Transcript: Interview
Book: Fingerprints of the Gods r
Host: Ron Way
Author: Graham Hancock
Part II
Ron:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Author Talk for part two of our interview with Graham Hancock. What an amazing interview we had last week, so I want you to tune in this week as we continue where we left off. If you haven't heard Part One, start there, because this is actually Part Two. We're talking about a period of time 11,600 years ago when we had an extinction level event, and we talked about all of that during the first interview. We're about to get to humanity now, because we have broached the subject of the massive flooding, and that's where we're going to start right now for Part Two. Graham, welcome back to Author Talk.
Graham:
Thank you. Good to be back with you, Ron.
Ron:
Now, when we last left, we had a gigantic flood from an asteroid that hit us.
Graham:
There were two significant episodes of impacts from fragments of a single giant comet, which broke up into multiple fragments. The first set of impact was 12,800 years ago, and the second set of impact of 11,600 years ago. The second set of impacts, in particular, was associated with very large scale, rapid sea level rise, which in a sense, in a very real sense, was a global flood. All of the world's oceans are interlinked. You can't dump millions of square miles of ice water into any single ocean without affecting the level of all the world's oceans, and we know that at the end of the last ice age—and 11,600 years ago really is taken as the end of the last ice age—we know that sea levels rose 400 feet. Million square kilometers of land, put that in miles, 10 million square miles of land, roughly the equivalent in size to Europe and China added together, was submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. These are facts, and it sounds like a global flood to me.
Ron:
Absolutely, and I would assume also that the rivers were flooding, and everything was flooding.
Graham:
My goodness, the vast volumes of water going down the great river systems. Mississippi Valley, for example, as a result of that flooding, just extraordinary, and then dumping huge amounts of debris out into the ocean. Really it's almost impossible to imagine what the world went through at that time, and it's not surprising that it is remembered in the myths and traditions of just about every culture on earth.
Ron:
Absolutely, and it's an amazing thing. I'll just tell you that I've always considered Noah's Ark a myth, because it gets all wrapped up, all those animals in the ark, and so you get slopped into that. I didn't think that it really was a geological event, but you say it is.
Graham:
Yes, I'm saying that we have the conditions that can rightly be described as a global flood at the end of the last ice age, and it gets particularly interesting in that episode between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. 11,600 years ago is the date for what geologists call "Melt Water Pulse 1B", which is a very rapid increase of global sea level and Melt Water Pulse 1B coincides exactly with the date that Plato gives us for the destruction and submergence of the lost civilization of Atlantis. He tells us that Atlantis went under the ocean 9,000 years before the time of the Greek lawmaker, Solon. Solon lived in 600 BC, so Plato's telling us that Atlantis was submerged in 9,600 BC.
Which is 11,600 years ago, which is Melt Water Pulse 1B, so again and again what we find is that these so-called myths are actually real memories of real events, and as our own science advances, we can begin to connect them to what we now know happened in the past.
Ron:
Tell us. Many people don't understand or don't realize that these memories are in many, many civilizations. You mentioned several in your book.
Graham:
Oh, yes. They're all over the world. There's more than 2,000 accounts of the global flood, and for a hundred years now, archaeologists have been trying to dismiss them and say that they were all independently invented locally. Some poor, primitive, local people saw river flooding its banks and decided that it was a global flood. No, absolute nonsense. This is just one of the many nonsenses that archeologists speak. We have testimony from our ancestors from all around the world that a global flood did occur, and that it changed the world utterly. That nothing was ever the same again after it, and that testimony shouldn't be dismissed as mere mythology, because the myths are actually the only memories our species have of the time before this cataclysm. The cataclysm was so severe, that it effectively wiped our memory bank. For as Plato put it, it forced us to begin again like children with no memory of what went before.
Ron:
When we read about the flood and Noah's Ark in the Bible, that really comes from an older or Babylonian myth?
Graham:
Yeah, we know there's a background to it. The Babylonian flood tradition, which archaeologically is older than the biblical one. The biblical one is, to some extent, derived from it, takes us back much further, certainly back as far as 5,000 years to the setting down in writing of the tradition, but the tradition, of course, was an oral tradition, long before that. There's just a vast mass of global testimony on this global flood. Yes, there's a close relationship between the Mesopotamian flood tradition and the biblical flood tradition. What's interesting to me about the biblical flood tradition, actually is that they ... the two-by-two thing that you mentioned, here is almost scientific attempt to make sure that species survive.
