Graham Hancock

When I talk about a lost civilization introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archaeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, and that Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture.

It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers. who traveled west. So the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so annoying to archaeologists as it is.

This is the out of Africa theory. I think it's more than a theory. It's really strongly evidenced. Why? Because we're part of the great ape family and it's an African family. There's no doubt that human beings, our deep origins are in Africa.

But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus and... The astonishingly distant travels that they undertook. Yes, I think there is an urge to explore in all of humanity.

I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the next hill. And I think that goes very deep into human character. And I think it was being manifested in those early adventures of humanity. people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world.

I think a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not only in Africa.

That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archaeological record, which await to be discovered. And, of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archaeology.

But the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archaeology is not on its own enough to suggest that we're missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000-year gap.

It's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world. And They're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another and that are also distant from one another in time. They don't necessarily occur at the same time.

And this is where I think that archaeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story. So there are particular issues. For example, the notion of the afterlife destiny of the soul, what happens to us when we die.

And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do think about, what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all...

decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey.

And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America through Mexico through into North America, but it's also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we're looking at is

an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is this sequence of numbers that are

result of the precession of the equinoxes. At least I think that's the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Deschend. Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you're based, back in the 60s.

And Hertha von Deschend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. And they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill. And Hamlet's Mill... differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I'll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession.

And the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so.

Santillana and van der Schind are pointing out that knowledge of procession is much much older than that thousands of years older than that and and they do actually trace it I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly to some almost unbelievable ancestor Civilization reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this this mystery in the first place Okay.

Now the procession of the equinoxes to give it its full name is is results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet of course is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis.

So if you imagine the extended north pole of the Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star, precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth. Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended north pole of the Earth points at empty space.