Graham Hancock: prediction

Transcript context

…How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the ice age advanced civilizations? Is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have erased most of an advanced civilization during this period? In a sense, it’s not the impact hypothesis that is central to what I’m saying, it’s the Younger Dryas that’s central to what I’m saying. And the Younger Dryas required a trigger, something caused it. I think the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the notion that we’re looking at a debris stream of a fragmenting comet, and we can still see that debris stream because it’s still up there and we still pass through it twice a year, is the best explanation. But I don’t mind other explanations. It’s good that there are other explanations. The Younger Dryas is a big mystery, and it’s not a mystery that’s been solved yet. And that word, advanced civilization, this is another word that is easily misunderstood. And I’ve tried to make clear many, many times that when we consider the possibility of something like a civilization in the past, we shouldn’t imagine that it’s us, that it’s something like us. We should expect it to be completely different from us, but that it would’ve achieved certain things. Amongst the clues that intrigue me are those precessional numbers that are found all around the world, and are a category of ancient maps called Portolanos, which suddenly started to appear just after the crusade that entered Constantinople and sacked Constantinople, the Portolanos suddenly start to appear. And they’re extremely accurate maps. The most of the ones that have survived are extremely accurate maps of the Mediterranean alone, but some of them show much wider areas. For example, on these Portolano-style maps, you do find a depiction of Antarctica again and again. And another thing that these maps have in common is that many of the mapmakers state that they base their maps on multiple older source maps, which have not survived. These maps are intriguing because they have very accurate relative longitudes. Our civilization did not crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century with Harrison’s chronometer, which was able to keep accurate time at sea so you could have the time in London and you could have the local time at sea at the same time. And then you could work out your longitude. There might be other ways of working out longitude as well, but there it is. The fact is these Portolanos have extremely accurate relative longitudes. Secondly, some of them show the world, to my eye, as it looked during the ice age. They show a much extended Indonesia and Malaysian peninsula and the series of islands that make up Indonesia today are all grouped together into one landmass. And that was the case during the ice age. That was the Sunda Shelf. And the presence of Antarctica on some of these maps also puzzles and intrigues me and is not satisfactorily explained in my view by archeology, which says, “Oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it so they put a fictional landmass there.” not satisfactorily explained in my view by archeology, which says, “Oh, those mapmakers, they felt that the world needed something underneath it to balance it so they put a fictional landmass there.” I don’t think that makes sense. I think somebody was mapping the world during the last ice age, but that doesn’t mean that they had our kind of tech. It means that they were following that exploration instinct. That they knew how to navigate. They’d been watching the stars for thousands of years before, they knew how to navigate and they knew how to build seagoing ships. And they explored the world and they mapped the world. Those maps were made a very, very long time ago. Some of them, I believe, were likely preserved in the Library of Alexandria. I think even then they were being copied and recopied. We don’t know exactly what happened to the Library of Alexandria, except that it was destroyed. I suggest it’s likely this was during the period of the Roman Empire. I suggest it’s likely that some of those maps were taken out of the library and taken to Constantinople, and that’s where they were liberated during the crusade and entered world culture again and started to be copied and recopied.…

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