Forget about the two-by-two. What is being done here is the preservation of species, and that's a scientific effort that's going on there. I think the notion of survivors of the cataclysm that occurred between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, those survivors going around the world and seeking to restart civilization, it's precisely that that the story of the flood of Noah picks up on.
Ron:
Let me ask you a question. Do you think that Atlantis was a single place or were there communities scattered around the world, because you do talk about evidence of this advanced—and when I say "advanced" I don't mean technological, necessarily, or I guess they could have been.
Graham:
Much more advanced than archeologists give our ancestors credit for, capable of sailing and exploring the world, capable of creating spot-on accurate maps with precise latitudes and longitudes. The scientific culture, perhaps very different from our own, perhaps with different focus from our own, but nonetheless, with scientific ability.
Ron:
Now, do you think that you have found different Atlantis’, and I say that meaning did you find evidence of this earlier civilization around the world, not just a specific place.
Graham:
Yes, it's around the world. Atlantis is not a specific place. Atlantis is, in a way, everywhere, just like modern technological society is everywhere. The same basic motifs are going to appear whether you're in New York or London or Frankfurt or Tokyo. I would say it's the same with Atlantis. I think we're looking at a globally distributed civilization of prehistoric antiquity, which was Maritime in nature, which used the sea, and which had outreach to the predominant population of the world at that time, which was hunter-gatherers. That outreach took place around the shores of the Atlantic, around the shores of the Pacific, around the shores of the Indian Ocean, and there are specific memories in all those places of a former great civilization destroyed in a flood and of its survivors.
Ron:
Tell us about some of the exciting archaeological evidence you're finding of this, and I’d say it, but I can't pronounce it, but it's in the Middle East…
Graham:
Well, you're speaking of Gobekli Tepe.
Ron:
Thank you, but when you see that written, folks, you won’t be able to say it either. [Laughter]
Graham:
Gobekli Tepe is in Turkey. It actually means potbellied hill, and for thousands and thousands of years, that was all this was thought to be. A potbellied-shaped hill, but then in second half of the 1990’s, along comes Professor Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, and he's looking at that hill, and it doesn't seem quite like a natural hill to him, so he does some digging there, and lo and behold, he discovers a gigantic megalithic site. Everybody has heard of Stonehenge in England, so we know what a megalithic site is, but this site in Turkey is 50 times bigger than Stonehenge, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. It goes back guess when? To 11,600 years ago.
Ron:
11,600 ears ago, right. We are right back to when the asteroid hit earth.
Graham:
The second spike of that global cataclysm, and suddenly, around Gobekli Tepe in Southeastern Turkey, we see the first evidence of agriculture. Just at the very moment that we see the first evidence, highly sophisticated, of megalithic architecture, suddenly agriculture appears in that area as well, and archeologists are scrambling to catch up with this. They're saying, "Well, there must have been some specially gifted group of hunter-gatherers there who woke up one morning magically equipped with the ability to move 50 ton megaliths and create a megalithic site. At the same time, they were inspired to create agriculture too."
I think that's a fairy tale. I think what we're looking at, obviously, is a transfer of technology that people who had the ability to work with megalithic architecture and precise astronomical alignments that we see at Gobekli Tepe, people who already knew how to do agriculture, the survivors of the lost civilization settled at Gobekli Tepe and attempted to transfer their skills and knowledge to others around them, and in some ways, Gobekli Tepe is like a Noah's Ark. There are many, many different species of animals, for example, depicted on the megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe. When you stand in the midst of it, you're surrounded by images of animal species.
Ron:
Well, if they did and they started building there after that cataclysm ...
Graham:
Sorry If I could just add ...
Ron:
Oh, yeah, sure.
Graham:
Gobekli Tepe is very close to the mountains of Ararat. It's really not very far way. It's two or three days' walk.
Ron:
Wow, what a coincidence.
Graham:
Yeah.
Ron:
Tell me, then, if they started, or restarted a civilization are the remains of their civilization is so sparse now, I would assume these are just a few remaining from ... Let's call this the Atlantians, if you ...
