28
HUNTER-GATHERERS AND THE LOST CIVILIZATION
UTTERLY HORRIFIC, TROUBLING, AND CONFUSING events took place at the onset of the Younger Dryas, and more than a decade under the scientific spotlight has repeatedly confirmed that the best explanation of all the evidence is that the earth underwent a series of interactions with the remnants of the disintegrating giant comet that spawned the Taurid meteor stream. These encounters are thought to have reached a peak 12,822 years ago but were sustained over a span of 21 years beginning 12,836 years ago and ending 12,815 years ago. There were other episodes of bombardment around the time of the Younger Dryas onset, but this was the worst.
Perhaps it was not a comet after all. Perhaps in the next decade some other even more compelling theory with even more evidence to back it up will be advanced—or perhaps some decisive new discovery will be made that vindicates one of the existing non impact theories. Until that time, however, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis continues to make complete sense to me and to a great many scientists, and its 21-year window of maximum devastation, peaking around 12,822 years ago, deserves special attention.
Archaeological evidence from this period is scarce in North America, but what there is suggests that widely scattered populations of Native American hunter-gatherers were badly mauled at the Younger Dryas onset. Amid indications of sudden population collapses, many previously inhabited areas were abandoned entirely, as we saw in chapter 26, with no return for hundreds of years. Clovis ceased to exist—an entire vibrant, widely distributed culture obliterated—but other humans survived and bounced back, something our species has a talent for. I’d stayed in touch with Al Goodyear since Topper and he confirmed that in his view, while there was evidence for a “possible demographic crash/depression,” there had been no “extermination post Clovis.”1
We shouldn’t be surprised.
Hunter-gatherers are hard to exterminate!
They roll with the punches and they bounce back. In the technology-dominated twenty-first century, the majority of humans live in cities fed by intensive agriculture, but in the world today there still exists a tiny minority of hunter-gatherers. Many of the urbanites enjoy great wealth and abundance while the hunter-gatherers possess very little. If a cataclysm on the scale of the Younger Dryas impacts were to strike in our lifetimes, however, I predict it would be these few remaining groups of hunter-gatherers—in the Kalahari desert, for example, or in the Amazon rainforest—who would have the best chance of surviving the devastating consequences, and it would be their descendants, not ours, who would carry the human story forward. Unlike most city dwellers who have no idea how to live off the land, hunter-gatherers are masters of survival, they know how to deal with environmental setbacks, and no matter how tough things get they can usually improvise a workaround. By contrast the masses in the cities, suddenly discovering that technology can’t fix everything, would be psychologically traumatized and largely helpless.
Almost the opposite of our twenty-first-century world, the world as I imagine it 12,800 years ago is one in which the vast majority of humans are hunter-gatherers while a minority have taken another, more complex, path. The hunter-gatherers form populations recognized by modern archaeologists, and their stone tools, weapons, and ornaments speak of an effective but fairly rudimentary technology. The minority who have taken a different path are not recognized and I contend that this is primarily because the destruction of their civilization was near-total, and because the few, faint, tantalizing clues to their technology that have reached us across the ages hint at a level of science far in advance of anything believed by scholars to have been possible at such a remote period of prehistory.
It is for this reason that ancient maps incorporating scientifically accurate latitudes and longitudes and depicting the world as it looked during the lowered sea levels of the last Ice Age have been dismissed by the mainstream as mere curiosities with no bearing on our understanding of the origins of civilization.
I looked into the mystery of these maps in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and again in Underworld in 2002, and refer the reader to appendix 2 for details. Contrary to the mainstream, 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 lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery.
