Horizon (1964–…): Season 36, Episode 2 - Atlantis Reborn - full transcript
There are many mysteries about the past
and how we journeyed from
the Stone Age to civilisation.
Now there is a controversial new theory.
It claims that historians have
ignored evidence of a lost civilisation
of spectacular sophistication,
the key to our past.
If true, this forgotten episode
would overturn all our ideas
about the origins of civilisation.
If I'm right and our whole conception
of prehistory is wrong,
then the foundations upon which we have
built our idea of what our society is
are crumbling.
ATLANTIS
REBORN AGAIN
Graham Hancock is determined
to rewrite history.
His books about the ancient
past have sold in their millions,
making him a leading figure in a group
of influential and radical authors.
Hancock has a huge following
who believe passionately
in his controversial views
that civilisation was invented
by a god-like people
ignored by orthodox historians.
It's possible we may have lost from
the record an entire civilisation
and I feel that the evidence for
this lost episode in human history
is mounting.
According to orthodox archaeology
various Stone Age peoples slowly
evolved complex cultures
in different parts of the world.
13,000 years ago
groups of hunter/gatherers
began to settle and to farm.
Over thousands of years they separately
developed writing, religions and astronomy.
Eventually they built the great
monuments of the Ancient World.
But not everyone was satisfied with
the archaeologists' explanation.
For them there was a tantalising mystery.
Ancient people in far-flung
parts of the world,
who seemed to have had no
contact with each other,
were doing very similar things
building pyramids
and studying the stars.
One explanation for these
puzzling resemblances
was the enduring myth of Atlantis.
The story goes that Atlantis was
the home of an ancient civilisation
of astonishing sophistication.
When it was destroyed in a flood
its survivors travelled the world
bringing their knowledge to
less developed peoples,
but the idea of Atlantis as
the cradle of all civilisation
was scorned by historians.
If Atlantis were true, if
there was one source
it would be very easy to
test archaeologically
and the evidence would be clear.
The fact that it's not clear,
the fact that that kind
of evidence is not present
is indicative of the fact that the
cultures developed independently
and were not derived
from a single source.
Graham Hancock believes that the idea
of Atlantis deserves a second chance.
He does not claim to be a scientist,
but he has used science
to revive an old idea.
Ten years ago Hancock
set out on a quest.
He came back with a radical vision,
one that he hoped would overturn
established ideas about the past.
What we're looking at here
is an accumulation of discordant
evidence and information
which doesn't quite fit in
with the orthodox picture.
Bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
that seem to have been just scattered
and thrown all around the world
and yet the feeling that if we
can put those pieces together
slowly, methodically, painstakingly
they will show us something that
we've forgotten about ourselves,
a great civilisation lost in prehistory.
In his research
Hancock became intrigued
by the ideas of writers
who have linked ancient monuments with
the stars as they appeared long ago.
Since ancient times people
have seen shapes in the stars
and they'd given these constellations names
like Aries the Ram, or Orion the Hunter.
Different ancient societies saw different
animals and objects in the stars.
The patterns of the
constellations don't change,
but the precise angle of groups of
stars in relation to the horizon
alters over time.
It's the result of a
process called precession.
The earth spins on its
axis every 24 hours,
but the axis has a very slow
wobble which lasts 26,000 years.
This is precession
and it slowly changes
our view of the stars.
It means that their position in the sky
is unique to different moments in time.
Astronomers have calculated the slowly
changing position of the stars back in time.
Using an astronomical software programme,
Hancock made an intriguing discovery.
Some of the wonders of the Ancient World
appear to mirror the stars at a
precise moment in the past:
10,500BC.
It was a date that was to assume an
extraordinary significance for his theory.
Groups of monuments in Egypt and another
large group of monuments far away in Cambodia
are copying constellations
in the sky as they looked,
not at the time when those
monuments were constructed,
but in a much earlier epoch,
the epoch of 10,500BC.
In other words,
if looked at from above,
groups of monuments mirrored
the unique position of the stars
as they looked at that
crucial moment in the past.
For Hancock, the
implications were stunning.
We are looking at the vestiges of an
ancient world-wide religious system,
a sky ground religion.
The essential thing that it had to do
was to build architectural copies
of groups of stars in the sky
and we're looking at the vestiges of that
system spread out around the world.
Hancock argued that there had indeed
been an ancient lost super-civilisation
destroyed 12,000 years ago.
Its survivors brought civilisation
to a Stone Age world
and a map of the sky
as it looked in 10,500BC.
It became a blueprint for future
generations around the world
who built monuments to mirror
these ancient patterns of stars.
Hancock could revive
the old idea of Atlantis
with a difference.
I avoid using the word
Atlantis in my books
because most people when
they hear the word Atlantis
immediately think that they're
dealing with the lunatic fringe.
I don't feel that I belong
to a lunatic fringe.
When Hancock published his theory
in 1995 it caused a sensation.
Five million copies were
sold around the world.
The impact of his book
rivalled the spectacular success of
Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods
published in the 1970s.
Von Däniken explained
the birth of civilisation
as the result of visits
from alien astronauts.
Other books by Hancock followed,
every one a best-seller.
His success has been crowned
by a major television series
which reached 10 million viewers.
Hancock is now part of a growing movement
of radical, alternative historians.
These writers have
become hugely influential.
No mainstream archaeologist ever
reaches such a wide audience,
but for academics their ideas are heresy.
Certainly one thing that they're
doing is selling a lot of books.
There's a long and ignoble
history of this sort of thing
and I view it as merely
the latest incarnation
of somebody obviously quite fascinated
by the past, a populariser of the past,
but someone who doesn't want
to adhere to the scientific method.
It is inevitable that this is a threat
to orthodox views of the past.
It can't simply be
accepted by a historian
that the whole burden of his work
over many, many years is wrong.
If Hancock and his
fellow authors are right,
we will have to rewrite history.
The only way to find out if
they are is to test the theory.
It is Ancient Egypt that provides most of
these writers with their key evidence,
in particular the pyramids
built 4,500 years ago
on the Giza plateau near modern Cairo.
According to Egyptologists those
pyramids are tombs and tombs only.
They have no other function whatsoever
and they were built to serve as the tombs
of three Pharaohs of the 4th dynasty
Khufu, Khefren and Menkaure
and that's the end of the story really as
far as orthodox Egyptologists are concerned.
I think there's room for a reconsideration
of what the pyramids might be
and in order to reconsider
that information
I think it's very important that
we take astronomy into account.
There's always been a mystery
about the three Giza pyramids.
Looked at from above they
form a perfect diagonal,
but with the third, smaller pyramid
that is offset.
Many have been baffled by
this curious imperfection,
but now there is a new explanation.
Robert Bauval is a former engineer.
He has developed a controversial
theory about the Giza pyramids
and it has a crucial role in the evolution of
Hancock's theories about a lost civilisation.
In 1982, on his way to Cairo airport,
Bauval flew over these mysterious
wonders of the Ancient World.
There was something about the
puzzling layout of the pyramids
that began to obsess him.
Now if you can see you
have two large pyramids
which are of almost equal size
and along a diagonal line
whereas the third pyramid,
the smaller one, of Menkaure,
is offset to the east of this diagonal.
Bauval had an inspiration.