Graham:
These are the random survivors of the high civilization.
Ron:
Right.
Graham:
They have whatever skills they have in a random selection of survivors.
Ron:
Just like we would today.
Graham:
Just like we would today, and they do what they can to restart it. However, I sometimes wonder every single flood tradition around the world, very much including the tradition of Noah's Ark, implicates mankind in the story. It's not just that the universe got nasty one day. Mankind has done something to bring this upon ourselves. That is the key of every flood tradition, and it's very clear in the Noah story, but it's clear in all the others too. It's clear in the Plato story. Plato's Atlantis, he tells us that the Atlantians were once this beautiful, gentle, loving civilization. They sought to nurture spirit wherever they went. They sought to help others. They were very humble, but as time went by, they became arrogant. They became cruel. They began to impose their powers upon others.
They ceased to wear their prosperity with moderation, and for that, the universe slapped them down. It was their hubris that resulted in their nemesis, and this story is told in all the flood traditions of the world, so I wonder sometimes whether those survivors might not have wished not to rush back to a full-scale technological society again. Maybe they felt that they had done something wrong, that a new system had to emerge. At any rate, that's my thinking on the matter so far.
Ron:
Bridge the gap then, if you wouldn't mind, Graham, between that and Egypt. That sounds like the pyramids were built with megalithic knowledge that nobody else seemed to have at that time, but that's much later. That's much more modern, right? That isn't the link we're looking for to Egypt.
Graham:
What? The pyramids?
Ron:
Yes.
Graham:
What's interesting about the pyramids of Giza—again, you have to look at the complexity of the site—there are aspects of the site at Giza—for example, the Great Sphinx—where we have the characteristic marks of exposure to more than a thousand years of extremely heavy rainfall, and I pay tribute here to the work of John Antony West and Geology Professor Robert Schoch at Boston University, who's shown that the Sphinx couldn't possibly date from 4,500 years ago as Egyptologists say. It must be much older than that, much closer to 12,000 years old, because it's in that Younger Driers episode that you get these heavy rains in Egypt that could have caused the water erosion on the Sphinx.
Ron:
Because it is so great.
Graham:
In front of the sphinx are giant megalithic temples, which were created at the same time as the Sphinx. In fact, the blocks that were cut out to separate the core body of the Sphinx were used in the construction of those temples, and they also, in my view, are much, much older than other structures at Giza. Even the Giza pyramids, I fully accept that the Giza pyramids were completed and substantially constructed during the fourth dynasty. I believe that that was finishing off a much older project and that the three pyramids ... That the platforms of the three pyramids were laid out long before. There's a distinct difference between the lower courses and the upper courses of these pyramids. I think Giza is a very nuanced site. The old knowledge that was brought there 12,000 years ago was still being manifested and brought through into the historical civilization of ancient Egypt, less than 5,000 years ago.
Ron:
Well, if we look at archaeological history, you can see where the pharaohs in a line begin with the very modest pyramids, the Step Pyramid for example, and then they continue in a progression of knowledge of building, larger and larger, but you think that ...
Graham:
No, no, there's not at all a progression of knowledge. Egyptologists have never been able to demonstrate that at all. The Great Pyramid of Giza is supposedly a fourth dynasty construction. It is vastly, vastly superior to pyramids that come before it and to pyramids that come after it. You would have thought that the fifth and sixth dynasty pyramids would incorporate all the skills and knowledge that have manifested just 50 or 60 years before in the Great Pyramid. Not so. The fifth and sixth dynasty pyramids are falling apart, hardly recognizable as pyramids at all, and this leads I and my colleagues in this field to wonder and to ask questions about the story of the Great Pyramid. We don't think that Egyptology is giving us the whole story of the Great Pyramid at all.
Ron:
I'll be darned. Okay, my gosh, you've blown my mind again, and that wasn't even basically the subject we started with, but you can see how fascinating this is. You've got remnants of civilization. They have spread out across the known world, and basically probably because that's where they were scattered when the cataclysm came.
Graham:
Quite likely, they were people at sea. They were already at sea.
Ron:
Yeah, sure, that makes sense, because the sea rise would not affect a boat that's on it.
Graham:
No, it would not.
