The episode features Graham Hancock, author of America Before, discussing new archaeological evidence that challenges conventional understanding of human civilization in the Americas and globally.

Hancock explains that a Barnes & Noble special edition of America Before includes an extra chapter with additional material not in the standard version, available through his website grahamhancock.com.

The conversation explores the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, supported by 60+ scientists proposing that multiple comet fragments struck Earth 12,800 years ago, causing mass extinctions and climate changes that may have wiped out an advanced prehistoric civilization.

Hancock discusses his upcoming North American speaking tour with 17-18 U.S. events and three Canadian events (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto) from April 22 to June 5, where he'll present illustrated talks, sign books, and meet readers.

Younger Dryas Cataclysm and Comet Impact Evidence

"From 2007 onwards, we get a group of more than 60 major scientists who are seriously proposing that the Earth was hit by multiple fragments of a giant comet 12,800 years ago" - Graham, published in leading mainstream journals

Greenland crater discovery (18 miles wide) found under ice shows evidence of iron impactor during last ice age. "They can say for sure that it happened during the last ice age... all the evidence suggests that this crater dates to that period between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago" - Graham

Impact evidence now found from Antarctica to Syria, making it "truly a global event" that "changed the world" and potentially "wiped our memory of a previous episode of human civilization" - Graham

The Younger Dryas period (12,800-11,600 years ago) saw "all the megafauna dying off suddenly and rapidly... rises in sea level... huge collapse in global temperature" - Graham describing the cataclysmic epoch

Channeled Scablands: Evidence of Catastrophic Flooding

Graham traveled across Washington State's Channeled Scablands with Randall Carlson, observing glacial erratics (giant boulders) transported by "floods that were at least 500 up to 1,000 feet deep that were tearing through the channeled scablands, literally ripping the landscape apart"

"Icebergs the size of oil tankers" carried these boulders in floods, then grounded on valley sides. "Anything that was underneath that 12,800 years ago is gone completely" - Graham on the scale of destruction

"I felt emotional traveling across the Channel Scablands, realizing that this was the heart of an event that changed the world completely" - Graham on witnessing the geological evidence firsthand

Clovis First Dogma and Archaeological Resistance

"For the best part of 50 years, from the 1960s through until about 2010, American archaeology was locked in a dogma that they actually had a name for, which was Clovis first" - Graham on the 13,400-year-old limit

Jacques Sank Mars excavated in Yukon in 1980s-1990s and "was ruined by the Clovis First lobby" but vindicated in 2017 when Smithsonian re-excavated and confirmed "every single thing he said was correct" - Graham

Al Goodyear at Topper site in South Carolina dug below Clovis layer through 1.5 meters of barren soil and found human artifacts dating back "more than 50,000 years ago" - Graham

"Any archaeologist who attempted to dispute that dogma... would face severe problems with his or her career. They would be mocked and humiliated at conferences... Their research funding would be withdrawn" - Graham on academic suppression

130,000-Year-Old Human Presence: The Cerutti Mastodon Site

Tom Demare at San Diego Natural History Museum published in Nature magazine (2017) evidence for human presence in North America 130,000 years ago - mastodon bones cracked open by humans using tools for marrow extraction

"When you break a fresh bone, it has a characteristic kind of spiral fracture that does not happen when you break a fossilized bone" - Graham explaining how team ruled out road construction machinery

Challenge paper "never even looked at the archaeological remains... based it on reference to a freeway right-of-way map and construction plans, contemporary road building practices, and worksite photographs available on the internet" - Graham quoting the abstract

"If humans were present in North America 130,000 years ago, and archaeologists have been telling us for 50 years that they were only present from 13,000 years ago, that's 10 times as long that we've had humans in North America capable of doing stuff" - Graham

Amazon Rainforest: Lost Cities and Ancient Science

"The Amazon basin is 7 million square kilometers in area. And within it, 5.5 million square kilometers remains almost entirely unstudied by archaeologists" - equivalent to entire Indian subcontinent - Graham