The plan of the three pyramids
reminded him of a constellation
Orion the Hunter.
In the middle of the constellation
are the three belt stars.
They, too, form a diagonal
line with one star offset.
It seemed to be a perfect
match for the pyramids.
I observed that the stars had exactly the
same pattern as the pyramids on the ground.
You have two bright stars, or
two large stars if you like,
and the third one on the top dimmer and offset
to the east in exactly the same pattern.
There are, of course, many
other stars in Orion,
but it was the three belt stars that
led Bauval to make another discovery,
one that linked the pyramids uncannily
with that date long in the past.
As a result of precession,
the angle of the three
stars changes over time
and Bauval found the best
fit on one particular date.
So we have a moving
sky over a fixed land,
the pyramids on the ground,
and when you move that sky in
time to fit the patterns of Orion
you get that lock in 10,500BC.
Hancock was impressed
by Bauval's theory
and the way it linked Ancient Egypt
with an even more ancient date.
The whole arrangement
freezes the time of 10,500BC.
In his television series Hancock
showed how Bauval's idea works.
The pyramids form a precise 45 degree
angle with a line running north/south
and the three stars form the same exact
angle in the sky on only one date:
10,500BC.
For Hancock, Bauval's findings seemed like
compelling evidence for a lost civilisation.
I accept Egyptological opinion the
great pyramids were built in 2,500BC.
I am not saying that the pyramids
were built earlier than that.
What I'm saying is that
they were built in 2,500BC
but designed to commemorate architecturally,
symbolically and astronomically
an earlier epoch.
If Bauval and Hancock are right
the implications are astounding.
It means that Ancient
Egyptian civilisation
was inherited from a lost people
unknown to any mainstream historian.
One astronomer took a keen
interest in Bauval's theory
Ed Krupp.
He quickly became troubled
by Bauval's claims.
When The Orion Mystery came out
my curiosity was naturally aroused.
Anybody comes up with a good
idea about ancient astronomy
I want to know about it
and in going through the book
there was something nagging.
In The Orion Mystery there's
a nice double page spread
and anybody looking at this would
say ah, Giza pyramids, belt of Orion,
one kind of looks like the other, you know
you've got three in a row, three in a row,
slanted, slanted, we've got a map
and what I was bothered by turned
out to be really pretty obvious.
In the back of my head I knew that
something was wrong with these pictures
and what's wrong with these
pictures in their presentation
is that north for the constellation
Orion is here at the top of the page.
North for the Giza pyramids is down here.
Now they're not marked, but I
knew which way north was at Giza
and I knew which way north was in Orion.
To make the map of the
pyramids on the ground
match the stars of Orion in the sky
you have to turn Egypt upside down
and if you don't want to do that then
you've got to turn the sky upside down.
But Hancock and Bauval
reject Krupp's analysis.
They point out that Orion can only be
seen by looking in a southward direction.
So you're looking south of correlation
and for the natural tendency is to
draw what you see in that direction
and you would come up with looking
at three stars in that pattern
and three dots, or three pyramids,
or three marks in the same direction.
If you choose a time when Orion
is at its highest point in the sky
looking south high over the pyramids
there is an apparent match
and Bauval and Hancock's
view seems convincing.
There's no other way you can draw them
except in the way that the pyramids
lie on the ground today.
You can't do it in any other way.
If you're extremely pedantic
and believe that the Ancient
Egyptians' priesthood
was a group of narrow-minded bureaucrats
determined to follow
procedure above all else
then it's true that the northern most star is
depicted in the southern most place on the ground
and the southern most star in the
northern most place on the ground
and this is what Ed Krupp is getting at,
but if you regard it as a work
of symbolic and religious art
meant to copy on the ground what
the observer sees in the sky
then there's just no other way you
can make it than the way it is made.
But there's evidence that the Egyptians
may well have seen it another way;
perceiving the sky as forming
a canopy over their heads,
with north in the sky matching
north on the ground,
and the top of Orion thus pointing north.
The pyramids are set out facing
precisely north, south, east and west
and research suggests they were
aligned using the north polar stars
and also there are shafts built through the
north and south sides of the great pyramid
which point directly to stars in
the north and south of the sky
indicating that the Egyptians clearly linked
directions on the ground and in the sky.
That locks the pyramids north side and
south side to the north side of the sky
and the south side of the sky.
That means the Egyptians, in building
and laying out the pyramids,
said we know where north
is and we care about it
because we've incorporated
it into the architecture.
The Egyptians were perfectly capable of
drawing the pyramids right if they wanted to.
If they wanted Orion's belt to look
like Orion's belt on the ground
and match up with the north
and south sides of the pyramid
they could have done that.
But whether or not the
Egyptians cared about
matching north and south in
the sky and on the ground
there are other problems.
There are 13 other stars in Orion.
None of them match pyramids.
There are over 75 other pyramids in Egypt
and among them all there are no
convincing matches with stars,
but Hancock and Bauval
still stand by their theory.
I don't need every pyramid in
Egypt to map a star in the sky.
The people who built these monuments
were making a grand symbolic statement
that was supposed to be understood
on an intuitive and spiritual level.
It is hard to invest a lot
of intellectual effort
into three stars in a row and
three pyramids on the ground.
That's like a simple configuration
and it's very easy to find
three things in a row
and if, if you know there are roughly
81 or so pyramids in Egypt
well yeah if all 81 of 'em mapped
the sky perfectly I'd be impressed,
but if three of them mapped the
sky sorta I'm not impressed.
There's more.
Astronomer Anthony Fairall has
re-examined that precise 45 degree angle
that seemed to link the
pyramids with the belt stars
as they were in 10,500BC.
Fairall found that the match was not
as precise as originally claimed.
The angle formed by the two
large pyramids is 45 degrees,
but the angle formed by
the Belt stars is 54.
Hancock and Bauval dispute the
large size of Fairall's angle,
but accept there is a discrepancy.
No they're not absolutely
correct and I don't care.
I have to stress that in my view
the Ancient Egyptian priesthood
was not staffed by
anal-retentive bureaucrats.
The Ancient Egyptian priesthood was a
group of creative and imaginative thinkers
who were exploring the
mystery of life and death
and who believed that there was a
connection between ground and sky.
They wanted to make a resemblance on
the ground of a particular moment in time.
There is a simple explanation
for the way the pyramids were laid out
along that diagonal line 4,500 years ago
and it has nothing to do with Orion.
Kate Spence is an Egyptologist.
She's studied the historical sequence of quarrying
and construction on the Giza plateau in 2,500BC.
The interior blocks of the pyramids
were extracted from quarries
on the plateau itself.
The bases of the blocks
can still be seen today.
It turns out that the choices
of the pyramid builders
were severely limited by the site
they had chosen to build on.
It's entirely possible to explain the position
of the pyramids relative to each other
just through the geology of the site and
the nature of the pyramids themselves.
If we look at a map of the pyramids
which shows the contour lines you
can actually see it quite clearly.
These are the pyramids, the Khufu
pyramid, Khefren and Menkaure
and they're built on a ridge
which runs diagonally.
The reason they're set
obliquely to the ridge
is because they're aligned
so carefully towards north,
so this is the first pyramid to
be built, the Khufu pyramid
and when Khefren came along to build
his he couldn't build it in a straight line
because there's a quarry here
and it's very steeply sloping.