Suppose there was an earlier “Age of Discovery” in the centuries before the onset of the Younger Dryas, when the fleets of the lost civilization set out to open interaction with tribes of hunter-gatherers all around the world and either passed themselves off as, or were mistaken for, “gods.” I’m just offering food for thought here, a pure speculation, but I submit this might have followed a period of severely restricted involvement with other peoples —such as the Ming dynasty imposed on China in the late fourteenth century —and I suggest that the renewed outreach may have been motivated by foreknowledge of the impending Younger Dryas cataclysm. This lost civilization, after all, appears to have evolved a sophisticated religion deploying powerful symbolism that emphasized the connection between heaven and earth and that envisaged an afterlife journey through specific well-charted regions of the celestial vault. Its astronomer-priests are therefore most unlikely to have missed the signs in the sky as our planet began its long journey toward intersection with a particularly lumpy and debris-filled filament of the Taurid meteor stream where the menacing serpentlike tails of the outgassing larger fragments might have served as visible omens of the terrors to come.
The astronomers and mathematicians of our hypothetical lost civilization would surely have set to work calculating trajectories and orbits and would have learned in due course that collisions with fragments of the disintegrating comet, though not an immediate threat, were unfortunately inevitable during the centuries ahead. It was not yet certain how large and how sustained the bombardments would be, or where and when the first fragments would strike. Multiple outcomes were possible, from escaping relatively unscathed, at one end of the scale, to a worst-case scenario in which civilization itself would be snuffed out. And although the worst would probably never happen, a contingency plan would certainly have been prepared on the off chance that it did.
My bet is the planners would have seen from the outset that the superior survival skills of hunter-gatherer populations might potentially make them the inheritors of the earth in the event of a true planetary cataclysm. An important strand of any contingency plan, therefore, would have been to establish connections with hunter-gatherers, to teach them, to learn from them, and in so doing to ensure that these populations were willing and able —if called upon—to offer refuge to the “gods” of the lost civilization.
It would not be until weeks or even days before the bombardments began that the areas likely to be worst hit could be pinpointed with any certainty. There must have been hope that by some miracle the impacts might be avoided altogether, but until the centuries of danger passed it was best to regard the whole world as a target and therefore to prepare safe havens on many different continents so that if some were destroyed others would survive. I speculated in chapter 10 that this process of preparation might even have involved the experimental resettlement of groups of hunter-gatherers far from their home regions with the intention that they should create places of refuge for the “gods” in their new surroundings. Such a project might account for that strange Australasian DNA signal stranded in the genes of certain Amazonian tribes.
In this scenario, therefore, hunter-gatherer populations all around the world were deliberately recruited by people from a different, more scientifically advanced culture to prepare for a coming cataclysm, to offer refuge to the “gods” should they require it, and perhaps even to serve as duplicate archives —either in oral tradition or in the safekeeping of physical records—for some of the scientific knowledge of the “gods.”
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 even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural knowhow, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It’s therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of “package” is involved here.
Something designed.
Something deliberately and carefully contrived to engage future generations in specific courses of action, regarded as religious duties, that would also educate them deeply in the cycles of the heavens and in the measurement and nurturing of the earth.
It’s almost as though a guiding hand has been at work behind the scenes of prehistory. If so, whether through secret groups of insider initiates or by some other means of cultural transmission, this hidden influence appears to have been active in the Americas since before the onset of the Younger Dryas, to have undergone long periods of inactivity, and to have reemerged again and again at crucial junctures to shape the direction of civilization.
CLOVIS GIVEN A HELPING HAND?
KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUE GLOBAL extent of the Younger Dryas impacts continues to grow. We’ve focused on the evidence from North America, but recent research published in Studia Quaternaria in 2018 presents evidence of a cometary airburst over Mount Viso in Europe’s Western Alps around 12,800 years ago that raised temperatures instantly, in a brief pulse, to above 2,200 degrees C—almost 1,000 degrees hotter than the melting point of steel.2 Another 2018 study, published in the Journal of Geology, reports evidence from Antarctica’s New Mountain, near the Taylor Glacier, that an “impact/airburst of the same time line as the Younger Dryas Boundary may have reached across South America and the Pacific Ocean to the Dry Valley Mountains of Antarctica.”3
As of late 2014, the Younger Dryas Boundary strewn field of impact proxies had been traced across 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface (above). Since then YDB impact proxies have been found much more widely distributed than previously reported in South America, and a 2018 study reports their discovery in Antarctica’s Taylor Valley (inset) linked to evidence of an impact or airburst around 12,800 years ago.