Ron:
All boats rise with the tide. Do you think that there was a single Atlantian City that was blown up? Perhaps the Island that they talk about that's in the Mediterranean ...
Graham:
I think we should be looking at all of this material again very, very carefully. For example, the Azores in the Mid-Atlantic have often been signaled. There's a likely location for Atlantis. The Azores are very deeply submerged at the moment, but we know that a vast ice mass pressed down upon the North American continent for the best part of 100,000 years. When it did so, it pushed up the other end of the tectonic plates. That's called a “forebulge” in Ice Age science. The forebulge was pushed up. The forebulge off the North American ice cap would have been the Azores, and when the North American ice cap came off, the Azores would have gone down under the ocean, so we should be looking there. We should be following up suggestions that structures have been found on top of the so-called sea mount in the Azores. This should require some really serious investigation.
In Indonesia, which was a vast land mass during the Ice Age, so the islands of Indonesia and the Malaysian peninsula today are only the remnant of a huge continent-sized land mass that was submerged between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, and on the island of Java, we have an incredibly megalithic site recently investigated by Indonesia's leading geologist, and the evidence he's come up with is that this pyramid upon the Island of Java may be more than 20,000 years old, dating back from before the cataclysm. The site of Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, that I've mentioned is another one that cannot be explained by the existing archaeological paradigm. In short, both in terms of our knowledge of past earth cataclysm and our knowledge of previously undiscovered archeology, I would say that the possibility of a lost civilization is stronger now than it ever has been.
Ron:
You mentioned in the book—thank you for mentioning again—the Java dig, it was stopped at the time you went to publication as a ...
Graham:
And it's still stopped. That dig has been stopped since 2014, just at the time that they were pulling up pieces of organic material associated with worked stone, indicating dates in excess of 20,000 years old. Just at that time, all work was stopped on the site and it's never resumed.
Ron:
Because of political reasons?
Graham:
I really don't know why, and the lead excavator, the geologist that went to judge, who's conducted the excavations, he doesn't know why either, but he's hoping with sufficient lobbying to get the project restarted during 2017.
Ron:
Isn't it amazing how much science—new science—has backed you and the asteroid scientists up, and it's like the entrenched scientific world, they don't want to rewrite their textbooks, too much work.
Graham:
Yes, there's tremendous resistance to any kind of intellectual change in our society.
Ron:
Isn't it amazing that in what we call “science” they're not open to new, truly revolutionary science?
Graham:
It's very odd. It's a very odd thing. I don't understand it myself. Most scientists in the process of their education read a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhl, in which they learn that knowledge progresses in a revolutionary way in science. Not in slow increments, but rather paradigms are stuck to long after they're discredited, and then a revolutionary new idea comes along, which changes everything, but yet science is very opposed to revolutionary new ideas.
Ron:
Oh my gosh, folks, the time has flown by again. Graham, holy cow, we're completely out of time. What a fascinating adventure you take people on with your new book called, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization … and everyone has to get it. You can click on our website or go straight to Amazon, if you wish. Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization.
Thank you, Graham, for appearing on Author Talk twice now. I hope that you'll come back again soon when you write your next book.
Graham:
My pleasure. It's been a delight to talk to you.
Ron:
Folks, make sure that you go to the AuthorTalk website and fill out your name and email on the pop-up screen that appears. That way, we can send you a quick notice every time we post another fascinating interview. And, I want to mention one more thing, again, if you are listening to this interview and you want to hear more of Graham, please tune in to hear him being interviewed on the Joe Rogan Show, the November 15th. Show. Mark your calendars. I also want to mention that the Comet Group that Graham mentions so many times in his book has launched their Crowd Funding appeal via Crowd Funding to raise funds to continue their research into the exciting field of discovery.
Check out the Author Talk website there again, and you'll see the details. I understand that there'll even be a live feed on some of these archeological digs so that you can really be a part of the research, and feel like you're a part of everything going on. It's very exciting times, folks. Check it out.
Graham, one last time, I want to thank you for taking your time today. You're an amazing author, as seven million of your fans will attest. Thank you, Graham.
Graham:
Thank you, Ron. It's been a joy to talk to you.
Ron:
Ladies and gentleman, thank you for joining us here on Author Talk. Until next week, when we begin a new adventure together, I remain your host, Ron Way, faithfully yours.
