Here we go. And boom, we're live. Graham, great to see you again.

Nice to be with you, Joe. And we were just talking about your new book, America. Before that, there's two versions of it.

There's one version, and then there's a newer version that's a Barnes and noble version that's specific to Barnes and Noble that has an extra whole chapter in it. That's correct. Yeah, yeah.

And so they can get that at Barnes and Noble. I'm just trying to keep bookstores alive, man. They're on the way out.

I think it's really important. And that's one of the reasons that I did this, because I. I had finished the book, and then Barnes and Noble came to me through my publishers and said they would like to do a special edition of the book.

But in order to do that, I needed to write them some extra material, and I had a lot of material that I hadn't put in the book. And I thought, well, this is an opportunity to put that out there. Beautiful.

So if people want that, it's a little bit different than there's a small gold square square. Okay, so, first of all, my website, grahamhancock.com, has a page about America before, and the link to the Barnes and Noble edition is there, as well as the link to the standard edition, which is on Amazon and iTunes and all kinds of other places.

So grahamhancock.com and the America before page, the link to the Barnes and Noble edition is right there. All right.

There it is. So how is this? Before we even get into this, what is it? Go to talks and events. Okay, we're on the Graham Hancock website.

No, go to books. Go to books. Go to America before.

Bam, bam, there it is. Go to United States. You can see Amazon Barnes, and there's Barnes and Noble.

Special edition. Special edition. Click on that.

There you go. And then the e book as well. The ebook.

The ebook is available. The audiobook, which I read myself, is available there. Then if you scroll down.

Oops, that shouldn't be there. Damn pop ups. Damn bitches.

I am so happy you read it yourself. I get angry when someone else reads someone who I'm like, come on, he can talk. Yeah.

I enjoy reading web books myself, and what I've learned from feedback I get from audiences at presentations is people like me doing that. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, 100%.

It's just weird when someone else is talking in your voice, like, hey, man, I know you're not Graham. You know that I write fiction as well as non fiction. And the one thing I can't read is my fiction.

Really? Well, yeah, because fiction requires accents. You really need an actor to read a fiction book who can get into the different characters. But for a non fiction book like America before, it's very straightforward for me just to read it myself.

I agree. Tremendous Stephen King fan. But when I read Stephen King's books, where he reads them or listen to him when he reads them, they're terrible.

He's awful at it. I don't think a novelist should, should read their own novels. I think that's a job for an actor.

Oddly enough, I've just been reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series, very near the end of the 7th volume of that. Yeah, I'm just a giant fan of his, but, man, when he reads it, he reads it like he's just reading it. Yeah, it's like, oof, this is rough.

It's hard to get behind. Anyway, America before, so there's give us the, on the website, there's details about the book. There's a page where there are links to the book.

And also the other thing I would like to take this opportunity to mention is I'm in America and Canada for the next seven weeks, and I'm going to be doing something like 25 presentations in something like 20 american cities and then three canadian cities in Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. And that's all on the talks and events page of my website. So if anybody wants to come along and meet this old man in person, I'll be doing those events.

And are you doing these at theaters? And do you allow Q and A's? Like, how do I work? Absolutely, I allow Q and A's. I encourage that. I feel as an author that, frankly speaking, I'm nothing without my audience.

I owe my audience, my readers big time. And what I try to do at events is to give back as much as I can. So if people want to take pictures with me, I am absolutely up for that.

I don't understand why anybody would want to do that. But it's fun. It's kind of fun.

And when people want to come to the desk where I'm signing and ask me personal questions, I'm ready to do that sometimes. On the british book tour, which I just finished, I was behind in the event space for 4 hours after the event finished, signing and taking and taking pictures. But it's a joy.

It's a really opportunity for me to interact with the people who actually make my work matter. That's fantastic. Beautiful.

So what inspired this? I know there's always been. Well, you, first of all, we should just say, for people who don't know, you have been at the front of the line for decades talking about these lost civilizations. And from reading your work, I mean, I think I first read your work in the nineties, you exposed me to a lot of these, what were at the time, controversial ideas that have now been substantiated by actual evidence, particularly Gobekli Tepe.