So he had to set the pyramid back,
for two reasons, both so that it
was on a reasonably high level
and also so that he could get a clear
view of north for the alignment,
and exactly the same thing happened
when Menkaure came to build his.
It's actually set back from the
line of the Khefren pyramid
because if you see here the contours
are very close so it's quite steep,
so it's set on a level plateau at about
the same height as the Khefren pyramid
and with a clear view towards north.
It seems clear that as the Egyptian kings
built their monuments across the Giza plateau
the decisions they made about
the position of the pyramids
were not inspired by a pattern of stars
but were the result of the limitations
of the site they chose to build on.
But Graham Hancock's radical
theory about the past
does not depend on
the Orion theory alone.
He claims to have discovered a
global network of ancient monuments,
either mapping constellations
on the ground
or linked in other ways to the stars.
He believes that they're all based on a
12,000 year-old blueprint of the night sky.
Far from Egypt
Hancock has discovered other
crucial evidence in Cambodia,
at one of the most extraordinary
archaeological sites in the world:
the temples of Angkor Vat.
The temples were built
by the Khmer people
3,000 years after the
Giza pyramids were built,
but Hancock claims to have found
evidence of a more ancient master plan.
There's a similarity,
a very strong similarity
between the pattern of
the temples on the ground
and the pattern of the stars in
the constellation of Draco,
one of the great northern constellations.
Quite simply if you take a map
of the temples of Angkor
and join the dots to connect
up the different temples
you find that you have drawn out on that map
the pattern of the constellation of Draco.
As Hancock shows in
his television series,
it does seem as if the temples at Angkor
are a genuine mirror of the stars
mapped out by the lost civilisation,
and that wasn't all.
The temples of Angkor also seemed to
be connected with that momentous date:
10,500BC
as a result of precession.
I found extraordinarily
that the correlation becomes as close
as possible to perfect only at one date,
and that is 10,500BC.
In his television series,
Hancock refers to the work of one of
the world's leading experts on Angkor,
Eleanor Mannikka.
She has spent 20 years surveying
and mapping the temples
and now she's examined Hancock's theory
in detail.
This hypothesis is based on the fact
that certain temples are
placed in their position
because they have to follow a pattern
that evokes the constellation Draco,
so if we look at this we see the beginning
apparently is the head right here at Angkor Vat
and the pattern goes from there up to Phnom
Bakheng which is this enormous central mountain.
Then it travels up here
to (TEMPLE NAME) Thom
and then it goes over
here to (TEMPLE NAME)
and from (TEMPLE NAME) it
goes to (TEMPLE NAME).
Then it goes to (TEMPLE NAME),
then it goes to (TEMPLE NAME),
out here to (TEMPLE NAME)
built in the 12th century.
I see a vague resemblance of course
because it goes up and down and off,
but actually the tail of
Draco goes way up like this,
it doesn't just go off like that.
When examined closely
the actual match between the
temples and the constellation
is not at all precise.
Does Hancock have an answer?
There's a rather good correspondence.
By no means you know
absolutely spot-on accurate,
but a rather good correspondence
between the stars in the sky
and the temples on the ground
and when you bear in mind that
these temples were constructed
across hundreds of square miles
of really very dense jungle,
something like 1,000 years ago,
when there was no ability for the
builders to get above their subject
and check that they were
achieving a perfect design,
I think they did a very good job.
But surveying has never depended
on viewing from above.
It's all done by measuring distances
and angles on the ground.
Mannikka's investigations show that the
Khmers must have been expert surveyors.
Such is the precision of their work
that she is convinced that they could
have accurately laid out and built
any pattern they wanted,
and there is good evidence which reveals
why the Khmers placed the temples
where they did.
Certain of these temples within
this so-called constellation here
are where they are for very
clear-cut historical reasons
referred to in inscriptions,
very obvious reasons.
For example, (TEMPLE NAME),
which is located here on top of
the central hill at Angkor,
had to be the place where the
king put his royal temple
because nothing else was
so prominent at the site.
Up here at (TEMPLE NAME) there was
a very bloody battle around 1190.
That's why (TEMPLE NAME) is here.
It couldn't be anywhere else.
It had to be here 'cos
the battle was here.
Mannikka discovered
that the position of every one of
the temples included by Hancock
can be explained in similarly
well documented ways.
Hancock includes only ten temples in
the shape of the constellation Draco,
but investigation of the Angkor region
has revealed that there
are more than 60 temples.
It seems arbitrary to use
so few out of so many.
The correlation he has found
begins to look more like
coincidence than planning.
I'm sure that, that there are
academics who can find a dozen reasons
why the resemblance of the temples of Angkor
to the pattern of the constellation of Draco
is accidental and a coincidence and can
be explained in all sorts of other ways,
but I've put forward my case in as
much detail as I can in my work.
I think there is a striking resemblance
between the basic pattern on the ground
and the pattern of the
constellation in the sky.
But there is a final problem.
Although Hancock believes the Khmer based their
cherished temples on the constellation of Draco,
strangely it is not mentioned
in any of their inscriptions.
Draco had nothing to do
with the culture whatsoever.
I mean there's no reference to the
constellation in any inscription,
there's no reference to
it whatsoever in any way.
No Draco.
Unfortunately, Ancient Egypt and Cambodia
are Hancock's most important
pieces of evidence,
that monuments mirror an
ancient blueprint of the stars.
His claim seems flawed
and Horizon has made a discovery which
further questions his basic theory.
It links a group of unique monuments
with a pattern of stars.
Here are the monuments on
the ground looking north.
The pattern matches one of
the great constellations:
Leo the Lion.
These are the monuments:
Grand Central Station,
the New York Public Library,
Macey's,
Madison Square Gardens,
the Central Post Office,
a theatre,
a university,
Times Square,
the Rockefeller Centre
and a police station.
The monuments are, of course,
in Manhattan.
The Leo master plan doesn't account
for every Manhattan landmark,
but using Hancock's
criteria it doesn't have to.
As long as you have enough points
and you don't need to
make every point fit,
you can find virtually
any pattern you want.
But Hancock does offer other
kinds of evidence for his theory.
I'm already convinced about the existence
of an ancient worldwide religious system
which must have emanated
from a remote, lost source,
but I need to convince others
and the best way to do that
is to produce artefacts and evidence
that are 12,000 or so years old
and which, therefore, fall outside of
the framework of orthodox history.
There are two far-flung monuments
that Hancock claims were actually built
by the people of the lost civilisation.
One is the ancient city
of Tiwanaku in Bolivia,
the other is the Egyptian Sphinx.
The Sphinx was carved out of the
limestones of the Giza plateau.
Mainstream archaeologists think
it was built 4,500 years ago
but Hancock believes
it is 12,000 years old.
Some of his evidence
is again astronomical.
The constellation Leo rose above the
horizon directly east of the Sphinx
in 10,500BC,
but there is no evidence that this constellation
was recognised by the Ancient Egyptians,
but Hancock also claims there
is geological evidence.
Egypt has had a dry climate since
the time the pyramids were built,
but the Sphinx and its surrounding
enclosure are deeply eroded.