As more evidence of this quality continues to pour in, two significant observations thrust themselves to the fore.
First, this cataclysm, which we know to have been drawn out over 21 years between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago, was truly global, affecting regions as far apart as Greenland, the Pacific, the Americas, Europe, and Antarctica.
And second, it was just the luck of the draw that North America, rather than some other region, found itself at the epicenter of the peak bombardment. However, this had profound implications for the world because so much of the continent was then still covered by ice that was radically destabilized, releasing the meltwater flood that shut down the Gulf Stream and ushered in the Younger Dryas. The fact that Greenland and Europe were also severely hit and also ice covered compounded the problem by adding to the deluge of icy meltwater pouring into the Atlantic Ocean. There is no doubt, however, that it was the continental landmass of North America that suffered the worst effects of the impacts, airbursts, shock waves, and wildfires and finally, perhaps early in that 21-year episode of bombardment, of Antonio Zamora’s proposed storm of icy ejecta. The latter, we might speculate, could even have played a role in extinguishing the wildfires, thus accounting for the fact that a single massive episode of biomass burning, the largest in the entire NGRIP Ice Core, is documented for North America right at the onset of the Younger Dryas, and then rapidly dies down, never to recur on such a scale.4
Once all this is taken into account, the severity of the extinctions in North America seems less surprising and we can begin to understand how it was that the Clovis people passed from abundance to nonexistence virtually overnight.
Moreover, the Clovis phenomenon is, itself, an intriguing mystery. We’ve already seen that no archaeological background has ever been found to the beautiful and sophisticated fluted points used by these remarkably successful hunter-gatherers to spear mammoths like Eloise at Murray Springs. From the moment we meet them around 13,400 years ago to the moment of their disappearance from the record about 12,800 years ago, they’re equipped with their extremely effective signature “toolkit” of which the points are part. These Clovis tools and weapons appear suddenly and fully formed in archaeological deposits across huge expanses of North America with no evidence, anywhere, of experiments, developments, prototypes, or, indeed, of any intermediate stages in their evolution.5
My guess is there’s a connection between Clovis and the lost civilization, not least because studies of ancient DNA show the Clovis genome to be much more closely related to Native South Americans than to Native North Americans (see part 3). Indeed, there’s a parallel between the rather sudden and inexplicable way that Australasian genes turn up in the Amazon basin and the equally sudden and inexplicable way that Clovis fluted-point technology turns up in North America.
Could both have the same cause?
Could the same hidden hand that transported a population of Australasian setters across the Pacific Ocean from New Guinea to the Amazon also have given technical assistance to one group among the many that we now know inhabited North America before the onset of the Younger Dryas? And since the whole Clovis First nonsense has finally been relegated to the dustbin of history, perhaps it’s time to consider another possibility—let’s call it “Clovis Most Favored” or “Clovis Given a Helping Hand.”
Though in no way “high-tech” in twenty-first-century terms, the Clovis toolkit is far superior to anything else Native Americans are thought to have been capable of 13,400 years ago when the first fluted points begin to appear south of the ice cap. I’m not proposing that these stone tools were part of the technology of the lost civilization itself—any more than jet aircraft were part of it. I’ve argued already that a more realistic parallel for the level of science and technology attained would be with Europe and the newly formed United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Other than that, the civilization I envisage was very different from our own, founded upon entirely different principles. Much of its science may remain opaque to us not because it is absent but because we are unable to recognize it for what it is. Nor is there any reason to suppose it would have shared its own “high-tech” with other peoples; quite possibly there were even specific stipulations against doing so. But there might have been less hesitation around the idea of devising better, more efficient stone tools to put into the hands of favored groups of hunter-gatherers, thus conferring a competitive advantage upon them.
