Graham Hancock

It's now about 30 million kilometers wide. It takes the Earth a couple of days to pass through it on its orbit. It passed through it in June and it passes through it at the end of October.

The suggestion is that the Taurid meteor stream is the end product of a very large comet that entered the solar system round about 20,000 years ago, came in from the Oort cloud, got trapped by the gravity of the Sun and went into orbit around the Sun, an orbit that crossed the orbit of the Earth. However, when it was one object, The likelihood of a collision with the Earth was extremely small.

But as it started to do what all comets do, which was to break up into multiple fragments, because these are chunks of rock held together by ice. And as they warm up, they split and disintegrate and break into pieces. As it passed through that, its debris stream became larger and larger and wider and wider.

And the theory is that 12,800 years ago, the Earth passed through a particularly dense part of the torrid meteor stream and was hit by multiple impacts all around the planet, certainly from the west of North America as far east as Syria. And that we are by and large not talking about impacts that would have caused craters, although there certainly were some. We're talking about airbursts.

When an object is 100 or 150 meters in diameter, and it's coming in very fast into the Earth's atmosphere, it is very unlikely to reach the Earth. It's going to blow up in the sky. And the best known recent example of that is the Tunguska event in Siberia, which took place on the 30th of June, 1908. The Tunguska event was nobody disputes. It was definitely an airburst of a cometary fragment.

And the date is interesting because the 30th of June is the height of the beta Taurids. It's one of the two times when the Earth is going through the Taurid meteor stream. Well, luckily, that part of Siberia wasn't inhabited, but 2,000 square miles of forest were destroyed.

If that had happened over a major city, we would all be thinking very hard about objects out of the Taurid meteor stream and about the risk of... cosmic impact.

So the suggestion is that it wasn't one impact, it wasn't two impacts, it wasn't three impacts, it was hundreds of air bursts all around the planet, coupled with a number of bigger objects, which the scientists working on this think hit the North American ice cap, largely.

Some of them may also have hit the Northern European ice cap, resulting in that sudden, otherwise unexplained, flood of meltwater that went into the world ocean.

um and and uh caused the cooling that then that then took place but this was a disaster for life all over the planet and and it's interesting that one of the sites where they find the younger dryas boundary and where they find overwhelming evidence of an air burst and where they find all the shocked quartz the carbon microspherules the nano diamonds the trinitite and so on and so forth

All of those impact proxies are found at Abu Huraira. That was a settlement within 150 miles of Gobekli Tepe, and it was hit 12,800 years ago, and it was obliterated. Interestingly, it was re-inhabited by human beings within probably five years, but it was completely obliterated at that time.

And it's difficult to imagine that the people who lived in that area would not have been very impressed by what they saw happening, by these massive explosions in the sky and the obliteration of Abu Huraira. This is a theory, the Younger Dryas Impact. It's a hypothesis, actually. It's not even a theory. A theory is, I think, considered a higher level than a hypothesis.

That's why it's the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. And of course, it has many opponents, and there are many who disagree with it. And there have been a series of... peer-reviewed papers that have been published supposedly debunking the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. One, I think, was in 2011. It was called a requiem for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

And there's one just been published a few months ago or a year ago, you know, called a complete refutation of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, something like that, some lengthy title. So it's a hypothesis that has its opponents. And even within those of us who are looking at the alternative side of history, there are different points of view.

Robert Shock from Boston University, the geologist who demonstrated that the erosion on the Sphinx may well have been caused by exposure to a long period of very heavy rainfall. He doesn't go for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. fully accepts that the Younger Dryas was a global cataclysm and that the extinctions took place, but he thinks it was caused by some kind of massive solar outburst.

So what everybody's agreed on is the Younger Dryas was bad, but there is dispute about what caused it. I personally have found the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to be the most persuasive, which most effectively explains all the evidence.

In a sense, it's not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I'm saying. It's the Younger Dryas that's central to what I'm saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger. Something caused it. I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we're looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it's still up there,

and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation. But I don't mind other explanations. It's good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it's not a mystery that's been solved yet. And that word advanced civilization... This is another word that is easily misunderstood.

And I've tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn't imagine that it's us, that it's something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would have achieved something certain things.

So amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world and are a category of ancient maps called portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople. The portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they're extremely accurate maps.