American Atlantis

What´s the fuzz all about, old boy? 

Graham Hancock is a British explorer, documentary film maker and bestselling writer. Most of his books touch on alternative history or forbidden knowledge: Atlantis, the Sphinx dating controversy, the face on Mars, Masonic conspiracies…you get the drift. The books often come with excellent photos made by professional photographer Santha Faiia from Malaysia (also Hancock´s wife). I find Hancock´s tomes on “Atlantis” or the Lost Civilization to be his most interesting ones. While a few real scientists have teamed up with the intrepid explorer, most of the scientific community apparently still regards him as something the cat dragged in. I consider this unfortunate – in my opinion, both scientists and perennial gadflies are necessary parts of the intellectual ecology.

Graham Hancock´s latest book “America Before: The Key to Earth´s Lost Civilization” covers a lot of ground. It feels like three or four books under one cover. (Apparently, the Barnes & Noble edition, which I haven´t seen, contains some extra material not included in the main edition.) In his bestselling “Fingerprints of the Gods”, Hancock speculated that the Lost Civilization was in Antarctica. In this new book, he rather places it in North America. “America Before” could be seen as a sequel of sorts to both “Fingerprints”, “Magicians of the Gods” and “Supernatural”, the latter work being Hancock´s exploration of shamanism and psychadelics.

Parts of the book deal with “official” scientific theories and speculations about American pre-history. Hancock points out that Clovis First dogma (the idea that the so-called Clovis culture were the earliest humans in the Americas, migrating from Asia around 12,000 years ago) is basically dead, many pre-Clovis sites being discovered all around the New World. The current consensus is that the earliest humans arrived in the Americas around 25,000 years ago. This too has been challenged by the recent find of 130,000 year old mastodon bones in California which seem to have been worked by humans. While that find is still controversial, the time frame for human habitation in the New World is clearly being pushed back, millennium by millennium. And where did the earliest human settlers come from, anyway? DNA research shows that certain Amazonian tribes have “Melanesian” and “Aboriginal” genes! How such genes could end up in the middle of the Amazon in pre-historic times, but nowhere else in America, is an interesting question…

Hancock spends considerable time describing the latest sensational archaeological finds in the Amazon, which proves that this supposed “counterfeit paradise” was home to a relatively advanced culture until the Conquista, with city-states capable of fielding large armies. A number of large geoglyphs (broadly similar to those found at Nazca in Peru) and megalithic sites have been unearthed in the Brazilian jungle. As usual, Hancock proposes that this high culture was much older than mainstream archeology dares to claim. He also discusses the mound-building cultures in North America, again proposing that the sites are substantially more ancient than mainstream scientists allow for. One chapter deals with parallels between Native American (American Indian) spiritual traditions and ancient Egyptian religion. They seem to be substantial. Thus, as the book progresses, it becomes less and less mainstream. No hard feelings!

Hancock´s thesis is that a relatively advanced civilization, on the level of late 18^th century and early 19^th century United States, existed before the end of the last Ice Age somewhere in North America. If I understand him correctly, he holds that this culture originally came from South America and even earlier from Southeast Asia or Indonesia. It reached America by simply sailing the Pacific – Hancock believes that these were the “ancient sea-kings” also described by Charles Hapgood (he believes in the anomalous origins of the Piri Reis map). I´m not sure why he doesn´t engage with the work of Steve Oppenheimer on this point. Oppenheimer wrote an entire volume about the Lost Civilization being at Sundaland in the ancient East Indies. One obvious problem with Hancock´s idea is that literally no traces of the Lost Civilization have been found, at least none which are entirely uncontroversial (the controversial ones are described in his earlier book “Underworld”). The clues to its existence are indirect. For instance, why are there striking parallels between Native American and Egyptian religion? Why are there similarities between ancient monuments on different continents? Why are there legends about a lost civilization submerged by a gigantic flood all over the world? If you accept the Piri Reis map as anomalous, that´s another clue.

Hancock believes that the ancient high culture he is looking for was completely destroyed by a vast cataclysm which occurred around 12,900 years ago. Here, Hancock joins forces with a faction within the official scientific community: the proponents of the “Younger Dryas impact hypothesis”. Or almost joins forces, since some of them have apparently disavowed Hancock for fear of being ostracized by the establishment! According to this neo-catastrophist hypothesis, Earth was hit by a comet, or perhaps bombarded repeatedly by many comet fragments, at the end of the last Ice Age. This led to the return of a cold climate, the extinction of the Paleolithic megafauna, and the demise of the Clovis culture (dramatically described in the book). In Hancock´s scenario, it also wiped out the Lost Civilization and indeed drastically changed the face of North America, making it downright impossible to find any traces or remains from it. Or *almost* wiped out, since some of the Atlanteans must have survived in refuges around the world, helping to restart civilization. Unfortunately, most of *this* knowledge was lost when the Spaniards burned virtually all Aztec and Maya manuscripts during the Conquista. Hancock believes that we are soon about to be hit by another huge comet, giving his books a slightly apocalyptic feel…unless we mend our ways and build an international space station with the capacity to fend off killer comets.

In this book, Hancock comes clean about what he believes concerning the technological know-how of the Lost Civilization. While its nuts-and-bolts technology resembled that of an advanced civilization at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, its real achievements were more “supernatural”. They mastered telekinesis of an advanced kind, with the help of which they could raise gigantic stones and build huge walls and temple complexes which still baffle us today. The telekinetic abilities came from “the gods” or the spirits, contacted by Lost Civilization shamans through the psychedelic drug ayahuasca. Here, I have to say that I´m perhaps a bit more conventional than the author…

My guess is that official science will soon accept both that humanity is much older than expected, that the human story is “multi-regional” rather than strictly “Out of Africa”, and that the Americas were settled very early, probably by more than one ethnic group. They will probably accept the Younger Dryas impact event, too. However, the Lost Civilization as such – the central idea of Graham Hancock´s life long quest – won´t be accepted any time soon. Unless something really interesting comes up when those cursed Greenland ice caps start to melt by the time Greta Thunberg turns 30…

With that remark, I close this review.