Graham Hancock on a Lost Civilization and the Comet That Ended It
Erik: That's great, that's great. And I understand there's a fair amount of evidence behind this theory, tied to structures and how they relate to objects in the sky.
Graham: The information really falls into two broad groups. The first one matters enormously, and it's recent. Since 2007, so within roughly the last eight years, a scientific finding has emerged and kept gaining support season after season. It points to our planet being struck by pieces of an enormous comet. Most people remember Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that slammed into Jupiter in 1994 with devastating results. Jupiter, though, is a giant world. Comets do tend to split into several pieces, and the picture that's forming goes like this: a comet over 100 kilometers across came into the solar system a bit more than 20,000 years ago, settled into an orbit around the sun, broke apart somewhere around 13,000 years ago, and then 12,800 years ago the earth took hits from at least eight of its fragments, a few of them close to 2 kilometers wide.
This is fresh, carefully done research. It isn't free of dispute, and plenty of scientists haven't signed on yet, but the supporting data keeps accumulating until it's getting hard to argue against. It took time, remember, for people to accept that a massive asteroid finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now we're reaching comparable ground, where it looks reasonable to say that another run of cosmic impacts 12,800 years ago may have destroyed an early advanced civilization.
The bigger issue is this. There's scientific evidence for a sudden worldwide catastrophe, an event at the level of mass extinction. In North America by itself, more than 35 genera of large animals vanished: the mammoths, the giant beaver, and so on. All of them gone at precisely this moment, 12,800 years ago. And here's the problem. Until very recently, historians and archaeologists left this out of the account they build and hand to us about our past. If somebody tells you their picture of human prehistory is simply missing a piece this large, then the honest response is that we have to go back to the start and rethink the entire story of where civilization began. That's a big project I'm still working on.
The second group is physical. There are architectural and archaeological sites scattered across the globe, and one of them is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which happens to date to exactly that window. With Gobekli Tepe the evidence lines up with a stretch of time geologists call the Younger Dryas. It's a strange period. It opens 12,800 years ago, with the earth already climbing out of the ice age, and then everything snaps back into a severe cold spell. That freeze holds for about 1,200 years. Then, 11,600 years ago, it ends and the planet swings into rapid warming. What the data suggests is that the earth ran through this comet's trail of debris twice. The first pass came 12,800 years ago, when the comet's largest chunks struck the ice sheet covering North America.