America Before

by Graham Hancock

  This is always a problem with monuments carved out of stone. The cutting and shaping of the stone itself cannot be directly dated. What is needed is an archaeological context in which the monument is set—preferably with carbon-datable organic materials in situ—and from these the age of the monument may then usually be inferred. Since there was no excavation at Mt. Mokhnataya, however, no context had yet been established and the archaeological researchers were surely right that precise dating was presently impossible.

  But what sort of “archaeological researchers” had even these provisional assessments reported in The Siberian Times come from? The news item gave no information about their credentials, nor could I find any online. The only clue, and not necessarily a reliable one, was in the comments section where Ruslan Peresyolkov was described as “a little-known web-designer and not an archaeologist (not even an amateur).”19

  We humans are hardwired for pattern recognition, so it’s not surprising that people all over the world frequently detect patterns in nature that they believe are the work of men but later, on closer examination by cooler and more experienced heads, prove to be entirely natural. This happens particularly often with eroded outcrops of rock, notably with certain types of granite that can crack and weather in ways that seem obviously designed but in fact are not.

  Archaeologists are trained to be skeptical of such simulacra and their default position will be that a rock is just a rock until there is really hard and compelling evidence that humans shaped it. Needless to say, if the rock in question ended up as a granite statue of Ramesses II, the context and the style, plus any hieroglyphs engraved upon it, would tell you all you need to know. Granite boulders that have been sitting on an unexcavated hillside in the Altai for unknown thousands of years, however, are an entirely different proposition, and I wasn’t inclined to take any opinion of them on trust whether expressed by a fully qualified archaeologist or by a web designer or, for that matter, by Vladimir.

  I was just curious, and literally “in the area”—so why not take a look for myself?

  MESSAGES OF EARTH AND SKY

  WE DROVE AS CLOSE AS possible to a rugged hill that I recognized from our earlier search, and trudged across a field to get to it. Raisa, who’d recently had hip replacement surgery, remained behind in the Mitsubishi, but Vladimir, Svetlana, and Maxim joined us—the young man kindly offering to carry Santha’s weighty bag of cameras.

  We reached the base of the hill and began a long clamber up a steep slope thickly carpeted with wild grasses, heather, and clinging brambles. Svetlana warned us that the area was infested with snakes. “Always look before you step,” she said.

  The afternoon was sunny and surprisingly warm and the sky an eggshell blue with a few soft white clouds up high. At one point, pausing for breath, I turned and looked back. Behind us, dotted with lower mounds and hills, was a patchwork quilt of greens and yellows spread out for 20 miles across the floor of a glorious valley. It was through this valley and around these hills that we had spent the morning fruitlessly driving. Now, from this new vantage point, I saw it was bounded to the east by the humped, tawny backs of a distant range of mountains. I watched for a moment the shadows of the clouds painting their own patterns across the landscape, struck by the poignant, fleeting beauty of it all.

  We resumed the climb, close now to our first objective—an outcrop of rough, deeply fissured and fractured natural granitic bedrock, visible because the otherwise omnipresent undergrowth could find no purchase on it. It was red-gray in color, about 50 meters in length and 20 wide, obviously an integral part of the hillside itself, sloping at the same steep angle and surmounted at its upper end by a dense cluster of large boulders. “The tail of the dragon,” said Vladimir skeptically, pointing to the downslope sector of the outcrop, “and the head”—he indicated the boulders.

  At first I didn’t get it, but once we’d climbed above the outcrop and could look back and down on it, a figure began to emerge. I could just about make sense of the tail and I could see the head clearly—but not as the head of a dragon. Viewed very slightly turned in profile from where I stood it seemed to me much more to resemble the head and the left eye of some great serpent.

  I was, of course, already sensitized and preconditioned to recognize the form of a serpent in the outcrop, perhaps a little by Svetlana’s warning of snakes in the grass in these parts but also, in an even more visceral way, by what I had learned at Serpent Mound in Ohio.