Spanish explorer Francisco Oriana (1541-1542) reported seeing "incredible cities, advanced arts and crafts, millions of people" but 100 years later Europeans couldn't find them because "smallpox devastated the local population... cities were deserted... completely overgrown by the jungle" - Graham

Latest evidence suggests Amazon population "exceeded 20 million people" with cities larger than 16th-century London (which had roughly 50,000 population) - Graham

Terra preta (Amazonian dark earth) is "man-made soil... thousands of years old... full of microbes that are not found in adjoining soil... you can take a handful of 8,000-year-old terra preta, and you can add it to barren soil, and that soil will instantly become fertile" - Graham

"The Amazon is basically a garden. The Amazon is a man-made rainforest" with hyper-dominant food crop trees like Brazil nut trees deliberately cultivated over thousands of years - Graham

Amazonian Geoglyphs: Geometrical Earthworks and Astronomy

Thousands of henges (deep ditches with embankments) emerging from cleared Amazon jungle, similar to UK structures like Stonehenge and Avebury but "hundreds of meters" in scale - Graham

LIDAR technology in Guatemala (100,000 square kilometers) revealed "more than 60,000 structures that they hadn't identified" near Tikal. "In that five and a half million square kilometers of the Amazon, if LIDAR technology could be applied comprehensively, what would we find?" - Graham

Jakosar site shows "a square perfectly enclosing a circle" - exercise called "squaring the circle that our academics have given to the Greeks" but "being done in the Amazon long before the Greeks" - Graham

Earliest dated geoglyphs are "about 3,500 years old" but "evidence is that the sites have been constantly remade" - Graham noting sites are "perfectly aligned to true north, true south, true east, and true west... there's only one way to do it, and that's with astronomy"

"No habitation refuse found in them whatsoever" - geoglyphs were not lived in, suggesting ceremonial or spiritual purpose connected to "death and the afterlife destiny of the soul" - Graham

Ayahuasca and Amazonian Spiritual Technology

"Ayahuasca is itself another example of Amazonian science" - combining two plants out of 150,000 species that aren't psychoactive alone but together create visionary brew - Graham

Ayahuasca vine contains monoamine oxidase inhibitor that "switches off the enzyme in the gut and allows the DMT to be accessed orally" producing 4-5 hour journey versus 10-12 minute smoked DMT - Graham

"Ayahuasca means the vine of the dead" connected to "what happens to us when we die" - Tucano people give "a teaspoonful of ayahuasca to a newborn infant" believing in hidden realm awareness - Graham

Tucano shamans paint their ayahuasca visions of the afterlife realm, and "quite a number of the tucano paintings of the other world... are geometrical and they look exactly like the geoglyphs" - Graham connecting visionary experience to earthworks

Australasian DNA Mystery in the Amazon

"Very specific, clearly identifiable pattern of DNA, which is only found in one other place in the world, and that is in Australasia, in Papua New Guinea, and amongst Australian Aborigines" found in Amazon tribes - Graham

DNA signal found "in ancient skeletal remains that are close to 11,000 years old in the Amazon" meaning "this DNA signal has been in the Amazon for at least 11,000 years" - Graham

Professor S.K. Willislev at University of Copenhagen said "the most parsimonious explanation... is that a group of people during the Ice Age crossed the Pacific Ocean and ended up in South America" - Graham quoting lead geneticist

When asked why it doesn't make practical sense, Willislev said "because the archaeologists tell me that no human population was capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean during the Ice Age" - Graham highlighting archaeologists' limiting assumptions

Path of Souls: Global Afterlife Belief System

Mississippi Valley mound builder sites, particularly Moundville in Alabama, share "exactly the same system of religious ideas" with Amazon - soul ascends to Orion, transits to Milky Way called "path of souls" - Graham

Ancient Egypt: "The soul must rise up to the constellation of Orion" through Great Pyramid shaft targeting "directly the lowest of the three stars of Orion's belt... widely accepted as a star shaft or a soul shaft" - Graham