Suppose Clovis was such a group, already present alongside many other groups that we now know to have inhabited the Americas before the Younger Dryas onset. The connection to the southern lineage of Native Americans is interesting. Perhaps it might even have been in those 5 million square kilometers of Amazon rainforest where archaeologists have not yet ventured that fluted-point technology was initially taught to Clovis ancestors who then migrated north, bringing “their” expertise with them.
In so doing they burst in upon—and in a brief few centuries radically changed—a cultural landscape that archaeologists are now beginning to realize had previously been stable and continuous for thousands of years. Just as Al Goodyear discovered at Topper when he took the decision to dig down below the lowest Clovis occupation level (see chapter 6), recent excavations at the extremely prolific Clovis site of Gault, Texas, have likewise revealed deeper, pre-Clovis levels. Reported in the journal Science Advances in July 2018, these levels contain an assortment of stone tools—“the Gault Assemblage”—so far confirmed to be at least 2,000 years older than Clovis. Significantly, what archaeologists have identified in the assembly is “a previously unknown, early projectile point technology unrelated to Clovis.”6
Of note also is that:
There is a ~10-cm-thick zone of decreased cultural material between the Clovis and Gault components. This suggests a reduction in site activity or possible occupational breaks between … cultural depositions.7 … The distinct technological differences between Clovis and Gault Assemblage, together with the stratigraphic separation between the cultural depositions, indicate a lack of continuity between the two complexes.8
In other words, Clovis just rather inexplicably appears and replaces preexisting native North American cultures, and pretty soon its occupation levels are imposed over other, earlier occupation levels all across the continental United States until suddenly, and mysteriously, in the big bang of the Younger Dryas onset, Clovis itself is gone—dead and buried beneath the black mat.
Yet in the brief few hundred years of its florescence, Clovis sparkled and shone as the most successful and widespread hunter-gatherer culture thus far seen in the Americas. Archaeologists and flint knappers who have studied the matter are in no doubt that the distinctive points, and the way that fluting was deployed in their manufacture, would have given the Clovis people a significant technological edge over other hunter-gatherers.9 The question, therefore, has to be why they were wiped out while other less prominent and capable cultures were able to emerge from the shadows of archaeological invisibility and survive.
Perhaps they grew too close to the “gods” of the lost civilization and shared their fate?
This is a serious proposition, not a frivolous question, and we may anticipate the skeptical response. If Clovis benefited from contact with a more advanced civilization, then we should find the skeletal remains of those more advanced people intermingled with the Clovis remains, and we do not —therefore, there was no advanced civilization. Similarly, if Clovis benefited from contact with the people of a more advanced civilization, then we should find at least some traces of their higher tech among the Clovis assemblages, and we do not—therefore, there was no advanced civilization.
I’ve already responded to the second argument. There might have been very good reasons why people from a more technologically advanced civilization would have decided not to share their high-tech with hunter gatherers, while at the same time choosing to favor a particular group with the know-how to work existing raw materials like stone, antler, and bone into more efficient hunting weapons and tools than they’d ever made before.
As to the first argument, although Clovis were not the “first Americans,” their culture has been the subject of intensive archaeological study for more than 80 years and we’ve seen that Clovis artifacts have been discovered in great quantities at sites scattered far and wide across North America.
But how many Clovis bones have been found alongside the artifacts? How many skeletons, crania, tibia, phalanges, or teeth? I had imagined there must be quite a collection for such a famous and well-understood culture. I was therefore surprised to learn during the research for this book that apart from the incomplete skeleton of a single individual—the Anzick-1 child excavated in Montana and discussed in chapter 9—there are no human remains at all from the Clovis period. 10 Even in the case of Anzick-1, as we’ve seen, the Clovis provenance was questioned by some until sophisticated dating techniques in 2018 resolved an apparent discrepancy between the age of the infant’s bones and the age of the Clovis tools found with him, placing both firmly at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago and confirming the Clovis identity of the buried child.11
Here then is the conundrum. 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 12 and tens of thousands of other artifacts from the Clovis toolkit (40,000 at Topper alone, as we saw in chapter 6). Yet among all these archaeological riches, it bears repeating that the sum total of Clovis human remains found in 85 years of excavations is limited to the Anzick-1 partial skeleton.13
In short, if the homeland of our hypothetical advanced civilization were in America, and if it became a lost civilization during the tumultuous earth changes of 12,800 years ago, then the Clovis case suggests that a dearth of skeletal remains is a normal state of affairs by which we should not be surprised. Certainly it does not constitute disproof of the lost civilization hypothesis.