  The “language” that Serpent Mound speaks is hard to understand from the technological-materialist point of view. That view, so dominant and widespread today, is one in which there is no such thing as “spirit” and the earth is simply dead “matter” to be mined, exploited, and consumed. By contrast the ancient people to whom Serpent Mound addressed itself in clear and ringing tones not only knew that all things, both animate and inanimate, were imbued with spirit but also lived close to the earth and were in touch with Her rhythms and awake to the manifold messages and signals and ciphers by which She spoke to them.

  Among these were perfectly “natural” features of the landscape through which, whether on account of their special appearance, or location, or alignment, or some other remarkable quality, the spirit of the earth could manifest wisdom, beauty, and teachings. Serpent Mound is one of these “Manitou,” and we saw how the presence there of a natural serpentine ridge, with a natural serpentlike “head” oriented toward the setting point of the sun on the summer solstice, offered an epiphany to the ancients of the union of earth and Sky and was their cue to create the great effigy mound that now commands the site and still “swallows the sun” on the longest day of the year.

  Nearly 3 months had passed since that summer solstice at Serpent Mound. Now the autumn equinox was just a few days away and I was very far from America, yet in a part of the world directly linked to the migrations of the ancestors of the First Americans. I was therefore not averse in principle to considering the possibility that this peculiar formation in the Siberian Altai might be another “Earth Serpent,” enhanced and embellished by human beings attentive to the ciphers of nature.

  But it equally might be how Vladimir saw it—simply one of those accidents of nature that give the illusion of a human hand at work.

  From the rough bearings I was able to take, though I offer no guarantees, it seemed to me that the serpent’s head (I could not see it as a “dragon!”) was oriented more or less due west and thus aligned to the setting point of the sun on both the spring and the autumn equinoxes. About 2 meters high and 4 meters long to the base of the neck, the head was massive and possessed a distinct brow ridge overlying the firmly defined left eye. Moving forward, I saw the mouth was present, the jaws clearly demarcated and slightly ajar. There was a peculiar cleft in the front of the lower jaw.

  The Altai “dragon/serpent.” Graham Hancock at the left side of the “head” with his hand on its lower left eyelid. PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA. INSET: An enhanced image helps to explain why recent visitors, and the ancients before them, could imagine this natural rocky outcrop as the head of a dragon or serpent.

  View of the right side of the same structure. PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA.

  Much of this, apart from that odd gap, was moderately serpentlike—but only on the left side of the serpent’s head. When I scrambled around to view the right side it was as though I were suddenly looking at a completely different structure—not a serpent at all but a megalithic wall built from ten hefty eroded but precisely interlinked granite blocks. Somehow, whether by nature or by human beings, a structure had been created that appeared to be a wall on one side and the head of a serpent on the other.

  If this was done by humans, I reasoned, then surely they would have wanted to make both sides look the same?

  On the other hand, if it was done by nature, how were we to account for the blocks—and, even more difficult—the combination of blocks and serpent simulacrum?

  Either on its own might be explained by weathering, but for both to oc
cur together in such a limited area seemed much less likely.

  A few hundred meters farther up the hill the so-called griffin shed no greater light on the problem. Another rocky outcrop was involved, this time oriented south, and into its granite face, 3 meters tall from the base of its neck and 5 meters wide from the tip of its beak to the crest on the back of its head, was carved the likeness of some immense, mythical, hook-beaked bird—hence its designation as a “griffin.”

  The Altai “Griffin.” Natural? Or modified by human hands? PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA.

  Natural? Or modified by human hands?

  An argument against it being man-made is the way that the lower part of the beak is unfinished and unseparated from the surrounding bedrock. An argument in favor of human enhancements of the natural bedrock is that directly beneath the crest are three small alcoves set side by side step fashion. It is difficult to envisage how nature alone could have achieved this effect. And, besides, there are similar rock-hewn structures in the high Andes of South America that are indisputably man-made.

