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00:00There are many mysteries about the past and how we journeyed from the Stone Age to civilization.
00:11Now there is a controversial new theory.
00:16It claims that historians have ignored evidence of a lost civilization of spectacular sophistication, the key to our past.
00:26If true, this forgotten episode would overturn all our ideas about the origins of civilization.
00:37If I'm right and our whole conception of prehistory is wrong, then the foundations upon which we have built our idea of what our society is are crumbling.
00:56Graham Hancock is determined to rewrite history.
01:12His books about the ancient past have sold in their millions, making him a leading figure in a group of influential and radical authors.
01:24Hancock has a huge following who believe passionately in his controversial views that civilization was invented by a godlike people ignored by orthodox historians.
01:38It's possible we may have lost, from the record, an entire civilization.
01:45And I feel that the evidence for this lost episode in human history is mounting.
01:50According to orthodox archaeology, various Stone Age peoples slowly evolved complex cultures in different parts of the world.
02:0813,000 years ago, groups of hunter-gatherers began to settle and to farm.
02:15Over thousands of years, they separately developed writing, religions, and astronomy.
02:23Eventually, they built the great monuments of the ancient world.
02:33But not everyone was satisfied with the archaeologists' explanation.
02:38For them, there was a tantalizing mystery.
02:41Ancient people in far-flung parts of the world, who seemed to have had no contact with each other, were doing very similar things, building pyramids and studying the stars.
02:57One explanation for these puzzling resemblances was the enduring myth of Atlantis.
03:04The story goes that Atlantis was the home of an ancient civilization of astonishing sophistication.
03:14When it was destroyed in a flood, its survivors travelled the world, bringing their knowledge to less developed peoples.
03:26But the idea of Atlantis as the cradle of all civilization was scorned by historians.
03:33If Atlantis were true, if there was one source, it would be very easy to test archaeologically, and the evidence would be clear.
03:42The fact that it's not clear, the fact that that kind of evidence is not present, is indicative of the fact that the cultures developed independently and were not derived from a single source.
03:56Graham Hancock believes that the idea of Atlantis deserves a second chance.
04:02He does not claim to be a scientist, but he has used science to revive an old idea.
04:09Ten years ago, Hancock set out on a quest.
04:14He came back with a radical vision, one that he hoped would overturn established ideas about the past.
04:23What we're looking at here is an accumulation of discordant evidence and information which doesn't quite fit in with the orthodox picture.
04:34Bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that seem to have been just scattered and thrown all around the world.
04:41And yet the feeling that if we can put those pieces together slowly, methodically, painstakingly, they will show us something that we've forgotten about ourselves.
04:51A great civilization lost in prehistory.
04:54In his research, Hancock became intrigued by the ideas of writers who have linked ancient monuments with the stars as they appeared long ago.
05:07Since ancient times, people have seen shapes in the stars, and they've given these constellations names like Aries the Ram or Orion the Hunter.
05:22Different ancient societies saw different animals and objects in the stars.
05:27The patterns of the constellations don't change, but the precise angle of groups of stars in relation to the horizon alters over time.
05:38It's the result of a process called precession.
05:42The Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours, but the axis has a very slow wobble which lasts 26,000 years.
05:53This is precession, and it slowly changes our view of the stars.
05:59It means that their position in the sky is unique to different moments in time.
06:06Astronomers have calculated the slowly changing position of the stars back in time.
06:16Using an astronomical software program, Hancock made an intriguing discovery.
06:22Some of the wonders of the ancient world appear to mirror the stars at a precise moment in the past, 10,500 BC.
06:33It was a date that was to assume an extraordinary significance for his theory.
06:54Groups of monuments in Egypt, and another large group of monuments far away in Cambodia,
06:58are copying constellations in the sky as they looked, not at the time when those monuments were constructed,
07:04but in a much earlier epoch, the epoch of 10,500 BC.
