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Published · transcript-backedBuilt Supernatural Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. Built Visionary.
16 Oct 2024 Lex Fridman Podcast #449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
“And I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called Supernatural Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind recently retitled Visionary.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Graham Hancock
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 16 Oct 2024
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…And then there’s different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture. And that is also non-obvious, but it’s just there’s first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living. Then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff. It seems like an entirely reasonable argument. Everything about that makes sense. There is no doubt that you’re seeing evolutionary progress, social evolution taking place in those thousands of years before Sumer emerges. But what’s happening now, really, I spent much of the nineties and the late 1980s investigating this issue of a lost civilization. I wrote a series of books about it. But by 2002 when I published a book called Underworld, which was the most massive and most heavy book that I’ve ever written, because I was writing very defensively at the time. By the time I finished that book, my wife Santha and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world looking for structures underwater, often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they’d seen underwater. By the time that book was finished, I thought, actually, I’ve done this story. I’ve walked the walk. I really don’t have much more to say about it. And I turned in another direction and I wrote a book called Supernatural Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind recently retitled Visionary. And that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in the evolution of human culture. And I didn’t think that I would go back to the lost civilization issue, but Göbekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me the more and more discoveries there, the 11,600 year date from Enclosure D, which is the two largest megalithic pillars. And I reached a point where I realized I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again. And Göbekli Tepe was a game changer, but I think it’s a game changer for everything because Göbekli Tepe, the extraordinary nature of it. We are looking at a major megalithic site, which is at least five and a half thousand years older than Ġgantija in Malta, which was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world. And this led of course to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from the Turkish government who see the potential tourism potential of having the world’s oldest megalithic site and from archeologists. And this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region. And what they’re finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli Tepe and going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus, is what Turkish archeologists are now calling the Taş Tepeler civilization. They’re calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills Civilization with very definite identifying characteristics, semi-subterranean circular structures, the use of T-shaped megalithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It’s clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually in a way, the end of this process. alithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It’s clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually in a way, the end of this process. It was the summation of everything that Stone Hills Civilization had achieved. But what is becoming clear is that this is a period between before the foundation of Göbekli Tepe, as far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Göbekli Tepe. But of course there’s a lot of Göbekli Tepe still underground, so we can’t say for sure that that’s the oldest, but it’s the oldest so far excavated. What we’re seeing is that in that whole region around there, there was something was in motion and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And this is where these two dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I’ll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago. So Göbekli Tepe’s construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don’t find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas, but the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we are already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form at Göbekli Tepe and after the construction of Göbekli Tepe, in fact, even during the construction of Göbekli Tepe, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted. The people who created Göbekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning. But by the time Göbekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and then topped off with a hill, which is why Göbekli Tepe is called what it is, Göbekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill or the hill of the navel. For a long time, Göbekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.…
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