It has been argued by Hancock and others
that the erosion was caused by heavy rainfall
and that this means
the Sphinx must have been carved many
thousands of years earlier than we thought,
when the climate was wetter.
But the erosion argument has not
stood up to the scrutiny of geologists.
Erosion on the Giza plateau
does not depend on water.
The Giza limestones contain salts
and these have proved to cause
destructive levels of erosion
in very short periods of time.
There is no hard evidence that the Sphinx
is any older than the orthodox date.
Hancock has also focused
on another monument
thousands of miles from Egypt,
in South America.
High in the Bolivian Andes
lies Lake Titicaca.
Nine miles to the east is one of the most
mysterious ruined cities in the world.
It is called Tiwanaku.
Archaeologists think that this was the
capital of a South American empire
that began to flourish
nearly 2,000 years ago,
but the identity of the people who
created Tiwanaku remains a mystery.
Whoever they were, they
were superb stone-masons
creating temples and monuments
using immense but precisely
carved blocks of stone.
For more than a century
Tiwanaku has attracted
fabulous explanations.
As to who would have built Tiwanaku
what we might be talking about is
the survivors of the lost civilisation,
people who have moved into the
mountains to create a new settlement
to try to preserve something of their
culture, something of their tradition,
something of their religious ideas.
For evidence Hancock turned to
the writings of Arthur Posnansky,
who thought Tiwanaku was the cradle
of ancient American civilisation.
He stumbled on the site at
the turn of the century
and became a self-appointed expert.
Posnansky claimed Tiwanaku was
an ancient astronomical observatory.
He believed that particular stone blocks
had once been positioned to face the sun
as it rose above the horizon at
the winter and summer solstices,
but like the constellations,
the position of the solstices
changes very slowly over time
and Posnansky found the best match
between the stone blocks and the rising sun
12,000 years ago.
Arthur Posnansky, who is by no means
a favourite with orthodox scholars,
but did spend 50 years of his life studying
Tiwanaku from the early 1900s up until the 1940s,
made a very strong case that the alignments,
the original alignments of Tiwanaku,
had been set out at a time when the rising
point of the sun was quite different
from, from where it is today at
the winter and summer solstices
and he dated that approximately
to about 12,000 years ago.
But how good is the evidence
that Hancock relies on?
Has Posnansky's work
stood the test of time?
Tiwanaku is in a ruinous state.
Its great blocks lie shattered and fallen.
That's because in the 17th century
the Spanish Conquistadors arrived
in this region of the Andes.
They set about destroying
this pagan monument.
The Spanish broke up the site,
moved hundreds of blocks
and built a cathedral with them nearby.
No one knows where many of the remaining
blocks were originally positioned.
Posnansky could only guess that they might
once have been aligned with the rising sun,
yet this was his most important evidence.
Posnansky died in 1948.
That means he missed a revolution
in archaeological science,
one that might have changed his
mind about the age of the site.
Carbon dating is a method that has
provided increasingly reliable dates
for archaeological
sites all over the world,
including Tiwanaku.
Carbon dates for the
great stone monuments
show they are less than 2,000 years old.
Graham Hancock disputes their age because
carbon dating can't date the stone itself,
but only organic remains like bone or
charcoal found in association with the stone.
He regards this association as unreliable,
although the method has been tried and
tested at sites throughout the world,
and at Tiwanaku archaeologists
are confident of the link.
But anyway, here archaeologists have
dug deeper than the stone structures.
The earlier signs of any human habitation,
probably a small village,
easily dated from organic remains
are just 3,500 years old;
nowhere near 10,500BC.
So how does Hancock deal with this
information in his most recent book?
I'm not required to be encyclopaedic.
In Heaven's Mirror there is no representation
whatsoever of recent carbon dates for Tiwanaku.
I simply didn't discuss it in there.
There is no hard evidence
that survivors of a lost civilisation built
Tiwanaku or the Sphinx 12,000 years ago.
But there is one other way Hancock
could change our view of the past
and that is to find the home
of the lost civilisation.
It would be the find of the century,
the real Atlantis.
Hancock has made an astonishing
suggestion about where it could be:
Antarctica.
He has claimed that Antarctica
was once in a warmer region
and home to the lost civilisation.
12,000 years ago, he argued,
a massive shift in the earth's crust
thrust Antarctica to the South Pole
where it became ice-bound.
Geologists have studied the history
of Antarctica through ice-cores,
some as deep as 3.5 kilometres.
Ice-cores are like tree rings
and they can be used to work out
the history of the ice-sheets.
The scientists' work shows clearly
that the ice has been here
for over 400,000 years.
It would have been hard to
survive here in 10,500BC
let alone create a
sophisticated civilisation.
What I've come to realise as
my research has gone on
in a sense, is that I
don't need Antarctica
and therefore I don't need to propose
a radical revolution of geological ideas
in order to explain a lost civilisation.
Hancock now believes we've been
looking in the wrong place.
The lost civilisation was
underwater all along.
This is the Yonaguni formation.
Discovered in 1987 by
a Japanese fisherman
it lies under five metres of water at
the end of the Japanese island chain.
It appears to be a series of steps
and pyramid-like structures.
Could this be the remains of a
city lost 12,000 years ago?
It looks like a monument.
It has very curious features.
It has a series of steps and
terraces cut into its side,
it's oriented to the cardinal directions,
it faces due south, it has a deep east/west
feature running along in front of it.
It bears all the hallmarks of a designed
ceremonial, ritual or religious monument.
Yonaguni looked as if it could
be a spectacular discovery
and Hancock needed corroboration.
He invited the Boston University geologist
Robert Schoch to inspect the site.
Professor Schoch has taken a keen interest
in unorthodox views of the past
and he welcomed the chance to
examine the underwater discovery.
Schoch dived with Hancock
several times at Yonaguni.
I went there in this case actually hoping
that it was a totally manmade structure
that was now submerged underwater, that
dated maybe back to 6,000BC or more.
When I got there and I got
to dive on the structure
I have to admit I was
very, very disappointed
because I was basically
convinced after a few dives
that this was primarily possibly
totally a natural structure.
I think that what Robert Schoch
needs to do is a lot more diving.
When I took him there in 1997,
September of 1997,
he did four dives at that time
and then he went back
again in July of 1998
and did a few more dives.
I really feel that before anybody
pronounces definitively on this monument
they should put in a
minimum of 50 dives.
Professor Schoch has
not changed his mind.
Isolated portions of it
look like they're manmade,
but when you look at it in context,
you look at the shore features etc
and you see how, in this case,
fine sandstones split along
horizontal bedding plains
that gives you these regular features.
I'm convinced it's a natural structure.
Graham Hancock is still scouring the oceans
of the world for a lost civilisation.
He has also investigated pyramids
and a giant stone face on the planet Mars,
but he has yet to find firm evidence that
there really was a forgotten civilisation
of god-like astronomers 12,000 years ago.
I believe passionately
that the past has been misrepresented
and that people today are not
being given the full picture
and I don't think that my arguments are ever
going to be successfully destroyed by nit-picking.
After having invested a lot of time
doing what I think very
few other people do,
which is saying, OK, you've made
this claim, let's see if it holds up.
And so, subjecting it to
the rules of evidence
and then coming to a conclusion,
my conclusion is no, I
don't think they're right
and I don't think they're right because I
don't think the evidence fits the hypothesis.
and how we journeyed from
the Stone Age to civilisation.