Book: Fingerprints of the Gods r
Host: Ron Way
Author: Graham Hancock
Part II
Ron:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Author Talk for part two of our interview with Graham Hancock. What an amazing interview we had last week, so I want you to tune in this week as we continue where we left off. If you haven't heard Part One, start there, because this is actually Part Two. We're talking about a period of time 11,600 years ago when we had an extinction level event, and we talked about all of that during the first interview. We're about to get to humanity now, because we have broached the subject of the massive flooding, and that's where we're going to start right now for Part Two. Graham, welcome back to Author Talk.
Graham:
Thank you. Good to be back with you, Ron.
Ron:
Now, when we last left, we had a gigantic flood from an asteroid that hit us.
Graham:
There were two significant episodes of impacts from fragments of a single giant comet, which broke up into multiple fragments. The first set of impact was 12,800 years ago, and the second set of impact of 11,600 years ago. The second set of impacts, in particular, was associated with very large scale, rapid sea level rise, which in a sense, in a very real sense, was a global flood. All of the world's oceans are interlinked. You can't dump millions of square miles of ice water into any single ocean without affecting the level of all the world's oceans, and we know that at the end of the last ice age—and 11,600 years ago really is taken as the end of the last ice age—we know that sea levels rose 400 feet. Million square kilometers of land, put that in miles, 10 million square miles of land, roughly the equivalent in size to Europe and China added together, was submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. These are facts, and it sounds like a global flood to me.
Ron:
Absolutely, and I would assume also that the rivers were flooding, and everything was flooding.
Graham:
My goodness, the vast volumes of water going down the great river systems. Mississippi Valley, for example, as a result of that flooding, just extraordinary, and then dumping huge amounts of debris out into the ocean. Really it's almost impossible to imagine what the world went through at that time, and it's not surprising that it is remembered in the myths and traditions of just about every culture on earth.
Ron:
Absolutely, and it's an amazing thing. I'll just tell you that I've always considered Noah's Ark a myth, because it gets all wrapped up, all those animals in the ark, and so you get slopped into that. I didn't think that it really was a geological event, but you say it is.
Graham:
Yes, I'm saying that we have the conditions that can rightly be described as a global flood at the end of the last ice age, and it gets particularly interesting in that episode between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. 11,600 years ago is the date for what geologists call "Melt Water Pulse 1B", which is a very rapid increase of global sea level and Melt Water Pulse 1B coincides exactly with the date that Plato gives us for the destruction and submergence of the lost civilization of Atlantis. He tells us that Atlantis went under the ocean 9,000 years before the time of the Greek lawmaker, Solon. Solon lived in 600 BC, so Plato's telling us that Atlantis was submerged in 9,600 BC.
Which is 11,600 years ago, which is Melt Water Pulse 1B, so again and again what we find is that these so-called myths are actually real memories of real events, and as our own science advances, we can begin to connect them to what we now know happened in the past.
Ron:
Tell us. Many people don't understand or don't realize that these memories are in many, many civilizations. You mentioned several in your book.
Graham:
Oh, yes. They're all over the world. There's more than 2,000 accounts of the global flood, and for a hundred years now, archaeologists have been trying to dismiss them and say that they were all independently invented locally. Some poor, primitive, local people saw river flooding its banks and decided that it was a global flood. No, absolute nonsense. This is just one of the many nonsenses that archeologists speak. We have testimony from our ancestors from all around the world that a global flood did occur, and that it changed the world utterly. That nothing was ever the same again after it, and that testimony shouldn't be dismissed as mere mythology, because the myths are actually the only memories our species have of the time before this cataclysm. The cataclysm was so severe, that it effectively wiped our memory bank. For as Plato put it, it forced us to begin again like children with no memory of what went before.
Ron:
When we read about the flood and Noah's Ark in the Bible, that really comes from an older or Babylonian myth?
Graham:
Yeah, we know there's a background to it. The Babylonian flood tradition, which archaeologically is older than the biblical one. The biblical one is, to some extent, derived from it, takes us back much further, certainly back as far as 5,000 years to the setting down in writing of the tradition, but the tradition, of course, was an oral tradition, long before that. There's just a vast mass of global testimony on this global flood. Yes, there's a close relationship between the Mesopotamian flood tradition and the biblical flood tradition. What's interesting to me about the biblical flood tradition, actually is that they ... the two-by-two thing that you mentioned, here is almost scientific attempt to make sure that species survive.