And I mean, all the water erosions stuff on the sphinx. And I've since had Doctor Robert Schock on the podcast to talk about that as well. But all this stuff was at one point very controversial and now far less.

I mean, whatever traditional academics and traditional historians that are trying to, I guess as archaeologists that we're trying to resist, they've let go a lot of that. They've had to with things like Gobekli Tepe, they've had to because the evidence has overwhelmed them. And Gobekli Tepe is an excellent example.

Prior to the discovery and excavation of Gobekli Tepe, which is a site in Anatolia, in Turkey, it was the view, very firm view of archaeologists that there had been no megalithic architecture anywhere on earth. And when I say megalithic, I mean literally big stones, stone circles, huge constructions, nothing like that before, at the very, very earliest, 6000 years ago. And they would point to sites in, for example, Malta, a site called Gigantea, which is about 5800 years old.

That's the oldest megalithic architecture in the world. And they could understand how that was because these were agricultural societies. They generated surpluses.

You could free up people who could become specialists in architecture, in astronomy, in geometry, and they could apply their skills to the construction of these sites. But what they never considered possible was that a society that was hunter gatherers would have created a gigantic megalithic site. And then suddenly Gobekli Tepe is discovered.

It dates to 11,600 years ago. It's more than 5000 years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world. And it is in the center where there had been no previous evidence of agriculture.

But the moment Gobekli tepe appears, agriculture appears as well. And this is just something that's really hard for archaeology to explain. They've suddenly got 5000 years of missing history that they've just never taken into account.

And what I see them doing is largely avoiding the problem rather than getting to grips with it directly. And in fact, there have been a great number of changes in the last 20 years which have worked generally in favor of the arguments that I've, that I've proposed. Well, I'm so happy for you, because I know that for a long time you were out there on your own with a lot of these theories.

Very, very much so. And also subjected to the most blistering and deeply unpleasant criticism from the archaeological fraternity and from their friends in the media. Like, how dare this journalist propose that history might be different or that we might have a forgotten chapter in the human story.

It was regarded almost as offensive that I would put this material out there. And archaeologists felt it was their responsibility to show the public that I was full of shit. And that was.

And that was the whole way my work was greeted, and to a certain extent, still is greeted by archaeologists. But things have changed. Central to my work was the notion of a global cataclysm.

Roughly 12,000, 512,800 years ago. There was. It made sense to me in 1995 when I wrote fingerprints of the gods, but there was no compelling evidence for a global cataclysm then.

I just. All the evidence seemed to point to that time and a massive global event. And then from 2007 onwards, you know, more than a decade after I wrote fingerprints of the gods, we get a group of more than 60 major scientists who are seriously proposing that the earth was hit by multiple fragments of a giant comet 12,800 years ago, and that this caused a huge rise in sea level and extinctions of megafaunas.

They are not saying that it also wiped out a lost advanced civilization of prehistory. I'm saying that. But what has changed is that we now have compelling, hard scientific evidence.

I'm not saying every scientist accepts it. It's the nature of science to dispute findings. But we have a group of 60 major figures who have seriously proposed this in all the leading mainstream journals.

And it's changed the balance of power in this argument, because one thing that they used to say is, Hancock can't be right, because there was no global cataclysm, you know, twelve or 13,000 years ago. Well, now we know there was, and there are various explanations for it. So that's moved things along.

And the other thing that's changed a lot is the attitude of the man in the street to authority. That has changed. Back in the nineties, authority figures were the gatekeepers.

They controlled everything. If an authority figure in a discipline like archaeology said Hancock, is completely wrong, he's made all this stuff up that would generally be believed not by everybody, but by the majority of people today. To have a mainstream authority figure say that, to me, is actually an advantage because people are so distrustful of authority, and rightly so, because we've been lying by authority figures in all fields for so long, the bullshit has been so enormous that people are finally waking up and we can't trust what authority figures say.

No, I think we can thank the Internet for that. We can thank the Internet for that. Yeah.

I'm sure you've seen the more recent evidence of a crater that they just discovered, like fairly recently. Greenland. Yes.

Enormous. Enormous. It's an enormous crater.

It's 18 miles wide. It had not been discovered before because it's under ice. It's under a lot of ice.