Now there is a controversial new theory.
It claims that historians have
ignored evidence of a lost civilisation
of spectacular sophistication,
the key to our past.
If true, this forgotten episode
would overturn all our ideas
about the origins of civilisation.
If I'm right and our whole conception
of prehistory is wrong,
then the foundations upon which we have
built our idea of what our society is
are crumbling.
ATLANTIS
REBORN AGAIN
Graham Hancock is determined
to rewrite history.
His books about the ancient
past have sold in their millions,
making him a leading figure in a group
of influential and radical authors.
Hancock has a huge following
who believe passionately
in his controversial views
that civilisation was invented
by a god-like people
ignored by orthodox historians.
It's possible we may have lost from
the record an entire civilisation
and I feel that the evidence for
this lost episode in human history
is mounting.
According to orthodox archaeology
various Stone Age peoples slowly
evolved complex cultures
in different parts of the world.
13,000 years ago
groups of hunter/gatherers
began to settle and to farm.
Over thousands of years they separately
developed writing, religions and astronomy.
Eventually they built the great
monuments of the Ancient World.
But not everyone was satisfied with
the archaeologists' explanation.
For them there was a tantalising mystery.
Ancient people in far-flung
parts of the world,
who seemed to have had no
contact with each other,
were doing very similar things
building pyramids
and studying the stars.
One explanation for these
puzzling resemblances
was the enduring myth of Atlantis.
The story goes that Atlantis was
the home of an ancient civilisation
of astonishing sophistication.
When it was destroyed in a flood
its survivors travelled the world
bringing their knowledge to
less developed peoples,
but the idea of Atlantis as
the cradle of all civilisation
was scorned by historians.
If Atlantis were true, if
there was one source
it would be very easy to
test archaeologically
and the evidence would be clear.
The fact that it's not clear,
the fact that that kind
of evidence is not present
is indicative of the fact that the
cultures developed independently
and were not derived
from a single source.
Graham Hancock believes that the idea
of Atlantis deserves a second chance.
He does not claim to be a scientist,
but he has used science
to revive an old idea.
Ten years ago Hancock
set out on a quest.
He came back with a radical vision,
one that he hoped would overturn
established ideas about the past.
What we're looking at here
is an accumulation of discordant
evidence and information
which doesn't quite fit in
with the orthodox picture.
Bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
that seem to have been just scattered
and thrown all around the world
and yet the feeling that if we
can put those pieces together
slowly, methodically, painstakingly
they will show us something that
we've forgotten about ourselves,
a great civilisation lost in prehistory.
In his research
Hancock became intrigued
by the ideas of writers
who have linked ancient monuments with
the stars as they appeared long ago.
Since ancient times people
have seen shapes in the stars
and they'd given these constellations names
like Aries the Ram, or Orion the Hunter.
Different ancient societies saw different
animals and objects in the stars.
The patterns of the
constellations don't change,
but the precise angle of groups of
stars in relation to the horizon
alters over time.
It's the result of a
process called precession.
The earth spins on its
axis every 24 hours,
but the axis has a very slow
wobble which lasts 26,000 years.
This is precession
and it slowly changes
our view of the stars.
It means that their position in the sky
is unique to different moments in time.
Astronomers have calculated the slowly
changing position of the stars back in time.
Using an astronomical software programme,
Hancock made an intriguing discovery.
Some of the wonders of the Ancient World
appear to mirror the stars at a
precise moment in the past:
10,500BC.
It was a date that was to assume an
extraordinary significance for his theory.
Groups of monuments in Egypt and another
large group of monuments far away in Cambodia
are copying constellations
in the sky as they looked,
not at the time when those
monuments were constructed,
but in a much earlier epoch,
the epoch of 10,500BC.
In other words,
if looked at from above,
groups of monuments mirrored
the unique position of the stars
as they looked at that
crucial moment in the past.
For Hancock, the
implications were stunning.
We are looking at the vestiges of an
ancient world-wide religious system,
a sky ground religion.
The essential thing that it had to do
was to build architectural copies
of groups of stars in the sky
and we're looking at the vestiges of that
system spread out around the world.
Hancock argued that there had indeed
been an ancient lost super-civilisation
destroyed 12,000 years ago.
Its survivors brought civilisation
to a Stone Age world
and a map of the sky
as it looked in 10,500BC.
It became a blueprint for future
generations around the world
who built monuments to mirror
these ancient patterns of stars.
Hancock could revive
the old idea of Atlantis
with a difference.
I avoid using the word
Atlantis in my books
because most people when
they hear the word Atlantis
immediately think that they're
dealing with the lunatic fringe.
I don't feel that I belong
to a lunatic fringe.
When Hancock published his theory
in 1995 it caused a sensation.
Five million copies were
sold around the world.
The impact of his book
rivalled the spectacular success of
Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods
published in the 1970s.
Von Däniken explained
the birth of civilisation
as the result of visits
from alien astronauts.
Other books by Hancock followed,
every one a best-seller.
His success has been crowned
by a major television series
which reached 10 million viewers.
Hancock is now part of a growing movement
of radical, alternative historians.
These writers have
become hugely influential.
No mainstream archaeologist ever
reaches such a wide audience,
but for academics their ideas are heresy.
Certainly one thing that they're
doing is selling a lot of books.
There's a long and ignoble
history of this sort of thing
and I view it as merely
the latest incarnation
of somebody obviously quite fascinated
by the past, a populariser of the past,
but someone who doesn't want
to adhere to the scientific method.
It is inevitable that this is a threat
to orthodox views of the past.
It can't simply be
accepted by a historian
that the whole burden of his work
over many, many years is wrong.
If Hancock and his
fellow authors are right,
we will have to rewrite history.
The only way to find out if
they are is to test the theory.
It is Ancient Egypt that provides most of
these writers with their key evidence,
in particular the pyramids
built 4,500 years ago
on the Giza plateau near modern Cairo.
According to Egyptologists those
pyramids are tombs and tombs only.
They have no other function whatsoever
and they were built to serve as the tombs
of three Pharaohs of the 4th dynasty
Khufu, Khefren and Menkaure
and that's the end of the story really as
far as orthodox Egyptologists are concerned.
I think there's room for a reconsideration
of what the pyramids might be
and in order to reconsider
that information
I think it's very important that
we take astronomy into account.
There's always been a mystery
about the three Giza pyramids.
Looked at from above they
form a perfect diagonal,
but with the third, smaller pyramid
that is offset.
Many have been baffled by
this curious imperfection,
but now there is a new explanation.
Robert Bauval is a former engineer.
He has developed a controversial
theory about the Giza pyramids
and it has a crucial role in the evolution of
Hancock's theories about a lost civilisation.
In 1982, on his way to Cairo airport,
Bauval flew over these mysterious
wonders of the Ancient World.
There was something about the
puzzling layout of the pyramids
that began to obsess him.
Now if you can see you
have two large pyramids
which are of almost equal size
and along a diagonal line
whereas the third pyramid,
the smaller one, of Menkaure,
is offset to the east of this diagonal.
Bauval had an inspiration.
The plan of the three pyramids
reminded him of a constellation
Orion the Hunter.
