Table of Contents
Talking with Lex Fridman, Graham Hancock says he cannot name where an advanced society of the ice age began or where it was based. The Sahara is immense and only thinly studied. Standing forest in the Amazon is another vast gap. Shores now underwater matter because the sea climbed sharply, with pulses of melt, across many thousands of years. Northern country under ice he calls a frozen waste, so the places to search are ones that could hold people then. Drowned coasts, the Sahara, and the Amazon are candidates for what he calls his lost society. He names no single capital and does not sort those regions into a later sequence of cultures. Egyptian talk of something hidden under the Sphinx is, he says, already native to Egypt. He treats Gobekli Tepe as a hall of records. A reading of Pillar 43, which he credits to Martin Sweatman and says the profession has not accepted, marks about 12,800 years ago, the opening of the Younger Dryas and of an impact he argues for.
Key points
- Hancock says he does not know where an ice age society started or where it was based.
- The search areas he names are hospitable ground of that era, including drowned coasts, the Sahara, and the Amazon, not the frozen north.
- He answers the forager objection with partial excavation and with a possible choice not to interfere.
- Egyptian tradition of something concealed under the Sphinx is, in his view, already native to Egypt.
- He calls Gobekli Tepe a hall of records and cites a Pillar 43 date near 12,800 years ago, at the Younger Dryas opening.
- Astronomy, he says, can memorialize a date without an undeciphered script, though he notes Sweatman is not accepted in the field.
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Short quotes
I don't know where this civilization started or where it was based.
Graham Hancock, An ice age homeland
He refuses a single homeland and says the base of the society is exactly what he cannot locate. Watch at 2:22
Göbekli Tepe is a hall of records.
Graham Hancock, An ice age homeland
He treats that site as a stored archive, not as the capital whose location he has just left open. Watch at 6:10
If you use astronomical language, then any astronomical literate civilization will be able to give you a date.
Graham Hancock, An ice age homeland
His point is that sky symbols can carry a date without a script that later readers cannot decipher. Watch at 8:36
Video by Lex Clips. Watch on YouTube.