America Before

by Graham Hancock

  THE MANITOU AND THE MEGALITH

  DEEP IN CONVERSATION, WE’VE WALKED along the bank of Brush Creek at the base of Serpent Mound ridge to its northwestern end where it comes to a point naturally targeting the summer solstice sunset. Trees and bushes cover everything here except the snout of the ridge itself, which thrusts a gnarled and weathered limestone cliff forward through the green veil, revealing an overhang and hints of caves.

  Ross stops and holds up a hand. “Do you see it?” he says.

  I look around. I’m bad at tests! Then my eyes fall on a chunky, moss-covered limestone megalith leaning into the bank among the undergrowth. It’s not finely quarried but its relatively straight sides and corners, and the curved section cut out at one end, make it likely that humans have worked on it. It’s over 9 feet in length, about 2 feet wide and something more than a foot thick, almost big enough to stand in at Avebury or Stonehenge as a replacement for one of the smaller megaliths there.

  ABOVE RIGHT: Unenhanced image (PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA) of the Serpent’s head simulacrum in the cliff directly beneath the head of Serpent Mound. ABOVE LEFT: An enhanced image helps to explain why many travelers, and the ancients before them, could imagine this natural rocky outcrop as the head of a serpent. BELOW: Juxtaposition of Serpent Mound and the ridge on which it stands with its natural “serpent-like head.”

  “Do you mean this megalith?” I ask.

  “We’ll come to that,” says Ross, “but look past the megalith. Look above it.”

  “I see a cliff.”

  “But do you see the face in the cliff?”

  The moment Ross says the word “face” everything swings into focus for me. It’s not a human face but a serpent’s face. That overhang is an upper jaw, there’s the line of a mouth below it. Above the corner of the mouth to the right, much darker than the rest of the face, a distinct eye seems to gaze down at us.

  In later research I’ll find that many visitors have noticed the resemblance of this completely natural outcrop to the head of a serpent. In 1919, for example, Charles Willoughby of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum visited Serpent Mound and concluded:

  The site chosen for this great effigy was probably determined largely by superstitions which may have been connected with the headland upon which it was built. This headland, rising to a height of about 100 feet, gradually narrows and terminates in a cliff, bearing a certain resemblance to the head of a reptile. … The contour of the head, the muzzle, the eye and mouth are clearly indicated. The Indians may also have seen in the promontory extending backward from the head along the shore of Bush creek, the body of the serpent deity. Natural formations, peculiarly shaped stones, concretions, and other objects resembling human or animal forms or any of their parts were generally supposed to possess supernatural powers, and in this instance, with a little imagination, one can easily approach the Indian’s point of view.7

  Earlier, in 1886, archaeologist W. H. Holmes came away from Serpent Mound with a similar impression. “Having the idea of a great serpent in the mind,” he wrote in Science,

  one is at once struck with the remarkable contour of the bluff, and especially of the exposure of rock, which readily assumes the appearance of a colossal reptile lifting its front from the bed of the stream. The head is the point of rock, the dark lip-like edge is the muzzle, the light coloured underside is the white neck, the caves are the eyes, and the projecting masses to the right are the protruding coils of the body. The varying effects of light must greatly increase the vividness of the impressions, and nothing would be more natural than that the Sylvan prophet … should recognize this likeness and should at once regard the promontory as a great Manitou. His people would be led to regard it as such and the celebration of feasts upon the point would readily follow.

  With a mound-building people, this would result in the erection of suitable enclosures and in the elaboration of the form of the reptile, that it might be the more real. The natural and the artificial features must all have related to one and the same conception. The point of naked rock was probably at first and always recognised as the head of both the natural and the modified body. It was to the Indian the real head of the great serpent Manitou.8

  We’re still standing by the megalith that first caught my attention. “What about this?” I ask. “Is this part of the Serpent Mound story or just a random chunk of rock?”

  Ross shrugs. “Nobody knows for sure.” He pauses before adding, “I’ve got my own theory though.”

  “Which is?”

  “I think it’s one of the large stones that Squier and Davis reported had stood in the oval earthwork in front of the Serpent’s head in the nineteenth century.”

  “The ones they said had been scattered by some treasure hunter?”

  “That’s right,” Ross replies. “And if I recall correctly, they also said those stones had been arranged in a circle before they were thrown down.”

  I know what Ross is reminding me of here is a connection he’s written about between the geometry of Stonehenge and the geometry of Serpent Mound, which he regards as “two elements comprising a larger picture pointing to a highly evolved school of astro-architecture, the origin of which is not known.”9

  Graham Hancock (left) with Ross Hamilton (right) at Serpent Mound megalith. PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA.

  Therefore, while he does not dispute that Serpent Mound was the work of Native American geometers and astronomers, he believes that they were members of a much older school and implementing a much older design which likewise—at many different times and in many different media—was brought into commission in many other parts of the world as well.

  This fundamental, endlessly reiterated, endlessly reincarnated design, he says, “seems to have no home base—no specific country or culture responsible for its phenomenon.”10

  This, however, is precisely what we would expect if it’s “home base” were a lost civilization destroyed so completely, and so deeply buried in time, that it has been reduced to the stuff of myths and legends.