07:15In other words, if looked at from above, groups of monuments mirrored the unique position of the stars
07:21as they looked at that crucial moment in the past.
07:28For Hancock, the implications were stunning.
07:32We are looking at the vestiges of an ancient worldwide religious system, a sky-ground religion.
07:38The essential thing that it had to do was to build architectural copies of groups of stars in the sky,
07:43and we are looking at the vestiges of that system spread out around the world.
07:52Hancock argued that there had indeed been an ancient, lost super-civilisation destroyed 12,000 years ago.
07:59It's survivors brought civilisation to a stone-age world, and a map of the sky as it looked in 10,500 BC.
08:08It became a blueprint for future generations around the world,
08:12who built monuments to mirror these ancient patterns of stars.
08:16Hancock had revived the old idea of Atlantis with a difference.
08:21I avoid using the word Atlantis in my books,
08:26because most people, when they hear the word Atlantis,
08:30immediately think that they're dealing with the lunatic fringe.
08:33I don't feel that I belong to a lunatic fringe.
08:37When Hancock published his theory in 1995, it caused a sensation.
08:42Five million copies were sold around the world.
08:46The impact of his book rivaled the spectacular success of Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods, published in the 1970s.
08:57Von Däniken explained the birth of civilisation as the result of visits from alien astronauts.
09:06Other books by Hancock followed.
09:08Every one a bestseller.
09:10His success has been crowned by a major television series, which reached 10 million viewers.
09:20Hancock is now part of a growing movement of radical, alternative historians.
09:29These writers have become hugely influential.
09:32No mainstream archaeologist ever reaches such a wide audience.
09:36But for academics, their ideas are heresy.
09:42Certainly one thing that they're doing is selling a lot of books.
09:46There's a long and ignoble history of this sort of thing.
09:51And I view it as merely the latest incarnation of somebody obviously quite fascinated by the past,
09:58a populariser of the past, but someone who doesn't want to adhere to the scientific method.
10:03It is inevitable that this is a threat to orthodox views of the past.
10:13It can't simply be accepted by a historian that the whole burden of his work over many, many years is wrong.
10:21If Hancock and his fellow authors are right, we will have to rewrite history.
10:38The only way to find out if they are, is to test the theory.
10:42It is ancient Egypt that provides most of these writers with their key evidence.
10:57In particular, the pyramids, built 4,500 years ago on the Giza Plateau near modern Cairo.
11:09According to Egyptologists, those pyramids are tombs, and tombs only.
11:21They have no other function whatsoever, and they were built to serve as the tombs of three pharaohs of the 4th dynasty,
11:27Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure.
11:29And that's the end of the story, really, as far as orthodox Egyptology is concerned.
11:35I think there's room for a reconsideration of what the pyramids might be.
11:41And in order to reconsider that information, I think it's very important that we take astronomy into account.
11:47There's always been a mystery about the three Giza pyramids.
11:58Looked at from above, they form a perfect diagonal, but with a third, smaller pyramid that is offset.
12:06Many have been baffled by this curious imperfection.
12:11But now there is a new explanation.
12:17Robert Beauval is a former engineer.
12:28He has developed a controversial theory about the Giza pyramids,
12:32and it has a crucial role in the evolution of Hancock's theories about a lost civilization.
12:38In 1982, on his way to Cairo Airport, Beauval flew over these mysterious wonders of the ancient world.
12:47There was something about the puzzling layout of the pyramids that began to obsess him.
12:56Now, if you can see it, you have two large pyramids, which are of almost equal size, and along a diagonal line.
13:04Whereas the third pyramid, the smaller one, of Menkaure, is offset to the east of this diagonal.
13:11Beauval had an inspiration.
13:14The plan of the three pyramids reminded him of a constellation, Orion the Hunter.
13:20In the middle of the constellation are the three belt stars.
13:24They, too, form a diagonal line with one star offset.