  As we climbed back down the hill Vladimir remained unpersuaded but I wasn’t so sure and a few days later, after returning to Novosibirsk where we had access to fast internet again, I searched for information about the region’s snakes.

  What I learned was that there are six species of serpent in the Altai and that the largest, most venomous and most respected of these by far is Gloydius halys, the Siberian pit viper.

  In my opinion its clearly defined eyes, its brow ridges, the general shape of its head, and the way that its forked tongue is sometimes thrust out, allowing it to hang down over the middle of its lower jaw creating the illusion of a cleft in that jaw are all rather closely mimicked by the granite features of the “Earth Serpent” we trudged up and down that hill in the Altai to inspect.

  But does that make it a remnant of a megalithic Ice Age civilization? Or even a megalith at all? Certainly not! And the same goes for the “griffin.” Yet they are set in the heart of a region of mystery where previously held certitudes about humanity’s past have been shattered by the discoveries at Denisova Cave.

  After saying our good-byes to Vladimir, Raisa, Svetlana, and Maxim, as evening fell over that sunny Siberian day, we drove the remaining 80 kilometers south to Topolnoye, only 20 kilometers from the cave. There another friendly, down-to-earth couple waited to welcome us into their home and feed us not only bread and honey but milk fresh from the cow and other delicious, nourishing things.

  ENTERING THE DENISOVANS’ SECRET VALLEY

  OUR NEW HOSTS WERE PAPIN Asatryan, dark-haired and bearded, a migrant to the Altai from Armenia when it was still part of the former Soviet Union, and his blond Siberian wife, Elena Darenskikh. They were both in their fifties, their children long ago grown up and fled the nest. Like most of the other 1,100 inhabitants of Topolnoye they had regular jobs (Papin was a builder, Elena an accountant), but also owned a few cows and goats and a fair-sized vegetable garden, growing enough food, it seemed, to make them self-sufficient in most essentials.

  That night over a fantastic dinner I joked that if twenty-first-century civilization were to collapse it would be people like Elena and Papin who would survive—not people like me who’ve never hunted a deer or grown a cabbage or milked a cow in their lives.

  “Don’t worry,” Elena said, “we will save you!”

  Some eye-watering local vodka was served, followed by a surprisingly comfortable night’s sleep on bunk beds and a sunlit morning greeted with an ample breakfast of eggs, bread, jams, fruit, coffee, and a jug of clotted cream. Then Sergey fired up the Mitsubishi and we were off along a reasonably good road, graded but not paved, running beside the Anui River, fast-flowing with patches of white water, reminding me of the trout streams my grandfather used to fish in the Scottish Highlands where I would sometimes accompany him when I was a child.

  For Santha the landscape had more of a “Tolkienesque” quality. Guarded by distant, soaring peaks, we were in a deep, hidden valley, sometimes darkly shadowed and enclosed, sometimes opening out suddenly and unexpectedly into undulating hills and hummocks where coppices of mixed autumnal woodland overlooked bright meadows at the river’s edge.

  For geologists the landform here is known as “karst,” a special type of topography created by the random dissolution over millions of years of soluble, usually sedimentary rocks—in this case limestone. Like all such landscapes it is characterized by extensive underground drainage systems, sinkholes, and caves, of which Denisova Cave is just one among many. Some are already known to contain ancient human remains and artifacts, but far more have not yet been properly studied, or studied at all, by archaeologists.20

  Sergey pulled the Mitsubishi over and parked beneath a freshly minted National Monument sign, painted brown and helpfully labeled “Denisova Cave” in both Russian and English. Narrow here between low banks, the river was behind us, forested to its edge on the far side and with a saw-toothed range of mountains rising in the distance beyond. On our bank the trees had been cleared and in front of us, across the road, rising steeply for about 200 meters, was a grassy slope with a wooden stairway constructed on its upper part leading to a rugged silver-gray karst cliff at the base of which gaped the black, almost square mouth of the cave.