In the middle of the constellation
are the three belt stars.
They, too, form a diagonal
line with one star offset.
It seemed to be a perfect
match for the pyramids.
I observed that the stars had exactly the
same pattern as the pyramids on the ground.
You have two bright stars, or
two large stars if you like,
and the third one on the top dimmer and offset
to the east in exactly the same pattern.
There are, of course, many
other stars in Orion,
but it was the three belt stars that
led Bauval to make another discovery,
one that linked the pyramids uncannily
with that date long in the past.
As a result of precession,
the angle of the three
stars changes over time
and Bauval found the best
fit on one particular date.
So we have a moving
sky over a fixed land,
the pyramids on the ground,
and when you move that sky in
time to fit the patterns of Orion
you get that lock in 10,500BC.
Hancock was impressed
by Bauval's theory
and the way it linked Ancient Egypt
with an even more ancient date.
The whole arrangement
freezes the time of 10,500BC.
In his television series Hancock
showed how Bauval's idea works.
The pyramids form a precise 45 degree
angle with a line running north/south
and the three stars form the same exact
angle in the sky on only one date:
10,500BC.
For Hancock, Bauval's findings seemed like
compelling evidence for a lost civilisation.
I accept Egyptological opinion the
great pyramids were built in 2,500BC.
I am not saying that the pyramids
were built earlier than that.
What I'm saying is that
they were built in 2,500BC
but designed to commemorate architecturally,
symbolically and astronomically
an earlier epoch.
If Bauval and Hancock are right
the implications are astounding.
It means that Ancient
Egyptian civilisation
was inherited from a lost people
unknown to any mainstream historian.
One astronomer took a keen
interest in Bauval's theory
Ed Krupp.
He quickly became troubled
by Bauval's claims.
When The Orion Mystery came out
my curiosity was naturally aroused.
Anybody comes up with a good
idea about ancient astronomy
I want to know about it
and in going through the book
there was something nagging.
In The Orion Mystery there's
a nice double page spread
and anybody looking at this would
say ah, Giza pyramids, belt of Orion,
one kind of looks like the other, you know
you've got three in a row, three in a row,
slanted, slanted, we've got a map
and what I was bothered by turned
out to be really pretty obvious.
In the back of my head I knew that
something was wrong with these pictures
and what's wrong with these
pictures in their presentation
is that north for the constellation
Orion is here at the top of the page.
North for the Giza pyramids is down here.
Now they're not marked, but I
knew which way north was at Giza
and I knew which way north was in Orion.
To make the map of the
pyramids on the ground
match the stars of Orion in the sky
you have to turn Egypt upside down
and if you don't want to do that then
you've got to turn the sky upside down.
But Hancock and Bauval
reject Krupp's analysis.
They point out that Orion can only be
seen by looking in a southward direction.
So you're looking south of correlation
and for the natural tendency is to
draw what you see in that direction
and you would come up with looking
at three stars in that pattern
and three dots, or three pyramids,
or three marks in the same direction.
If you choose a time when Orion
is at its highest point in the sky
looking south high over the pyramids
there is an apparent match
and Bauval and Hancock's
view seems convincing.
There's no other way you can draw them
except in the way that the pyramids
lie on the ground today.
You can't do it in any other way.
If you're extremely pedantic
and believe that the Ancient
Egyptians' priesthood
was a group of narrow-minded bureaucrats
determined to follow
procedure above all else
then it's true that the northern most star is
depicted in the southern most place on the ground
and the southern most star in the
northern most place on the ground
and this is what Ed Krupp is getting at,
but if you regard it as a work
of symbolic and religious art
meant to copy on the ground what
the observer sees in the sky
then there's just no other way you
can make it than the way it is made.
But there's evidence that the Egyptians
may well have seen it another way;
perceiving the sky as forming
a canopy over their heads,
with north in the sky matching
north on the ground,
and the top of Orion thus pointing north.
The pyramids are set out facing
precisely north, south, east and west
and research suggests they were
aligned using the north polar stars
and also there are shafts built through the
north and south sides of the great pyramid
which point directly to stars in
the north and south of the sky
indicating that the Egyptians clearly linked
directions on the ground and in the sky.
That locks the pyramids north side and
south side to the north side of the sky
and the south side of the sky.
That means the Egyptians, in building
and laying out the pyramids,
said we know where north
is and we care about it
because we've incorporated
it into the architecture.
The Egyptians were perfectly capable of
drawing the pyramids right if they wanted to.
If they wanted Orion's belt to look
like Orion's belt on the ground
and match up with the north
and south sides of the pyramid
they could have done that.
But whether or not the
Egyptians cared about
matching north and south in
the sky and on the ground
there are other problems.
There are 13 other stars in Orion.
None of them match pyramids.
There are over 75 other pyramids in Egypt
and among them all there are no
convincing matches with stars,
but Hancock and Bauval
still stand by their theory.
I don't need every pyramid in
Egypt to map a star in the sky.
The people who built these monuments
were making a grand symbolic statement
that was supposed to be understood
on an intuitive and spiritual level.
It is hard to invest a lot
of intellectual effort
into three stars in a row and
three pyramids on the ground.
That's like a simple configuration
and it's very easy to find
three things in a row
and if, if you know there are roughly
81 or so pyramids in Egypt
well yeah if all 81 of 'em mapped
the sky perfectly I'd be impressed,
but if three of them mapped the
sky sorta I'm not impressed.
There's more.
Astronomer Anthony Fairall has
re-examined that precise 45 degree angle
that seemed to link the
pyramids with the belt stars
as they were in 10,500BC.
Fairall found that the match was not
as precise as originally claimed.
The angle formed by the two
large pyramids is 45 degrees,
but the angle formed by
the Belt stars is 54.
Hancock and Bauval dispute the
large size of Fairall's angle,
but accept there is a discrepancy.
No they're not absolutely
correct and I don't care.
I have to stress that in my view
the Ancient Egyptian priesthood
was not staffed by
anal-retentive bureaucrats.
The Ancient Egyptian priesthood was a
group of creative and imaginative thinkers
who were exploring the
mystery of life and death
and who believed that there was a
connection between ground and sky.
They wanted to make a resemblance on
the ground of a particular moment in time.
There is a simple explanation
for the way the pyramids were laid out
along that diagonal line 4,500 years ago
and it has nothing to do with Orion.
Kate Spence is an Egyptologist.
She's studied the historical sequence of quarrying
and construction on the Giza plateau in 2,500BC.
The interior blocks of the pyramids
were extracted from quarries
on the plateau itself.
The bases of the blocks
can still be seen today.
It turns out that the choices
of the pyramid builders
were severely limited by the site
they had chosen to build on.
It's entirely possible to explain the position
of the pyramids relative to each other
just through the geology of the site and
the nature of the pyramids themselves.
If we look at a map of the pyramids
which shows the contour lines you
can actually see it quite clearly.
These are the pyramids, the Khufu
pyramid, Khefren and Menkaure
and they're built on a ridge
which runs diagonally.
The reason they're set
obliquely to the ridge
is because they're aligned
so carefully towards north,
so this is the first pyramid to
be built, the Khufu pyramid
and when Khefren came along to build
his he couldn't build it in a straight line
because there's a quarry here
and it's very steeply sloping.