At the end of the ice age, Greenland was one area which never lost its ice cover completely, whereas North America, everywhere north of Minnesota, was covered in ice a mile, sometimes 2 miles deep. Europe, the same northern Europe. But Greenland kept its ice, whereas the other parts of the world lost their ice at the end of the ice age.

And what's interesting about Greenland is there's already evidence of comet impact in Greenland, which goes back to papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 that they found what are called impact proxies in Greenland. In other words, nano diamonds, carbon spherules and evidence of a lot of platinum and iron was found in a layer in the ice dated to 12,800 years ago. But the next development that you're absolutely right, and this was just a few months ago, was the discovery of this humongous crater in Greenland and evidence that it was caused by an iron impactor of some kind now dating of it.

I would be irresponsible to say that that crater definitely dates to 12,800 years ago, because the work has not been done to prove that yet. But what I can say and what the specialists who have explored and excavated the crater are saying is that it's recent. They can say for sure that it happened during the last ice age.

Under it, under the crater, is nothing but massively disturbed and destroyed and completely wrecked ice from the ice age from the pleistocene above. It is smooth, perfect ice from our epoch, which is called the holocene, which began about 11,600 years ago. So all the evidence suggests that this crater dates to that period between 12,000, 811,600 years ago.

But to absolutely confirm that, more work needs to be done. But it's part of a growing pattern. The younger Dryas impact scientists, they call themselves, they call this the younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

And it's because there was a period in the earth's geological history that geologists call the younger Dryas, which lasted for 1200 years, from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago, it's a very mysterious period. We see all the megafauna dying off suddenly and rapidly. We see rises in sea level.

We see a huge collapse in global temperature. It's a cataclysmic epoch. And what is becoming clearer and clearer is that the evidence that a comet was behind it is extremely strong.

And as more and more evidence comes in, we realize how widespread it was found evidence of the impacts as far south as Antarctica. Now, previously, they were focused very much on North America. Now as far south as Antarctica, as far east as Syria.

This was truly a global event, and it changed the world. And I think, and it's my case that it wiped our memory of a previous episode of human civilization, that right at the epicenter of this cataclysm was a civilization that we would regard as advanced, not a simple hunter gatherer civilization, which was utterly wiped out in this cataclysmic event. And I should say for anyone who's really fascinated right now, please maybe pause and go listen to the one that the two that you did with Randall Carlson, where it really goes into depth about the impact, the evidence of these impacts, the evidence of the very quick demise of the ice age and what may have resulted in all these floods that you read about in the epic of Gilgamesh, that you read about in Noah's Ark, and that all these things are probably tales of stories that people passed down from generation to generation that survived this time.

Yeah. Because we know that at that time, between 12,000, 811,600 years ago, truly global cataclysmic events involving rapid rises in sea level did occur. And suddenly the worldwide tradition of a global flood stops being just a myth and starts being a memory, an account of real events.

It's been my privilege to work very closely with Randall Carlson. Yeah, he's amazing. Randall is absolutely amazing.

He is a total genius. He's also a gentle giant and such a kind, generous spirited person. It's a joy to work with him.

And every minute spent with him is in education. I had the privilege of traveling across the channel scablands in Washington state with Randall and seeing things through his eyes really opened my eyes to the scale of this disaster. You know, you could look at these giant boulders called glacial erratics, and they just look odd sitting there in the landscape.

But when you really consider how they got there, that they got there in icebergs the size of oil tankers that were carried on floods that were at least 500, up to 1000ft deep that were tearing through the channeled scablas, literally ripping the landscape apart. Then the icebergs would ground on valley sides, the flood waters would recede, the icebergs would be left. They're giant icebergs.

And as they melted away, they revealed the rocks that they had enchained that were caught up within them. And they're scattered all over the landscape. And you look at that and you think anything that was underneath that 12,800 years ago is gone completely.

There can't be anything left of it at all. Utterly, utterly destroyed. And I would encourage people that are interested in this to please watch the YouTube videos of it, because Randall provides all sorts, video and photographic evidence where you can take a look at the landscape and you get a perspective of how immense this destruction was.

