#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series ancient apocalypse. The second season of which has just been released, and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas. A topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist, scholar I love talking t
It would be better to describe it as a foundational sense of puzzlement and incompleteness, in the story that we are taught about our past. Which envisages, more or less, there have been a few ups and downs, but more or less, straightforward evolutionary progress. We start out as hunter foragers, then we become agriculturalists. The hunter for the forager phase could go back 100 of 1000 of years. I mean, this is where It's also important to mention that anatomically modern humans, and we're not the only humans. We we had Neanderthals from, I don't know, 400000 years ago to about 40000 years ag
So the current understanding in mainstream archaeology is that after the Younger Dryas is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently. Yeah.
Independently. And and and by coincidence. And by coincidence, those those big civilizations that we all remember as the first civilizations, Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization, China, they all pop up at the pretty much the same time. That is that is that is the mainstream view.
And they don't just pop up. They kinda build up gradually. 1st, there's some settlements. Oh,
definitely. Yes.
And then there's different dynamics of how
they build up and
the role of the role of agriculture in that is, also non obvious, but it's just there's, first, a kind of settlement Yeah. A stabilization of where the people are living, then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff. It
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