So he had to set the pyramid back,
for two reasons, both so that it
was on a reasonably high level
and also so that he could get a clear
view of north for the alignment,
and exactly the same thing happened
when Menkaure came to build his.
It's actually set back from the
line of the Khefren pyramid
because if you see here the contours
are very close so it's quite steep,
so it's set on a level plateau at about
the same height as the Khefren pyramid
and with a clear view towards north.
It seems clear that as the Egyptian kings
built their monuments across the Giza plateau
the decisions they made about
the position of the pyramids
were not inspired by a pattern of stars
but were the result of the limitations
of the site they chose to build on.
But Graham Hancock's radical
theory about the past
does not depend on
the Orion theory alone.
He claims to have discovered a
global network of ancient monuments,
either mapping constellations
on the ground
or linked in other ways to the stars.
He believes that they're all based on a
12,000 year-old blueprint of the night sky.
Far from Egypt
Hancock has discovered other
crucial evidence in Cambodia,
at one of the most extraordinary
archaeological sites in the world:
the temples of Angkor Vat.
The temples were built
by the Khmer people
3,000 years after the
Giza pyramids were built,
but Hancock claims to have found
evidence of a more ancient master plan.
There's a similarity,
a very strong similarity
between the pattern of
the temples on the ground
and the pattern of the stars in
the constellation of Draco,
one of the great northern constellations.
Quite simply if you take a map
of the temples of Angkor
and join the dots to connect
up the different temples
you find that you have drawn out on that map
the pattern of the constellation of Draco.
As Hancock shows in
his television series,
it does seem as if the temples at Angkor
are a genuine mirror of the stars
mapped out by the lost civilisation,
and that wasn't all.
The temples of Angkor also seemed to
be connected with that momentous date:
10,500BC
as a result of precession.
I found extraordinarily
that the correlation becomes as close
as possible to perfect only at one date,
and that is 10,500BC.
In his television series,
Hancock refers to the work of one of
the world's leading experts on Angkor,
Eleanor Mannikka.
She has spent 20 years surveying
and mapping the temples
and now she's examined Hancock's theory
in detail.
This hypothesis is based on the fact
that certain temples are
placed in their position
because they have to follow a pattern
that evokes the constellation Draco,
so if we look at this we see the beginning
apparently is the head right here at Angkor Vat
and the pattern goes from there up to Phnom
Bakheng which is this enormous central mountain.
Then it travels up here
to (TEMPLE NAME) Thom
and then it goes over
here to (TEMPLE NAME)
and from (TEMPLE NAME) it
goes to (TEMPLE NAME).
Then it goes to (TEMPLE NAME),
then it goes to (TEMPLE NAME),
out here to (TEMPLE NAME)
built in the 12th century.
I see a vague resemblance of course
because it goes up and down and off,
but actually the tail of
Draco goes way up like this,
it doesn't just go off like that.
When examined closely
the actual match between the
temples and the constellation
is not at all precise.
Does Hancock have an answer?
There's a rather good correspondence.
By no means you know
absolutely spot-on accurate,
but a rather good correspondence
between the stars in the sky
and the temples on the ground
and when you bear in mind that
these temples were constructed
across hundreds of square miles
of really very dense jungle,
something like 1,000 years ago,
when there was no ability for the
builders to get above their subject
and check that they were
achieving a perfect design,
I think they did a very good job.
But surveying has never depended
on viewing from above.
It's all done by measuring distances
and angles on the ground.
Mannikka's investigations show that the
Khmers must have been expert surveyors.
Such is the precision of their work
that she is convinced that they could
have accurately laid out and built
any pattern they wanted,
and there is good evidence which reveals
why the Khmers placed the temples
where they did.
Certain of these temples within
this so-called constellation here
are where they are for very
clear-cut historical reasons
referred to in inscriptions,
very obvious reasons.
For example, (TEMPLE NAME),
which is located here on top of
the central hill at Angkor,
had to be the place where the
king put his royal temple
because nothing else was
so prominent at the site.
Up here at (TEMPLE NAME) there was
a very bloody battle around 1190.
That's why (TEMPLE NAME) is here.
It couldn't be anywhere else.
It had to be here 'cos
the battle was here.
Mannikka discovered
that the position of every one of
the temples included by Hancock
can be explained in similarly
well documented ways.
Hancock includes only ten temples in
the shape of the constellation Draco,
but investigation of the Angkor region
has revealed that there
are more than 60 temples.
It seems arbitrary to use
so few out of so many.
The correlation he has found
begins to look more like
coincidence than planning.
I'm sure that, that there are
academics who can find a dozen reasons
why the resemblance of the temples of Angkor
to the pattern of the constellation of Draco
is accidental and a coincidence and can
be explained in all sorts of other ways,
but I've put forward my case in as
much detail as I can in my work.
I think there is a striking resemblance
between the basic pattern on the ground
and the pattern of the
constellation in the sky.
But there is a final problem.
Although Hancock believes the Khmer based their
cherished temples on the constellation of Draco,
strangely it is not mentioned
in any of their inscriptions.
Draco had nothing to do
with the culture whatsoever.
I mean there's no reference to the
constellation in any inscription,
there's no reference to
it whatsoever in any way.
No Draco.
Unfortunately, Ancient Egypt and Cambodia
are Hancock's most important
pieces of evidence,
that monuments mirror an
ancient blueprint of the stars.
His claim seems flawed
and Horizon has made a discovery which
further questions his basic theory.
It links a group of unique monuments
with a pattern of stars.
Here are the monuments on
the ground looking north.
The pattern matches one of
the great constellations:
Leo the Lion.
These are the monuments:
Grand Central Station,
the New York Public Library,
Macey's,
Madison Square Gardens,
the Central Post Office,
a theatre,
a university,
Times Square,
the Rockefeller Centre
and a police station.
The monuments are, of course,
in Manhattan.
The Leo master plan doesn't account
for every Manhattan landmark,
but using Hancock's
criteria it doesn't have to.
As long as you have enough points
and you don't need to
make every point fit,
you can find virtually
any pattern you want.
But Hancock does offer other
kinds of evidence for his theory.
I'm already convinced about the existence
of an ancient worldwide religious system
which must have emanated
from a remote, lost source,
but I need to convince others
and the best way to do that
is to produce artefacts and evidence
that are 12,000 or so years old
and which, therefore, fall outside of
the framework of orthodox history.
There are two far-flung monuments
that Hancock claims were actually built
by the people of the lost civilisation.
One is the ancient city
of Tiwanaku in Bolivia,
the other is the Egyptian Sphinx.
The Sphinx was carved out of the
limestones of the Giza plateau.
Mainstream archaeologists think
it was built 4,500 years ago
but Hancock believes
it is 12,000 years old.
Some of his evidence
is again astronomical.
The constellation Leo rose above the
horizon directly east of the Sphinx
in 10,500BC,
but there is no evidence that this constellation
was recognised by the Ancient Egyptians,
but Hancock also claims there
is geological evidence.
Egypt has had a dry climate since
the time the pyramids were built,
but the Sphinx and its surrounding
enclosure are deeply eroded.
It has been argued by Hancock and others
that the erosion was caused by heavy rainfall
and that this means
the Sphinx must have been carved many
thousands of years earlier than we thought,
when the climate was wetter.
