America Before

by Graham Hancock

  Not for the first time in this investigation I’m reminded of what Tom Deméré told me when he showed me the finds from the Cerutti Mastodon Site at The Nat in San Diego:

  If you go to a place and you absolutely rule out in advance that humans were there 130,000 years ago, then you’re clearly not going to find evidence that they were. But if you go with an open mind and dig deep enough in the right places, then who knows what you might turn up.

  Tom was talking about the conclusion that he and his team had reached concerning the mastodon remains now on show in his museum, namely, as we saw in chapter 5, that they had been scavenged by human beings 130,000 years ago. His point was that an ingrained perception that no humans could have reached the Americas by such an early date had for too long inhibited investigation of alternative scenarios—and that perhaps much more evidence of a very early presence would be found if a more targeted and determined search were made.

  Using rocks intelligently to smash mastodon femurs so that the marrow can be extracted is certainly not the work of a lost civilization of any kind. It is the work of ancestral humans, perhaps anatomically modern, perhaps not. But the real importance of the Cerutti Mastodon Site is that it provides the first solid evidence—solid enough to make it into the pages of Nature—of a truly ancient human occupation of the New World. If humans were in North America 130,000 years ago (more than twice as long as the span of the known human presence in Europe), that gives them 117,000 years to have evolved a high civilization before the Younger Dryas cataclysm struck.

  And why should they not have done so? What is particularly special or inviolable about the so-called march toward civilization that seems to begin with the onset of the Neolithic at the end of the Younger Dryas? Why did it happen then and not before? Why shouldn’t there have been an earlier “march towards civilization” that began with an earlier peopling of the Americas—not with the last deglaciation event but, as Tom Deméré suggested, with “the deglaciation event before that, between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago?”

  Thereafter, until the next episode of deglaciation (the Bølling-Allerød interstadial) in the 2,000 years immediately preceding the Younger Dryas, all scholars agree that the vast landmass of the Americas, straddling half the globe, was cut off from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and by mountains of ice. Migrants from Asia, even when Beringia was accessible, could not get in. But for those humans who were already south of the ice cap 120,000 years ago, the Americas must have been a paradise, safe from incursions by any other peoples and blessed with an astonishing abundance and variety of natural resources. The New World offered conditions utterly different from those available on any other continent, so I see no reason why the very first of the First Americans should not also have followed a radically different path from other humans—a path that more rapidly veered away from hunting and gathering and that led ultimately to the emergence of a precociously early civilization.

  MYSTERIOUS POWERS

  IF THE YOUNGER DRYAS EARTH changes wiped a prehistoric civilization from the record, then can anything useful ever be said about the character of that civilization?

  Thus far (extrapolating from the belief systems of its descendants) I’ve suggested that its spirituality must have involved profound explorations of the mystery of death. I’ve suggested that accurate ancient maps depicting the earth as it looked during the Ice Age imply that it had developed a level of maritime technology at least as advanced as that possessed by European seafarers in the late eighteenth century. I’ve suggested that it had mastered sophisticated geometry and astronomy. I’ve also suggested that such a “lost” civilization, maturing in isolation for tens of thousands of years in North America, might have taken a very different path from our own and might have developed technologies that archaeologists would be unable to recognize because they operated on principles or manipulated forces unknown to modern science.

  In his 1920 study The Interpretation of Radium, Nobel Prize winner Frederick Soddy, one of the pioneers of nuclear physics, speculated as to the former existence of “a wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilization of which all other relic has disappeared.”4 He drew attention to the seemingly limitless stores of nuclear energy that were in his time understood to be possessed by certain elements such as radium and compared these to the fabulous “philosopher’s stone” credited in ancient traditions with mysterious powers of transmutation and regeneration. The similarity, he felt, was no coincidence but “an echo from one of many previous epochs in the unrecorded history of the world”5:

  Can we not read into [such traditions] … justification for the belief that some former forgotten race of men attained not only to the knowledge we have so recently won, but also to the power that is not yet ours? Science has reconstructed the story of the past as one of a continuous Ascent of Man to the present-day level of his powers. In face of the circumstantial evidence existing of this steady upward progress of the race, the traditional view of the Fall of Man from a higher former state has come to be more and more difficult to understand. From our new standpoint the two points of view are by no means so irreconcilable as they appeared. A race which could transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. If we can judge from what our engineers accomplish with their comparatively restricted supplies of energy, such a race could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden. Possibly they could even explore the outer realms of space. … The legend of the Fall of Man … may be all that has survived of such a time before, for some unknown reason, the whole world was plunged back again under the undisputed sway of Nature, to begin once more its upward toilsome journey through the ages.6

  In the 2020s (as would not have been the case in the 1920s) there’s a good chance archaeologists would recognize an ancient technology designed to exploit nuclear power—and if they didn’t, they would certainly be able to call in someone who did. This is because our own science has now advanced to a level where nuclear power is familiar to us. By contrast, Soddy’s imagining of a lost high civilization of prehistoric antiquity that had fully penetrated the mysteries of the atom was written in the infancy of our risky dance with nukes—25 years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 35 years before the first nuclear power stations came online. A man of his time, therefore, when the almost magical potential of the new technology was becoming apparent but when its downsides were largely unknown, Soddy was all idealism. He could not have anticipated that the immense power of the atom, once fully harnessed, would never be used to transform deserts, thaw the poles, or “make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden,” but would instead be deployed primarily for destructive purposes in the form of bombs and missiles, or for generating electricity at the long-term cost of poisoning the earth.