It's really important to see that because it's easy enough to talk about floods and cataclysms, but actually to see its effect on the landscape directly, it has an emotional impact. I felt emotional traveling across the channel scablands, realizing that this was the heart of an event that changed the world completely. And the evidence continues to build in America.

Before, I've not gone over old ground that I went over in magicians of the gods and that we covered in the various interviews and podcasts in which it's really a good idea that people take a look at. But what I have done is added the new information published since 2015, which further supports the younger Dryas impact hypothesis and the notion that multiple fragments of a giant comet hit the earth and created an absolute global catastrophe. So what was the motivation behind creating this book, America before? It's a curious mixture of things.

I have been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization for more than 25 years. That was the essence of my book, fingerprints of the gods. That was published in 1995, that there has been a huge forgotten episode in human history.

I continued to follow that in a series of other books. Time I got to 2002 when I published a book called Underworld that followed seven years of scuba diving on continental shelves looking for structures that were submerged by rising sea levels. At the end of the last ice age, I really felt I'd done it.

I felt I'd walk the walk. I'd put out to the public a massive body of information, and I thought, my role in this is over. And I can breathe a sigh of relief because it's hot in this particular kitchen, and I can go do something else.

And I ended up writing a book, psychedelics. I ended up writing supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind. About the role of psychedelics in the origins of the human story.

But then new information started to come out that touched on the lost civilization idea, and I couldn't just stand by and ignore that information. That's why I published Magicians of the gods in 2015. And then as I was researching that book, I became aware of something I hadn't realized before, that there's a mass of new information from the Americas, specifically from the Americas, which completely rewrites the story of humanity, that the Americas have been misrepresented for a very long time by archaeology.

And archaeologists will be annoyed with me for saying that they have a way of forgetting their own errors, of saying, oh, well, we knew that all along it wasn't the case. But the fact of the matter remains that for the best part of 50 years, from the 1960s through until about 2010, american archaeology was locked in a dogma that they actually had a name for, which was Clovis first, that they invented a name for a culture. They called them the Clovis culture.

We don't know what they called themselves. They were hunter gatherers. They first appear in the archaeological record 13,400 years ago, and they vanish from the archaeological record 12,600 years ago.

And for a very long time, it was maintained adamantly that these were the first Americans, that no human being touched the soil of the Americas until 13,400 years ago. Just animals, but no human beings present at all. And any archaeologist who attempted to dispute that dogma, and I use the word deliberately, there should be no room for dogma in science.

But any archaeologist who challenged that would face severe problems with his or her career. They would be mocked and humiliated at conferences, like an archaeologist called Jacques Cinq Mars from Canada, who excavated in the Yukon, humiliated at conferences, insulted, accused of making stuff up. Their research funding would be withdrawn.

Basically, to challenge Clovis first was the end of your archaeological career. So, naturally, very few archaeologists wanted to challenge Clovis first. What was this gentleman in the Yukon? What was his? He's called Jacques Cinq Mars.

And interestingly, the Smithsonian, just in 2017, did a big kind of mea culpa, a big admission about this, that everybody had got things wrong, that Jack Cinq Mars had been ruined by the Clovis first lobby. But he'd been right all along. The site he excavated in the Yukon was re excavated in 2017, and every single thing he said was correct, even though they had just sneered at him.

And what year was he? He was excavating in the 1980s and the 1990s. He's still alive. He's still alive.

He's still alive. Yeah. Is he better? Well, I think he's vindicated, you know, and it's kind of.

It's kind of nice to be vindicated that there's almost a place in folklore for the individual who is scorned and humiliated by others, but who turns out to be right, and he was right. But my point about this is that what it meant was, since it was the dogma that Clovis was first, that the oldest dates were 13,400 years ago, there seemed to be no logic to archaeologists in digging deeper. You know how it is with archaeology that the upper levels are the youngest, and the deeper you go, the older it gets? That's why we say Upper Paleolithic for the late ice age and lower Paleolithic for the late Stone Age and lower for the older Stone Age.

And the feeling was no need to dig below the Clovis layer, because we already know that there were no human beings there before that. And then a few archaeologists. I mentioned Jack Cinq Mars, but another is Al Gudier from the University of South Carolina, who excavated a site called Topper in South Carolina.