13:28It seemed to be a perfect match for the pyramids.
13:35I observed that the stars had exactly the same pattern as the pyramids on the ground.
13:41You have two bright stars, or two large stars, if you like, and the third one on the top dimmer and offset to the east in exactly the same pattern.
13:51There are, of course, many other stars in Orion.
13:55But it was the three belt stars that led Beauval to make another discovery.
14:00One that linked the pyramids uncannily with that date long in the past.
14:04As a result of precession, the angle of the three stars changes over time.
14:13And Beauval found the best fit on one particular date.
14:18So you have a moving sky over a fixed land, the pyramids on the ground.
14:25And when you move that sky in time to fit the patterns of Orion, you get that lock in 10,500 BC.
14:31Hancock was impressed by Beauval's theory and the way it linked ancient Egypt with an even more ancient date.
14:40Well, the whole arrangement freezes the time of 10,500 BC.
14:45In his television series, Hancock showed how Beauval's idea works.
15:02The pyramids form a precise 45-degree angle with a line running north-south.
15:07And the three stars form the same exact angle in the sky on only one date, 10,500 BC.
15:20For Hancock, Beauval's findings seemed like compelling evidence for a lost civilization.
15:26I accept Egyptological opinion. The great pyramids were built in 2500 BC.
15:36I am not saying that the pyramids were built earlier than that.
15:40What I'm saying is that they were built in 2500 BC, but designed to commemorate, architecturally, symbolically and astronomically, an earlier epoch.
15:50If Beauval and Hancock are right, the implications are astounding.
16:01It means that ancient Egyptian civilization was inherited from a lost people unknown to any mainstream historian.
16:10One astronomer took a keen interest in Beauval's theory, Ed Krupp.
16:24He quickly became troubled by Beauval's claims.
16:29When the Orion mystery came out, my curiosity was naturally aroused.
16:33Anybody comes up with a good idea about ancient astronomy, I want to know about it.
16:37And in going through the book, there was something nagging.
16:41In the Orion mystery, there's a nice double page spread.
16:47And anybody looking at this would say, ah, gaze of pyramids, belt of Orion, one kind of looks like the other.
16:54You know, you've got three in a row, three in a row, slanted, slanted.
16:58We've got a map.
17:00And what I was bothered by turned out to be really pretty obvious.
17:03In the back of my head, I knew that something was wrong with these pictures.
17:07And what's wrong with these pictures in their presentation is that north for the constellation Orion is here at the top of the page.
17:17North for the Giza pyramids is down here.
17:21Now, they're not marked, but I knew which way north was at Giza, and I knew which way north was in Orion.
17:26To make the map of the pyramids on the ground match the stars of Orion in the sky, you have to turn Egypt upside down.
17:37And if you don't want to do that, then you've got to turn the sky upside down.
17:42But Hancock and Beauval reject Krupp's analysis.
17:52They point out that Orion can only be seen by looking in a southward direction.
17:56So you're looking south at the correlation, and therefore the natural tendency is to draw what you see in that direction.
18:05And you would come up with looking at three stars in that pattern and three dots or three pyramids or three marks in the same direction.
18:15If you choose a time when Orion is at its highest point in the sky, looking south, high over the pyramids, there is an apparent match.
18:26And Beauval and Hancock's view seems convincing.
18:30There's no other way you can draw them except in the way that the pyramids lie on the ground today.
18:36You can't do it in any other way.
18:38If you're extremely pedantic and believe that the ancient Egyptians' priesthood was a group of narrow-minded bureaucrats determined to follow procedure above all else,
18:54then it's true that the northernmost star is depicted in the southernmost place on the ground,
19:01and the southernmost star in the northernmost place on the ground.
19:04And this is what Ed Krupp is getting at.
19:05But if you regard it as a work of symbolic and religious art meant to copy on the ground what the observer sees in the sky,
19:15then there's just no other way you can make it than the way it is made.
