Graham Hancock

um who i worked with in in the amazon for season two of ancient apocalypse looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the amazon jungle and which more and more are now being found with lidar indeed we found some of them ourselves with lidar while we were there yeah that was an incredible part of the show that i got a chance to preview it's like there's all this earthworks yeah the traces of things built on the ground that probably you can only really

the sky with the sky yeah and and and a very good knowledge of geometry as well because these are geometrical structures and some of them even even seem to incorporate geometrical games almost of the kind like squaring the circle uh it's not quite that but you have a lovely square earthwork with a lovely circle earthwork right in the middle of it Whatever else they were, they were geometers.

They were not just builders of fantastically huge earthworks that nobody expected in the Amazon, not just builders of cities that we now know existed in the Amazon, but that they were astronomers and mathematicians as well.

That's what I love about the past is the mystery that's there. And that's another thing that I regret about some archaeologists is that their mission seems to be to drain all mystery out of the past. to suck it dry like some kind of vampire, sucking the blood out of the past and to reduce it to a series of numbers that appear to be scientific. I think that's most unfortunate.

The past is deeply mysterious. The whole story of life on Earth is deeply mysterious. I mean, we were talking about the timeline of human beings, but if you go back to the formation of the Earth itself, If I've got the figures right, it's about four and a half billion years ago that the Earth supposedly formed.

It was then incredibly hot and inhospitable to life for the next several hundred million years. But it was actually Francis Crick who pointed out something odd, that within 100 million years of the Earth being cool enough to support life, there's bacterial life all over the planet. And Crick wrote a book called Life Itself that was published in 1981.

And he suggested that life had been brought here by a process of panspermia. Now, that's an idea that's around in circulation, that comets may carry bacteria which can seed life on planets. But Crick actually in life itself was talking about directed panspermia. He envisaged... This is Crick, not me. He envisaged an alien civilization far away across the galaxy which faced...

Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in the neighborhood. They were highly advanced. Their first thought might have been, let's get ourselves off the planet and go and populate some other planet. But the distances of interstellar space were so great. So their second thought was, let's preserve our DNA. Let's...

Put bacteria, genetically engineered bacteria into cryogenic chambers and fire them off into the universe in all directions. And bottom line of Crick's theory in life itself is one of those cryogenic containers containing bacterial life from another solar system crashed into the early Earth. And that's why life began so suddenly here on Earth.

The potential for that magic is there. The potential is there. And evolutionary forces will work upon it in different ways in different environments. But the potential is there. Yes, it's something that we would do. If we were facing a complete extinction of life on planet Earth, a major global effort would be made to preserve it somehow.

And that might well include firing off cryogenic chambers into the universe and hoping that some of them would land somewhere hospitable.

Yeah, yeah. I think that Homo sapiens is the tail end of a very long, deep series of mysteries that goes back right to the beginning of life on this planet and probably long before, actually. Because this planet is part of the universe and God knows what else is out there in the universe.

Well, it's interesting. There's no doubt that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for at least 10,000 years, probably more than that. And yet one of the popular views is that anatomically modern humans wiped out the Neanderthals, that we killed them off. But at the same time, we were into breeding with the Neanderthals. In a sense, the Neanderthals are not gone.

They are still within us today. We are part Neanderthal. There's another theory that I've read about. There is some evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals, that there was ritual cannibalism took place amongst Neanderthals, and particularly the eating of human brains. And this can cause kuru. which can kill off whole populations. That's another suggestion of whether Neanderthals died out.

There's lots of possibilities that have been put forward. Maybe we just out-competed them. Maybe anatomically modern humans had some brain connections that they didn't have, even though the Neanderthal brain was bigger than the brain of anatomically modern human beings. As the old saying goes, size isn't everything. Maybe we just had a more compact, more efficient brain.

The fact of the matter is that Neanderthals and Denisovans did not survive the rise of Homo sapiens.

Yes.

The fact that Homo erectus was all over the planet more than a million years ago is testament to that. And I do think that exploration urge is fundamental to humanity. And I would like to say that's what I think I'm doing. I'm exercising my urge to explore the past in my own way, making my own path and defining my own route.

I think that shamanism is the origin of everything of value in humanity. I think it was the earliest form of science. When I spend time with shamans in the Amazon, I observe people who are constantly experimenting with plants in a very scientific way.

They're always trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that in different forms, for example, of the ayahuasca brew to see if it enhances it or makes it different in any way. The invention of curare is a remarkable scientific feat, which is entirely down to shamans in the Amazon. They are the scientists of the hunter-forager state of society. And they were the ancient leaders of human civilization.