Egyptians called Milky Way "the winding waterway" where soul "would be confronted by challenges and ordeals. Very similar idea to the Tucano. Very similar idea to the Mississippi Valley" - Graham

"Either we're dealing with a huge, unbelievable, extraordinarily detailed coincidence involving architecture and ideas, or we're looking at the legacy that was inherited in all of these different places from a remote common ancestor" - Graham

Olmec Heads and the Man Bag Symbol

Olmecs are "considered to be the earliest high culture of Central America" before Aztecs and Maya, famous for "huge carved human heads, which can be on a scale of up to 20 to 25 tons in weight" - Graham

La Venta site shows "earliest ever image of a plumed or feathered serpent" (Quetzalcoatl) with "human figure who's holding this strange bag in his hand" - Graham

"Those identical bags are found in ancient Sumer in the hands of individuals who were considered to be civilization bringers" and "on Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe" at least 11,600 years old - Graham

"I call them man bags... a sort of badge of office of a group of civilizers who traveled around the world trying to bring back to life a lost civilization" - Graham's interpretation

Ancient Maps Showing Ice Age Geography

Piri Reis map (1513) "based on more than 100 older source maps, some of which had come from the library of Alexandria" shows "extremely precise relative longitudes and latitudes" - Graham

"Longitude is a difficult technological feat... involves a chronometer... our civilization did not invent such a chronometer until the late 18th century" yet appears in ancient source maps - Graham

Pinkerton world map (1818) has "nothing there" for Antarctica because "our civilization hadn't discovered Antarctica in 1818. Actually, we discovered it in 1819" - Graham

"Antarctica appears repeatedly on these much older maps and it appears in the right place and a bit bigger than it is today but very much as it looked during the last Ice Age" - Graham

Piri Reis map shows island off North America with "road of megaliths" in exact place of Grand Bahama Banks where Bimini Road sits underwater - "last time it was above water was thousands and thousands of years ago" - Graham

Bimini Road: Underwater Megalithic Mystery

Bimini Road is "about 20 feet" deep, "hundreds of feet" long in J-shape, featuring uniformly sized blocks that "look so man-made" - Graham from personal diving experience

"Beach rock does form in blocky formations but here I believe that the beach rock has been used as a construction material" - Graham's assessment after extensive diving

"The key issue is not whether the Bimini Road is man-made or not. The key issue is that it features on a map above water" dating to when it was last above surface 8,000-9,000 years ago - Graham

"It's really fucking weird that it appears on a map above water... a map that was drawn in 1513 based on older source maps" - Graham emphasizing the dating implications

Denisovans: Out-of-Place Ancient Technology

Denisovans discovered from single pinky bone from a little finger in Denisova Cave, Russia - complete genome revealed "another human species" who "interbred with anatomically modern humans" - Graham

"Denisovan DNA survives... predominantly in Australasia... in Papua New Guinea and amongst Australian Aborigines" - Graham connecting to Amazon DNA mystery

Greenstone bracelet (40,000-50,000 years old, possibly 65,000-70,000) shows "hole has been drilled through the bracelet" with drill marks indicating "drilled with a stable fixed drill... at extremely high speed" - Graham

"There is not supposed to have been any such technology in that period" - stable fixed drilling "we thought was introduced first in the Neolithic maybe 7,000, 8,000 years ago" - Graham on the anomaly

"Very fine needles, bone needles that the Denisovans made, very long ones, which suggest that they were stitching very heavy stuff together" possibly making "skin boats" for navigation - Graham

Serpent Mound and Astronomical Alignments

Graham and wife Santa visited Serpent Mound, Ohio on summer solstice (June 21, 2017) with drone at 400 feet - "The head of that serpent is pointing directly at a niche in the distant hills through which the sun sets on the summer solstice" - Graham

