Archaeology WARNING: They Secretly Found Antarctica 300 Years Before Us - Graham Hancock

**Graham Hancock** (0:00)
This could be the last time I speak about myself, my work, because there's a chance that I might not make it off the operating table this month. And a journalist who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than two years now, and it will come out in the next month or two, and I didn't want that to be the last word on my life.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:21)
What do you want the last word of your life to be?

**Graham Hancock** (0:23)
I'm here to communicate about the possibility of a major forgotten episode in human story. I'm talking about a lost civilization.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:32)
So most people think civilization started 6,000 years ago?

**Graham Hancock** (0:35)
Yes.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:35)
But you believe there's strong evidence that there could have been a previous civilization 20,000 years ago, and I'm going to present the evidence for that here, Steven.

**Graham Hancock** (0:43)
It suggests a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty, where great healers and sages were at work. They're extremely sophisticated. However, if you follow the myths further, as I've done, you find something odd happens. You find that they stepped away from the original purity and become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And then sewn into those myths is scientific information, which record a gigantic cataclysm, all but wiping out the human race.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:10)
If what you're saying is true, what does that mean for our lives, I guess also our future?

**Graham Hancock** (1:15)
Well, there's always this feeling in the myths that we brought this upon ourselves. And when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes for the next lost civilization, and that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Unless we wake up.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:33)
Graham Hancock, what will you care about on your last day?

**Graham Hancock** (1:39)
Most of all.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:44)
Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.
Graham Hancock, I guess the first question I wanted to ask you is, what is it you've committed the last more than 30 years of your life to understanding?

**Graham Hancock** (2:28)
What it is is a puzzle.
I'm puzzled by aspects of the human past.
There could be, and I think there's a lot to suggest there was, a major forgotten episode in the human story. That's why I refer to us as a species with amnesia. When I use that phrase, I need to give credit to Immanuel Velikovsky, who wrote a book called Mankind In Amnesia. I think we are a species with amnesia. I think we have forgotten something very important in our own past. When I turn to the experts, I find much of what they say very interesting and very useful, but some of what they say extremely unsatisfactory, and not responding to the problems that I have in the past. That's led me to take my own approach to the past, to look at that and to offer readers, because I'm mainly an author, occasionally make TV shows, to offer them an alternative point of view, which is rational and solidly based, but which is contrary to key aspects of the mainstream narrative. We only have decipherable written scripts from the last five and a half thousand years maximum. Before that, we don't have any writing that we can at any rate read, go back 10, 12, 15, 20,000 years. All you can base it on, from an archaeological point of view, is what they can dig out of the ground. And I think what they're missing, the ancients did leave us memories of what they went through.
We have myths and traditions and scriptures from all around the world, which record a gigantic cataclysm affecting the human race, and all but wiping out the human race. Everybody knows the story of the Flood of Noah, of course. The Flood of Noah is just one example of hundreds like that of stories from around the world. Archaeologists pour scorn on Plato's story of Atlantis.