319bce1
|
We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality that the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoretically there could be other realms, other dimensions, as all religious traditions and quantum physics alike maintain. Theoretically, the brain could be as much a receiver as a generator of consciousness and thus might be fine-tuned in altered states to pick up wavelengths that are normally not ..
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paranormal
spiritual
supernatural
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Graham Hancock |
3b0fc24
|
At a deeper level what this whole exchange revealed to me was something disturbing about the way science works. I hadn't quite grasped the role of before. But I could see it in action everywhere here: fear of being 'noticed and monitored by colleagues,' fear of unwanted negative celebrity, fear of indignity, fear of loss of reputation, fear of loss of career--and not for committing some terrible crime but simply for exploring unorthodox p..
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controversy
establishment
exploring
fear
science
shills
truth
unorthodoxy
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Graham Hancock |
7885886
|
My broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison's marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this l..
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explorers
ice-age
lost-civilization
masters
navigation
seafaring
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Graham Hancock |
c2beee6
|
The black mat formed on top of the layer of proxies,' Allen replies. 'Down here it has a lot of charcoal in it. But it also has algal remains so it's not just fire. The Younger Dryas changed the climate and made the area much wetter. Algae began to grow along the edges of the lakes.' He puts a hand on the black stripe along the arroyo wall: 'So the remains of about 1,000 years of dead algae, charcoal, and a lot of other stuff are all embedd..
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climate
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
2d51b23
|
The Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland..
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cataclysm
cosmic-impact
deluge
demolish
floods
ice-sheet
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
a547aae
|
That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of 'precession of the equinoxes'. And that is exactly what is involved in the notion of the 'dawning of the Age of Aquarius'. The famous line from the musical Hair refers to the fact that every year, for the last 2000 years or so, the sun has risen in Pisces on the vernal equinox. The age of Pisces, however, is now approaching its end and the vernal sun will soon pass out of the sector of the Fish and beg..
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Graham Hancock |
ec8a400
|
The cosmic impact that started the Younger Dryas] marked the end of their story, and the end of an epoch, really. There's not a single Clovis point found anywhere in North America that's above that black mat. They're all in it or below it. And there's not a single mammoth skeleton anywhere in North America that's above it. A huge part of the die-off could have been as a direct result of the impacts themselves, but impacts and airbursts sout..
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cosmic-impact
epoch
evidence
paleontology
wildfires
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
c3f6acb
|
Most human characteristics that are genuinely universal are easily accounted for in evolutionary terms, and the arguments are widely known. For example, we all live in families and societies because to do so aids our survival and the propagation of our genes. We all have the capacity for love because it is an emotion that promotes family and social life. We all have laws of one kind or another because these, too, reinforce family and social..
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paranormal
spiritual
supernatural
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Graham Hancock |
e8929b2
|
If the Edfu Texts contain a record of these events, as I have proposed, then we should take seriously the message they transmit, that there were survivors of the cataclysm who made it their mission to bring about: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods. ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundame..
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cataclysm
destruction
legacy
message
mission
re-creation
resurrection
survivors
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Graham Hancock |
e75ab8f
|
On the left side of the balcony, at the rear just outside the open doorway through which I'm looking, I suddenly become aware of the presence of a figure. It is an imposing statue, about six feet high and apparently carved in one piece from some green stone - perhaps jade. The sculptor provided excellent detailing of fine robes, and a belt, and something - possibly a sword? - suspended from the belt. At first this stunning piece of sculptu..
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paranormal
spiritual
supernatural
|
Graham Hancock |
2b19acc
|
It takes courage to throw off unproductive methods and approaches that the majority of scholars in your field have unquestioningly yoked themselves to for decades.
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paranormal
spiritual
supernatural
|
Graham Hancock |
926b645
|
Despite the passage of close to a million years since first sailed to Flores, however, what archaeology does concede is that the human species could have developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other. In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to have been undertaken until about 3,500 years a..