Now, Topr is an incredibly rich Clovis site. It's full of their tools, their points. They made these special flint points that were used as arrowheads and spears.

A great Clovis site. He finished excavating the Clovis level, and then he did something that was supposed not to be done. He decided to dig deeper, and he carried on digging down, and there was a layer of about a meter and a half of barren soil.

And then beneath that, more human artifacts, and they finally date those back to more than 50,000 years ago. And then in 2017, published in Nature by Tom Demeray, who's the chief paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and a bunch of other very high level paleontologists published in Nature magazine, evidence for human presence in North America 130,000 years ago. Now, this has really put the cat amongst the pigeons.

Now, if humans were present in North America 130,000 years ago, and archaeologists have been telling us for 50 years that they were only present from 13,000 years ago, that's ten times as long that we've had humans in North America capable of doing stuff, and the archaeological dogma has prevented any search for what they were doing until very recently. What was the evidence from 130,000 years ago? Okay, so what? It's not the. Let me be clear about this, because this is something that is often misrepresented in my views.

It is not the evidence for an advanced civilization that we find 130,000 years ago in America. The evidence that we find is evidence for human presence. And what they were doing was very much stone age stuff.

It's a mastodon. It's a mastodon skeleton that was excavated. It was actually found by accident during road construction near, near San Diego.

And an archaeologist was attached to the road construction crew and immediately stopped construction. And they investigated it thoroughly. And what they found was so much dynamite in the early 1990s when they found it that they decided not to publish at the time, because what they found was evidence that those mastodon bones had been cracked open by human beings using tools and that the marrow had been extracted, that one tusk had been left standing upright in the ground and another had been left beside it.

That femur had. A femur of the animal had been taken away completely from the site and there was assemblages of instruments that were used to smash and break the bones. And the conclusion of the team was that only one kind of creature could have done that work using tools on a mastodon, and that's human beings.

That's classic human behavior. This sets the goalposts in a totally different place. Suddenly we have to consider that humans have been in America for 130,000 years.

We already know that a dogmatic approach of archaeology has rather refused to look at anything older than 13,000 years ago. And what it does is it generates an engine of demand that we need to be looking at those missing hundred thousand plus years. We need to be looking at it hard.

Of course, the immediate reaction has not been to go looking for stuff in the other hundred thousand years. Most archaeologists have responded by saying, this is impossible. It can't be so.

But that's precisely what they said to Jacques Cinq Mars, who said that humans were in bluefish caves in the Yukon 25,000 years ago. And it's precisely what they said to Al Goodyear, who said humans had been at topper 50,000 years ago. And they were both right.

And I believe that Tom DeMeray and his team, you don't get a big article published in Nature unless it's already pretty solidly based and pretty much peer reviews. It has produced a reaction. I would be wrong to say that it's universally accepted.

It's very much challenged, but it's intriguing. What is the challenge? The challenge fundamentally comes from we archaeologists know that there were no human beings in the Americas that far back. To put it in perspective, it's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Europe.

It's about 60,000 years before the first evidence of human beings in Australia. And this is just evidence of the first human beings. We have to point out how difficult it is to find evidence of human beings.

It's extremely difficult to find. You know, sometimes we imagine that archaeologists are working with masses of skeletal material. No, they're not.

They're not. I mean, the whole. This is one of the ironies, the whole Clovis first dogma.

You would think that they had masses of material to work with. They did have the tools, but in terms of skeletal remains, just one. Just one single skeletal remain from that .1

of the things that Michael Shermer had sent me was this dispute that perhaps the bones had been cracked open by the excavation material, by the excavation machines. I saw Michael's email last night, and I appreciate that Michael wants to continue to engage with this subject, and that's his job. He's a professional skeptic, and it's his role to do so.

But what he misses out, it's true that a new paper has been published which raises questions over what's called the Surruti mastodon site, which is the site that Tom Demeray at San Diego Natural History Museum excavated. And what's interesting, since Michael took the trouble to write the questions. Can I just.

Can I just read you something that I responded to on this? Sure. Which is that stew into the microphone? Yeah. Yeah.

Basically, this paper was in no way a refutation of the original paper in nature. As a matter of fact, the gentleman who wrote that paper never even looked at the archaeological remains that are now in the San Diego Natural History Museum. What it is, what he based it on is reference.

