Graham Hancock Quotes

Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong, says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

The essence of this knowledge was the ability to `see all' and to `know all'. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'? · Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to `see far'. Thereafter `their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close ...' Both the Popol Vuh and Genesis therefore tell the story of mankind's fall from grace. In both cases, this state of grace was closely associated with knowledge, and the reader is left in no doubt that the knowledge in question was so remarkable that it conferred godlike powers on those who possessed it. The Bible, adopting a dark and muttering tone of voice, calls it `the knowledge of good and evil' and has nothing further to add. The Popol Vuh is much more informative. It tells us that the knowledge of the First Men consisted of the ability to see `things hidden in the distance', that they were astronomers who `examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky', and that they were geographers who succeeded in measuring `the round face of the earth'. 7 Geography is about maps. In Part I we saw evidence suggesting that the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization might have mapped the planet with great thoroughness at an early date. Could the Popol Vuh be transmitting some garbled memory of that same civilization when it speaks nostalgically of the First Men and of the miraculous geographical knowledge they possessed? Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps). Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying

We're in the hands of real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols. with the right symbols, with the right questions. they can lead you into initiating yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself… ~Robert Bauval

Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing 'none but the unlettered and the uncultured' and obliging the survivors to 'begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened ... in early times'. Such stories turn up in Vedic India, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient Egypt. They were told by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Jews. They were repeated in China and south-east Asia, in prehistoric northern Europe and across the Pacific. Almost universally, where truly ancient traditions have been preserved, even amongst mountain peoples and desert nomads, vivid descriptions have been passed down of global floods in which the majority of mankind perished.

More than seventy different indigenous Amazonian cultures use ayahuasca — many giving different names to the brew (yajé, natema, caapi, cipo, shori, etc.).

At a deeper level what this whole exchange revealed to me was something disturbing about the way science works. I hadn't quite grasped the role of fear before. But I could see it in action everywhere here: fear of being 'noticed and monitored by colleagues,' fear of unwanted negative celebrity, fear of indignity, fear of loss of reputation, fear of loss of career — and not for committing some terrible crime but simply for exploring unorthodox possibilities and undertaking 'somewhat controversial research' into what everyone agrees were extraordinary events 12,800 years ago.
Worse still, this pervasive state of fear has somehow ingrained itself so deeply into the fabric of science that those who have embraced unorthodox possibilities themselves are often among the least willing to consider unorthodox possibilities embraced by others — lest by doing so they 'contaminate' their own preferred unorthodoxy.
How will it ever be possible to discover the truth about the past when so much fear gets in the way?

[At Gunung Padang] First, the drill cores contained evidence — fragments of worked columnar basalt — that more man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly, the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates — 3000 BC to 5000 BC, then 9600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC and finally, at depths of 27.5 meters (90 feet) and more, an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.

Although I have no doubt that the ancients had developed special means for manipulating the physical world - means that our own technological society is sometimes unable to match - I think it is obvious that their main project was a profound spiritual quest & the dilation of the mind through the pursuit of esoteric knowledge. It is in this area, I believe, that we have the most to learn from our ancestors, where their great minds were put to work for thousands of years to penetrate the riddles of existence.

We are destroying the amazon rainforest, the lungs of our planet and home to our biodiversity in replace of producing soy beans so that we can feed cattle and enjoy hamburgers. Only and insane and sick society would allow for such an abomination to occur

The origin myth of the Tukano speaks of the time, eons ago, when humans first settled the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It seems that 'supernatural beings' accompanied them on this journey and gifted them the fundamentals upon which to build a civilized life. From the 'Daughter of the Sun' they received the gift of fire and the knowledge of horticulture, pottery-making, and many other crafts. 'The serpent-shaped canoe of the first settlers' was steered by a superhuman 'Helmsman.' Meanwhile other supernaturals 'travelled by canoe over all the rivers and ... explored the remote hill ranges; they pointed out propitious sites for houses or fields, or for hunting and fishing, and they left their lasting imprint on many spots so that future generations would have ineffaceable proof of their earthly days and would forever remember them and their teachings.

The fully qualified Indian marine archaeologists who had dived on the structure in 1993 had not hesitated in their official report to pronounce it to be man-made with 'courses of masonry' plainly visible — surely a momentous finding 5 kilometers from the shore at a depth of 23 metres? But far from exciting attention, or ruffling any academic feathers, or attracting funds for an extension of the diving survey to the other apparently man-made mounds that had been spotted bear by on the sea-bed — and very far indeed from inspiring any Tamil expert to re-evaluate the derided possibility of a factual basis to the Kumari Kandam myth — the NIO's discovery at Poompuhur had simply been ignored by scholarship, not even reacted to or dismissed, but just widely and generally ignored.

On Carvajal's account, therefore, not only did the Amazon have cities but its cities were comparable in size to those of Europe at the same time. He also reports that the chieftain Machiparo ruled over "many settlements and very large ones which together contribute for fighting purposes fifty thousand men of the age of from thirty years up to seventy, because the young men do not go to war." Aside from the interesting anthropological observation about the age at which men in sixteenth-century Amazonian society went to war, this statement has important implications for our understanding of the population of the region. Machiparo's domain was just one among many through which the Orellana expedition passed, yet if Carvajal reported correctly it could muster an army 50,000 strong. This is a greater number than Denmark and Norway combined, or Sweden and Finland combined, or Brandenburg-Prussia, or even the Tsardom of Russia, could field in the same period.

[The cosmic impact that started the Younger Dryas] marked the end of their story, and the end of an epoch, really. There's not a single Clovis point found anywhere in North America that's above that black mat. They're all in it or below it. And there's not a single mammoth skeleton anywhere in North America that's above it. A huge part of the die-off could have been as a direct result of the impacts themselves, but impacts and airbursts south of the ice cap, particularly as far south as New Mexico, would also have set off wildfires. There's overwhelming evidence that gigantic wildfires raged at the onset of the Younger Dryas — in fact, more soot has been found at the Younger Dryas Boundary than at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. We did the calculations and it looks like as much as 25 percent of the edible biomass and around 9 percent of the total biomass of the planet was on fire and destroyed within days or weeks of the YDB. So in many areas if the animals weren't killed outright they wouldn't have been able to forage enough food afterwards to survive. The grass would have burned up, leaves on trees were gone. ... And you know, the other thing is that when comet fragments come in they're traveling incredibly fast and they literally punch a hole in the atmosphere. They actually push the air aside and they bring in that super cold from space, and when they explode in the air that cold plume continues to the ground and you literally have things frozen in place if they were close enough to where the plume came down. It's possible they were fried and then frozen all within a matter of seconds.

We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet breakups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up 'mountain-topping superwaves' in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Other than Oppenheimer's own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the effects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms — floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions — all occurring at the same time.

Science in the twenty-first century does NOT encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of “the facts” — particularly when those facts call into question long-established notions