Graham Hancock

And by 6,000 years ago, we see ancient Sumer emerging as a civilization. And we're then in the pre-dynastic period in ancient Egypt as well, 6,000 years ago, beginning to see definite signs of what will become the dynastic civilization of Egypt about 5,000 years ago. And interestingly, round about the same time, you have the Indus Valley civilization popping up out of nowhere.

And by the way, the Indus Valley civilization was a lost civilization. until the 1920s when railway workers accidentally stumbled across some ruins. I've been to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. And these are extraordinarily beautifully centrally planned cities. Clearly, they're the work of an already sophisticated civilization.

One of the things that strikes me about the Indus Valley civilization is that we find a steatite seal of an individual seated in a recognizable yoga posture. And that seal is 5,000 years old. And the yoga posture is Moolabandhasana, which involves a real contortion of the ankles and twisting the feet back. It's an advanced yoga posture. So there it is 5,000 years ago.

And that then raises the question, well, how long did yoga take to get to that place when it was already so advanced 5,000 years ago? What's the background to this? China, the Yellow River civilization. Again, it's around about the same period, 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, you get these first signs of something happening. So

It's very odd that all around the world we have this sudden upsurge of civilization about 6,000 years ago, preceded by what seems like a natural evolutionary process that would lead to a civilization. And yet, certain ideas being carried down and manifested and expressed in many of these different civilizations. I just find that

That whole idea, very puzzling and very disturbing, especially when I look at this radical break that takes place in not just the human story, but the story of all life on Earth, which was the last great cataclysm that the Earth went through, which was the Younger Dryas event. It was an extinction-level event. That's when all the great megafauna of the Ice Age went extinct.

It's after that, it's after that event that we start seeing this, what are taken to be the beginnings of the first gradual steps towards civilization. We come out of the upper Paleolithic as it's defined, the end of the old Stone Age, and into the Neolithic. And that's... when the wheels are supposedly set in motion to start civilization rolling. But what happened before that?

And why did that suddenly happen then? And I can't help feeling, and I've felt this for a very long while, that there are major missing pieces in our story. It's often said that I'm claiming to have proved that there was an advanced lost civilization in the Ice Age. And I am not claiming to have proved that. That is a hypothesis that I am putting forward.

to answer some of the questions that I have about prehistory. And I think it's worthwhile to inquire into those possibilities because the Younger Dryas event was a massive global cataclysm, whatever caused it. And it's strange that just after it, we start seeing these first signs.

Yeah, independently and by coincidence. And by coincidence, those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, China, they all pop up at pretty much the same time. So that is the mainstream view.

Oh, definitely, yes.

It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you're seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of years before evolution. Sumer emerges. But what's happening now, really, I spent much of the 90s and the late 1980s investigating this issue of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it.

But by 2002, when I published a book called Underworld, which was the most massive and most heavy book that I've ever written because I was writing very defensively at the time,

Um, by the time I finished that book, my wife, Santa, and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world, looking for structures underwater, often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they'd seen underwater. By the time that book was finished, I, I thought, actually, I've done this story. I've walked the walk. I really don't have much more to say about it.

And I, I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind recently retitled visionary and that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in in the evolution of human human culture and i didn't think that i would go back to the lost civilization issue But Gobekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me.

The more and more discoveries there, the 11,600-year date from Enclosure D, which has the two largest megalithic pillars. And I reached a point where I realized I have to get back in. I have to get back in the water. And I have to investigate this again. And Gobekli Tepe was a game changer. But I think it's a game changer for everything. Because Gobekli Tepe... the extraordinary nature of it.

We're looking at a major megalithic site which is at least five and a half thousand years older than, say, Gigantia in Malta, which was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world.

And this led, of course, to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of having the world's oldest megalithic site and from archaeologists. And this, in turn, has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region and what they're finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe.

And going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus is what Turkish archaeologists are now calling the Taz-Tepeler civilization. They're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills civilization.

very definite identifying characteristics semi-subterranean circular structures the use of t-shaped megalithic pillars sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at gobekli tepe it's clear that gobekli tepe now was not the beginning of this process it was actually in a way the end of this process it was the summation of everything that that stone hills civilization had had achieved.