Is the House of History built on foundations of sand? | Graham Hancock | TEDxReading

Since 2007, compelling evidence has been published in leading scientific journals confirming that fragments of a disintegrating giant comet struck the earth around 12,800 years ago. The impacts set in motion a mysterious 1,200-year global deep freeze that caused worldwide extinction of species. Established theories about the emergence of civilization cite the invention of agriculture and monumental architecture some 11,600 years ago, immediately after the freeze. In this lecture, the best-selling author Graham Hancock argues that archaeologists, by not accounting for the cataclysm, have gravely misinterpreted History. What the record attests to is not the sudden invention of technology, but a transfer of technology to hunter-gatherers from a more advanced civilization.

British writer and journalist, Graham Hancock specializes in unconventional theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical-astrological data from the past. One of the main themes running through many of his books is a posited global connection with a "mother culture" from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang.

Graham sees himself as a journalist who asks questions based upon observation and as someone who provides a counterbalance to what he perceives as the "unquestioned" acceptance and support given to orthodox views by the education system, the media, and by society at large. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated to 27 languages.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Presenter: I don't think you need
much more introduction than that.

Mr. Graham Hancock!
(Applause)

GH: Thank you.

(Signting) Ahh!

Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

Let's consider
an extraordinary possibility.

Could there be a lost civilization
lurking as yet undetected

somewhere far back in remotest prehistory?

Could the myths of a former golden age

brought to an end by an immense
global cataclysm be true?

Plato provides the archetype
with the story of Atlantis

for which he's the earliest
surviving source.

He describes Atlantis as having advanced
architecture, advanced agriculture,

advanced shipbuilding technology
and seafaring skills,

and advanced social
and political organization.

It was once a beautiful
and generous culture

but in time it became arrogant,
cruel and materialistic.

In a ringing phrase that should remind us

of the behavior of advanced
technological societies today,

Plato tells us that it ceased to carry
its prosperity with moderation

as though in punishment for this hubris,
the universe slapped Atlantis down

in a single dreadful day and night
of fire, earthquakes and flood.

It was swallowed up
by the sea and vanished.

Mankind had to begin again like children,
with no memory of what went before.

The view of historians and archaeologists
is that Plato made the whole story up.

Today, anyone who takes Atlantis seriously

can expect to be accused
of archaeological fantasy

or worse, of a fraud.

Archeologists have worked out timelines

to construct what I call
the "House of History."

These timelines showing
slow steady evolutionary progress

are used to argue
that there's no room in our past

for an advanced prehistoric
civilization like Atlantis

or for a cataclysm big enough
to have wiped it out.

But new science not yet taken into account
by historians and archaeologists

should give us pause for thought.

As we'll see, there's now
growing recognition

that an extinction-level global
cataclysm unfolded very recently,

right in the foundation
of the House of History,

between 20,800 and 11,600 years ago.

Could this newly discovered cataclysm
be connected in some way

to the cataclysm
of earthquake flood and fire

that Plato tells us destroyed Atlantis?

Cataclysmic events shake
and reshape the world

and allow new stories to emerge.

Sixty five million years ago the dinosaurs
were wiped out in a global cataclysm.

If their line survives at all today,
it may be in chickens and other birds.

But at the same time,

a little shrew-like creature,
the ancestor of the mammalian line

was skulking in the primeval
forests going nowhere.

Once the dinosaurs were cleared
out of the way however,

that shrew began to evolve
and 65 million years later,

here we are the new rulers of the world.

So at risk of oversimplification,

what happened 65 million
years ago was so huge

that it turned dinosaurs into chickens
and shrews into human beings.

It's now universally agreed
that the cataclysm was caused

by a six mile wide chunk
of rock from outer space

hitting the earth at about
70,000 miles an hour.

Scientists are divided on whether
the culprit was an asteroid or a comet,

but whether asteroid or comet,

it left a distinct
fingerprint in the earth,

a layer of ash and soot
marking the KT Boundary,

the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary

that is filled with iridium,
carbon microsphere yolks,

nano diamonds, melt glass
similar to Trinitite,

and other minerals subjected
to huge temperatures in excess of 2,200°C,

the boiling point of quartz, across
enormous areas of the Earth's surface.

These are the characteristic chemical
signatures of a colossal cosmic impact.

Nothing else can account for them.
They're referred to as "impact proxies."

Luis and Walter Alvarez
were the father-son team

who revealed the true nature
of the KT event.

For more than a decade,

they were subjected to quite
vicious attacks from other scientists

who refused to accept the evidence
of the impact proxies.

Only when the crater left by the impact

was found deeply buried
beneath the Gulf of Mexico,

did the criticism cease.

The Alvarez's case for a cosmic impact

and related extinction
65 million years ago

is now regarded as confirmed.

Keep this in mind
while I introduce you to the work

of another group
of highly credentialed scientists.

There are more than
30 members of their team.

Their leading lights shown
in this slide include Jim Kennett,

Allen West, Richard Firestone,
James Wittke and Albert Goodyear.