I'm quoting from the abstract of the paper itself, reference to a freeway right of way map and construction plans, contemporary road building practices, and worksite photographs available on the Internet. In other words, the site was not visited. They simply looked at secondary references.

They did not look at the archaeological material. And they ignored the entire argument of Tom Demeray and his colleagues, who had already addressed that issue. They didn't look at the bones.

Look at the bones. When you break a fresh bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone. And Tom Demeray and his team specifically ruled out road making machinery as responsible for this breaking pattern because they actually carried out experiments on modern elephants, deceased elephants, and they broke their bones.

And the kind of fracture that you get in a fresh green bone is completely different from the kind of fracture you get in a fossilized bone. So unfortunately, this paper pays no attention to that. It just looks at road plans and says, there was road work there.

It must have been done by road work. I think it's very sloppy, very weak, and it's certainly not the answer. We can expect ongoing debate, and that is healthy, but this is not a strong case at all.

So this points to the first evidence that we found. And is there any effort underway to try to uncover more evidence from a similar timeline? Well, I'm going to cite Tom Demery, the chief paleontologist, San Diego Natural History Museum. That's what he would like to see.

He makes the point to me. I interview him. I spent a day with him at the National History Museum.

He was very generous with his time. I did an extended interview, and I quote from it in America before. And his wish is that archaeologists, instead of spending all their time trying to find ways to dismiss and get rid of his findings, his wish is that they would spend a little bit of that time looking at deposits older than 13,400 years and even being willing to go back as far as 130,000 years.

That's. That would be a proper scientific response. Here is a thorough body of work put forward by a very senior group of scientists who hesitated before they published it.

They had the information back in the 1990s, but it wasn't until refined dating techniques later than in the 21st century that they finally were sure what they had and that they published it in Nature in 2017. It's an important study, and I think what's going to happen is that we're going to find much more evidence of a very ancient human presence in the Americas. And that's what Tom DeMeray thinks as well.

And as he points out, if we don't look, then we're never going to find, if we allow dogma to stop us looking and saying, oh, it's impossible that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago, so we won't bother to look. What a failure of science that is, and to spend all the time instead trying to get rid of the evidence that doesn't fit the current paradigm. But it's so fascinating that just this fortuitous discovery during a construction site could change the way people perceive things.

You just got to wonder how much of that stuff is. I mean, how deep did they have to go to find these mastodon bones? Well, so this is a road cut that's being made. So those would be pretty deep down, 1015ft down, the grader is going through and flattening them.

It varies from place to place, depending on soil deposition, the stratification in the stratification of the soil. But the key point is that what you need to do is go deeper than 13,400 years ago, and you need to do so with dedication and vigor and with some kind of funding. And at the moment, archaeology doesn't see the point of that.

If the paper in nature by Tom Demeray was alone, if there were nothing else than that, I wouldn't place so much trust in it. But I've spent a lot of time during the researching of this book with archaeologists who did did dig deeper. And what those archaeologists all confirm is that there have been human beings in the Americas for tens of thousands of years.

And it's not surprising that that can be pushed back to 130,000 years ago, because part of the argument about the peopling of the Americas has to do with a place that we now call the Bering Straits, between Alaska and Siberia, which during the ice age were at times a land bridge. They were exposed because of lowered sea levels. But migrants who crossed that land bridge from Siberia on many occasions over periods of tens of thousands of years, would find themselves confronted then by the north american ice cap, which, oddly, wasn't at the tip of Alaska, but began further in.

So there was living space in a bit of Alaska, but you couldn't get through the ice Mountains, these literally ice mountains, 2 miles deep, covering the whole of North America and preventing access to the unglaciated parts of America. The thing is that what happened around 13,400 years ago, there had been a period of global warming and the ice sheets began to melt. And a corridor opened up between what's called the cordilleran ice sheet and the Laurentite ice sheet, the two major ice keeps in North America.

And it's thought that the migration came through that corridor. Well, the thing is that exactly the same thing happened between 140,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago. There was an episode of global warming.