  It is, arguably, the most important archaeological site in the world, and yet not a soul was here, not a scientist, not a tourist, not even a guard. The whole place was eerily deserted, silent but for birdsong and the gentle rustle of wind through the grass, marking time under the sun as it had done for millennia, the guardian of many mysteries still.

  Not that I minded the solitude and the peace.

  What a privilege, I thought, what a gift, to be here on this bright morning and to have this ancient place to ourselves.

  HALL OF RECORDS

  DENISOVA CAVE HAS HAD ITS modern name only since the early nineteenth century when a monk, Dionisij—Dennis—lived, meditated, and left his graffiti here.1 Before that the peoples of the Altai used to call it Aju-Tasch, which means “Bear Rock.”2 We have no idea how far that nomenclature may go back. It is certain, however, that Denisova Cave has been used and occupied by various species of human for at least 280,000 years, making it an unrivaled archive—a sort of “hall of records”—of our largely unremembered ancestral story.3 Since excavations began in 1977 it has proved to be a gift that just keeps on giving as archaeologists have systematically combed out the secrets buried in its successive occupation levels.4

  At the risk of stating the obvious, in an archaeological excavation through orderly and undisturbed stratigraphy of the kind that Denisova Cave generally exhibits, the upper levels are the youngest and the lower levels get progressively older the deeper down you dig. This, for example, is why archaeologists divide the period they call the Paleolithic (the “Old Stone Age,” dating from roughly 3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago) into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic, with the latter conventionally dated between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago.5

  The first two trenches at Denisova Cave, both 4 meters deep, sliced down through the more recent levels and exposed artifacts beneath them dating back to the Upper Paleolithic. In the decades that followed these deposits proved to be rich, various, and well preserved and the cave became recognized as a prehistoric locality of great importance.6 At certain times during the past 280,000 years, not continuously but at intervals, it had been occupied by Neanderthals7—our extinct cousins with whom, as is now widely known, our ancestors interbred and from whom some extant modern human populations have inherited as much as 1–4 percent of their DNA.8 Neanderthals were probably still using the cave 50,000 years ago. It wasn’t until 2010, however, when proof emerged that a human species hitherto unrecognized by science had been present at Denisova—a species now also known to have interbred with our ancestors9—that the true global significance of this very obscure and remote place could begin to be fully realized.

  The sensational news was broken first in the pages
of Nature in December 2010 in a benchmark paper, “Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia.”10 Coauthored by a stellar team of biomolecular engineers, geneticists, and biologists, with a couple of anthropologists and archaeologists thrown in for good measure, the paper announced the discovery of “the distal manual phalanx [i.e., the fingertip] of a juvenile hominin. … The phalanx was found in layer 11, which has been dated to 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This layer contains microblades and body ornaments of polished stone typical of the ‘Upper Palaeolithic industry’ generally thought to be associated with modern humans.”11

  The big surprise, however, following a thorough analysis of DNA from the fingertip, was that it didn’t belong to an anatomically modern human, nor a Neanderthal, but to a species that had diverged from the common lineage leading to anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago. This previously unknown species was judged to be “a sister group to Neanderthals.”12

  PALEO-CSI

  DNA WAS ON MY MIND as we scrambled up to the cave because a good way to get to grips with the challenge of Denisova is to think of it as a crime scene—a very old, neglected, contaminated, and long-unrecognized crime scene from which the physical evidence is mostly gone apart from a few bones and teeth but where just enough genetic material might remain to help us figure out what happened there.

  Nonetheless, from the moment I entered the cave it impressed itself upon me first, foremost, and forcefully, as a sacred and mystical space. It faced roughly west, overlooking the steep slope leading down to the Anui River, and that morning, as no doubt on many mornings over many thousands of years, the brightness of the day outside was reflected back through the entrance to illuminate the spacious “Main Gallery” within. Looking up I saw that a narrow natural window opened in the ceiling 10 meters above the gallery’s west side close to the entrance, admitting more light but also no doubt in ancient times serving as a chimney.