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b6b1ef5
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Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs (Bolivia), emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight-- and with no apparent antecedents whatever. For example, remains from the pre-dynasti..
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Graham Hancock |
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5fa0f12
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What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt's amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period). 7 The majority of Egyptologists will not consider the implications of Egypt's early..
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Graham Hancock |
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c4c10e0
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Not for the first time I felt myself confronted by the dizzying possibility that an entire episode in the story of mankind might have been forgotten. Indeed it seemed to me then, as I overlooked the mathematical city of the gods from the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, that our species could have been afflicted with some terrible amnesia and that the dark period so blithely and dismissively referred to as `prehistory' might turn out to c..
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Graham Hancock |
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2c87deb
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The essence of this knowledge was the ability to `see all' and to `know all'. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'? * Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to `see far'. Thereafter `their eyes were covered and they could on..
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Graham Hancock |
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8bf8c24
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The possession of such a big brain was no doubt an asset to these 'intelligent, spiritually sensitive, resourceful creatures'8 and the fossil record suggests that they were the dominant species on the planet from about 100,000 years ago until 40,000 years ago.
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Graham Hancock |
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f8a2f99
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No, the problem at Gobekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization so accomplished that it "invents" both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent moment of its birth."
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Graham Hancock |
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0c282fd
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a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarry..
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Graham Hancock |
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9f6b776
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If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization - a society that ticks all the boxes - is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track ..
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Graham Hancock |
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06b9ea1
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In the eyes of Muslim fundamentalists, contemporary Western geopolitics in the Middle East are a continuation of the Crusades by modern means and so must be resisted to the death.
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Graham Hancock |
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da932bb
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the Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth. Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days - extremely close to the true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.11 The Mayan priests also had in their possession very accurate tables for the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses and were aware that these could occur only within plus or minus eighteen days of the node (when the moon's path crosses the..
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Graham Hancock |
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a8e37fa
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Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences."
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Graham Hancock |
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d7ad6dc
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More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.
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Graham Hancock |
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d923be9
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Shamanism is not confined to specific socio-economic settings or stages of development. It is fundamentally the ability that all of us share, some with and some without the help of hallucinogens, to enter altered states of consciousness and to travel out of body in non-physical realms - there to encounter supernatural entities and gain useful knowledge and healing powers from them.
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Graham Hancock |
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58a2add
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At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and muc..
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Graham Hancock |
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12750e8
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Bauval found that the Pyramids/Orion's Belt correlation was general and obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one: At 10,450 BC - and at that date only - we find that the pattern of the pyramids on the ground provides a perfect reflection of the pattern of the stars in the sky. I mean it's a perfect match - faultless - and it cannot be an accident because the entire arrangement correctly depicts two very unusual celestial ev..
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Graham Hancock |
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3da1637
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An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that 'burned up the earth' in the remote past and that is destined to return: 'The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail ... Indian people were here before th..
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restoration
comet-impact
deep-human-history
prophecy
tradition
destruction
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Graham Hancock |
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7841ad1
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Science in the twenty-first century does NOT encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of "the facts"--particularly when those facts call into question long-established notions"
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Graham Hancock |
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b39fd07
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Thabit ibn Qurra (AD 836-901, and also born in Harran), would have had little patience with loaded terms like "star idolatry" which seek to place the "paganism" of the Sabians on a lower level than the deadly, and often bigoted, narrow-minded and unscientific clerical monotheism of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Thabit was well aware that, underlying the ancient Sabian practices misunderstood by these young religions as "st..
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science
wisdom
monotheism
sabians
paganism
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Graham Hancock |
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9f368d3
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Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, ..
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archeology
quetzalcoatl
apkallu
civilization
teach
méxico
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Graham Hancock |
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e612a28
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Consider this account from the Ojibwa, a Native American people: The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail. The comet burned everything to the ground. There wasn't a thing left. Indian people were here before that h..
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Graham Hancock |
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a8e9455
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The so-called 'Sleeping Lady' statues found in the Hypogeum and numerous 'Venus' figurines found throughout Malta's megalithic temples leave little doubt that a form of Mother Goddess was the supreme deity worshipped in these mysterious places. But these artifacts 'have all been attributed arbitrarily to the Neolithic', even though they are distinctly characteristic of European Palaeolithic art forms, dating as far back at 30,000 BP.
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deep-human-history
ice-age-civilizations
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Graham Hancock |
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af0ab88
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The same solution--that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass--would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies o..
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isolated
rongo-rongo
script
writing-system
mystery
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Graham Hancock |
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ba77df0
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irrefutable
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Graham Hancock |
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de7b5ad
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The Julian calendar, which it replaced, computed the period of the earth's orbit around the sun at 365.25 days. Pope Gregory XIII's reform substituted a finer and more accurate calculation: 365.2425 days. Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days.
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Graham Hancock |
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87ef1b1
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I poured out a libation on the mountain top ... I heaped up wood and cane and cedar and myrtle ... When the gods smelled the sweet savour they gathered like flies over the sacrifice
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Graham Hancock |
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0317515
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At present there are only two land-based cranes in the world that could lift weights of this magnitude. At the very frontiers of construction technology, these are both vast, industrialized machines, with booms reaching more than 220 feet into the air, which require on-board counterweights of 160 tons to prevent them from tipping over. The preparation-time for a single lift is around six weeks and calls for the skills of specialized teams o..
