America Before

by Graham Hancock

  has been introduced into North American archaeology at a time when the failings of the overkill model have been acknowledged by the majority of researchers. … Alternatives to overkill have long been focused on climate change associated with the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, but this idea has always been problematic because large animal populations had lived through previous interglacials without massive die offs. Something different seems to have happened in North America at the end of the Pleistocene, and that something was not a blitzkrieg by human hunters.

  An extraterrestrial impact event seems to provide an exceptionally parsimonious explanation for a variety of patterns in the archaeological and paleontological records that are not accommodated by overkill.40

  IN THE CROSSHAIRS

  ANOTHER “PATTERN” FOR WHICH THE YDIH provides a parsimonious explanation is formed by the deep structural connections demonstrated in part 6 between the spiritual beliefs and “astro-geometry” of the ancient Egyptians and the spiritual beliefs and “astro-geometry” of the ancient Mississippians. The case I’ve sought to make throughout this book is that these two river valley civilizations were among several in the ancient world that inherited a shared legacy of knowledge and ideas from an earlier, “lost” civilization. Regardless of when that legacy was activated, or how its integrity was preserved over the many generations before it first manifests in the archaeological record, I’ve argued that its origins go back to the last Ice Age and predate the physical separation of the Old World from the New. The additional element of parsimony that the YDIH brings to this case, therefore, comes in the form of the impact-related earth changes documented at the Younger Dryas Boundary. These involved not only radical climate change and sea-level rise, not only global wildfires and a subsequent “impact winter,” not only mass extinctions of large animal species and the abrupt disappearance of Clovis but also, in the combination of all these ills, a realistic mechanism deadly, substantial, drastic, and sustained enough to devastate and destroy even a technologically advanced civilization.

  If a disaster on such a scale were to recur today, our civilization would not survive it and all our works would crumble into ruin within a few millennia. I therefore see no reason in principle why the global cataclysm indicated in the Greenland ice cores that we know unfolded at the onset of the Younger Dryas between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago should not have brought an end to that previous high civilization of the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”—the civilization of the “Ancient Ones,” the civilization of the “First Time”—that is recalled with awe in myths and traditions from all around the world.

  Although there were significant impacts in Greenland, the Pacific, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and the Near East, the evidence points conclusively toward North America as the epicenter of the Younger Dryas cataclysm and to the North American ice cap specifically as the target for the largest swarm of comet fragments.

  Almost by default, therefore, although the crime scene has been brutally compromised, and although the lead investigators have a priori ruled the possibility out, North America is the most likely location on earth where a civilization could have thrived during the Ice Age and been destroyed at the onset of the Younger Dryas.

  Not only that. If the Edfu Texts contain a record of these events, as I have proposed, then we should take seriously the message they transmit, that there were survivors of the cataclysm who made it their mission to bring about:

  The resurrection of the former world of the gods. … The re-creation of a destroyed world. 41

  These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundamentals of civilization, including religion, agriculture, and architecture. In Heaven’s Mirror (1998) I speculate that it is perhaps as a result of their efforts that we find the basic doctrines of the same sky-ground religion, essentially the same beliefs about the afterlife journey of the soul, and the same architectural and geometrical principles as far afield as South America, Easter Island, Micronesia, Japan, Cambodia, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Malta, Spain, and Britain.

  Turtle Island.

  Because the earth is a sphere it is technically true that any point could be selected as central to the radiation of these ideas. As I’ve been researching this book, however, my perspective has changed and what I see now when I look at the globe are two great oceans, the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other, with the longitudinal sprawl of the Americas running between them and forming, literally, the center of the world.

  North America, we now know, was scoured, burned, frozen, and flooded by the Younger Dryas cataclysm and has since been systematically ransacked by Western greed and poorly served by Western scholars. Although less severely affected by the impacts of the Younger Dryas, South America also suffered all these assaults. And just as in North America, where millions of square kilometers have been rendered opaque to archaeologists because the “crime scene” has been so successfully wiped down, so, too, in South America we have 5 million square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest that remain almost as unfamiliar to archaeology as the dark side of the moon.

  The two great continents of the Americas are not separate and have never been separate, either before or after the Ice Age. North America is in itself a huge landmass, with vast regions where little or no archaeology has ever been done. If a lost civilization was here in the Ice Age we cannot rule out the possibility that its physical artifacts and remains might yet be found. Given that many Native American cultures share myths of the destruction of a former world, a subterranean interval in the womb of the earth, and then an emergence into our present world,42 the most fruitful direction in which to look might be for places of shelter and refuge deep underground.

  The other region with immense scope for further inquiry is the Amazon. When North America passed through that cataclysmic episode between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago, South America would have seemed like the obvious place for survivors of the lost civilization to take refuge. This would have been all the more likely if, as I speculate, South American hunter-gatherers had already been “adopted” and gifted with useful know-how in much the same way that Clovis appears to have been.