Forget about the two-by-two. What is being done here is the preservation of species, and that's a scientific effort that's going on there. I think the notion of survivors of the cataclysm that occurred between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, those survivors going around the world and seeking to restart civilization, it's precisely that that the story of the flood of Noah picks up on.
Ron:
Let me ask you a question. Do you think that Atlantis was a single place or were there communities scattered around the world, because you do talk about evidence of this advanced—and when I say "advanced" I don't mean technological, necessarily, or I guess they could have been.
Graham:
Much more advanced than archeologists give our ancestors credit for, capable of sailing and exploring the world, capable of creating spot-on accurate maps with precise latitudes and longitudes. The scientific culture, perhaps very different from our own, perhaps with different focus from our own, but nonetheless, with scientific ability.
Ron:
Now, do you think that you have found different Atlantis’, and I say that meaning did you find evidence of this earlier civilization around the world, not just a specific place.
Graham:
Yes, it's around the world. Atlantis is not a specific place. Atlantis is, in a way, everywhere, just like modern technological society is everywhere. The same basic motifs are going to appear whether you're in New York or London or Frankfurt or Tokyo. I would say it's the same with Atlantis. I think we're looking at a globally distributed civilization of prehistoric antiquity, which was Maritime in nature, which used the sea, and which had outreach to the predominant population of the world at that time, which was hunter-gatherers. That outreach took place around the shores of the Atlantic, around the shores of the Pacific, around the shores of the Indian Ocean, and there are specific memories in all those places of a former great civilization destroyed in a flood and of its survivors.
Ron:
Tell us about some of the exciting archaeological evidence you're finding of this, and I’d say it, but I can't pronounce it, but it's in the Middle East…
Graham:
Well, you're speaking of Gobekli Tepe.
Ron:
Thank you, but when you see that written, folks, you won’t be able to say it either. [Laughter]
Graham:
Gobekli Tepe is in Turkey. It actually means potbellied hill, and for thousands and thousands of years, that was all this was thought to be. A potbellied-shaped hill, but then in second half of the 1990’s, along comes Professor Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, and he's looking at that hill, and it doesn't seem quite like a natural hill to him, so he does some digging there, and lo and behold, he discovers a gigantic megalithic site. Everybody has heard of Stonehenge in England, so we know what a megalithic site is, but this site in Turkey is 50 times bigger than Stonehenge, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. It goes back guess when? To 11,600 years ago.
Ron:
11,600 ears ago, right. We are right back to when the asteroid hit earth.
Graham:
The second spike of that global cataclysm, and suddenly, around Gobekli Tepe in Southeastern Turkey, we see the first evidence of agriculture. Just at the very moment that we see the first evidence, highly sophisticated, of megalithic architecture, suddenly agriculture appears in that area as well, and archeologists are scrambling to catch up with this. They're saying, "Well, there must have been some specially gifted group of hunter-gatherers there who woke up one morning magically equipped with the ability to move 50 ton megaliths and create a megalithic site. At the same time, they were inspired to create agriculture too."
I think that's a fairy tale. I think what we're looking at, obviously, is a transfer of technology that people who had the ability to work with megalithic architecture and precise astronomical alignments that we see at Gobekli Tepe, people who already knew how to do agriculture, the survivors of the lost civilization settled at Gobekli Tepe and attempted to transfer their skills and knowledge to others around them, and in some ways, Gobekli Tepe is like a Noah's Ark. There are many, many different species of animals, for example, depicted on the megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe. When you stand in the midst of it, you're surrounded by images of animal species.
Ron:
Well, if they did and they started building there after that cataclysm ...
Graham:
Sorry If I could just add ...
Ron:
Oh, yeah, sure.
Graham:
Gobekli Tepe is very close to the mountains of Ararat. It's really not very far way. It's two or three days' walk.
Ron:
Wow, what a coincidence.
Graham:
Yeah.
Ron:
Tell me, then, if they started, or restarted a civilization are the remains of their civilization is so sparse now, I would assume these are just a few remaining from ... Let's call this the Atlantians, if you ...