But the erosion argument has not
stood up to the scrutiny of geologists.
Erosion on the Giza plateau
does not depend on water.
The Giza limestones contain salts
and these have proved to cause
destructive levels of erosion
in very short periods of time.
There is no hard evidence that the Sphinx
is any older than the orthodox date.
Hancock has also focused
on another monument
thousands of miles from Egypt,
in South America.
High in the Bolivian Andes
lies Lake Titicaca.
Nine miles to the east is one of the most
mysterious ruined cities in the world.
It is called Tiwanaku.
Archaeologists think that this was the
capital of a South American empire
that began to flourish
nearly 2,000 years ago,
but the identity of the people who
created Tiwanaku remains a mystery.
Whoever they were, they
were superb stone-masons
creating temples and monuments
using immense but precisely
carved blocks of stone.
For more than a century
Tiwanaku has attracted
fabulous explanations.
As to who would have built Tiwanaku
what we might be talking about is
the survivors of the lost civilisation,
people who have moved into the
mountains to create a new settlement
to try to preserve something of their
culture, something of their tradition,
something of their religious ideas.
For evidence Hancock turned to
the writings of Arthur Posnansky,
who thought Tiwanaku was the cradle
of ancient American civilisation.
He stumbled on the site at
the turn of the century
and became a self-appointed expert.
Posnansky claimed Tiwanaku was
an ancient astronomical observatory.
He believed that particular stone blocks
had once been positioned to face the sun
as it rose above the horizon at
the winter and summer solstices,
but like the constellations,
the position of the solstices
changes very slowly over time
and Posnansky found the best match
between the stone blocks and the rising sun
12,000 years ago.
Arthur Posnansky, who is by no means
a favourite with orthodox scholars,
but did spend 50 years of his life studying
Tiwanaku from the early 1900s up until the 1940s,
made a very strong case that the alignments,
the original alignments of Tiwanaku,
had been set out at a time when the rising
point of the sun was quite different
from, from where it is today at
the winter and summer solstices
and he dated that approximately
to about 12,000 years ago.
But how good is the evidence
that Hancock relies on?
Has Posnansky's work
stood the test of time?
Tiwanaku is in a ruinous state.
Its great blocks lie shattered and fallen.
That's because in the 17th century
the Spanish Conquistadors arrived
in this region of the Andes.
They set about destroying
this pagan monument.
The Spanish broke up the site,
moved hundreds of blocks
and built a cathedral with them nearby.
No one knows where many of the remaining
blocks were originally positioned.
Posnansky could only guess that they might
once have been aligned with the rising sun,
yet this was his most important evidence.
Posnansky died in 1948.
That means he missed a revolution
in archaeological science,
one that might have changed his
mind about the age of the site.
Carbon dating is a method that has
provided increasingly reliable dates
for archaeological
sites all over the world,
including Tiwanaku.
Carbon dates for the
great stone monuments
show they are less than 2,000 years old.
Graham Hancock disputes their age because
carbon dating can't date the stone itself,
but only organic remains like bone or
charcoal found in association with the stone.
He regards this association as unreliable,
although the method has been tried and
tested at sites throughout the world,
and at Tiwanaku archaeologists
are confident of the link.
But anyway, here archaeologists have
dug deeper than the stone structures.
The earlier signs of any human habitation,
probably a small village,
easily dated from organic remains
are just 3,500 years old;
nowhere near 10,500BC.
So how does Hancock deal with this
information in his most recent book?
I'm not required to be encyclopaedic.
In Heaven's Mirror there is no representation
whatsoever of recent carbon dates for Tiwanaku.
I simply didn't discuss it in there.
There is no hard evidence
that survivors of a lost civilisation built
Tiwanaku or the Sphinx 12,000 years ago.
But there is one other way Hancock
could change our view of the past
and that is to find the home
of the lost civilisation.
It would be the find of the century,
the real Atlantis.
Hancock has made an astonishing
suggestion about where it could be:
Antarctica.
He has claimed that Antarctica
was once in a warmer region
and home to the lost civilisation.
12,000 years ago, he argued,
a massive shift in the earth's crust
thrust Antarctica to the South Pole
where it became ice-bound.
Geologists have studied the history
of Antarctica through ice-cores,
some as deep as 3.5 kilometres.
Ice-cores are like tree rings
and they can be used to work out
the history of the ice-sheets.
The scientists' work shows clearly
that the ice has been here
for over 400,000 years.
It would have been hard to
survive here in 10,500BC
let alone create a
sophisticated civilisation.
What I've come to realise as
my research has gone on
in a sense, is that I
don't need Antarctica
and therefore I don't need to propose
a radical revolution of geological ideas
in order to explain a lost civilisation.
Hancock now believes we've been
looking in the wrong place.
The lost civilisation was
underwater all along.
This is the Yonaguni formation.
Discovered in 1987 by
a Japanese fisherman
it lies under five metres of water at
the end of the Japanese island chain.
It appears to be a series of steps
and pyramid-like structures.
Could this be the remains of a
city lost 12,000 years ago?
It looks like a monument.
It has very curious features.
It has a series of steps and
terraces cut into its side,
it's oriented to the cardinal directions,
it faces due south, it has a deep east/west
feature running along in front of it.
It bears all the hallmarks of a designed
ceremonial, ritual or religious monument.
Yonaguni looked as if it could
be a spectacular discovery
and Hancock needed corroboration.
He invited the Boston University geologist
Robert Schoch to inspect the site.
Professor Schoch has taken a keen interest
in unorthodox views of the past
and he welcomed the chance to
examine the underwater discovery.
Schoch dived with Hancock
several times at Yonaguni.
I went there in this case actually hoping
that it was a totally manmade structure
that was now submerged underwater, that
dated maybe back to 6,000BC or more.
When I got there and I got
to dive on the structure
I have to admit I was
very, very disappointed
because I was basically
convinced after a few dives
that this was primarily possibly
totally a natural structure.
I think that what Robert Schoch
needs to do is a lot more diving.
When I took him there in 1997,
September of 1997,
he did four dives at that time
and then he went back
again in July of 1998
and did a few more dives.
I really feel that before anybody
pronounces definitively on this monument
they should put in a
minimum of 50 dives.
Professor Schoch has
not changed his mind.
Isolated portions of it
look like they're manmade,
but when you look at it in context,
you look at the shore features etc
and you see how, in this case,
fine sandstones split along
horizontal bedding plains
that gives you these regular features.
I'm convinced it's a natural structure.
Graham Hancock is still scouring the oceans
of the world for a lost civilisation.
He has also investigated pyramids
and a giant stone face on the planet Mars,
but he has yet to find firm evidence that
there really was a forgotten civilisation
of god-like astronomers 12,000 years ago.
I believe passionately
that the past has been misrepresented
and that people today are not
being given the full picture
and I don't think that my arguments are ever
going to be successfully destroyed by nit-picking.
After having invested a lot of time
doing what I think very
few other people do,
which is saying, OK, you've made
this claim, let's see if it holds up.
And so, subjecting it to
the rules of evidence
and then coming to a conclusion,
my conclusion is no, I
don't think they're right
and I don't think they're right because I
don't think the evidence fits the hypothesis.