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|
assumptions
deep-human-history
geneticists
ice-age
migrations
oceans
prejudices
|
Graham Hancock |
85f08d4
|
Just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012 witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they'd been thought to be just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to the implications, they'd become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great deal of attention if it conce..
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geoglyphs
implications
understanding
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Graham Hancock |
c812a16
|
It seems [...] that the Native American 'brain smasher' and the ancient Egyptian goddess in the vignette from the Fifth Hour of the Duat both serve exactly the same function, namely, the annihilation and permanent destruction of unworthy souls on the afterlife journey. There are differences in the traditions, to be sure, as one would expect if they descended from a remote common ancestor many millennia ago and then evolved separately, but t..
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journey
orion
religion
souls
source
tradition
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Graham Hancock |
abdfac9
|
The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had b..
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deep-human-history
destruction
found
gods
primeval
remnant
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Graham Hancock |
8d4368e
|
After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older," "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as . During more than a century of subsequent a..
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assumptions
culture
neanderthals
paradigm
remains
|
Graham Hancock |
6660d29
|
My argument has long been that the Edfu Building Texts reflect real events surrounding a real cataclysm that unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, a period known to paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas and that the Texts call the 'Early Primeval Age.' I have proposed that the seeds of what was eventually to become dynastic Egypt were planted in the Nile Valley in that remote epoch more than 12,000 years ago by the survivors of a..
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civilization
deep-human-history
megalithic
paleoclimatology
seed
survivors
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Graham Hancock |
d35039c
|
As the discoverer and principal excavator of Murray Springs, [...] Haynes deserves credit for drawing attention to a very curious aspect of the site--a distinct dark layer of soil draped 'like a shrink-wrap,' as Allen West puts it, over the top of the Clovis remains and of the extinct megafauna--including Eloise. Haynes has identified this 'black mat' (his term) not only at Murray Springs but at dozens of other sites across North America, a..
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|
climate-change
extinction
ice-sheets
paleontology
pleistocene
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
8ba95a3
|
In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age--perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we've seen--or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor e..
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archaeology
earthworks
evidence
hunter-gatherers
legacy
monumental-architecture
mound-building
mystery
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
6396910
|
At locations scattered all across North America from Alaska to New Mexico and from Florida to the state of Washington, more than 1,500 Clovis sites have been found. These sites have yielded more than 10,000 Clovis points and tens of thousands of other artifacts from the Clovis toolkit (40,000 at Topper alone [...]). yet among all these archaeological riches, it bears repeating that the sum total of Clovis human remains found in 85 years of ..
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artifacts
clovis
deep-human-history
excavations
remains
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Graham Hancock |
4a4b2f0
|
To this day, scientists know of only two layers of sediment 'broadly distributed across several continents that exhibit coeval abundance peaks in a comprehensive assemblage of cosmic impact markers, including nanodiamonds, high-temperature quenched spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, carbon spherules, iridium and aciniform carbon.' These layers are found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been ag..
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cosmic-impact
science
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
415b4ec
|
It was not until 2014, more than two decades after the mastodon's discovery [a mastodon scavenged by humans in the Americas], that the tide decisively turned. Built on improved understanding of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil bone, a newly enhanced technique, known as 230 Th/U radiometric dating, was now available that could settle the age of the Cerutti deposit once and for all. Demere therefore ..
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deep-human-history
humanity
ice-age
prehistory
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Graham Hancock |
0d77e58
|
As a paleontologist, [...] I ask the question--why there humans here earlier? I mean, we have dispersal of Eurasian animal species into North America and dispersal of North American species into Eurasia at earlier times. So why humans have been here as well? [Quoting Tom Demere]
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humanity
humans
paleontology
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Graham Hancock |
ca4d30a
|
The earth is a dynamic place [...] with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can't be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won't work, either, because they were never entomb..
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dating
deposition
dynamic
earth
erosion
geology
preservation
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Graham Hancock |
af19252
|
For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.