Graham:
These are the random survivors of the high civilization.
Ron:
Right.
Graham:
They have whatever skills they have in a random selection of survivors.
Ron:
Just like we would today.
Graham:
Just like we would today, and they do what they can to restart it. However, I sometimes wonder every single flood tradition around the world, very much including the tradition of Noah's Ark, implicates mankind in the story. It's not just that the universe got nasty one day. Mankind has done something to bring this upon ourselves. That is the key of every flood tradition, and it's very clear in the Noah story, but it's clear in all the others too. It's clear in the Plato story. Plato's Atlantis, he tells us that the Atlantians were once this beautiful, gentle, loving civilization. They sought to nurture spirit wherever they went. They sought to help others. They were very humble, but as time went by, they became arrogant. They became cruel. They began to impose their powers upon others.
They ceased to wear their prosperity with moderation, and for that, the universe slapped them down. It was their hubris that resulted in their nemesis, and this story is told in all the flood traditions of the world, so I wonder sometimes whether those survivors might not have wished not to rush back to a full-scale technological society again. Maybe they felt that they had done something wrong, that a new system had to emerge. At any rate, that's my thinking on the matter so far.
Ron:
Bridge the gap then, if you wouldn't mind, Graham, between that and Egypt. That sounds like the pyramids were built with megalithic knowledge that nobody else seemed to have at that time, but that's much later. That's much more modern, right? That isn't the link we're looking for to Egypt.
Graham:
What? The pyramids?
Ron:
Yes.
Graham:
What's interesting about the pyramids of Giza—again, you have to look at the complexity of the site—there are aspects of the site at Giza—for example, the Great Sphinx—where we have the characteristic marks of exposure to more than a thousand years of extremely heavy rainfall, and I pay tribute here to the work of John Antony West and Geology Professor Robert Schoch at Boston University, who's shown that the Sphinx couldn't possibly date from 4,500 years ago as Egyptologists say. It must be much older than that, much closer to 12,000 years old, because it's in that Younger Driers episode that you get these heavy rains in Egypt that could have caused the water erosion on the Sphinx.
Ron:
Because it is so great.
Graham:
In front of the sphinx are giant megalithic temples, which were created at the same time as the Sphinx. In fact, the blocks that were cut out to separate the core body of the Sphinx were used in the construction of those temples, and they also, in my view, are much, much older than other structures at Giza. Even the Giza pyramids, I fully accept that the Giza pyramids were completed and substantially constructed during the fourth dynasty. I believe that that was finishing off a much older project and that the three pyramids ... That the platforms of the three pyramids were laid out long before. There's a distinct difference between the lower courses and the upper courses of these pyramids. I think Giza is a very nuanced site. The old knowledge that was brought there 12,000 years ago was still being manifested and brought through into the historical civilization of ancient Egypt, less than 5,000 years ago.
Ron:
Well, if we look at archaeological history, you can see where the pharaohs in a line begin with the very modest pyramids, the Step Pyramid for example, and then they continue in a progression of knowledge of building, larger and larger, but you think that ...
Graham:
No, no, there's not at all a progression of knowledge. Egyptologists have never been able to demonstrate that at all. The Great Pyramid of Giza is supposedly a fourth dynasty construction. It is vastly, vastly superior to pyramids that come before it and to pyramids that come after it. You would have thought that the fifth and sixth dynasty pyramids would incorporate all the skills and knowledge that have manifested just 50 or 60 years before in the Great Pyramid. Not so. The fifth and sixth dynasty pyramids are falling apart, hardly recognizable as pyramids at all, and this leads I and my colleagues in this field to wonder and to ask questions about the story of the Great Pyramid. We don't think that Egyptology is giving us the whole story of the Great Pyramid at all.
Ron:
I'll be darned. Okay, my gosh, you've blown my mind again, and that wasn't even basically the subject we started with, but you can see how fascinating this is. You've got remnants of civilization. They have spread out across the known world, and basically probably because that's where they were scattered when the cataclysm came.
Graham:
Quite likely, they were people at sea. They were already at sea.
Ron:
Yeah, sure, that makes sense, because the sea rise would not affect a boat that's on it.
Graham:
No, it would not.