19:20But there's evidence that the Egyptians may well have seen it another way,
19:24perceiving the sky as forming a canopy over their heads, with north in the sky matching north on the ground,
19:31and the top of Orion thus pointing north.
19:33The pyramids are set out facing precisely north, south, east and west,
19:38and research suggests they were aligned using the north polar stars.
19:42And also there are shafts built through the north and south sides of the Great Pyramid, which point directly to stars in the north and south of the sky,
20:02indicating that the Egyptians clearly link directions on the ground and in the sky.
20:06That locks the pyramids north side and south side to the north side of the sky and the south side of the sky.
20:17That means the Egyptians in building and laying out the pyramids said we know where north is and we care about it because we've incorporated it into the architecture.
20:25The Egyptians were perfectly capable of drawing the pyramids right if they wanted to.
20:33If they wanted Orion's belt to look like Orion's belt on the ground and match up with the north and south sides of the pyramid, they could have done that.
20:41But whether or not the Egyptians cared about matching north and south in the sky and on the ground, there are other problems.
20:55There are 13 other stars in Orion. None of them match pyramids.
21:06There are over 75 other pyramids in Egypt and among them all, there are no convincing matches with stars.
21:12But Hancock and Beauval still stand by their theory.
21:19I don't need every pyramid in Egypt to map a star in the sky.
21:24The people who built these monuments were making a grand symbolic statement that was supposed to be understood on an intuitive and spiritual level.
21:33It is hard to invest a lot of intellectual effort into three stars in a row and three pyramids on the ground.
21:48That's like a simple configuration.
21:52And it's very easy to find three things in a row.
21:55And if, you know, there are roughly 81 or so pyramids in Egypt, well, yeah, if all 81 of them mapped the sky perfectly, I'd be impressed.
22:02But if three of them mapped the sky, sorta, I'm not impressed.
22:09There's more. Astronomer Anthony Farrell has re-examined that precise 45 degree angle that seemed to link the pyramids with the belt stars as they were in 10,500 BC.
22:22Farrell found that the match was not as precise as originally claimed.
22:27The angle formed by the two large pyramids is 45 degrees.
22:33But the angle formed by the belt stars is 54.
22:37Hancock and Beauval dispute the large size of Farrell's angle, but accept there is a discrepancy.
22:47No, they're not absolutely correct, and I don't care.
22:56I have to stress that, in my view, the ancient Egyptian priesthood was not staffed by anal retentive bureaucrats.
23:03The ancient Egyptian priesthood was a group of creative and imaginative thinkers who were exploring the mystery of life and death and who believed that there was a connection between ground and sky.
23:14They wanted to make a resemblance on the ground of a particular moment in time.
23:25There is a simple explanation for the way the pyramids were laid out along that diagonal line 4,500 years ago.
23:33And it has nothing to do with Orion.
23:37Kate Spence is an Egyptologist.
23:41She studied the historical sequence of quarrying and construction on the Giza Plateau in 2,500 BC.
23:48The interior blocks of the pyramids were extracted from quarries on the plateau itself.
23:57The bases of the blocks can still be seen today.
24:00It turns out that the choices of the pyramid builders were severely limited by the site they had chosen to build on.
24:08It's entirely possible to explain the position of the pyramids relative to each other just through the geology of the site and the nature of the pyramids themselves.
24:18If we look at a map of the pyramids, which shows the contour lines, you can actually see it quite clearly.
24:25These are the pyramids, the Khufu pyramid, Kefran and Menkaure, and they're built on a ridge which runs diagonally.
24:34The reason they're set obliquely to the ridge is because they're aligned so carefully towards north.
24:40So this is the first pyramid to be built, the Khufu pyramid, and when Kefran came along to build his,
24:45he couldn't build it in a straight line because there's a quarry here and it's very steeply sloping.
24:52So he had to set the pyramid back for two reasons, both so that it was on a reasonably high level and also so that he could get a clear view of north for the alignment.