By contrast, the sudden appearance of Clovis fluted-point technology with no evidence of prior trial and error, buildup of skills, experimentation, or prototypes 14 cries out for an explanation. So, too, does the Australasian DNA signal in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. So, too, the shared geometry and astronomy, and the shared earthwork designs across the Old World and the New. So, too, the incredible overlaps of symbolism, spiritual inquiry, and beliefs.
The only viable explanation is a remote common source behind them all— a lost civilization, in my view. And although that civilization had established self-perpetuating memes that would keep the flame of its influence burning for thousands of years, it is clear that it did not survive the Younger Dryas cataclysm itself.
Let’s look at North America, therefore, with the possibility in mind that it might be the “crime scene” from which a great civilization of prehistoric antiquity—the stuff of myth and legend all around the world—vanished without a trace.
29
UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
A LOST ADVANCED CIVILIZATION OF the Ice Age with global navigational and map making skills equivalent to our own in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would have had the capacity to establish outposts on every continent but must also have had a homeland.
Since that homeland has not been found after 200 years of diligent archaeology, most diligent archaeologists conclude—quite reasonably on the face of things—that it did not exist.
But there are other options.
It might be underwater now—the immense Sunda Shelf around Indonesia, for example, submerged by sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age.
It might be under ice, perhaps in Antarctica, if we’re willing to accept that some rather extraordinary geophysical events occurred in the past 100,000 years.
It might await rediscovery in the unexplored heart of the Amazon rainforest.
It might lie beneath the sands of the Sahara desert.
Or perhaps its homeland has all along remained hidden in plain view in the very last place that anyone has thought to look—North America?
There are surprisingly few “known knowns” in American prehistoric archaeology and good reasons why there are so many “known unknowns”— reasons that in turn suggest that the third Rumsfeldian category,1 of “unknown unknowns,” the “things we don’t know we don’t know,” may ultimately prove to be far larger and more significant than either of the other two.
First and foremost, 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 to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere.
This immense and extraordinary deluge, “possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,”2 swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today—a devastated blank slate (described at length in Magicians of the Gods) littered with 10,000-ton “glacial erratics,” immense fossilized waterfalls, and “current ripples” hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high.3
If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone.
If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.
And if an advanced antediluvian civilization had flourished anywhere within 500 kilometers of the southern edge of the ice cap, not only in the Channeled Scablands but all the way along the ice margin, the flood alone might have been sufficient to ensure that not a trace of it would be left for archaeologists to misrepresent 12,800 years later.
Washington displays flood-ravaged scablands, but so, too, does New Jersey much farther to the east. Washington is notable for its fields and hillsides strewn with huge ice-rafted erratics, but so, too, is the state of New York. Interestingly also, just as Washington has its coulees, New York State has its Finger Lakes. These latter were long thought to have been carved by glaciers, but their geomorphology closely parallels that of the coulees of the channeled scablands, and some researchers now believe they were cut by glacial meltwater at extreme pressures—a process linked by sediment evidence to “the collapse of continental ice sheets.”4
Likewise in Minnesota, on the Saint Croix River, there is a spectacular array of more than eighty giant glacial potholes. One is 10 feet wide and 60 feet deep, making it the deepest explored pothole in the world. Others, as yet unexcavated, are even wider, and probably deeper as well. And all of them, without exception, were formed by turbulent floods at the end of the Ice Age.
We are looking then at vast expanses of North America that were literally scoured.
