Graham Hancock

Please look at the ancient astronomy. Please look at those ancient maps and don't just dismiss them and sneer at them. And for God's sake, please look more deeply at the parts of the world that were immensely habitable and attractive during the Ice Age and that have hardly been studied by archaeology at all before you tell us that your theory is the only one that can possibly be correct.

In fact, it's a very arrogant and silly position of archaeology because archaeological theories are always being overthrown. It can take years. It can take decades. It took decades in the case of the Clovis First hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas. But sooner or later, a bad idea will be kicked out by a preponderance of evidence that that idea does not explain.

First of all, just very recently, and it can be found on my YouTube channel and it's signaled on my website, I have made a video, runs about an hour, which looks at a series of statements that Flint made during the debate, which I was not prepared to answer. And it turns out that some of those statements are not correct. The notion, for example, that there were three million shipwrecks,

uh that have been mapped flint actually uses the word mapped three million shipwrecks that have been mapped at one point in the debate and i've i've put that clip into the video that i brought out that is not a fact that is an estimate a unesco estimate um and and actually in the small print on one of the slides that he has on the screen you can see the word estimate but he never

expresses that word out loud, so those who are listening to the podcast rather than watching it wouldn't even have a chance to see that. And I, sitting there in the studio, didn't see that word estimate either. And I didn't know that. I thought, my God, Flint has a point here.

If there have been three million shipwrecks found and mapped, if that's the case, the absence of any shipwreck from a lost civilization of the Ice Age is a problem. But then I discovered that it isn't 3 million shipwrecks that have been mapped. It's much, much less than that. And maybe it's 250,000, still a large number, but most of them from the last thousand years.

And unfortunately, what Flint didn't go into, and perhaps he should have shared with the audience, and again, I go into this in the video, is that there is... indisputable evidence that human beings were seafarers as much as 50 or 60,000 years ago.

The peopling of Australia involved a relatively short 90 kilometers, 100 kilometer ocean voyage but nevertheless it was an ocean voyage and it must have involved a large enough people, a large enough number of people to create a permanent population that wouldn't go extinct. The settlement of Cyprus is the same thing. It was always an island even during the Ice Age.

And no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Australia and no ships have survived that speak to the settlement of Cyprus either. But that doesn't mean that that thing didn't happen.

I don't know what's on the other side of that water. You can't see 90 kilometers. Humans did it. Yeah. And again, it's that urge to explore. And I suggest that it probably began with a few pioneers who made the journey there and back. They ventured into the water. They definitely had boats. And lo and behold, after a two or three day voyage, they ended up on a coastline. You're an individual.

You've got my relatively straightforward island hopping where each island is within sight of each other as far as Timor. And when you get to Timor, suddenly you can't island hop anymore. There's an expansive ocean that you can't see across. But that urge to explore, that curiosity that is central to the human condition.

would undoubtedly have led some adventurous individuals to want to find out more and even be willing to risk their lives. And that first reconnoitering of what lay beyond that strait would have undoubtedly been undertaken by very few individuals, not enough to create a permanent population in Australia. But when they came back with the good news that there's a whole land there,

That's the land that geographers call Sahul, which just as Sunda was the Ice Age, Indonesian and Malaysian peninsula all joined together into one landmass. So Sahul was New Guinea joined to Australia. So they would have made landfall in New Guinea. And then they think, well, here is this vast, open, incredible land. We need to bring more people here. And that would have involved larger craft.

You need to bring people with resources and you need to bring enough of them. both men and women, in order to produce a population that will not rapidly become extinct. And it's the same in Cyprus. There, the detailed work that's been done suggests very strongly that we're looking at planned migrations of groups of people in excess of a thousand at a time, bringing animals with them.

And this certainly would have involved multiple boats and boats of a significant size.

None whatsoever. The oldest boat that's ever been found in the world is the Dokos shipwreck off Greece, which is around 5,000 years old, if I recall correctly. So everything that makes a boat is lost to time. Yes, boats can be preserved under certain circumstances. There's a wreck at the bottom of the Black Sea, almost two miles deep. I didn't know the Black Sea was that deep.

And there's no oxygen down there. That is more than 2,000 years old and is still in pretty much perfect condition. But in other conditions... the structure of the ship evaporates. Sometimes what you're left with is the cargo of the ship, and you could say there was a ship that sank here, but the ship itself has gone.

The fact is we know that our ancestors were seafarers as much as 50,000 years ago, and no ship has survived to testify to that, yet we accept that they were.

It's not impossible. I think it's quite unlikely, given the very thin survival of ships the further back you go in time, with the oldest, as I say, being about 6,000 years old now. And then the other thing to take into account is the Younger Dryas event itself and the cataclysmic circumstances of that event. And

the roiling of the seas that would have taken place then how much would have survived in a, in a, in a boat accident at that time would have survived for thousands of years afterwards. I, I, I'm not sure, but I, I don't give up hope it's possible.