 is in rural Massachusetts to visit his son and grandchildren. I tell him that I was actually in his neck of the woods a year ago. We're making small talk. New England is a spooky corner of the world, especially in the autumn: H.P. Lovecraft country, all those boggy forests and stony hillsides. I like it. Graham agrees. 'Interestingly,' he says, 'when you get into the deep woods, there's lots of structures, lots of megalithic structures, which the mainstream describe as root cellars built during the colonial era. But I have my doubts.' Graham Hancock believes that we are 'a species with amnesia.' Ours is not the first advanced, globe-straddling civilisation to have existed on this planet: there was another in the very distant past, now completely lost. 12,800 years ago, he says, this society was destroyed in a natural cataclysm called the Younger Dryas. The planet had been slowly emerging from its Ice Age, but global temperatures suddenly plummeted in a brief period of extreme climate change, and the survivors fanned out across the earth to pass on their secrets to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Usually, this cooling is attributed to natural cycles, but some maintain it was a result of a gigantic extraterrestrial collision. Either way, Hancock believes the Younger Dryas civilisation was the origin of agriculture, architecture, and many of the world's myths. Its messengers were remembered as gods or giants – Prometheus, Quetzalcoatl. They inspired the legend of Atlantis. And you can still see the monuments their visits inspired, like the Great Sphinx of Giza or the Cuicuilco pyramid in Mexico, which Graham believes are much, much older than the scientific consensus allows.){kind=link}
His ‘contrarian’ theories about lost civilisations and hidden numerical patterns feature in a new Netflix series. But how much is true?
I’ve been talking to Graham Hancock for all of about 30 seconds when he first brings up the vastly ancient prehistoric structures that litter our world.
We’re speaking over Zoom. Graham (he insists on first names) is in rural Massachusetts to visit his son and grandchildren. I tell him that I was actually in his neck of the woods a year ago. We’re making small talk. New England is a spooky corner of the world, especially in the autumn: H.P. Lovecraft country, all those boggy forests and stony hillsides. I like it. Graham agrees.
“Interestingly,” he says, “when you get into the deep woods, there’s lots of structures, lots of megalithic structures, which the mainstream describe as root cellars built during the colonial era. But I have my doubts.”
Graham Hancock believes that we are “a species with amnesia.” Ours is not the first advanced, globe-straddling civilisation to have existed on this planet: there was another in the very distant past, now completely lost. 12,800 years ago, he says, this society was destroyed in a natural cataclysm called the Younger Dryas. The planet had been slowly emerging from its Ice Age, but global temperatures suddenly plummeted in a brief period of extreme climate change, and the survivors fanned out across the earth to pass on their secrets to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Usually, this cooling is attributed to natural cycles, but some maintain it was a result of a gigantic extraterrestrial collision.