  Even if the human story is badly broken in North America, with big pieces obviously missing, it’s possible that a more complete account awaits us in the Amazon.

  I can hear the mainstream protests already: “The whole idea of a lost civilization is nonsense!” “Pseudoscience!” “A waste of research funds!”

  But the mainstream, which has wasted research funds for decades fruitlessly pursuing nonsensical fantasies like “Clovis First,” should have learned by now to keep an open mind.

  THE KEY TO EARTH’S LOST CIVILIZATION

  SINCE I BEGAN WORK ON Fingerprints of the Gods in the early 1990s I’ve been an advocate for the unorthodox notion that an advanced civilization flourished during the Ice Age and was destroyed in the cataclysms that brought the Ice Age to an end. I’ve written my books to make the case and provide supporting evidence for this possibility. I’ve suggested a number of locations that I feel would be worth looking into—including, most controversially, Antarctica—and I invested nearly 10 years of my life in arduous and sometimes highly risky scuba-diving adventures searching for man-made structures submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age.

  So I’ve walked the walk, but it’s been a bit like tracking the Invisible Man. There are signs of his presence everywhere—he has touched this, he has reshaped that, this was how he did mathematics, these were his beliefs—but the Man himself remains concealed. There’s not even the option to guess the appearance and character of the lost civilization by wrapping its face in bandages like the hero of the H. G. Wells novel. It’s much more elusive. Physical traces that might point to its homeland have either been so completely demolished or so thoroughly hidden from view that they are extremely difficult to find, especially so by an archaeological community already preco
nvinced of their nonexistence and therefore unwilling to look for them.

  What’s tantalizing, however, is that the influence of the lost civilization declares itself repeatedly in the commonalities shared by supposedly unconnected cultures all around the ancient world. The deeper you dig, the more obvious it becomes that they did not get these shared features from one another but from a remote common ancestor of them all. We see only the effects and modes of expression of that inheritance, not its source, and all searches for the key to the mystery have thus far been in vain.

  My proposal, simply, is that America offers us that key, and that it does so because of the unique circumstances of its prehistory. Unlike the interconnected landmasses of Africa and Eurasia, and unlike Australia, which was relatively accessible by sea from the extreme southeast of Asia, we’ve seen that the Americas were isolated during much of the Ice Age—a geological epoch that lasted, let us not forget, from around 2.6 million years ago until around 12,000 years ago.1 In this long geological epoch, however, there were several periods of temporary climate warming when the macro-continent of North, Central, and South America would have become accessible. Two of these periods of enhanced accessibility occurred within the known time frame of past human migrations and it is the most recent (the so-called Bølling-Allerød interstadial, dated from around 14,700 years ago to around 12,800 years ago2) that archaeologists focused their attention on for far too long in their attempts to reconstruct the true story of the peopling of the Americas. I think paleontologist Tom Deméré is on to something HUGE with this plea that he makes to the scientific community, discussed in chapter 5:

  what we’re saying to everyone, really, is open your mind to the possibility that instead of the peopling of the Americas being associated with the last deglaciation event [the Bølling-Allerød interstadial] … what we should actually be looking at is the deglaciation event before that—between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago.3 You get the same sort of scenario with a landbridge and ice sheets retreating and you get that same sweet spot between really low sea levels and a blockage by ice sheets, and ice sheets gone and the flooding of the landbridge.

  Deméré’s suggestion still remains unpalatable to some archaeologists, yet it satisfactorily explains the growing mass of evidence that the Americas were peopled many tens of millennia before the Bølling-Allerød interstadial (see chapters 4, 5, and 6). More than that, this hitherto unimagined possibility of a very old (rather than very young) human presence in the New World helps make sense of the complex genetic heritage of Native Americans—explored in chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10. Embedded in this evidence is the mind-dilating mystery of the strong Australasian DNA signal present among certain isolated tribes of the Amazon rainforest. It’s a recent discovery and highly significant because it raises the possibility, as discussed in chapter 10, that transoceanic voyages were being undertaken more than 12,000 years ago—a notion hitherto considered impossible by archaeologists. If the technology and geodetic know-how to make such voyages were indeed present in the world during the Ice Age (see appendix 2), then we are, by definition, dealing with a lost civilization.

  And this of course brings us to the mystery of the Amazon itself. Was it in some way “touched” by a civilization advanced enough to have explored all the world’s oceans during the Ice Age? And if so, has any evidence of that influence remained? In chapters 11 through 17 I address these questions and present evidence that human settlement in the Amazon is extremely ancient, that great cities and large populations once flourished there, that ancient scientific knowledge of the properties of plants persists among Amazonian peoples to this day, that there was very early domestication of useful agricultural species, that the rainforest itself is an anthropocentric, cultivated, ordered “garden,” and that a “miraculous” man-made soil—terra preta—was developed in the Amazon in deep antiquity, bringing fertility to otherwise agriculturally unproductive lands and imbued with astonishing powers of self-renewal that modern scientists marvel at and do not yet fully understand.