Ron:
All boats rise with the tide. Do you think that there was a single Atlantian City that was blown up? Perhaps the Island that they talk about that's in the Mediterranean ...
Graham:
I think we should be looking at all of this material again very, very carefully. For example, the Azores in the Mid-Atlantic have often been signaled. There's a likely location for Atlantis. The Azores are very deeply submerged at the moment, but we know that a vast ice mass pressed down upon the North American continent for the best part of 100,000 years. When it did so, it pushed up the other end of the tectonic plates. That's called a “forebulge” in Ice Age science. The forebulge was pushed up. The forebulge off the North American ice cap would have been the Azores, and when the North American ice cap came off, the Azores would have gone down under the ocean, so we should be looking there. We should be following up suggestions that structures have been found on top of the so-called sea mount in the Azores. This should require some really serious investigation.
In Indonesia, which was a vast land mass during the Ice Age, so the islands of Indonesia and the Malaysian peninsula today are only the remnant of a huge continent-sized land mass that was submerged between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, and on the island of Java, we have an incredibly megalithic site recently investigated by Indonesia's leading geologist, and the evidence he's come up with is that this pyramid upon the Island of Java may be more than 20,000 years old, dating back from before the cataclysm. The site of Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, that I've mentioned is another one that cannot be explained by the existing archaeological paradigm. In short, both in terms of our knowledge of past earth cataclysm and our knowledge of previously undiscovered archeology, I would say that the possibility of a lost civilization is stronger now than it ever has been.
Ron:
You mentioned in the book—thank you for mentioning again—the Java dig, it was stopped at the time you went to publication as a ...
Graham:
And it's still stopped. That dig has been stopped since 2014, just at the time that they were pulling up pieces of organic material associated with worked stone, indicating dates in excess of 20,000 years old. Just at that time, all work was stopped on the site and it's never resumed.
Ron:
Because of political reasons?
Graham:
I really don't know why, and the lead excavator, the geologist that went to judge, who's conducted the excavations, he doesn't know why either, but he's hoping with sufficient lobbying to get the project restarted during 2017.
Ron:
Isn't it amazing how much science—new science—has backed you and the asteroid scientists up, and it's like the entrenched scientific world, they don't want to rewrite their textbooks, too much work.
Graham:
Yes, there's tremendous resistance to any kind of intellectual change in our society.
Ron:
Isn't it amazing that in what we call “science” they're not open to new, truly revolutionary science?
Graham:
It's very odd. It's a very odd thing. I don't understand it myself. Most scientists in the process of their education read a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhl, in which they learn that knowledge progresses in a revolutionary way in science. Not in slow increments, but rather paradigms are stuck to long after they're discredited, and then a revolutionary new idea comes along, which changes everything, but yet science is very opposed to revolutionary new ideas.
Ron:
Oh my gosh, folks, the time has flown by again. Graham, holy cow, we're completely out of time. What a fascinating adventure you take people on with your new book called, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization … and everyone has to get it. You can click on our website or go straight to Amazon, if you wish. Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization.
Thank you, Graham, for appearing on Author Talk twice now. I hope that you'll come back again soon when you write your next book.
Graham:
My pleasure. It's been a delight to talk to you.
Ron:
Folks, make sure that you go to the AuthorTalk website and fill out your name and email on the pop-up screen that appears. That way, we can send you a quick notice every time we post another fascinating interview. And, I want to mention one more thing, again, if you are listening to this interview and you want to hear more of Graham, please tune in to hear him being interviewed on the Joe Rogan Show, the November 15th. Show. Mark your calendars. I also want to mention that the Comet Group that Graham mentions so many times in his book has launched their Crowd Funding appeal via Crowd Funding to raise funds to continue their research into the exciting field of discovery.
Check out the Author Talk website there again, and you'll see the details. I understand that there'll even be a live feed on some of these archeological digs so that you can really be a part of the research, and feel like you're a part of everything going on. It's very exciting times, folks. Check it out.
Graham, one last time, I want to thank you for taking your time today. You're an amazing author, as seven million of your fans will attest. Thank you, Graham.
Graham:
Thank you, Ron. It's been a joy to talk to you.
Ron:
Ladies and gentleman, thank you for joining us here on Author Talk. Until next week, when we begin a new adventure together, I remain your host, Ron Way, faithfully yours.
