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Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock Quotes

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Famous Graham Hancock Quotes

“The earth is a dynamic place [...] with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can't be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won't work, either, because they were never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts themselves may obviously be ancient.”

EarthDatingPreservationGeologyArchaeologyErosionDynamicDeposition
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Grima explained that the primary tool in establishing Malta's prehistoric chronology had been radiocarbon-dating (based on the rate of decay of C-14 stored in all formerly living matter). My views about C-14 are on the record. I think it should be only one amongst several tools and techniques brought to bear on the dating of megalithic or rock-hewn sites. It is a truism, but worth repeating nevertheless, that C-14 cannot date stone -- only such organic materials as are found around or in association with stone ruins. It is an assumption (more or less safe depending on the stratigraphy and general circumstances of the site but still, at the end of the day, an assumption) that organic materials found close to megalith B or trilithon A or dolmen C, etc., do in fact date from the same period as the quarrying and erection of the megaliths concerned.”

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Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012 witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they'd been thought to be just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to the implications, they'd become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great deal of attention if it concerned Western architecture--indeed it would be like discovering that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres and York Minster were not, in fact, works of the late medieval period but had actually been built by the Romans.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age--perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we've seen--or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural know-how, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It's therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of 'package' is involved here.”

MysteryEvidenceLegacyAfterlifeArchaeologyHunter GatherersYounger DryasEarthworksMonumental ArchitectureMound Building
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older," "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans--literally morons by comparison with ourselves. Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.”

CultureRemainsParadigmAssumptionsArchaeologyNeanderthals
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“At locations scattered all across North America from Alaska to New Mexico and from Florida to the state of Washington, more than 1,500 Clovis sites have been found. These sites have yielded more than 10,000 Clovis points and tens of thousands of other artifacts from the Clovis toolkit (40,000 at Topper alone [...]). yet among all these archaeological riches, it bears repeating that the sum total of Clovis human remains found in 85 years of excavations is limited to the Anzick-1 partial skeleton.”

RemainsArchaeologyArtifactsDeep Human HistoryClovisExcavations
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus--perhaps to a large extent subconsciously--on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm.”

TruthCareersConservativeQuestioningOrthodoxyPredecessorsJeopardyArchaeology
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region, but the Lidar images make it clear, [...] that 'scale and population density had been grossly underestimated.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“If a failure to preserve and consider potentially controversial evidence has frustrated a full understanding of the Hypogeum, then the same is also true for the megalithic temples and even the prehistoric cave sites in Malta. Thus, Mifsud points out that archaeologists excavating Ghar Dalam cave in the early twentieth century [...] 'discovered several knives, scrapers, borers and burins in previously undisturbed deposits, and although stratigraphically Pleistocene, they have been arbitrarily attributed to the Neolithic'.”

EstablishmentArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryNeolithicPleistoceneMegalithic
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“The fully qualified Indian marine archaeologists who had dived on the structure in 1993 had not hesitated in their official report to pronounce it to be man-made with 'courses of masonry' plainly visible -- surely a momentous finding 5 kilometers from the shore at a depth of 23 metres? But far from exciting attention, or ruffling any academic feathers, or attracting funds for an extension of the diving survey to the other apparently man-made mounds that had been spotted bear by on the sea-bed -- and very far indeed from inspiring any Tamil expert to re-evaluate the derided possibility of a factual basis to the Kumari Kandam myth -- the NIO's discovery at Poompuhur had simply been ignored by scholarship, not even reacted to or dismissed, but just widely and generally ignored.”

AuthorityAcademiaArchaeologyMasonryDeep Human HistoryCataclysmMarine ArchaeologyUnderwater Structures
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“No investigation of the human story in the Americas [...] can ignore the role of Siberia as a crossroads in the migrations of our ancestors. Moreover, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of its vast area has yet been sampled by archaeologists, we already know that anatomically modern humans were present in both western and Arctic Siberia at least as far back as 45,000 years ago. We know, too, that DNA studies have revealed close genetic relationships between Native Americans and Siberians that speak to a deep and ancient connection.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Despite the passage of close to a million years since Homo erectus first sailed to Flores, however, what archaeology does not concede is that the human species could have developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other. In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to have been undertaken until about 3,500 years ago, during the so-called Polynesian expansion. And the mainstream historical view is that the Atlantic was not successfully navigated until 1492--the year in which, as the schoolyard mnemonic has it, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Indeed, the notion that long transoceanic voyages were a technological impossibility during the Stone Age remains one of the central structural elements of the dominant reference frame of archaeology--a reference frame that geneticists see no reason not to respect and deploy when interpreting their own data. Since that reference frame rules out, a priori, the option of a direct ocean crossing between Australasia and South America during the Paleolithic and instead is adamant that all settlement came via northeast Asia, geneticists tend to approach the data from that perspective.”