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Graham Hancock |
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d40140f
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While spinning daily on its own axis, the earth also orbits the sun (again in an anti-clockwise direction) on a path which is slightly elliptical rather than completely circular. It pursues this orbit at truly breakneck speed, travelling as far along it in an hour - 66,600 miles - as the average motorist will drive in six years. To bring the calculations down in scale, this means that we are hurtling through space much faster than any bulle..
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Graham Hancock |
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90100bd
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It concerns the growing body of evidence that 12,800 years ago a giant comet traveling on an orbit that took it through the inner solar system broke up into multiple fragments, and that many of these fragments, some more than a mile (2.4 kilometers) in diameter, hit the earth. It is believed that North America was the epicenter of the resulting cataclysm with several of the largest impacts on the North American ice cap causing floods and ti..
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Graham Hancock |
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ea3f82c
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With a lightness of touch that is almost subliminal, this verse has encouraged us to count Valhalla's fighters, thus momentarily obliging us to focus our attention on their total number (540 x 800 = 432,000). This total, as we shall see in Chapter Thirty-one is mathematically linked to the phenomenon of precession. It is, unlikely to have found its way into Norse mythology by accident, especially in a context that has previously specified a..
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Graham Hancock |
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5b5fa50
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Egyptian Book of the Dead, it had been given to him by
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Graham Hancock |
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68b01ae
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in order that the lower edge of each stone should hitch like a pawl into a ratchet cut into the top of the walls; hence no stone can press on the one below it, so as to cause a cumulative pressure all down the roof; and each stone is separately upheld by the side walls which it lies across.27 And this was the work of a people whose civilization had only recently emerged from neolithic hunter-gathering?
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Graham Hancock |
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c7dbb5b
|
if evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected.
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Graham Hancock |
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cae8200
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Olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel,
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Graham Hancock |
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334f538
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Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus--perhaps to a large extent subconsciously--on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for som..
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truth
careers
predecessors
jeopardy
conservative
questioning
orthodoxy
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Graham Hancock |
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b24c623
|
at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up and down the Nile.53 I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts by 'her name of the New Year'.54 Together with other relevant utterances (e.g., 66955), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar
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Graham Hancock |
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c40dc35
|
What would have made [seeing Gobekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to (usually contracted to ), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran." [...] A..
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dig
harran
archeology
sabians
göbekli-tepe
ruins
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Graham Hancock |
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6029a12
|
The Sanskrit texts make it clear that a cataclysm on this scale, though a relatively rare event, is expected to wash away of the former world and that the slate will be wiped clean again for the new age of the earth to begin. In order to ensure that the can be repromulgated for future mankind after each the gods have therefore designed an institution to preserve them -- the institution of the Seven Sages, a brotherhood of adepts posse..
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wisdom
cycle
institution
sanskrit
seven-sages
civilization
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Graham Hancock |
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4ff0336
|
This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ic..
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science
impact-event
cosmic-impact
younger-dryas
preservation
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Graham Hancock |
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74cbd64
|
The Piri Reis map of 1513 features the western shores of Africa and the eastern shores of North and South America and is also controversially claimed to depict Ice Age Antarctica--as an extension of the southern tip of South America. The same map depicts a large island lying east of the southeast coast of what is now the United States. Also clearly depicted running along the spine of this island is a 'road' of huge megaliths. In this exact ..
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piri-reis-map
rising-sea-levels
underwater
lost-civilization
navigation
ice-age
exploration
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Graham Hancock |
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66b860f
|
Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was..
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astrophysics
bombardments
collision-hazard
geophysics
taurid-stream
epoch
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
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e8d8fea
|
The view of Professor Robert Schoch Schoch is a renowned figure, indeed notorious, for the case he's made, based on strict geological evidence, that the Great Sphinx of Giza bears the unmistakable erosion patterns of thousands of years of heavy rainfall.6 This means it has to be much older than 2500 BC (the orthodox date, when Egypt received no more rain than it does today) and must originally have been carved around the end of the Ice Age ..
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Graham Hancock |
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f02e28f
|
A single high NH4 peak, traced to biomass burning across North America, begins at the [Younger Dryas] onset. It is the largest biomass-burning episode from North American sources in the entire record.
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wildfires
younger-dryas
cataclysm
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Graham Hancock |
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5540e12
|
The god believed by the Ancient Egyptians to have taught the principles of astronomy to their ancestors was Thoth: "He who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is therein, and the measurer of the earth."
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thoth
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Graham Hancock |
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7dfe3a5
|
At the entrance of one of the Hypogeum's painted rooms, the faint engraved impression of a large human hand, also arbitrarily assigned to the Neolithic, may still be seen. It 'has parallels in similar designs in Palaeolithic sites at Gargas, El Castillo, and particularly with Montespan in the Franco-Cantabrian region.' The impression shows a hand with six fingers [a condition known as Polydactyly that is also seen on at least one of the 'Fa..
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neolithic
palaeolithic
deep-human-history
ice-age-civilizations
|
Graham Hancock |