  It is not necessarily the case that an earlier advanced civilization would have chosen the nuclear path so enthusiastically envisaged for it by Soddy. Nor must it inevitably have taken the path of leverage and mechanical advantage that historical civilizations have so doggedly trudged down for the past few thousand years on their way to the “machine age.” I return again to my point. Since we are considering the possibility of “a wholly unknown and unsuspected civilization,” we must also consider the possibility that it might have developed wholly unknown and unsuspected ways of manipulating matter and energy—which we might therefore be unable to recognize even if the evidence was right before our eyes.

  Perhaps this is why modern archaeologists, trained to analyze ancient construction techniques through the reference frame of leverage and mechanical advantage, are unable to provide convincing explanations for a number of significant architectural problems of the ancient world.

  Take the case of the massive beams, quarried from solid granite and weighing in the range of 70 tons each, incorporated into the core of Egypt’s Great Pyramid in the series of “relieving chambers” stacked on top of the “King’s Chamber” m
ore than 50 meters (164 feet) above ground level. None of the wishful scholarly claims of megaliths somehow being slid “easily” into place on wooden rollers or on lubricated sand will work at this elevation. The fact of the matter is that the hulking beams forming the floors and ceilings of the relieving chambers are where they are—and that in order to get there they had to be lifted more than 50 meters into the air.

  Or consider the Trilithon at Baalbek in Lebanon. Here, 20 feet above the ground, three immense ashlars weighing more than 800 tons each have been placed end to end within a wall of smaller blocks and so tightly fitted that the joints can barely be seen. It wouldn’t be an easy feat even with twenty-first-century technology, so how could it possibly have been accomplished thousands of years ago?

  Let us also not forget the marvel of Sacsayhuamán, perched on a ridge above the city of Cuzco in the Peruvian Andes at an altitude of 3,700 meters (12,140 feet). I have made the case in previous books that this supposed Inca site was already enormously ancient at the time of the Incas and has been wrongly attributed to them. Of particular relevance here are its colossal megalithic walls arranged in a series of zigzags and consisting of intricately formed polygonal blocks. No two blocks among the thousands at Sacsayhuamán are the same shape, some weigh more than 300 tons, and all are so tightly interlocked in all dimensions that the edge of a piece of paper cannot be slipped between the joints. Efforts by archaeologists to reconstruct how the work at Sacsayhuamán was done have proved as ludicrous as a failed attempt in 1978 to build a midget-size scale model of the Great Pyramid—and once again this is because the only reference frame deemed acceptable, involving leverage and mechanical advantage, is unable to account for many of the more complex anomalies.

  There is an answer, but it involves looking outside the box.

  At the Great Pyramid, at Baalbek, and at Sacsayhuamán, as well as at numerous other mysterious sites (such as the almost unbelievable Kailasa Temple, hewn out of solid basalt at Ellora in the Indian state of Maharashtra), intriguing ancient traditions persist. These traditions speak of meditating sages, the use of certain plants, the focused attention of initiates, miraculously speedy workmanship, and special kinds of chanting or tones played on musical instruments in connection with the lifting, placing, softening, and moulding of megaliths. My guess, confronted by the global distribution of such narratives and by the stark reality of the sites themselves, is that we’re dealing with the reverberations of an ancient technology we don’t understand, operating on principles that are utterly unknown to us.

  Soddy, imagining a lost civilization that had developed machines powered by nuclear energy, speaks of exploring the outer realms of space and manipulating the global climate, but I beg to differ. I don’t think nuclear power was involved and I don’t think machines were involved, either. As I near the end of my life’s work, and of this book, I suppose the time has come to say in print what I have already said many times in public Q&A sessions at my lectures, that in my view the science of the lost civilization was primarily focused upon what we now call psi capacities that deployed the enhanced and focused power of human consciousness to channel energies and to manipulate matter.

  Although psi research is still undertaken at a small number of universities and institutes in Britain, the United States, and Russia, it is generally ridiculed and sidelined by modern mainstream scientists. This categorically does not mean that “there’s nothing to psi” but instead speaks volumes about the nature of science today, which is heavily dominated by materialist thinkers whose reference frame has little room for “spooky action at a distance.” The phrase (which was Einstein’s) refers specifically to the paradoxes of quantum entanglement but applies equally well to other alleged “non-local” phenomena such as:

  telepathy (“communication from one person to another of thoughts, feelings, desires, etc, involving mechanisms that cannot be understood in terms of known scientific laws”);

  remote viewing (“the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception”);

  telekinesis (“the movement of a body caused by thought or willpower without the application of physical force”);

  healing powers (whereby patients are successfully cured of their ailments by nonphysical and nonmedical means)

  My speculation, which I will not attempt to prove here or to support with evidence but merely present for consideration, is that the advanced civilization I see evolving in North America during the Ice Age had transcended leverage and mechanical advantage and learned to manipulate matter and energy by deploying powers of consciousness that we have not yet begun to tap. In action such powers would look something like magic even today and must have seemed supernatural and godlike to the hunter-gatherers who shared the Ice Age world with these mysterious adepts.

