Graham Hancock

And that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings, which is in a posture very similar to the constellation that we call Sagittarius. And on that outstretched wing is a circular object. And the suggestion is that it's marking the time when the sun was at the center of the dark rift in the Milky Way at the summer solstice 12,500 years ago. That's what it's marking.

And it's interesting that the same date can be deduced from Pillar 40. Of course, it's controversial. Martin Swetman's ideas are by no means accepted by archaeology. But he's done very, very thorough, detailed statistical work on this, and I'm personally convinced. So we have a time capsule at Gobekli Tepe, which is memorializing a date that is at least 1,200 years before Gobekli Tepe was built.

if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date as it is at present. The date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the impact event. And then Giza does the same thing, but in much larger scale.

It uses massive megalithic architecture, which is very difficult to destroy, and a profound knowledge of astronomy to encode a date in a language that any culture, which is sufficiently literate in astronomy, will be able to decode. We don't have to have a script that we can't read. like we do with the Indus Valley civilization or with the Easter Island script.

We don't have to have a script that can't be interpreted. If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date. The Hoover Dam has a star map built into it. And that star map is part of an exhibition that was put there at the founding of the Hoover Dam. And what it does is it freezes the sky

above the Hoover Dam at the moment of its completion. And Oscar Hansen, the artist who created that piece, said so specifically that this would be so that any future culture would be able to know the time of the dam's construction. So you can use astronomy and architecture to memorialize a particular date.

I think that, I think that, um, I can't speak of all archaeologists, but some archaeologists feel very territorial about their profession, and they do not feel happy about outsiders entering their realm, especially if those outsiders have a large platform. And that's I found that the attacks on me by archaeologists have increased step by step with the increase of my exposure.

I wasn't very interesting to them when I just had one minor bestseller in 1992 with a book called The Sign and the Seal. But When Fingerprints of the Gods was published in 1995 and became a global bestseller, then I started to attract their attention and appear to have been regarded as a threat to them. And that is the case today.

That is why Ancient Apocalypse Season 1 was defined as the most dangerous show on Netflix. It's why the Society for American Archaeology wrote an open letter to Netflix asking Netflix to reclassify the series as science fiction. It's why they accused the series of anti-Semitism, misogyny, white supremacism, and a whole, I don't know, a whole bunch of other things.

There's nothing to do with anything that's in the series. It was... It was like, we must shut this down. This is so dangerous to us. Certainly not a danger. There are many more dangerous things in the world than a television series going on right now.

But maybe it was seen as a danger to archaeology, that this non-archaeologist was in archaeological terrain and being viewed and seen and read by large numbers of people. Maybe that was part of the problem. And human nature being what it is,

I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoopes from the University of Kansas and Flint Dibble, who's now teaching at the University of Cardiff in Wales in the UK, are both people who like to have media exposure. And John Hoopes had just recently started his YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for decades. for quite a while, a pretty small number of followers.

I think that they feel that they should be the ones who are getting the global attention and that it's not right that I am and that the best way to stop that is to stop me, to shut me down, to get me cancelled, and basically requiring Netflix to relabel my series from a documentary to a science fiction, which is what they actually had the temerity to suggest to Netflix.

If that had gone through, if Netflix had listened to them, that would have effectively been the cancellation of my documentary series. It would no longer have been ranked under documentary. So it was a deliberate attempt to to shut me down. And I see that going on again and again. And it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary. I've become very defensive towards archaeology.

I hit back after 30 years of these attacks on my work. I'm tired of it. And I do defend myself. And sometimes I'm perhaps over-vigorous in that defense. Maybe I was a little bit too strong in my critique of archaeology in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse. Maybe I should have been a bit gentler and a bit kinder.

And I've tried to reflect that in the second season and to bring also many more indigenous voices into the second season, as well as the voices of many more archaeologists.

Keanu is genuinely curious about the past and very, very interested in it. And he's bringing to it questions that everybody brings to the past. He's speaking for every man in the series.

No, I completely understand why that is the position of archaeology, because that's what they've found. Archaeology is very much wishing to define itself as a science, and it uses the techniques of weighing and measuring and counting are very key to what archaeology does. And in what they've found and what they've studied around the world, they don't see any traces of a lost civilization.

And the idea that... Besides, we live in a very politically correct world today, and the idea that some kind of lost civilization brought knowledge to other cultures around the world is seen as almost racist or colonialist in some way. it triggers that aspect as well. But basically, I think majority of archaeologists are in complete good faith on this.

I don't think that anybody's really seeking to frame me. I think that what we're hearing from most archaeologists, some much more vicious than others, but what we're hearing from most archaeologists is this is what we found and we don't see evidence for a lost civilization in it. And to that, I... must reply, please look at the myths. Please consider the implications of the Younger Dryas.