An ice free corridor opened up, same opportunity to enter the Americas was there at that period than it was at the later period. And Tom Demeray's point and mine, is that we have to pay much more attention to that earlier period. And that's really why I've gone ahead and written this book, is to try to put before a broad, general audience, hopefully in language that makes sense, an assembly of all the latest information that casts doubt on the story.

We've been told because, my goodness, if archeology is wrong about the story of the peopling of the Americas, if it's radically wrong, as it now appears to be, then our whole understanding of human history has to change. It's not just the history of the Americas, it's the history of the entire world. It has been an absolute article of faith amongst archaeologists that civilization began in the old world.

And indeed I have a book in my library called history begins at Sumer, and it's by Samuel Noah Kramer, a very renowned archaeologist. And it's a good book, actually. But the argument is that this is where civilization began, in the culture that we call the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, and that it began about 6000 years ago, and that civilization is entirely an invention of the old world.

It has nothing to do with the new world at all, because the new world was populated so late. This has been the argument, and this is the argument that now radically and suddenly begins to change, that the Americas, this enormous landmass, resource rich, bountiful in every way, south of Minnesota, south of the ice cap, vast land areas that are bountiful, get into Central America, South America, the Amazon, just huge areas of land that were very, very offered great potential for human occupation. Dogma has said there were no humans there.

Now the first bits of evidence are coming out that says there were humans there. And if that's the case, then we must consider the possibility that the story of civilization might have begun in the Americas, not in the old world at all. It might be a new world invention, not an old world invention.

Some of the more fascinating pieces of evidence in South America have come out recently about these channels and pathways that they found in the Amazon that could not have been created any other way but by humans creating irrigation, humans creating, it appears, like grids, like a city grid, definitely. The Amazon is a colossal mystery, and it's one of the subjects that I explore in depth in America before. First of all, to give some basic figures, the Amazon basin is huge.

The Amazon basin is 7 million km² in area, and within it, five and a half million square kilometers, remains almost entirely unstudied by archaeologists. And that's the five and a half million square kilometers that is still covered by dense. And to put that into perspective, five and a half million square kilometers is the size of the entire indian subcontinent.

So it's like saying we've done world archaeology, but we've just ignored India. You know, we've done world archaeology, but we've just ignored the Amazon. It's the same.

Same argument. Five and a half million square kilometers. The view was, again, there was a dogma.

There was a preconception human beings couldn't have flourished in the Amazon. It's a. It's not a resource rich area.

The soils are poor. It's a difficult area, challenging to get to, very far from the Bering Straits. So the view was that humans hadn't entered the Amazon until about 1000 years ago.

And then gradually, little by little, that view has begun to change. And it's begun to change because of the tragic clearances of the Amazon, because the Amazon rainforest is literally being cut down and turned into soya bean farms and cattle ranches. And in that cutting down process has emerged things that shouldn't be there at all.

For example, evidence that large cities flourished in the Amazon. Enormous cities, which were larger than the. There was a spanish explorer who went down the Amazon river system in 1541 to 1542.

He was the first European to cross the entire length of South America. From west to east along the Amazon. He reported seeing incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people, a thriving culture.

And 100 years later, when other Europeans got into the Amazon, couldn't find these cities, so they said, oh, Francisco Orellana, that was his name, made it all up. It was just a fantasy. And then in the last decade, as the clearances of the Amazon have proceeded, we've begun to see the traces of those cities.

What happened was that the Spaniards brought smallpox into the Amazon. Smallpox devastated the local population because there was no immunity to it. There was a massive die off.

The cities were deserted. Within 50 years, they were completely overgrown by the jungle. And that's why they were not seen by the explorers who came in 100 years later.

Now the jungle's being cleared, those cities are emerging and we can say that a city like London, which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of that size all over the Amazon, huge numbers of them, and a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people. What? Yes, 20 million. This is the latest evidence from the Amazon.

And then you ask yourself, how did they do that? How did they feed 20 million people in the Amazon? Because it's a fact rainforest soils are poor. It's one of the reasons these soya bean farms are really stupid ideas, because once you clear the rainforest, the land is largely unfertile and you can't grow stuff on it for very long. So how did they feed all these people? The answer was, they invented a soil.

And that soil has a name. It's called terra prater. Archaeologists refer to it as amazonian dark earths or amazonian black earth.