"It stands on a natural ridge... that natural ridge, the head end of it... is naturally oriented to the summer solstice sunset. Somebody, a long time ago, noticed that natural orientation. And they decided to monumentalize it" - Graham

Dating controversy: Fort Ancient culture (1,000 years old) versus Adena culture (2,300 years ago) with "evidence for an earlier construction enterprise" through continuous reconstruction - Graham

Earth's axis nutation (41,000-year cycle) "does adjust the position of sunrise on the horizon" - theoretically possible to "precisely target the rising sun on the equinox" and date original construction astronomically - Graham

Newark and High Bank: Geometrical Precision

Newark earthworks feature octagon-circle combination preserved in private golf course - "if it hadn't been preserved within a private golf course, it would be gone completely" - Graham noting 90% of documented Native American earthworks are destroyed

High Bank site 60 miles away has "another octagon circle combination... oriented at precisely 90 degrees to that one" - Graham

"That speaks of high high science in the Mississippi Valley a very, very, very long time ago" - Graham on the precision and coordination between distant sites

Stonehenge: Natural Alignment Monumentalized

Two sarsen stones (16 and heel stone) "were naturally in position all the time at Stonehenge" - 2018 research discovery - Graham

"If you stand behind sarsen stone 16 and look at the heel stone at dawn on the summer solstice, you see the sun rising in direct alignment with the view. And the heel stone is like the sight on the barrel of a rifle targeting the sun" - Graham

"Earth was speaking to sky. The ancients saw that. They decided this was sacred" and brought sarsens from Marlborough Downs (20 miles away) and bluestones from Wales (150 miles) - Graham

"As above, so below... we are connected to the cosmos, that it is part of our heritage" - Graham on ancient understanding versus modern disconnection

Antikythera Mechanism and Lost Navigation Technology

Ancient Greek device "tracks the movements of the planets. It's a navigational device... a geared, cogged system that allows you to track the passage of time and figure out where you are" - Graham

"Goes back to Greek times... around about 500 BC" making it 2,000+ years old - Graham

"You can't have something like that without a vast effort behind it" - suggests secret technology carefully guarded by ship owners and navigators, "as top secret as nuclear power is in our world today" - Graham

Taurid Meteor Stream: Current Cosmic Threat

"Taurid meteor stream is a giant complex of debris... 30 million kilometers wide" from original comet "100 to 200 kilometers in diameter, a small moon, which fragmented and broke up" - Graham

Our planet still passes through it twice a year in June and November, each passage taking "12 and a half days" - Graham

"19 recognized huge objects within the Taurid meteor stream" with calculations indicating "as much as 200 asteroids... of a diameter of a kilometer or more which would have catastrophic effect" - Graham

"Responsible astronomers regard the torrid meteor stream as the greatest collision hazard facing mankind at the present time" - Graham

Tunguska event (1908) "extremely likely... came from the Taurid meteor stream" - 60-190 meter object airburst "flattened 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometers" equivalent to entire London inside M25 ring road - Graham

Technology Solutions and Global Cooperation

"Commercial interests are looking right now... to mine asteroids. We can go to asteroids... we can mine them, we can extract minerals, we can bring them back to the Earth. The same technology would allow you to move asteroids or comet fragments" - Graham

"You don't want to blow them up with a nuke... that would turn one large object into multiple smaller objects... What you want to do is to nudge them and move them out of a dangerous orbit" - Graham

"In the next 30 years, we are going to be passing through dangerous filaments of the torrid meteor stream" requiring resources devoted to "protecting our cosmic environment" - Graham

"We devote limitless resources to technologies of mass destruction... spending trillions of dollars" but "the cosmos doesn't give a fuck about any of that" - Graham on misplaced priorities

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter (1994) had "300 gigatons" explosive power versus "entire nuclear arsenal of the world today... 6.4 gigatons" - Graham on scale of cosmic threats

Altered States and Psychedelic Insights

Graham quit cannabis for three years after 2011 ayahuasca sessions showed him "I was using cannabis completely wrong... it had become a dominant force in my life... making me paranoid... making me suspicious"