AssumptionsPrejudicesArchaeologyIce AgeOceansDeep Human HistoryMigrationsGeneticists
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Kramer's recognition, with the geologists Lees and Falcon, that people could have settled in the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers much earlier than had previously been assumed has been entirely vindicated by subsequent discoveries of the traces of 'primitive agricultural villages' dating back more than 8000 years.”

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“So what was going on in Malta that led to all this? Why did the first megalithic temple-builders in the world choose to make things so difficult for themselves? Why didn't they start with small megaliths (if that is not too serious a contradiction in terms)? Why didn't they start simple? Why did they plunge straight into the very complicated stuff, like Gigantija and the Hypogeum? And, having plunged, how did they manage to produce such magnificent results? Was it beginner's luck? Or were their achievements as humanity's pioneering architects the product of some sort of heritage? Beginner's luck is possible, but having studied the earliest temples, and their level of perfection, archaeologists agree that heritage is the right answer. The only problem is what heritage? And where is it to be looked for? Since it is the received wisdom that no human beings lived on Malta before 5200 BC, and since this is a 'fact' that is at present unquestioned anywhere within conventional scholarship, archaeologists from roughly the mid-twentieth century onwards have simply seen no reason to explore the possibility that the heritage of the Maltese temples might be older than 5200 BC. To do so would be the research equivalent of an oxymoron -- like breeding dodos, trying to conduct an interview with William Shakespeare or seeking evidence that the earth is flat -- and would invite the ridicule of one's peers.”

AuthorityHeritageEstablishmentAcademiaArchaeologyMegalithic Monuments
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Anzick-1's "Clovis connection" is of immediate relevance to our quest here--which is that although Clovis did, at the limits of its range, extend into some northern areas of South America, its heartland was in North America. Intuitively, therefore, we would expect the Montana infant, a Clovis individual, to be much more closely related to Native North Americans than to Native South Americans. Further investigations, however, while reconfirming that Anzick-1's genome had a greater affinity to all Native Americans than to any extant Eurasian population, revealed it to be much more closely related to native South Americans than to Native North Americans!”

GeneticsArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryMigrations
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“At the entrance of one of the Hypogeum's painted rooms, the faint engraved impression of a large human hand, also arbitrarily assigned to the Neolithic, may still be seen. It 'has parallels in similar designs in Palaeolithic sites at Gargas, El Castillo, and particularly with Montespan in the Franco-Cantabrian region.' The impression shows a hand with six fingers [a condition known as Polydactyly that is also seen on at least one of the 'Fat Lady' figures on show in the National Museum of Archaeology].”

ArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryIce Age CivilizationsNeolithicPalaeolithic
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Soon after the news broke about these published conclusions [regarding the evidence of a Palaeolithic human presence on Malta] and their stark contradiction of the orthodox view on Malta's prehistory, the Italian team distanced itself from its initial Palaeolithic leanings and claimed instead that the depictions in Ghar Hasan are 'out of context' -- which indeed they are if one is only prepared to countenance a Neolithic context for the earliest human presence in Malta. Another development at about the same time was that the Ghar Hasan cave began to be vandalized, and the paintings defaced or completely removed, a process that continued over a long period. The result, which would have caused an international furore anywhere else but Malta, is that today: 'The only depictions which have survived, unless more are obscured by stalagmitic material on the cavern walls, are the two handprints in red pigment in Gallery D ... Vandalism not of the popular type has destroyed and obscured the entire repertoire of images on the accessible areas.”

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Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“On 16 January 2002 India's Minister of Science and Technology released the first results of carbon-dating of the artefacts from the flooded cities of the Gulf of Cambay. The results date the artifacts to 9500 years ago -- 5000 years older than any city so far recognized by archaeologists.”

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“For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.”

HistoryIgnorancePrejudicesArchaeologyDeep Human HistoryCivilizationsSmithsonian Institute
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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