YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Hancock

lines on the record: 175
first: 2024-10-16
most recent: 2024-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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, you know, 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a very good knowledge of geometry as well, because these are geometrical structures. And some of them even seem to incorporate geometrical games, almost of the kind, like squaring the circle. 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arrogant way, we archaeologists are the only people who are really qualified to speak about the past. And anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship, and I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart. Very much the case with archaeologist Monty Parsonen from the University of Helsinki and with geographer Alsea Ranzi, Brazilian geographer very, very senior figure who I worked with 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Session of the Star Sirius over a period of time, archaeologists aren't interested in any of that. So I value and respect archaeology. I think it's an incredible tool for investigating our past. But I wish archaeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it and a slightly opener perspective. And also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds. It's as though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as quote unquote dangerous, because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public and think the general public are just going to accept that much. Actually, by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today and behaving in a snobbish way.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very interesting. It's a very important discipline, and I've said many times before publicly I couldn't do any of my work without the work that our killists do. I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don't study what archaeologists study, but nevertheless the data that archaeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do. But when I look at the great sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the pharaoh Kafre, despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription that ascribes it to Kafre, and in fact the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of Khufu, I am not looking at what Egyptologists study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Kafre connection at Gobekli Tepe. I'm not really looking at what archaeologists look at. I'm looking at the alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most archaeologists don't want to talk to me at all. They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudoarchaeologist or a purveyor of pseudoarchaeological theories. They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there, but they actually don't want to sit down and confront me. At least Flint was willing to do that. And I'm grateful to him for that. And I think in that sense, it is an important encounter between people with, let's say, an alternative view of history and those with the very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us. And he's also a very determined character. He doesn't give up. So all of those things about him, I admire and respect. I think he fought dirty during the debate, and I've said exactly why in this video that I now have up on YouTube.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is my family. And these are kids who are going to grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that grandpa was some kind of racist. You know, this is a personal issue for me, and I'm afraid I carried that personal anger into the debate, and it made me less effective than I should have been. But ultimately, I do want to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He's got a very sharp mind. He's a very clever man, and he's very fast on his feet. And I recognize that. I was definitely up against a superior debater in that debate. I'm not sure that I have those debating skills, and I certainly didn't have them on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else, which is...”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented, and I felt that I, as a human being, were being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful. My wife and I have six children between us, and we have nine grandchildren. And of those nine grandchildren, seven are of mixed race.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a white supremacist. And that really got under my skin, and it really upset me. And I felt angry about it. And I felt that I was there to defend ancient apocalypse season one, whereas in fact what I was there to do was to listen to a series of lectures where an archaeologist tells me what archaeologists have found and that somehow I'm to deduce that from what they have found they're not going to find anything else. Least not anything to do with the lost civilization.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my takeaway from that debate is that I should have been better prepared and I should have been less angry. I have to say that Flint had really disturbed me with this constant snide not quite exact references to racism and white supremacism in my work. I detest such things and to have those labels stuck on me. He's always avoided taking direct responsibility, pretty much always avoided. There's one example that I include in the video I've made where he really hasn't successfully avoided it. But in most cases, he's trying to say that I rely on sources that were racist. But that he's not saying that I myself am a racist. But the end result of those statements is that people all around the world came to the conclusion that Graham Hancock is a racist.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. The roiling of the seas that would have taken place then, how much would have survived in a boat accident at that time would have survived for thousands of years afterwards. I'm not sure, but I don't give up hope. It's possible.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, but there's a wreck, 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 is 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. They're 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're an individual. You've got my relatively straightforward island hopping with 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But nevertheless, it was an ocean voyage, and it must have involved a large enough people 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 discover that it isn't three 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 kilometres, 100 kilometre ocean voyage.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Critics 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 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 put that clip into the video that I've brought out. That is not a fact. That is an estimate, a UNESCO estimate. 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”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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 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, 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...”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly Curiosity. 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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had the temerity to suggest 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 shut down.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People maybe maybe that was part of the problem. And human nature being what it is, I noticed that two of my principal critics, John Hoops 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 Hoops had just recently started his YouTube channel. Flint Dibble has had one for quite a while. 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...”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apocalypse season one 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 of 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 like that. Nothing to do with anything that's in the series. 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 by large and read by large numbers of”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's partly territorial. I think that I cannot 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 I found that the attacks on me by archaeologists have increased step by step with the increase of my exposure. I wasn't very interested 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”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Present, the date memorialized on Pillar 43 is 12,800 years ago, the beginning of the Younger Dryness, the beginning of the impact event. And then Giza does the same thing, but in much larger scale, it draws, 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. Hoover Dam has a star map built into it, and that star map is part of the state.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It's interesting that the same date can be deduced from pillar 40. Of course, it's controversial. Martin Sweetman'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 Tepi was built, if that dating of 11,600 years ago proves to be absolutely the oldest date, as it is.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think in a way, that's what Gobekli Tepi is. Gebekli Tepe is a hall of records. You know, it's interesting that just as I've tried to outline, I hope reasonably clearly that the three great pyramids of Giza match Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, just as the Sphinx matches Leo in 10500 BC, 12,500 years ago or so. Pillar 43 in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe contains what a number of researchers, myself included, regard as an astronomical diagram. Martin Sweetman of Edinburgh University has brought forward the best work in this field, but it was initially started by a gentleman called Paul Burley, who noticed that one of the figures on pillar 43 is a scorpion, very much like we represent the constellation of Scorpio today, and that above it is a vulture with outstretched wings, which is”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some kind of archive, some kind of hall of records. There's both mystical associations with the Hall of Records at Giza from people like the Edgar Casey Organization. There's also ancient Egyptian traditions which suggest that something was concealed beneath the Sphinx. This is not an idea that is alien to ancient Egypt. It's quite present in ancient Egypt. So far, as far as I know, nobody has dug down beneath the Sphinx. And of course, there's very good reasons for that. You don't want to damage the place too much. But let's call it.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, very tiny percent, and even a tiny percent of every archaeological site has been studied by archaeologists too. Typically, 1 to 5% of any archaeological site is excavated.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And only when we come to a global cataclysm does it become essential to have outreach and actually to take refuge amongst those hunter-forager populations. That is the hypothesis that I'm putting forward. I'm not claiming that it's a fact. But for me, it helps to explain the evidence.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And because I think largely from those ancient maps that it was a navigating seafaring civilization, I suspect that it wasn't only in one place. It was probably in a number of places. And then I can only speculate. Maybe there was... There was a cultural value where it was felt that it was not appropriate to interfere with the lives of hunter foragers at that time. Maybe it was felt that they should keep their distance from them. Just as even today, there is a feeling that we shouldn't be interfering too much with the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Although interestingly, some of those tribes are now using cell phones. That possibility may have been there in the past.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the reason that I'm talking about the gaps is I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based. All I'm seeing are clues and mysteries and puzzles that intrigue me and which suggest to me that something is missing from our past. And I'm not inclined to look for that missing something in, for example, Northern Europe, because Northern Europe was not a very nice place to live during the ice age. I mean, nobody's smart would build a civilization in Northern Europe 12,000 years ago. It was a hideous, frozen wasteland. The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. And that, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. And of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well. All of these places, I think, are candidates for quote-unquote my lost civilization.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Amazon rainforest is another example of this. I think the Sahara is about 9 million square kilometers. The Amazon that's left under dense canopy rainforest is about 5 million square kilometers, maybe closer to six. And then you have the continental shelves that were submerged by sea level rise at the end of the ice age. Now, it's well established that sea level rise by 400 feet, but it didn't rise by 400 feet overnight. It came in drips and drabs. There were periods of very rapid, quite significant sea level rise, and there were periods when the sea level was rising much more slowly. So that 400 foot sea level rise is spread out over a period of about 10,000 years, but there are episodes within it, like Melt Water Pulse 1B, like Meltwater Pulse 1A when the flooding was really immense.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is where I'm often accused of presenting a God of the Gaps argument, and I think there was a lost civilization because there's lots of the earth that archaeologists have never looked at. Of course, I'm not thinking that. These are very special gaps that I'm interested in. And I'm interested in them because of all the curiosities and the puzzlement that I've expressed to you before. It's not just because there are gaps in the archaeological record. It's because those gaps involve places that were very interesting places to live during the ice age. specifically include the Sahara Desert, which was not a desert during the Ice Age and went through this warm, wet period when it was very, very fertile. Certainly some archaeology has been done in the Sahara, but it's fractional. It's tiny. And I think if we want to get into the origins, the true origins of ancient Egyptian civilization, of the peoples of ancient Egypt, we need to be looking in the Sahara for that.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And finally, it bursts into full form in the fourth dynasty in ancient Egypt. And, you know, the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn't be absurd. We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC. And knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for eight.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Giza, may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that they are referred to in the Edfu building text as seven sages, because that repeats again and again. It's also in Mesopotamia, it's seven sages, seven Abkhalu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy. It's found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter foragers who lived at Giza at that time and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter foragers. But it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time. And that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods, the souls of Pey and Neken are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the younger Dryas cataclysm.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zeptepe, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when the gods walked the earth. This is when seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt. And that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists by the ancient Egyptians themselves. There are king lists that go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists, but nevertheless it's interesting that there's that reference to remote time. What you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies, the followers of Horus are one of those.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because they're only three feet five inches high. You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu. But after cutting out that 300-foot-long, 26 degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there. And they built what's now known as the Queen's Chamber as his burial chamber. But then they decided that wouldn't do either. So they then built the king's chamber. And that's where the pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Caliph Mahmun didn't find anything in the great pyramid at all.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's clear that what he's talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He's not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid. He's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. During the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure. And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is a one hundred feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You've got to go down a 26 degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet. It's 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you're going to walk a distance of about not walk, you're going to ape walk. You're almost going to have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to go”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allegedly found, well, he claims he found the graffiti, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang, naming the pharaoh Kufu. And it's true, I've been in that chamber, and there is the cartouche of Khufu there, quite recognizable. But the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the old kingdom or whether how Azz actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu. Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jafirai, where on the Red Sea a diary, the diary of an individual called Mera was found, and he talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Above the king's chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the king's chamber of the weight of the monument. But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down where more weight was involved, you have the Queen's Chamber and there are no such relieving chambers above that. In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vise, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That goes up. When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in, slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid. You go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor, and it's above the so-called Queen's Chamber, you go up the Grand Gallery, you're eventually going to come to what is known as the King's Chamber, in which there is a sarcophagus. And that sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway. It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus already in place.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing, plus it's very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it. You know, in the 9th century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place, but there was an Arab caliph, Khalif al-Mamun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the north face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was. But he figured, if there's an entrance to this thing, it's going to be in the north face somewhere. So he put together a team of workers and they went in with sledgehammers and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. And they cut their way into the great pyramid for a distance of maybe 100 feet. And then the hammering that they did dislodged something. They heard a little bit further away something big falling. And they realized there was a cavity there and they started heading in that direction. And then they joined the internal passageway of the great pyramid, the descending and the ascending corridors.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is according to the Orthodox chronology. And then suddenly once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt, and the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place. Whereas the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy. Basic statistics, it's a six million ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? And the timeline that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid, is the pyramid of the pharaoh Zoser, the steppe pyramid at Sakara about a hundred years or so before the Giza pyramids are built. And then we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to single pharaohs, Sneferu. who built supposedly the pyramid at Maidum and the two pyramids at Dashur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid. And then within that same 100-year span, we have the Giza pyramids being built.”
2024-10-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source