First joint after three years was on Joe Rogan's show: "Are you still off the cannabis?... I'm thinking of dipping my toes back in the water, at which point you produce a joint" - Graham recounting the moment

"It was a liberation for me and what it said to me is it's time to go back to cannabis, but perhaps in a different way... if I can forge that, if I can make that different relationship happen, then it can be a constructive and positive part of my life" - Graham

Native American peyote ceremony: "It doesn't overpower you in the way that DMT or ayahuasca does. It's much gentler. You feel much more integrated and connected with Nature... just like a very beautiful and healing experience" - Graham

"Our society is not against altered states of consciousness. As such, it's against particular kinds of altered states of consciousness that lead to questioning of the existing control system" - Graham on selective drug prohibition

DMT Research and Reality Exploration

Rick Strassman and Andrew Gallimore (University of Okinawa) "developed a technology for releasing DMT into human volunteers in a very slow drip that will keep them in the DMT state... for hours on end" - Graham

"Imperial College London is going to deploy this technology" for research that's "not going to be purely and simply into the therapeutic potential... It's going to be an investigation into the Nature of reality using a psychedelic" - Graham

"When you get plunged into that DMT realm, it is so different from the realm of our daily world, filled with geometry, filled with these spritely intelligences, completely internally coherent. How can that be... generated by the brain?" - Graham

"I think that ancient cultures, and in particular, my lost civilization, were deeply involved in exploring the mysterious Nature of reality and used the plant medicines as part of that process" - Graham

Cannabis Legalization as Gateway to Change

"Only in America could we see happening what has happened with cannabis... at a local level individuals have got together mobilized petitions organized votes and changed the law... stuck a finger up at central government and said, fuck off" - Graham

"Eight states now totally legal for recreational, 23, 24 states legal for medical use... at the federal level, it's still a Schedule 1 controlled drug. This is a huge state of dissonance" - Graham

"Cannabis laws were vicious and wrong and cruel and evil and ruined people's lives for decades. And it's people who've changed that. It's not government who's changed that. It's the people at the grassroots level" - Graham

"On cannabis as a quote-unquote gateway drug, it absolutely is in this sense that the legalization of cannabis is going to open the doors... to the legalization of psychedelics" - Graham

"Once that dawns on people the realization... here's this herb i love i have been lied to systematically misinformed by central government... that leads to questioning of everything that central government does" - Graham

Paradigm Shifts and Scientific Revolution

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes paradigm shifts: "an accumulation of evidence which that model cannot explain... no matter how strongly the advocates of the existing system hold on to it... sooner or later, the evidence overwhelms them" - Graham

Göbekli Tepe (11,600 years old) "is more than 5,000 years older than the supposedly oldest megalithic architecture in the world" (Malta's Gigantia at 5,800 years) - Graham on paradigm-breaking evidence

"I am not saying that I am 100% right. I believe that what I'm doing that's worthwhile is I'm asking questions about the past that haven't been asked enough. I'm putting archaeologists on the spot and demanding that they explain themselves" - Graham

"Younger generation of archaeologists... has been exposed to open-minded thinking... exposed to the Internet... is suspicious of authority... incredibly open-minded and really willing to consider extraordinary possibilities" - Graham on changing attitudes

Authority, Nationalism, and Human Unity

"Back in the 90s, authority figures were the gatekeepers... Today, to have a mainstream authority figure say that to me is actually an advantage because people are so distrustful of authority and rightly so because we've been lied to" - Graham

"I am strongly opposed to nationalism. I don't see any virtue in nationalism. It is an accident of birth which nation you were born in. It was nothing that you did for your own merit" - Graham

"I've been privileged to spend my life traveling around the world... One thing that really comes across to me strongly... is that we are all one family, that humans are intimately interconnected all around the world" - Graham