  WHAT THE SERPENT SEES

  IN THE HOUR BEFORE SUNSET, as a refreshing chill enters the air, we’re back at the upper level of Serpent Mound with all batteries charged and the drone ready to fly.

  The sun, which rose north of east this morning, seems already drawn down low on its arc toward its setting point on the northwestern horizon, and again we notice the effective “blinding” of the serpent by the dense trees allowed to flourish along its line of sight as a matter of deliberate policy by the Ohio History Connection. It’s obvious, if we did not have the drone, that we would get at best only faint impressions and hints of the alignment if a few scattered sunbeams somehow found their way through the thicket.

  “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” I say to Ross. “It feels almost like sacrilege.”

  “But the good news is people are waking up again, here and everywhere else. Regardless of what the Ohio History Connection wants or does, or what the archaeologists tell us we should believe, we’re at one of those junctures in the cycle where the Manitou is reactivated as a source of knowledge and wisdom.”

  With a soft buzz of its rotors, Santha’s little drone climbs into the sky and we cluster around the monitor to share the aerial view. It’s 7:55 pm and from an altitude of 400 feet uncluttered by trees, we can see that the sun still has some distance to travel before it conjuncts the range of hills forming the local horizon to the northwest. The warm, mellow light of the end of a summer’s day interspersed with patterns of cool, deep shade dapples the immense earthwork along its entire length and despite the trees closing in around its head it seems truly master of its enchanted kingdom.

  Santha has the drone hovering in place near the back of the Serpent’s neck overlooking its open jaws, the great oval, the trees, and the horizon far beyond. It’s the perfect shot but by 8:12 pm, the glare is so intense that it’s difficult to be certain exactly where the sun now sits in relation to the horizon. There’s a great scooped out hollow o
f silver light there and the sun’s disk is somewhere in the middle of it. A shift in position of the drone, however, confirms that sunset is still some time off.

  At 8:13 pm, we bring the device down for a battery change and relaunch it, but just 11 minutes later, at 8:24, the control panel lights up with a low-battery warning. The ponderous roll of the earth toward the east, the majestic descent of the sun toward the west, seem to have synced into a kind of slow-motion dream sequence and, with no alternative, hoping we have not miscalculated the timing of the universe, we bring the drone back to earth.

  There’s something seriously wrong with it. Not the battery problem—that was easily solved—but something in the communications between the control unit and the little quadcopter. In the 28 minutes it takes to fix it we can feel the light leaching out of the sky. The evening air grows cool and the shadows cast by the trees lengthen. The sun’s still in the heavens—somewhere!—but whether it has dropped behind the hills yet or whether we’ll still have a chance to witness that moment is completely unclear when the drone finally starts to obey orders again and we’re able to relaunch it at 8:52 pm.

  Santha rockets it straight up to 400 feet, to the vantage point she’d found before, and we all give a cheer as we see in the monitor, as though by some miracle, that the sun is indeed still with us and poised exactly on the rim of the hills that the Hardmans dubbed “Solstice Ridge.”

  The next 3 minutes are magical as the great luminary, source of all life on earth, begins its final descent into night. It’s a transformation and a transition rather than an abrupt change of state.

  The glare that dazzled the camera earlier is much reduced now, and little by little the sky fills with the most seductive soft glow and the sun’s disk seems to excavate a niche in the horizon, where, as readers can confirm from the photographs, its setting is indeed in very fine alignment with the open jaws of the Serpent.

  There it reclines, seemingly still, shedding its brilliance and beneficence across this golden land of bounteous fields and forests, as though in deep communion with the earth. I’m reminded of a passage from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, a hymn addressed to Ra the Sun God:

  Men praise thee in thy name “Ra” and they swear by thee, for thou art lord over them. Thou hearest with thine ears and thou seest with thine eyes. Millions of years have gone over the world; I cannot tell the number of those through which thou hast passed. … Thou dost pass over and dost travel through untold spaces requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over; thou passest through them in peace and thou steerest thy way across the watery abyss to the place which thou lovest; this thou doest in one little moment of time, and then thou dost sink down and dost make an end of the hours.11

  Over Serpent Mound the drama continues to unfold, this love affair of planet and star, ground and sky, above and below, this beautiful and moving alignment sustained for a long, lingering interval as the sun continues its descent.

  Half its disk has disappeared from view now, then three quarters, then just a glimmering, radiant shimmering sliver somehow enduring on the horizon, and then at last it’s gone entirely but for a warm, all-embracing afterblush that blossoms in the gloaming.

  OLD CERTAINTIES

  IF SERPENT MOUND HAD BEEN kept clear of trees by the successive cultures that venerated and repeatedly restored the great effigy, then the alignment within the wide spread of the Serpent’s jaws would always have been a striking feature here from the time of the retreat of the ice sheets more than 13,000 years ago. Because of the shifting tilt of the earth’s axis, however, the exact point on the horizon where the summer solstice sun would set would shift several degrees north and south of its present position over the 41,000-year obliquity cycle.

