with the footprints of human beings.
It's very intimate to see a footprint, to see those five toes, to see the heel mark. To see sometimes a child walking beside a mother, that's there in the record as well. It's quite something special. And it opens the door. Archaeology has been very reluctant to accept a much older peopling of the Americas than previously was held. It was held for a long time, but it was about 13,000 years ago.
They've abandoned that now. They did cling on tooth and nail for decades, but that's been abandoned. It's accepted that human beings came here long before 13,000 years ago. And White Sands is one of the places which provides just absolute definite irrefutable evidence of that, that they were here 23,000 years ago. But we don't know yet how long before that they were here.
This is part of the problem. I often remember a site called the Cerruti Mastodon site in San Diego. I went to see – the exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Demaree. And they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there. It was a butchering of a mastodon.
But the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings. The thing is – It's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old. And, you know, this opens the possibility that human beings have been in the Americas before they were in Europe.
And that becomes... That's crazy. That's a door that opens all kinds of possibilities which have been neglected. I think that... The prejudice that the Americas were only settled very late in the human story led archaeology to not have their eye on the possibility of what happens if they were here earlier. And they tend not to, and they tend not to look to that.
It was found by accident. The first footprints were found completely by accident. And they were found by indigenous local people who alerted the National Park Service to them. And we have a number of indigenous spokespeople who speak to the White Sands mystery and how it feels for them, the emotional feeling of seeing the footprints of their ancestors from 23,000 years ago.
The thing is that the dunes are constantly shifting and sometimes the footprints will be covered up and then wind will reveal them again. And they're fragile. They can be easily destroyed and wiped off. And in a way, it's a miracle that they've survived. But to see the stride of a mammoth You see how far apart those huge footpads are. And to realize this thing was alive.
This thing existed on this planet. Human beings interacted with it. It's a very compelling evidence for an earlier settlement of the Americas.
Oh, yeah.
Almost certainly. And the way the evidence is looking... It's most likely that South America was settled first before North America was settled. And that raises all kinds of questions. And we've gone into this in season two of Ancient Apocalypse primarily to do with the DNA evidence of a direct connection between the peoples of New Guinea and Australia.
and the peoples of certain tribes in South America. And that's very ancient, very old DNA evidence in South America, but also to do with archaeological sites like Monteverde. I did bring up the issue of Tom Dillehay the last time we were on when Flint was here.
And Tom Dillehay, who found Monteverde, who excavated Monteverde in South America and realized that it was plus 14,000 years old and therefore a lot older than than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America. When he put that idea forward, he was eviscerated by his colleagues in archaeology.
It took them a decade to come around to accepting that actually he was right. And there are many other sites in South America going back 30 plus thousand years. They're all controversial because they conflict with an existing model. But I think instead of clinging on to existing models, I think that's one of the problems with archaeology is this territoriality, this kind of control of the past.
I think instead of doing that, it would be nicer if archaeology was a little bit more welcoming, a little bit more open to new and different ideas.
I've come to the point, and I'm going to say something, some strong words here. Get crazy. Get crazy, Grandmaster. I've come to the point where I believe that some archaeologists, not all of them, most actually this problem is with a small number of archaeologists, but they're extremely vocal. I think what we're looking at is a kind of abuse of power. Archaeologists have a power.
They are the official spokespeople for the past. And they use that power to slap down any point of view that doesn't agree with theirs. So I think that there's an abuse of power there. And at the same time, there's not a realization that that's happening because the mindset that drives it is the feeling that members of the general public are unable to decide things for themselves.
This is the arrogance of archaeology that they feel that they have to tell people what to think about the past and they underestimate the intelligence of the public and the ability of the public to discern, to make choices between different possibilities about the past. They think that So archaeologists seem to think that only one possibility of the past must be considered by the general public.
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