"Our similarities as human beings and what we share in common at the emotional level and the level of love and at the level of heart are far more important than our differences that are defined by the nation or the political group" - Graham

"I would like to see a situation in which no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he or she has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca... we want to see that you're drinking every drop" - Graham's proposal

Lost Civilization Hypothesis and Evidence

"Right at the epicenter of this cataclysm was a civilization that we would regard as advanced, not a simple hunter-gatherer civilization, which was utterly wiped out in this cataclysmic event" - Graham's core thesis

"We ourselves are an advanced civilization... and we coexist in the world with hunter-gatherers... If a catastrophe on the level of the Younger Dryas were to occur today, I don't think that our civilization would make it through" - Graham

"An advanced civilization would be smart if they were survivors to seek refuge amongst hunter-gatherers, to make that the place where they might try to restart their civilization" - Graham on survival strategy

"Maybe an advanced civilization might have decided never to get involved in plastic in the first place... Maybe they cultivated powers of the human mind that we dismiss and regard as completely completely unimportant" - Graham on different technological paths

Great Pyramid chambers above King's Chamber with "70-ton granite beams... elevated to a height of more than 350 feet above the ground" - Graham questioning how this was achieved without modern machinery

Memes and Cultural Transmission

Richard Dawkins' concept from The selfish gene: "memes are cultural objects cultural ideas that are passed on and replicate and reproduce themselves" - Graham applying to ancient civilizations

"Right across the Americas and right across the old world... a set of memes that involve the sky, that involve the ground, that involve geometry, that involve notions of life after death" - Graham

"I think the only way to explain these is that they have been inherited from an earlier culture that was in some way connected with the ancestors of all of these cultures" - Graham

Tucano origin myth: "their ancestors were brought to the Amazon... by a group of supernaturals who included the daughter of the sun and an individual called the helmsman who steered the serpent canoe" - Graham connecting to DNA evidence

Digital Fragility and Lost Skills

"There was a time when I was an excellent map reader... Today, I can hardly use a map. The skill of using a map has lapsed within me. Why? Because of GPS" - Graham on technology dependence

"Supposing GPS supposing all those satellites go down... the whole the whole industrialized human race is going to suddenly be lost... all those uber drivers who don't know their way from a to b and who rely entirely on their gps's they won't know where they're going" - Graham

"Digital data unlike print data is very fragile and requires programs in order to access and interpret it that are much more complicated than simply cracking the code of a lost language" - Graham

"It's very clear that preparation is not being made for the risk of another cosmic impact" despite having technology to address it - Graham on societal blindness

Audience Impact and Life-Changing Ideas

"Part of the audience are older people who read me in the 1990s... But another part... consists to a large extent of young people, most of whom are men... what those mainly young men come up to me and say... is, we first encountered your work on Joe Rogan's show" - Graham

"I've had so many young men say, this has changed my life... once we realize that we have been misinformed about our past, that everything that we've built our idea of who we are upon... may be founded on falsehoods and perhaps even deliberate lies" - Graham

"The fact that I, as an elder, have consistently pursued an independent path, have been willing to put up with the shit that's been thrown at me over the years, but have stuck to my guns... That is... found as inspiring by younger people" - Graham

"What better gift could an old guy hope to leave to the world than a younger generation who feel inspired by that person's work to change the world?" - Graham

Species with Amnesia: The Human Condition

"We as a species... are a species with amnesia... We have forgotten so much more about ourselves than we remember" - Graham's signature phrase

"The process of history and archaeology should really be about is a process of remembering. We shouldn't be imposing our ideas of what we should have been on the past. We should allow the past to speak for itself" - Graham

"We tend to review the whole story of history as though it's a project that leads to us that that we're what it's all about... there may have been an earlier civilization that reached a high level of advancement... which was just taken out of the story completely by a global cataclysm" - Graham

"We ourselves are a hybrid species we are we are the result of interactions with all kinds of different looking human beings... we carry neanderthal or denisovan dna in a sense we are neanderthals and denisovans" - Graham