They initially joined forces
to investigate a mystery

of the closing millennia
of the last ice age.

The last glacial maximum,
if you look at the chart,

was reached 21,000 years ago.

After that, temperatures began to warm.

But then suddenly, with ice sheets
still two kilometers deep

on top of North America
and northern Europe,

there was a striking and dramatic
plunge in temperatures,

a short sharp deep freeze

that lasted from roughly
20,800 to 11,600 years ago.

This period of extreme and anomalous cold

is known to geologists
as the "Younger Dryas."

The mystery is, what caused it?

It turns out that precisely
at the Younger Dryas boundary,

there's a layer of ash
and soot in the soil

referred to as the "black mat,"

distributed across a vast area
of the Earth's surface

and filled with abundances
of the same impact proxies

that bear witness to the KT event.

Unlike the KT event however,
the Younger Dryas cataclysm

is astonishingly recent:
just 12,800 years ago.

Initially, the team put
the event at 12,900 years ago,

but with subsequent research,

that date has been refined
down to 12,800 years ago.

This is the first paper published
by the Younger Dryas impact team.

It appeared in PNAS, the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences,

in October 2007.

The headline speaks for itself.

"Evidence for extraterrestrial
impact 12,900 years ago

that contributed to the megafaunal
extinctions and Younger Dryas cooling."

I'll show you a few more of the team's
papers just to make the point

that this is mainstream peer-reviewed
science we're dealing with here,

not the lunatic fringe.

PNAS 2009, "Shock-synthesized
hexagonal diamonds

in Younger Dryas boundary sediments."

"Very high-temperature
impact melt products

as evidence for cosmic airburst
and impacts 12,900 years ago."

Evidence from Mexico.
Evidence from the Greenland ice cores.

"Evidence for deposition
of ten million tons

of impacts burials across
four continents 12,800 years ago."

Here is the Journal of Geology,
September 5, 2014:

"Nano diamond rich layer
across three continents

consistent with major
cosmic impact 12,800 years ago."

Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, July 2015,

the evidence presented in this paper
rules out any possibility

that the impact proxies in the Younger
Dryas layer were laid down gradually,

say over periods of hundreds of years.

The Bayesian chronological analysis shows

that the cataclysm was unleashed
synchronously in a geological instant,

effectively, a single
dreadful day and night.

Moreover the evidence tracks
the fingerprint of the cataclysm

across more than 50 million square
kilometers of the Earth's surface.

Multiple ball lights
thought to be fragments

from a giant disintegrating comet

came in on a trajectory
from northwest to southeast.

The primary impacts
were on the North American ice cap,

then still more than two kilometers deep.

There were further impacts
on the northern European ice cap.

And the furthest east
evidence for the impacts,

as so far been traced, is Syria.

Because the primary impacts
were on the North American ice cap,

it's been difficult to find craters
since the craters were transient,

excavated in two-kilometer-deep ice
that has subsequently melted away.

Despite the abundant evidence
of the impact proxies,

the absence of craters has exposed
the team to the same kind of attacks

that Luis and Walter Alvarez suffered.

In the last couple of years however,
craters have been identified

in areas beyond the edge
of the former ice cap

or where the ice cover was thin.

These craters are the final pieces of
the puzzle that should settle the debate.

Twelve thousand eight hundred years ago,

multiple fragments of a giant
disintegrating comet hit the Earth,

with the epicenter of the cataclysm
on the North American ice cap.

Why did the impacts 12,800 years ago

caused the worldwide
plunge in temperatures

witnessed at the beginning
of the Younger Dryas?

The best explanation
is that floods of icy melt water

released by the heat
and kinetic energy of the impacts

flowed off the North American ice cap
and into the Atlantic ocean

where they interrupted the Gulf Stream,

a key element of the central
heating system of our planet,

hence the sudden and dramatic cooling.

Why did the Younger Dryas end
equally suddenly 11,600 years ago

with a dramatic rise in temperatures?

As long ago as the 1980s,

the british astrophysicist
Sir Fred Hoyle became intrigued

by the sudden temperature rise
at the end of the Younger Dryas.

He proposed the comet impact
in an ocean as the agency,

producing not only tidal waves

but also sending a vast cloud
of water vapor into the upper atmosphere

where it shrouded the Earth,
creating a greenhouse effect

large enough to account
for the dramatic warming.

It's possible that further fragments
from the debris stream

of the same disintegrated comet
that hit the Earth 12,800 years ago

were involved in the events
of 11,600 years ago as well.

Astronomers calculated that this comet

originally entered the inner solar
system about 20,000 years ago

and began to break up
into multiple fragments.

These spread out
along the course of its orbit

to form a torus of lethal debris
that crosses the orbit of the Earth

and has interacted catastrophically
with human History

on more than one occasion
in the past 13,000 years.

The science on what caused the end
of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago

is not as complete as the science
on the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

Whatever the agency however,

the facts on the ground
are not in dispute.

The Younger Dryas did end
abruptly 11,600 years ago.