25:02And exactly the same thing happened when Menkaure came to build his.
25:07It's actually set back from the line of the Kefran pyramid because if you see here the contours are very close, so it's quite steep.
25:14So it's set on a level plateau at about the same height as the Kefran pyramid and with a clear view towards north.
25:20It seems clear that as the Egyptian kings built their monuments across the Giza plateau, the decisions they made about the position of the pyramids were not inspired by a pattern of stars, but were the result of the limitations of the site they chose to build on.
25:38But Graham Hancock's radical theory about the past does not depend on the Orion theory alone.
25:50He claims to have discovered a global network of ancient monuments either mapping constellations on the ground or linked in other ways to the stars.
25:58He believes that they're all based on a 12,000 year old blueprint of the night sky.
26:06Far from Egypt, Hancock has discovered other crucial evidence in Cambodia at one of the most extraordinary archeological sites in the world, the temples of Angkor Wat.
26:17The temples were built by the Khmer people 3,000 years after the Giza pyramids were built, but Hancock claims to have found evidence of a more ancient master plan.
26:36There's a similarity, a very strong similarity, between the pattern of the temples on the ground and the pattern of the stars in the constellation of Draco, one of the great northern constellations.
27:02Quite simply, if you take a map of the temples of Angkor and join the dots to connect up the different temples, you find that you have drawn out on that map the pattern of the constellation of Draco.
27:16As Hancock shows in his television series, it does seem as if the temples at Angkor are a genuine mirror of the stars mapped out by the lost civilization.
27:27And that wasn't all. The temples of Angkor also seem to be connected with that momentous date, 10,500 BC, as a result of precession.
27:44I found extraordinarily that the correlation becomes as close as possible to perfect only at one date, and that is 10,500 BC.
28:01In his television series, Hancock refers to the work of one of the world's leading experts on Angkor, Eleanor Manica.
28:18She has spent 20 years surveying and mapping the temples, and now she's examined Hancock's theory in detail.
28:29This hypothesis is based on the fact that certain temples are placed in their position because they have to follow a pattern that evokes the constellation Draco.
28:41So if we look at this, we see the beginning, apparently, is the head right here at Angkor Wat.
28:49And the pattern goes from there up to Phnom Bakheng, which is this enormous central mountain.
28:58Then it travels up here to Prasap Bantietom, and then it goes over here to Prasap Pitou, and from Prasap Pitou it goes to Praia Khan.
29:07Then it goes to Takayo, then it goes to Takayo, then it goes to Taprom, out here to Bantiet Samre, built in the 12th century.
29:22I see a vague resemblance, of course, because it goes up and down and off, but actually the tail of Draco goes way up like this.
29:32It doesn't just go off like that.
29:34When examined closely, the actual match between the temples and the constellation is not at all precise.
29:44Does Hancock have an answer?
29:46There's a rather good correspondence, by no means, you know, absolutely spot on accurate, but a rather good correspondence between the stars in the sky and the temples on the ground.
29:59And when you bear in mind that these temples were constructed across hundreds of square miles of really very dense jungle, something like a thousand years ago, when there was no ability for the builders to get above their subject and check that they were achieving a perfect design, I think they did a very good job.
30:17But surveying has never depended on viewing from above. It's all done by measuring distances and angles on the ground.
30:25Manika's investigations show that the Khmer's must have been expert surveyors.
30:32Such is the precision of their work that she is convinced that they could have accurately laid out and built any pattern they wanted.
30:39And there is good evidence which reveals why the Khmer's placed the temples where they did.
30:48Certain of these temples within this so-called constellation here are where they are for very clear-cut historical reasons referred to in inscriptions, very obvious reasons.
31:01For example, Baking, which is located here on top of the central hill at Angkor, had to be the place where the king put his royal temple because nothing else was so prominent at the site.
