Graham Hancock

And I do think this is part of the story of the preservation of knowledge.

I take them very seriously. And the other... There's many reasons, but... I can't help being deeply impressed and deeply puzzled by the worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm. within human memory. I mean, we know scientifically that there have been many, many cataclysms in the past going back millions of years.

I mean, the best known one, of course, is the K-Pg event, as it's now called, that made the dinosaurs extinct 65 million or 66 million years ago. But has there been such a cataclysm in the lifetime of the human species? Yeah, the Mount Toba eruption about 70,000 years ago was pretty bad.

But a global cataclysm, the Younger Dryas really ticks all the boxes as a worldwide disaster, which definitely involved sea level rise, both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. It definitely involved the swallowing up of lands that previously had been above water.

And I think it's an excellent candidate for this worldwide tradition of a global cataclysm of which one of, but not the only, distinguishing characteristics was a flood, an enormous flood, and the submergence of lands that had previously been above water, underwater. The fact that this story is found all around the world suggests to me that the archaeological explanation is, look,

People suffer local floods all the time. I mean, as we're talking, there's flooding in Florida. But I don't think anybody in Florida is going to make the mistake of believing that that's a global flood. They know it's local. But that's the argument largely of archaeology dealing with the flood myths, that some local population experienced a

a nasty local flooding event, and they decided to say that it affected the whole world. I'm not persuaded by that, particularly since we know there was a nasty epoch, the Younger Dryas, when flooding did occur and when the Earth was subjected to events cataclysmic enough to extinguish entirely the megafauna of the Ice Age.

Yes. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, YDIH for short... is not a lunatic fringe theory, as its opponents often attempt to write it off. It's the work of more than 60 major scientists working across many different disciplines, including archaeology and including oceanography as well. And they are collectively puzzled

by the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas and by the fact that it is accompanied 12,800 years ago by a distinct layer in the earth. You can see it most clearly at Murray Springs in Arizona, for example. You can see it's about the width of a human hand. And there's a drawer there that's been cut by flash flooding at some time. And that drawer has revealed the sides of the drawer.

And you can see the cross section. And in the cross section is this distinct dark layer that runs through the earth. And it contains evidence of wildfires. There's a lot of soot in it. There are also nanodiamonds in it. There is shocked quartz in it. There is quartz that's been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees centigrade. There are carbon microspherules.

All of these are proxies for some kind of cosmic impact. I talked a moment ago about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Lewis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, Initially, their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater. And for a long time, they were disbelieved because they couldn't produce a crater.

But when they finally did produce that deeply buried Csikszentmihalyi crater, that's when People started to say, yeah, they have to be right. But they weren't relying on the crater. They were relying on the impact proxies. And they're the same impact proxies that we find in what's called the Younger Dryas boundary layer all around the world.

So it's the fact that at the moment when the Earth tips into a radical climate shift, it's been warming up. for at least 2,000 years before 12,800 years ago. People at the time must have been feeling a great sense of relief. You know, we've been living through this really cold time, but it's getting better. Things are getting better.

And then suddenly around 12,800 years ago, some might say 12,860 years ago, There's a massive global plunge in global temperatures, and the world suddenly gets as cold as it was at the peak of the ice age. And it's almost literally overnight. It's very, very, very rapid. Normally, in an epoch when the Earth is going into a freeze, you would not expect sea levels to rise.

But there is a sea level rise, a sudden one, right at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And then you have this long frozen period from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. And then equally dramatically and equally suddenly, the Younger Dryas comes to an end and the world very rapidly warms up.

And you have a recognized pulse of meltwater at that time as the last of the glaciers collapse into the sea called Meltwater Pulse 1b, round about 11,600 years ago. So this is a period which is very tightly defined. It's a period when we know that human populations were grievously disturbed.

That's when the so-called Clovis culture of North America vanished entirely from the record during the Younger Dryas, and it's the time when the mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers vanished from the record as well.

The abrupt cessation of the global meridional overturning circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best known part, And the main theory that's been put forward up to now, and I don't dispute that theory at all, is that the sudden freeze was caused by the cutting off of the Gulf Stream, basically, which is part of the central heating system of our planet. So no wonder it became cold.

But what's not really been addressed before is why that happened. Why? gulf stream was cut why a sudden pulse of melt water went into the world ocean and and it was so much of it and it was so cold that actually stopped the gulf stream in its tracks that's where the younger dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem now

The hypothesis, of course, is broader than that. Amongst the scientists working on it are, for example, Bill Napier, an astrophysicist and astronomer. They have assembled a great deal of evidence which suggests that the culprit in the Younger Dryas impact event or events was what we now call the torrid meteor stream, which the Earth still passes through twice a year.