Global temperatures soared,

and the remnant ice caps
very rapidly collapsed into the sea

causing a dramatic pulse of sea level rise

nominated by geologists
as "Meltwater pulse 1B."

Is it a coincidence that 11,600 years ago,
the date of Meltwater pulse 1B,

is also the date that Plato gives

for the destruction
and submergence of Atlantis?

Let's double-check Plato's date.

The story he tells us was passed
down to him through his family line

from his ancestor, the famous
Greek lawmaker Solon,

who visited Egypt around 600 BC,

and their claim to have been told
the story of Atlantis by priests,

in the temple of Neath
at Sais in the Delta.

Solon asked the priests
when the disaster occurred,

and they replied matter-of-factly,
"9,000 years ago."

Remember that this was in 600 BC,

and of course 9,000 years ago in 600 BC
is 9,600 BC in our calendar,

in other words 11,600 years ago,

the precise date that modern geological
science puts on Meltwater pulse 1B

and a sudden global rise in sea level.

If Plato made the whole thing up,
as historians tell us,

then he was astonishingly on the money
with 21st century science

linking a global flood cataclysm
to the date of 11,600 years ago.

And something else,

the same precise date is now
being cited by archaeologists

as a highly significant one,
the date at which the invention

of both megalithic
architecture and agriculture

occurred, apparently
for the first time, in the world.

The place where this happened
was Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

And here I am at Göbekli Tepe

with the late professor Klaus Schmidt
who discovered the site

and began excavating it
for the German Archaeological Institute,

from the second half of the 1990s onwards.

He's telling me three things.

First, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe
exposed in the excavations

were not covered by natural
sedimentation over the course of ages.

Instead, after being used
for about a thousand years,

they were deliberately
and meticulously buried

beneath an artificial hill
of earth and rubble.

Indeed the very name "Göbekli Tepe"
in the Turkish language

means "pot-bellied Hill."

Secondly, it's this ceiling of the site
with no contamination by later cultures

that allows archaeologists to be sure
of the date of Göbekli Tepe's foundation,

11,600 years ago, which makes it
7,000 years older than Stonehenge

and about 6,000 years older
than the very oldest megalithic sites

hitherto recognized anywhere on Earth.

Thirdly, up to 50 times as much as
has already been excavated at Göbekli Tepe

still waits to be brought to light.

Ground-penetrating radar has revealed

that hundreds and hundreds of giant
megalithic pillars still lie buried,

making this not only the oldest but also
the largest megalithic site on Earth.

And yet, it just seems to pop up
out of nowhere with no background

and no evidence of the evolution
of the necessary architectural skills.

Strangest of all, the German
Archaeological Institute also suspects

that Göbekli Tepe functioned
as a centre of innovation

from which knowledge of agriculture
was distributed to a population

that hitherto had consisted only
of nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Rather than a sudden
mysteriously precocious invention

7,000 years ahead of its time,

what happened
at Göbekli Tepe looks to me

much more like a transfer of technology
from the survivors of a lost civilization

who already knew how to work
megaliths on a grand scale

and who already fully
understood agriculture.

Prior to the excavation of Göbekli Tepe,
we would have had no context

to understand the newly discovered
megalithic sites shown in this slide.

It's submerged to a depth of 40 meters
beneath the Mediterranean

and was last above water
more than 9,000 years ago.

We don't know how long
the site stood there

before the rising seas covered it.

Since the early 1990s,
question marks have been raised

over the age of the great
Sphinx of Giza in Egypt.

Egyptologists think
it's about 4,500 years old,

although there's not a shred
of inscription evidence

to support this date.

Independent researcher John Anthony West

and Robert Schoch, professor
of geology at Boston University,

have made a case that the sphinx
must be much older than that,

based on its distinctive
pattern of erosion.

Schoch argues that
the Sphinx was subjected

to a very long period of heavy rainfall,

and such rains have not fallen
in Egypt in the past 5,000 years.

Indeed, to find the kind
of heavy rains in Egypt

that could have cut
these deep vertical fissures

characteristic of precipitation
induced weathering,

you have to go back to the climatic
disturbances of the Younger Dryas,

between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.

When Shock and West
first put their case forward,

it was dismissed
by Egyptologists on the grounds

that no other megalithic sites
in the world date back to that period.

But that was in 1992,
when you could still say such things.

Subsequently, in the
second half of the 1990s,

excavations began at Göbekli Tepe,
proving it to be 11,600 years old.

Needless to say, if you can make
Göbekli Tepe, you can make the Sphinx.

The two sites aren't even that far apart.

So in summary, I suggest,

though most of the later
construction is of high quality,

that the edifice of our past built
by historians and archaeologists

stands on foundations
that are likely to prove defective

and dangerously unsound.

An extinction level cataclysm
occurred on our planet

between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.

The event was global in its consequences,
and it affected mankind profoundly.

Because the scientific evidence
that proved it happened

has only begun to emerge since 2007,
and because its implications

have not yet been taken into account
at all by historians and archaeologists,

we are obliged
to contemplate the possibility

that everything we've been taught
about the origins of civilization

could be wrong.

Thank you.

(Applause)