31:18Up here at Praia Khan, there was a very bloody battle around 1190.
31:31That's why Praia Khan is here. It couldn't be anywhere else. It had to be here because the battle was here.
31:36Manika discovered that the position of every one of the temples included by Hancock can be explained in similarly well-documented ways.
31:54Hancock includes only ten temples in the shape of the constellation Draco.
31:59But investigation of the Angkor region has revealed that there are more than 60 temples.
32:07It seems arbitrary to choose so few out of so many.
32:12The correlation he has found begins to look more like coincidence than planning.
32:17I'm sure that there are academics who can find a dozen reasons why the resemblance of the temples of Angkor
32:27to the pattern of the constellation of Draco is accidental and a coincidence and can be explained in all sorts of other ways.
32:34But I've put forward my case in as much detail as I can in my work.
32:40I think there is a striking resemblance between the basic pattern on the ground and the pattern of the constellation in the sky.
32:45But there is a final problem.
32:52Although Hancock believes the Khmer based their cherished temples on the constellation of Draco, strangely, it is not mentioned in any of their inscriptions.
33:04Draco had nothing to do with the culture whatsoever.
33:06I mean, there's no reference to the constellation in any inscription.
33:11There's no reference to it whatsoever in any way.
33:18No Draco.
33:23Unfortunately, ancient Egypt and Cambodia are Hancock's most important pieces of evidence,
33:29that monuments mirror an ancient blueprint of the stars.
33:35His claim seems flawed.
33:38And Horizon has made a discovery which further questions his basic theory.
33:43It links a group of unique monuments with a pattern of stars.
33:48Here are the monuments on the ground looking north.
33:53The pattern matches one of the great constellations, Leo the Lion.
33:57These are the monuments.
34:01Grand Central Station, the New York Public Library, Macy's, Madison Square Gardens, the Central Post Office, a theatre, a university, Times Square, the Rockefeller Center and a police station.
34:18The monuments are, of course, in Manhattan.
34:21The Leo Master Plan doesn't account for every Manhattan landmark, but using Hancock's criteria, it doesn't have to.
34:32As long as you have enough points, and you don't need to make every point fit, you can find virtually any pattern you want.
34:40But Hancock does offer other kinds of evidence for his theory.
34:47I'm already convinced about the existence of an ancient worldwide religious system, which must have emanated from a remote, lost source.
34:55But I need to convince others, and the best way to do that is to produce artefacts and evidence that are 12,000 or so years old, and which therefore fall outside of the framework of orthodox history.
35:11There are two far-flung monuments that Hancock claims were actually built by the people of the lost civilisation.
35:24One is the ancient city of Tiwanaku in Bolivia. The other is the Egyptian Sphinx.
35:33The Sphinx was carved out of the limestones of the Giza Plateau. Mainstream archaeologists think it was built 4,500 years ago.
35:43But Hancock believes it is 12,000 years old.
35:47Some of his evidence is, again, astronomical. The constellation Leo rose above the horizon directly east of the Sphinx in 10,500 BC.
36:00But there is no evidence that this constellation was recognised by the ancient Egyptians.
36:06But Hancock also claims there is geological evidence.
36:10Egypt has had a dry climate since the time the pyramids were built.
36:17But the Sphinx and its surrounding enclosure are deeply eroded.
36:22It has been argued by Hancock and others that the erosion was caused by heavy rainfall.
36:28And that this means the Sphinx must have been carved many thousands of years earlier than we thought, when the climate was wetter.
36:35But the erosion argument has not stood up to the scrutiny of geologists.
36:51Erosion on the Giza Plateau does not depend on water.
36:55The Giza limestones contain salts.
36:58And these have proved to cause destructive levels of erosion in very short periods of time.
37:03There is no hard evidence that the Sphinx is any older than the orthodox date.
37:12Hancock has also focused on another monument, thousands of miles from Egypt, in South America.