It's a man made soil. It's thousands of years old. It's full of microbes that are not found in adjoining soil.

It's based around biochar. And you can take a handful of 8000 year old terra prater and you can add it to barren soil and that soil will instantly become fertile. It's highly sought after in the Amazon and it explains how they fed these people.

There was science in the Amazon. How did they create this? Well, this is something that's not understood. It's still not understood by soil experts to this day as to how that was done.

But it's one of many intriguing evidences, pieces of evidence of much higher development in the Amazon that it has been given credit for and of a kind of science in the Amazon. Jamie's got an image of it up there. So this is it? This is tera Prater? Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Exactly.

So was that done by burns? Did they use controlled burns? They did. One way that it was achieved was to do wet burning of middens. They would be burned and smolder.

They wouldn't burn fiercely, which just produces charcoal. They would burn and smolder and that what is called biochar would result of the fertility of the soil. But the mystery is the microbial content of this soil, which is completely different from the microbes in neighboring soils.

And that remains unexplained. So what are the theories? Composting. Some sort of advanced composting? Some sort of advanced composting.

But again, what has not been explained is the microbial content of these soils. So there, first of all, is an issue of how two things, how large populations get fed in the Amazon. Evidence that there was a culture in the Amazon that was capable of manipulating the environment in such a way that it could support large populations with the invention of terra praetor.

Secondly, new evidence previously not recognized. The Amazon is basically a garden. The Amazon is a man made rainforest.

There are certain trees, like Brazil nut trees or the ice cream bean tree, which are food crops, which are very, very valuable. And they dominate the tree regime in the Amazon. They're what's referred to as hyperdominant species.

In other words, people living in the Amazon over thousands of years selected certain trees which they then cultivated and grew. So the whole thing is not simply a wild, pristine rainforest. It's a very ancient man made environment.

And emerging from that man made environment, as well as evidence of large cities, large populations and this mysterious dark earth, are huge geometrical structures. And again, I go into this at length in America before, because I love this mystery. We have in the UK, structures that are called henges.

I live in the city of Bath, and about 30 miles away, there's a beautiful site called Avebury and another, more famous site called Stonehenge. And what a henge is, is a ditch, which has been dug deep and then an embankment has been pushed up outside the ditch. When people first saw these structures, they wondered if they'd been built for defense.

But then it became obvious they hadn't been built for defense, because if you want to create a moat, you put it outside your embankment, not inside your embankment. So a henge is an earthwork which consists of a deep moat with a large embankment outside it. And it can be circular, it can be square.

And in the UK and other parts of Europe, it often contains stone circles, megalithic stone circles as well. But the henge itself is entirely an earthwork. What we find in the Amazon are, are thousands of henges that are now beginning to emerge from the cleared area of the jungle, and others that have been identified for the first time with lidar.

Lidar technology is being employed in the Amazon. It's non destructive. You can see what's under the trees.

What is lidar? Light imaging and detective radar. They bounce laser beams down into the jungle, a whole pattern of them. You need helicopters, but it doesn't damage the rainforest, and you can strip away and see what's there.

If this isn't too much of a diversion, let me give you the example of Guatemala. Guatemala. Guatemala is a small country, if I remember correctly, it's not much more than 100,000 km² in size.

It is filled with intriguing mayan ruins. Everybody has heard of tikal. What archaeologists didn't know was that literally within walking distance of Tikal, surrounding that whole area, were more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified.

And these have all been identified by lidar in a country that's just 100,000 km in area. So you have to ask yourself, five and a half million square kilometres of the Amazon, if lidar technology could be applied comprehensively, what would we find beneath there? And the evidence already is extremely tempting and extremely tantalizing. And I'm intrigued by these huge geometrical figures, which involve primarily circles and squares.

And they are classic hinges in the sense that they are deep ditches surrounded by huge embankments, extremely geometrical. For example, you can find an octagon surrounding a square. At a place called Jaco Sar in the Amazon, you can find a square perfectly enclosing a circle.

Now that is an exercise called squaring the circle that our academics have given to the Greeks. They said the Greeks were the first people who performed that exercise. But now we find in dated sites in the Amazon that this was being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks.