Graham Hancock - America is Most Likely Home for Lost Civilization | Joe Rogan

? And I have to say, archaeologists like to insult me by calling me a pseudoscientist. I can't think of anything more pseudoscientific than the Clovis First Doctrine, which locked American archaeology for fifty years in a particular framework which we now know was totally wrong—nothing good about it at all—a complete mistake. What I'm hoping the book will do in the long run is that it will lead to more attention being focused on the Americas. This is a very neglected area of the world as far as deep and ancient archaeology goes. The recent history of the Americas has been relatively well studied, but the deep and ancient history has not been well studied. And I think America is going to contain revelations for us about our story and about our past. And I'm serious when I suggest that America is the most plausible and the most likely home base for a lost civilization. If you're going to propose a lost civilization, there are certain preconditions. You can't have it on a small island. There's got to be a large landmass with enormous resources and the ability for population to grow and for those resources to be mobilized. And what I suddenly realized, you asked earlier why I started to write this book at all, is what the new evidence is pointing to is that the Americas have been wrongly neglected, that here we have a giant continental landmass with extraordinary resources that has just been ruled out of the story of human civilization. But once we take account of the fact that there was a giant cataclysm over North America 12,800 years ago, once we start looking, as I do in America before, at the incredible deep in-depth similarities between, for example, the religious system of ancient Egypt and the religious system of the Mississippi Valley, then you realize that you're into a global mystery here and that the answer to that mystery may not at all be in the old world and may very much be in the Americas. See it's odd. I mentioned Moundville earlier on. It's kind of odd that we should find what is essentially the ancient Egyptian religion existing in the symbolism of Moundville, the ascent to Orion, the transit to the Milky Way, the journey along the Milky Way. These are very specific and idiosyncratic ideas. And what makes it doubly odd is Moundville isn't that old. Moundville as a site is about a thousand years old. Ancient Egypt had already been gone completely from the world for at least 600 years before Moundville was created. The end of ancient Egypt, there's Moundville. And what we're looking at in the foreground is Mound B and we're looking at Mound A in the distance and a complete circle of mounds. What is odd about it is we find this system of ancient Egyptian ideas in Moundville 500 years after ancient Egypt has gone from the world. The Romans were the end of ancient Egypt. By 400 AD, ancient Egypt is gone. Moundville doesn't even exist then, but 600 years later, it is created and it manifests the entire set of ancient Egyptian ideas. Clearly it did not get that as a result of direct transmission from ancient Egypt unless they were time travelers. The only way I think it could have got it is as a result of a legacy passed down from a much earlier civilization that had been influenced and affected many different parts of the world. And the characteristics of that civilization, the shamanistic heart of it, the use of altered states of consciousness, the focus on those are amongst the reasons that I would suggest that America is the place that we should be looking. And the big mysteries are in the areas that were so devastated at the end of the last ice age up in the north of North America, the channeled scab lands in particular, and then the Mississippi Valley, the whole story of the Mississippi Valley. Yes, Moundville is a thousand years old, but then you can go back to Poverty Point in Louisiana, which is 2,700 years old. You can go to Watson Break in Louisiana, which is 5,500 years old. You can go to sites like Connolly, which are 8,000 years old. The system keeps on going back and disappearing back into time. And I think the most fruitful new work on exploring the origins of civilization is going to occur counterintuitively in the Americas, the very last place on earth that archaeologists have ever thought to look.