37:23High in the Bolivian Andes lies Lake Titicaca.
37:27Nine miles to the east is one of the most mysterious ruined cities in the world.
37:32It is called Tiwanaku.
37:35Archaeologists think that this was the capital of a South American empire that began to flourish nearly 2,000 years ago.
37:45But the identity of the people who created Tiwanaku remains a mystery.
37:50Whoever they were, they were superb stonemasons, creating temples and monuments using immense but precisely carved blocks of stone.
38:00For more than a century, Tiwanaku has attracted fabulous explanations.
38:09As to who would have built Tiwanaku, what we might be talking about is the survivors of a lost civilization.
38:14People who had moved into the mountains to create a new settlement to try to preserve something of their culture, something of their traditions, something of their religious ideas.
38:27For evidence, Hancock turned to the writings of Arthur Poznansky, who thought Tiwanaku was the cradle of ancient American civilization.
38:38He stumbled on the site at the turn of the century and became a self-appointed expert.
38:43Poznansky claimed Tiwanaku was an ancient astronomical observatory.
38:53He believed that particular stone blocks had once been positioned to face the sun as it rose above the horizon at the winter and summer solstices.
39:01But like the constellations, the position of the solstices changes very slowly over time.
39:09And Poznansky found the best match between the stone blocks and the rising sun 12,000 years ago.
39:16Arthur Poznansky, who is by no means a favorite with Orthodox scholars, but did spend 50 years of his life studying Tiwanaku from the early 1900s up until the 1940s,
39:27made a very strong case that the original alignments of Tiwanaku had been set out at a time when the rising point of the sun was quite different from where it is today at the winter and summer solstices.
39:42And he dated that approximately to about 12,000 years ago.
39:46But how good is the evidence that Hancock relies on? Has Poznansky's work stood the test of time?
39:52Tiwanaku is in a ruinous state. Its great blocks lie shattered and fallen.
40:00That's because in the 17th century, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in this region of the Andes.
40:07They set about destroying this pagan monument.
40:11The Spanish broke up the site, moved hundreds of blocks and built a cathedral with them nearby.
40:17No one knows where many of the remaining blocks were originally positioned.
40:31Poznansky could only guess that they might once have been aligned with the rising sun.
40:37Yet this was his most important evidence.
40:39Poznansky died in 1948.
40:46That means he missed a revolution in archaeological science,
40:50one that might have changed his mind about the age of the site.
40:57Carbon dating is a method that has provided increasingly reliable dates for archaeological sites all over the world,
41:03including Tiwanaku.
41:06Carbon dates for the great stone monuments show they are less than 2,000 years old.
41:12Graham Hancock disputes their age because carbon dating can't date the stone itself,
41:18but only organic remains like bone or charcoal found in association with the stone.
41:23He regards this association as unreliable, although the method has been tried and tested at sites throughout the world,
41:32and at Tiwanaku, archaeologists are confident of the link.
41:36But anyway, here, archaeologists have dug deeper than the stone structures.
41:40The earliest signs of any human habitation, probably a small village, easily dated from organic remains,
41:49are just 3,500 years old, nowhere near 10,500 BC.
41:55So how does Hancock deal with this information in his most recent book?
42:00I'm not required to be encyclopedic.
42:03In Heaven's Mirror there is no representation whatsoever of recent carbon dates for Tiwanaku.
42:10I simply didn't discuss it in there.
42:15There is no hard evidence that survivors of a lost civilization built Tiwanaku or the Sphinx 12,000 years ago.
42:26But there is one other way Hancock could change our view of the past.
42:30And that is to find the home of the lost civilization.
42:35It would be the find of the century, the real Atlantis.
42:43Hancock has made an astonishing suggestion about where it could be.
42:49Antarctica.
42:51He has claimed that Antarctica was once in a warmer region and home to the lost civilization.
42:5812,000 years ago, he argued, a massive shift in the Earth's crust thrust Antarctica to the South Pole, where it became icebound.