  Keep in mind that we are talking about a Native American civilization growing to maturity at some point during the long interval between the scavenging of the Cerutti mastodon 130,000 years ago and the cataclysmic onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago. Though we may never know what set it on its own brilliant, idiosyncratic path, there is every reason to suppose that its people would have been closely related genetically, linguistically—and at first culturally—to other early Native American populations who remained at the hunter-gatherer stage. It follows, therefore, if this hypothetical civilization had sciences, that they should be rooted and grounded in a recognizably Native American reference frame, and therefore would likely have developed under the guidance of shamans and using the methods of shamanism.

  Telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing, and healing powers are, of course, all capacities believed to be within the repertoire of master shamans. Indeed ayahuasca, which lies at the heart of Amazonian shamanism, first entered mainstream Western consciousness under the name Telepathine. In 1952, for example, on a quest in Ecuador for the visionary brew, William Burroughs wrote [his spellings; emphasis mine] that he had failed to “score for Yage, Bannisteria caapi, Telepathine, ayahuasca—all names for the same drug.”7

  He was determined to find it, however, because of its “tremendous implications” and the “mystery” surrounding it, adding, “I’m the man who can dig it.”8

  The reason behind the choice of the name Telepathine, which began to be applied to ayahuasca as early as 1905,9 was that Amazonian tribes making regular use of the brew repeatedly stated that it facilitated telepathic communication. The mechanistic Western mind of the twenty-first century scoffs at such claims, but leading ayahuasca researcher Benny Shanon, professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, concedes that “reports of paranormal experiences with Ayahuasca abound:”

  Practically everyone who has had more than a rudimentary exposure to the brew reports having had telepathic experiences. Many such reports also appear in the anthropological literature. … Similarly many of my informants said that without overt verbal articulation they could pass messages to other people present in the Ayahuasca session. … Likewise, many indicated that they received such messages from other persons or beings. Usually, in visions in which drinkers feel that they are receiving messages or instructions from beings and creatures, the communication in question is said to be achieved without words—directly from thought to thought.10

  In the modern world we are so fixated on our machines and devices that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without them. But if telepathy is real—a debate we won’t be able to get into here—and if its use and projection could be refined and made reliable, then who would need cell phones or Facebook or any of the other means of communication that are so ubiquitous today? Once again we would own our own conversations rather than having to depend on some intermediary or “platform” to relay them!

  Might it not be the case that psi powers have always been part of the human heritage? Part of our “Golden Age”? Perhaps these powers atrophied after the Younger Dryas cataclysm broke our connection to our roots? And perhaps, in the aft
ermath of the cataclysm, the resourcefulness of our species was refocused on techniques of leverage and mechanical advantage and a negative feedback loop developed that ushered in the march of the machines and saw psi banished to the margins of human experience?

  REVERSE ENGINEERING THE SYSTEM

  I’LL NOT SPECULATE FURTHER HERE about the lost technology of a destroyed civilization. There are tantalizing hints and clues but unfortunately even the first archaeological steps that might make solid progress possible have never been taken. There’s more to work with, however, when we come to religious and spiritual beliefs that, according to the Edfu Building Texts, it was the duty of the survivors of the lost civilization to preserve and to replicate wherever in the world they could find receptive ground.

  In the twenty-first century, Christianity and Islam—upstart religions of the past 2,000 years—exercise effective monopolies over the spiritual lives of more than half the world’s population. Their simple formula of one creator god (male, of course), and of a heavenly paradise for His faithful paired with a hellish place of punishment for disbelievers and evildoers, brilliantly removes the need for serious thought. All that’s required to join the elect is to tick the right boxes and maintain a state of rigid, abiding, unquestioning BELIEF in the authority of the sacred texts and the utterances of the priests and the mullahs self-appointed to interpret them.

  Perhaps it’s the easiest option, requiring the smallest quantum of uncomfortable reflection, but it’s certainly not the only one, and neither is atheism—which also rests on unproven beliefs—in any way its opposite. The full range of human spiritual potential cannot be brutally reduced to believing that a god exists or to believing that a god does not exist. Agnosticism is often proposed as the only alternative, but there are far more subtle and even “scientific” ways forward, explored confidently by our ancestors many millennia ago, that deserve serious attention. Important elements survive in some of the more esoteric aspects of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism—notably in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which bears striking similarities to the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and descends, I suggest, from the same common source. There is much among the Maya (reported in Fingerprints of the Gods and in Heaven’s Mirror) that adds to the picture. Meanwhile, Amazonian shamanism and the strangely interlinked religions of the Nile and Mississippi Valleys open further vistas of understanding.