Graham Hancock on Lost Ice Age Civilizations and the Sacred Use of Visionary Plants

In this archived conversation, the interviewer thanked Graham Hancock for laying out his view of where civilization may have begun, and referred to cave paintings as being more than 100,000 years old. Hancock corrected him right away. No cave art reaches that age. The oldest examples known anywhere are around 40,000 years old.

He added a detail that had surfaced not long before the interview: a fresh batch of paintings found in Indonesia, also dated to roughly 40,000 years ago, which puts them on equal footing with the famous painted caves of Europe. Hancock was careful about what he was claiming. In his reading, hunter gatherers made that art. He was not arguing that the paintings themselves were produced by some lost advanced society, though he does see points of overlap and connection between the two.

His reasoning leans on the present day. We live in the 21st century with our own high technology, and yet hunter gatherer peoples still exist alongside us. Some groups deep in the Amazon have never been contacted and have no idea the rest of us are even here. If an advanced civilization can share a planet with hunter gatherers right now, Hancock figures the same arrangement could easily have held during the ice age: hunter gatherers on one side, and an advanced culture on the other. What went missing, in his account, are the traces of that advanced culture. He points to Plato, who in telling the Atlantis story said plainly that the catastrophe struck down the educated and the literate while sparing those without letters or learning as the survivors.

Asked how these old megalithic societies might connect to psychoactive plants, Hancock said he was not trying to be provocative. Go almost anywhere with remains of an ancient culture, whether Egypt or South America, and the pattern keeps turning up. He gave Peru as an example. Pyramids were dug out over the previous decade at Caral, structures dating to roughly 2,800 to 2,600 BC, putting them in the same general period as the Giza pyramids in Egypt.

When archaeologists studied Caral, two things stood out. The old assumption had been that powerful states and organized warfare went hand in hand with the rise of civilization. Peru pointed the other way. There was no sign of warfare at all. What they did find were far-reaching trade networks, and evidence that hallucinogens brought up from the Amazon were in use at the site. The ceremonial use of visionary plants, in other words, appears to sit at the heart of the oldest pyramid-building culture in the Americas.

Egypt tells a similar story to him. The Egyptian tree of life was acacia nilotica, a plant that carries DMT, and the DMT can be drawn out of the bark. Hancock finds the case strong that the ancient Egyptians used DMT as a visionary substance, a tool for the esoteric work of probing the meaning and mystery of life and death. That inquiry, he suggests, the Egyptians carried further than perhaps any other civilization in the historical record.