  In parallel, and again a recent discovery, is the presence of gigantic geometrical earthworks and astronomically aligned stone circles in the Amazon. I show in chapters 15 and 16 that these remarkable structures share significant scientific “memes” with the henges and stone circles of the British Isles and with other works of ancient, sacred architecture all around the world. I suggest this is not coincidental, nor due to the direct influence of one region upon the other, but that it bears witness instead to a shared legacy, a shared package of sacred geometrical and astronomical blueprints, inherited in both these widely separated regions from an earlier civilization lost to history.

  Chapter 17 returns to the theme of plant gnosis in the Amazon, looks into the mysteries of the vision-inducing brew ayahuasca, and hears the words of ayahuasca shamans, who see geometric patterns as portals to other realms of existence—specifically to the afterlife realm or land of the dead.

  Indeed, the very name ayahuasca means “Vine of the Dead” or “Vine of Souls.”

  In chapters 18 through 21 I explore the deep structural similarities between the Amazonian geoglyphs and the great mounds and geometric earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. It’s not simply a matter of appearances. Mississippian religious ideas, like those of the ancient Amazon, were focused on the mystery of death and on certain very specific notions concerning the afterlife journey—and destination—of the soul.

  I show that these notions are extremely ancient in North America and trace them back into remote prehistory through a succession of sites such as Poverty Point, Lower Jackson Mound, Watson Brake, and Conly, where the same astronomical and geometric “memes” consistently reappear.

  Chapter 22 recounts my own close encounter, as a teenager, with the mystery of death and how my interest in this mystery was reawakened when I first studied the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead many years later. I describe the Duat, the afterlife realm as depicted by the ancient Egyptians, and the soul’s ascent to the constellation Orion and thence through a portal, or “doorway in the sky,” to a journey along the Milky Way. And I describe my astonishment, on a visit to Moundville in Alabama, to learn that what appeared to be exactly the same system of ideas involving Orion, the Milky Way, and a journey to the realm of the dead was also a predominant motif of the Mississippian civilization.

  In chapters 23 and 24 I offer a detailed investigation of Mississippian and ancient Egyptian ideas concerning the afterlife journey—and destiny—of the soul. The parallels, in my view, are too remarkable, too many, and too detailed to be explained by coincidence. Nor do they point to a direct influence of ancient Egypt on the Mississippian civilization or vice versa—chronologically impossible because they existed at completely different times. As with the geoglyphs, what is indicated here is a legacy of ideas inherited in both these widely separated areas from a remote common source as yet unidentified by archaeologists.

  Could that common source, that lost civilization, have had its Ice Age homeland in North America?

  I set out to answer that question in chapters 25 through 27, where I present detailed evidence of the immense cataclysm that shook the earth around 12,800 years ago—a cataclysm that was global in its consequences but that had its epicenter in North America.

  For more than two decades, while eliciting patronizing sneers and sometimes extreme hostility from the scholarly establishment, I’ve consistently maintained that “my” proposed lost civilization was erased from history in a global cataclysm somewhere around 12,500 years ago. At first, the very suggestion that there had been a cataclysm at all, and that it might be of immense relevance to the past of our species, was singled out for particular ridicule, but then came a mass of new evidence that shifted the balance of the argument decisively. Within the resolution limits of radiocarbon calibration (where at such a remove margins of error of two or three centuries are the norm), the date for the cataclysm of around 12,500 years ago that I first put into print in 1995 is extremely close to th
e date of around 12,800 years ago that scientists have much more recently established for the impacts of multiple fragments of the giant disintegrating comet that precipitated the catastrophic onset of the Younger Dryas.

  It seems, then, that there was a global cataclysm—and at more or less the very time I had proposed.

  But so what? Just because I got lucky on the timing of the cataclysm doesn’t mean I was right that it wiped out an advanced prehistoric civilization. Show us its homeland, the skeptics therefore quite reasonably demanded.

  This book is, in part, my response to that challenge.

  MORE THAN ENOUGH TIME FOR A CIVILIZATION TO DEVELOP

  HITHERTO ICE AGE NORTH AMERICA has been seen as an uninhabited archaeological vacuum, awaiting the arrival of culture with the first human migrations across the Bering land bridge. Because of the entrenched belief that these migrations came relatively late, at a time when our ancestors had been “out of Africa” and already established in Europe, Asia, and Australia for tens of millennia, there was no reason to seek the origins of civilization in such an unlikely place. In the light of the new evidence on the very ancient peopling of the Americas that we have explored, however, and of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, I suggest that the balance of the argument has once again shifted decisively. Whereas before it was reasonable to ask why the homeland of the lost civilization should have been in North America, the more pertinent question today is why should it not have been in North America—the continent that suffered more severe disruption than any other and that had so much of its rich prehistory pounded, pulverized, and swept away by the devastating events of 12,800 years ago.