  We’ve already seen how the Hardmans were taken to task in the 1980s for mistakenly proposing a summer solstice sunset alignment at an azimuth as viewed from Serpent Mound that—according to the calculations of their critics Fletcher and Cameron—coincided with a date of 11,000 BC. Archaeologists at the time considered that date far too early for any civilization capable of creating a structure of the scale and complexity of Serpent Mound to have evolved in North America and accordingly no further investigation of this rather intriguing anomaly was ever undertaken.

  The 1980s are long gone, however, and in the twenty-first century, as we’ll see in part 2, new evidence has emerged that calls all the old certainties into question.

  A PAST NOT SO MUCH HIDDEN AS DENIED

  ALTHOUGH HE HIMSELF IS NOT an archaeologist, Tom Deméré, curator of paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum in California, does have occasion to work with archaeologists. I was therefore not surprised when his response to my request to interview him and have him show me certain stones and bones in the museum’s archives was declined. My initial approach was on September 18, 2017, and the polite refusal came on September 20, not from Dr. Deméré himself but from Rebecca Handelsman, the museum’s communications director. “While we’re unable to accommodate your request for a meeting,” she wrote, “I’d like to share with you our online press kit which has a wealth of information about the project and the discovery.”1

  Though they have their place, press kits are low on my list of priorities when I’m researching books, and because of the very special nature of what Rebecca called “the project and the discovery,” I was not going to be so easily fobbed off. Deméré had been closely involved from the outset with the excavation of a controversial site near San Diego and had published a paper in 2017 claiming that humans had been present there as early as 130,000 years ago.2 The paper was a prominent one, since it appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, and almost immediately aroused the fury of archaeologists committed to a much later date for the peopling of the Americas.

  Among them was Professor Donald Grayson of the University of Washington.3 “I have read that paper,” he sniped, “and I was astonished by it. I was astonished not because it is so good, but because it is so bad.”4

  In a response that was typical of many, David J. Meltzer, professor of prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, also dismissed the paper. “If you are going to push human antiquity in the New World back more than 100,000 years in one fell swoop,” he said, “you’ll have to do so with a far better archaeological case than this one. I’m not buying what’s being sold.”5

  Gary Haynes, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Nevada, went so far as to accuse Nature of “an editorial lapse in judgment” for publishing the paper at all.6

  Jon M. Erlandson, director of the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, said “the site is not credible.”7

  Earlier, foreseeing such reactions, George Jefferson, former associate curator of the Page Museum in Los Angeles, had warned Deméré that the archaeological community, invested in long-established notions of the recent peopling of the Americas, wasn’t even close to being ready for a claim of antiquity as remote as 130,000 years. “Keep it under wraps,” he advised. “No one will believe you.”8

  But Deméré was sure of the evidence and decided to go ahead. The Nature paper, published in April 2017, was the result and quickly caught my attention.

  DON’T SAY A WORD ABOUT LOST CIVILIZATIONS

  COULD DEMÉRÉ’S CLAIM BE TRUE? Rather than having been in America for 30,000 years or less, as archaeologists have recently been dragged kicking and screaming to accept, could our ancestors have populated the continent 130,000 years ago or more?

  If the facts checked out (and, I had to keep reminding myself, despite the hostile reactions of some academics, that Nature would not have published the paper without having it thoroughly peer-reviewed first), then they raised serious question marks over how complete our understanding of prehistory really is.

  In particular, and to get right to the point, what could those very early Americans and their descendants have been doing during all the tens of thousands of years that archaeo
logists insisted they weren’t present at all? My whole focus, since long before the publication of Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, has been a quest for a high civilization of remote antiquity, a civilization that can rightly be described as “lost” because the very fact that it existed at all has been overlooked by archaeologists. I couldn’t help but wonder, therefore, whether some traces of it might be found in those 100,000 lost years of the Americas.

  So I persisted with Deméré, writing to him several times through the formidable Rebecca Handelsman, setting out the reasons why I wanted to interview him and providing more background on my own work. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that missing pages in the story of the origins of civilization might await discovery in North America—the very last place, until now, that archaeologists have thought to look?”9

  Pointing out that other, now-extinct human species had been present in the world 130,000 years ago and had interbred with anatomically modern humans, I also asked which species of human he thought might have been involved at his site. “Were they anatomically modern? Were they Neanderthals? Were they Denisovans? Or were they one of the several other species of Homo that will likely be identified by further research in the coming years?”10

  For days I heard no more and then, on October 2, 2017, Rebecca wrote again to report that Dr. Deméré had agreed to a “brief meeting” with me, that he was willing to discuss his site and the evidence for an early human presence that it yielded, but that he would not “speculate on what species it may have been or on broader topics/hypotheses re ancient civilizations.”11

  I accepted these constraints and the interview was arranged for the next day, Tuesday, October 3. Whatever I got out of him it would surely add something to the museum’s press kit and, besides, Deméré’s reticence made perfect sense to me. The last thing he wanted while his own work was under attack was to be associated with what archaeologists call “crackpot theories” about a lost civilization promulgated by a “pseudoscientist” like myself. If I were in his shoes, frankly, I would have been cautious, too. Indeed, I was quite surprised that he’d agreed to talk to me at all.