Graham Hancock: evaluation

Transcript context

…So I guess the general puzzlement that you’re filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements? That’s the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn’t take so long. Maybe things were happening that we haven’t yet got hold of in the archeological record, which await to be discovered. And of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archeology, but the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archeology is not on its own enough to suggest that we’re missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn’t only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap. It’s also to do with the fact that there’s common iconography. There’s common myths and traditions, and there’s common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world, and they’re found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another and that are also distant from one another in time. They don’t necessarily occur at the same time. And this is where I think that archeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea can manifest again and again throughout the human story. So there are particular issues, for example, the notion of the afterlife, destiny of the soul, what happens to us when we die? And believe me, when you reach my age, that’s something you do think about what happens. I used to feel immortal when I was in my forties, but now that I’m 74, I definitely know that I’m not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way, that it makes a journey along the Milky Way, that there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates. The course of the life that that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It’s very strongly found in the Americas right from South America through Mexico, through into North America. But it’s also found in ancient Egypt, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same idea. And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is the sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes. plain both the similarities and the differences in the expression of these ideas. The other thing, very puzzling thing, is the sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes. At least I think that’s the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it’s important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you are based, back in the sixties. And Hertha von Dechend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University, and they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet’s Mill, and Hamlet’s Mill differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I’ll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it’s held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession and the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so. Santillana and von Dechend are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that. And they do actually trace it. I think I’m quoting them pretty much correctly to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization. Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this mystery in the first place. Okay, now, the precession of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what’s less obvious is that it’s also wobbling on its axis. So if you imagine the extended North Pole of the earth pointing up at the sky in our time, it’s pointing at the star Polaris, and that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth. Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended North Pole of the earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That’s one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth’s axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The earth is orbiting the sun, and we are seeing what’s behind it, what’s in direct line with the sun in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So at different times of the year, the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today we live in the age of Pisces, and it’s definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where I differ from archeology.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.