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|
civilizations
deep-human-history
history
ignorance
prejudices
smithsonian-institute
|
Graham Hancock |
946d5e8
|
No investigation of the human story in the Americas [...] can ignore the role of Siberia as a crossroads in the migrations of our ancestors. Moreover, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of its vast area has yet been sampled by archaeologists, we already know that anatomically modern humans were present in both western and Arctic Siberia at least as far back as 45,000 years ago. We know, too, that DNA studies have revealed close gene..
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deep-human-history
dna
ice-age
investigation
migrations
|
Graham Hancock |
5bd777d
|
So not only was this curious bracelet [found at the Denisova cave] unequivocally the work of anatomically human beings--the Denisovans-- but also it testified to their mastery of advanced manufacturing techniques in the Upper Paleolithic, many millennia ahead of the earliest use of these techniques in the Neolithic by our own supposedly "advanced" species, . Also made crystal clear was the realization that the Denisovans must have posses..
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denisovans
intelligence
mastery
neolithic
paleolithic
self-awareness
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Graham Hancock |
a7f1f8f
|
Anzick-1's "Clovis connection" is of immediate relevance to our quest here--which is that although Clovis did, at the limits of its range, extend into some northern areas of South America, its heartland was in North America. Intuitively, therefore, we would expect the Montana infant, a Clovis individual, to be much more closely related to Native North Americans than to Native South Americans. Further investigations, however, while reconfirm..
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|
deep-human-history
genetics
migrations
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Graham Hancock |
84408f3
|
Some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a 12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of foun..
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founding
genetics
migrations
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Graham Hancock |
f7ddeaa
|
The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only..
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history
survey
underestimate
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Graham Hancock |
41b9934
|
The origin myth of the Tukano speaks of the time, eons ago, when humans first settled the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It seems that 'supernatural beings' accompanied them on this journey and gifted them the fundamentals upon which to build a civilized life. From the 'Daughter of the Sun' they received the gift of fire and the knowledge of horticulture, pottery-making, and many other crafts. 'The serpent-shaped canoe of the first settl..
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|
deep-human-history
lost-ancient-civilizations
myth
origin
proof
serpent-people
settle
|
Graham Hancock |
e64d4ae
|
We wouldn't expect to gather crucial information about modern cultures from their knives, forks, hammers, and screwdrivers, so why should we suddenly set different standards when we try to understand the ancient world?
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archaeology
culture
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Graham Hancock |
2249a68
|
It's not unreasonable [...] to suppose that some kind of cosmic "sky-ground" religion lay behind the alignments to the solstices and the equinoxes at Watson Brake and at the other early sites--a religion sufficiently robust to ensure the continuous successful transmission of a system of geometry, astronomy, and architecture over thousands of years. John Clark is in no doubt. 'The evidence,' he says, 'suggests very old and widely disseminate..
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|
knowledge
monument-building
religion
transmission
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Graham Hancock |
ce5d336
|
Traces of the same spiritual concepts and symbolism that enlighten the Egyptian texts are found all around the world among cultures that we can be certain were never in direct contact. Straightforward diffusion from one to the other is therefore not the answer, and 'coincidence' doesn't even begin to account for the level of detail in the similarities. The best explanation, in my view, is that we're looking at a legacy, shared worldwide, pa..
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|
contact
cultures
deep-human-history
knowledge
legacy
symbolism
|
Graham Hancock |
a61d4ab
|
Not only was the constellation of Orion part of the Moundville story [of Native Americans], not only was a journey to the realm of the dead part of it, too, but now I knew also that a series of trials would have to be faced on that journey, that the Milky Way was involved and, last but by no means least, that Moundville itself had been thought of as an image, or copy, of the realm of the dead on earth. Every one of these were important symb..
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|
journey
legacy
narratives
orion
realm
symbols
trials
|
Graham Hancock |
4ff4e37
|
Elsewhere Lankford reiterates that this belief system was by no means confined to the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Mississippi Valley. It is better understood, he argues, as part of 'a widespread religious pattern' found right across North America and 'more powerful than the tendency towards cultural diversity.' Indeed, what the evidence suggests is the former existence of 'an ancient North American international religion ... a co..