43:09Geologists have studied the history of Antarctica through ice cores, some as deep as three and a half kilometers.
43:28Ice cores are like tree rings and they can be used to work out the history of the ice sheets.
43:34The scientists' work shows clearly that the ice has been here for over 400,000 years.
43:43It would have been hard to survive here in 10,500 BC, let alone create a sophisticated civilization.
43:54What I have come to realize as my research has gone on, in a sense, is that I don't need Antarctica, and therefore I don't need to propose a radical revolution of geological ideas in order to explain a lost civilization.
44:14Hancock now believes we've been looking in the wrong place.
44:21The lost civilization was underwater all along.
44:29This is the Yonaguni Formation.
44:33Discovered in 1987 by a Japanese fisherman, it lies under five meters of water at the end of the Japanese island chain.
44:41It appears to be a series of steps and pyramid-like structures.
44:52Could this be the remains of a city lost 12,000 years ago?
44:57It looks like a monument. It has very curious features.
45:01It has a series of steps and terraces cut into its side.
45:04It's oriented to the cardinal directions.
45:07It faces due south.
45:08It has a deep east-west feature running along in front of it.
45:13It bears all the hallmarks of a designed ceremonial, ritual or religious monument.
45:20Yonaguni looked as if it could be a spectacular discovery.
45:24And Hancock needed corroboration.
45:26He invited the Boston University geologist, Robert Schock, to inspect the site.
45:35Professor Schock has taken a keen interest in unorthodox views of the past.
45:41And he welcomed the chance to examine the underwater discovery.
45:45Schock dived with Hancock several times at Yonaguni.
45:49I went there, in this case, actually hoping that it was a totally man-made structure that was now submerged underwater that dated maybe back to 6,000 B.C. or more.
46:03When I got there and I got to dive on the structure,
46:07I have to admit I was very, very disappointed because I was basically convinced after a few dives that this was primarily, possibly, totally a natural structure.
46:23I think that what Robert Schock needs to do is a lot more diving.
46:27When I took him there in 1997, September of 1997, he did four dives at that time.
46:34And then he went back again in July of 1998 and did a few more dives.
46:39I really feel that before anybody pronounces definitively on this monument, they should put in a minimum of 50 dives.
46:51Professor Schock has not changed his mind.
46:56Isolated portions of it look like they're man-made.
46:59But when you look at it in context, you look at the shore features, etc.,
47:05and you see how, in this case, fine sandstones split along horizontal bedding planes,
47:12that gives you these regular features.
47:14I'm convinced it's a natural structure.
47:22Graham Hancock is still scarring the oceans of the world for a lost civilization.
47:27He has also investigated pyramids and a giant stone face on the planet Mars.
47:36But he has yet to find firm evidence that there really was a forgotten civilization of godlike astronomers 12,000 years ago.
47:46I believe passionately that the past has been misrepresented and that people today are not being given the full picture.
47:55And I don't think that my arguments are ever going to be successfully destroyed by nitpicking.
47:59After having invested a lot of time, doing what I think very few other people do, which is saying,
48:08OK, you've made this claim, let's see if it holds up.
48:11And so subjecting it to the rules of evidence.
48:15And then coming to a conclusion.
48:18My conclusion is, no, I don't think they're right.
48:20I don't think they're right.
48:21And I don't think they're right because I don't think the evidence fits the hypothesis.
48:26What I see that is, I don't think that's what I think it's right, no one is on Patreon.
48:31Don't think that's the one.
48:33I think the idea that this path is always, we're not going to be able to find it.
48:36I think we need to see a couple of different ideas,
48:39but here's one of the features that we already know.
48:42We need to see a couple of different ideas.
48:44And we're all right.
48:46We can see a couple of different ideas.
48:49And the traditions of us,
48:51they are all right and they're all right.
48:53Let me know that we can already know that.
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