Graham Hancock Quotes

[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.

Around this date, too, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis first appears, a quite distinct subspecies which most of us know as 'Neanderthal Man'. Tall, heavily muscled, with prominent brow ridges and a protruding face, Neanderthal Man had a bigger average brain size than modern humans (1400cc as against our 1360cc).7 The possession of such a big brain was no doubt an asset to these 'intelligent, spiritually sensitive, resourceful creatures'8 and the fossil record suggests that they were the dominant species on the planet from about 100,000 years ago until 40,000 years ago.

We can spend countless money on war and hatred but we cannot even scrap up the funds to save the lungs of our planet

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.

I couldn't help but reflect on the significance of the location favored by Plato. I had considered other possibilities, as readers of my previous books know, but I had to admit that an immense island lying far to the west of Europe across the Atlantic Ocean does sound a lot like America.

After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older", "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans—literally morons by comparison with ourselves. Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.

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.

Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus—perhaps to a large extent subconsciously—on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm.

If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization—a society that ticks all the boxes—is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is—that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology—all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us.

We have severed our connection to spirit. That's what our society has done. It has sought to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm. And the only way we're going to recover is to reconnect with spirit. And I truly believe we need the help of the plants in order to do that.

Our society values alert, problem-solving consciousness, and it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today. Of course, we accept drunkenness. We allow people some brief respite from the material grind. A society that subscribes to that model is a society that is going to condemn the states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert, problem-solving mentality. And if you go back to the 1960s, when there was a tremendous upsurge of exploration of psychedelics, I would say the huge backlash that followed that had to do with a fear on the part of the powers that be: that if enough people went into those realms and those experiences, the very fabric of the society we have today would be picked apart—and, most importantly, those in power at the top would not be in power at the top any more.

Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow—we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely—through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site. Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of "world ages" of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins.

Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight—and with no apparent antecedents whatever. For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.

We can no longer think of the so-called Fertile Crescent of Sumeria as the cradle of civilization. What seems more likely from the large body of evidence I have compiled is that there were a number of cities built before this time which were submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age... It proved that the methods I was using, the combination of deciphering ancient myths and new technology, actually worked. Of course I still keeping an open mind, but it does suggest I am on the right track after all. Its mainstream archaeology and science that are blinkered.