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ethnoastronomy
legacy
mythology
origin
pattern
symbolism
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Graham Hancock |
98a9fc3
|
The first anomalous structure that was discovered at Yonaguni lies below glowering cliffs of the southern shore of the island. Local divers call it Iseki Point ('Monument Point'). Into its south face, at a depth of about 18 metres, an area of terracing with conspicuous flat planes and right-angles has been cut. Two huge parallel blocks weighing approximately 30 tonnes each and separated by a gap of less than 10 centimetres, have been placed..
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|
deep-human-history
ice-age-civilizations
japan
monument
underwater-monument
yonaguni
|
Graham Hancock |
fd1baaf
|
Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing 'none but the unlettered and the uncultured' and obliging the survivors to 'begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened ... in early times'. Such storie..
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|
deep-human-history
deluge
flood
myths
survivors
|
Graham Hancock |
2ad1c99
|
As I studied the e-mail from Glenn Milne, I knew just how ancient the U-shaped structure [found a few kilometers away from the Indian coast] really might be - at least 11,000 years old. That's 6000 years older than the first monumental architecture of ancient Egypt or of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia - traditionally thought of as the oldest civilizations of antiquity. Certainly, no civilization known to history existed in southern India - or..
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|
archaeology
civilizations
deep-human-history
monuments
|
Graham Hancock |
e51562d
|
Now we know that man is more than two million years old,' exlaimed Heyerdahl, 'it would be very strange if our ancestors lived like primitive food collectors for all that time until suddenly they started in the Nile valley, in Mesopotamia and even in the Indus valley, to build a civilization at peak level pretty much at the same time. And there's a question I ask that I never get an answer to. The tombs from the first kingdom of Sumer are f..
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|
civilizations
deep-human-history
geography
|
Graham Hancock |
afd60d4
|
Another extraordinary similarity concerns the presence of Seven Sages in both the Sumerian and Vedic traditions. Most ancient societies, I concede, had their sages or seers or wise men -- in India they were, and still are, called . But it seems to me to be stretching coincidence too far to find a group specifically named the 'Seven Sages' prominently associated with two separate ancient cultures and to imagine that this did not come about ..
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|
connection
deluges
knowledge
seven-sages
wisdom
|
Graham Hancock |
73c2a8d
|
Around 12,800 years ago, it was as though an enchantment of ice had gripped the earth. In many areas that had been approaching terminal meltdown full glacial conditions were restored with breathtaking rapidity and all the gains that had been made since the LGM were simply stripped away: 'Temperatures ... fell back on the order of 8-15 degrees centigrade ... with half this brutal decline possibly occurring within decades. The Polar Front in ..
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|
deep-human-history
ice-age
ice-sheets
younger-dryas
|
Graham Hancock |
e2ee3ec
|
The Red Hill was referred to in the most ancient surviving work of Tamil literature, the , which itself makes reference to an even earlier work now lost to history which in turn had supposedly been part of a library of archaic texts, all now also vanished, the compilation of which was said to have begun more than 10,000 years previously. This had been the library of the legendary First Sangam -- or 'Academy' -- of the lost Tamil civilizati..
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|
deep-human-history
ice-age-civilizations
kumari-kandam
library
tamil
|
Graham Hancock |
65cbdf6
|
Soon after the news broke about these published conclusions [regarding the evidence of a Palaeolithic human presence on Malta] and their stark contradiction of the orthodox view on Malta's prehistory, the Italian team distanced itself from its initial Palaeolithic leanings and claimed instead that the depictions in Ghar Hasan are 'out of context' -- which indeed they are if one is only prepared to countenance a Neolithic context for the ear..
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archaeology
authority
establishment
neolithic
palaeolithic
vandalism
|
Graham Hancock |