And this is before we get to the other effects of the Younger Dryas impacts explored in previous chapters—including direct hits on populated areas, searing heat and shock waves from airbursts, continent-wide wildfires, an impact winter, icy ejecta, and so on and so forth.
All in all, if North America is where a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity vanished, then by far the most significant problem we face in investigating it is the way that the “crime scene” was systematically “wiped down” by the cataclysmic events at the onset of the Younger Dryas.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: CONQUEST
THE EUROPEAN INVASION OF THE American mainland began 500 years ago with the Spanish conquest of Mexico. In 1519, when Hernán Cortés first set foot 449 on the shores of the Yucatán, more than 30 million people lived in Mexico. A century later, after the brutal genocide of the conquest itself and immense loss of life to smallpox epidemics, the population had fallen to just 3 million.5
The entire pre-Columbian literature of Mexico, a vast library of tens of thousands of codices, was carefully and systematically destroyed by the priests and friars who followed in the wake of the conquistadors. In November 1530, for example, Bishop Juan de Zumarraga, who had shortly before been appointed “Protector of the Indians” by the Spanish crown, proceeded to “protect” his flock by burning at the stake a Mexican aristocrat, the lord of the city of Texcoco, whom he accused of having worshipped the rain god. In the city’s marketplace Zumarraga “had a pyramid formed of the documents of Aztec history, knowledge and literature, their paintings, manuscripts, and hieroglyphic writings, all of which he committed to the flames while the natives cried and prayed.”6
More than 30 years later, the holocaust of documents was still under way. In July 1562, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in the Yucatan), Bishop Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings, and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He boasted of destroying countless “idols” and “altars,” all of which he described as “works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity.”7 Noting that the Maya “used certain characters or letters, which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences” he informs us:
We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously and which gave them great pain.8
Any of us today interested in the truth about the past share the pain of those horrified Native Americans—for what, we cannot help but wonder, was written in their lost books concerning “the antiquities and sciences” of the ancients? What exactly went up in smoke there?
I have explored the mysteries of the Maya, and of their predecessors the Olmec, in my earlier work, so I have not retold their extraordinary story here. I will mention in passing, however, that in 1998, long before I knew of the Mississippi Valley civilization and its afterlife beliefs concerning the constellation Orion and the Milky Way, I drew attention in Heaven’s Mirror to a discovery by archaeologists Jose Fernandez and Robert Cormack establishing that the settlement core of the Maya city of Utatlan was designed “according to a celestial scheme reflected by the shape of the constellation of Orion.”9
Fernandez was also able to prove that all of Utatlan’s major temples “were oriented to the heliacal setting points of stars in Orion,”10 and noted that the Milky Way, alongside which Orion stands, “was thought of as a celestial path connecting the firmament’s navel with the centre of the underworld.”11
This should be familiar territory to the reader by now and hopefully you can guess what comes next. “Very much like the ancient Egyptians,” I reported in Heaven’s Mirror, the Maya regarded the Milky Way as a particularly important feature of the heavens:
They conceived of it as the road that led to their netherworld, Xibalba which, in common with other Central American peoples, they located in the sky.12
I also commented on Mexican traditions of the postmortem journey of the soul in which the deceased, just as in the ancient Egyptian Duat, would face a series of ordeals and “a final judgment in the terrifying presence of the death god.”13 Noting numerous other striking similarities in beliefs and symbolism around the mysteries of death and the afterlife, I concluded:
In Egypt, as amongst the Maya, the stellar context involves Orion and the Milky Way. In Egypt as in Mexico a journey through the netherworld must be undertaken by the deceased. In Egypt as in Mexico religious teachings assert that life is our opportunity to prepare for this journey—an opportunity that should under no circumstances be wasted.14
Such correspondences led me to speculate that both ancient Egypt and ancient Mexico had shared in the legacy of an even more ancient cosmological religion, “wrapped up in sophisticated astronomical observations” and specifically focused on the afterlife journey of the soul. Neither Egypt nor Mexico had originated this religion, nor had they transmitted it directly to one another. Rather each of them had inherited it from a third, as yet unidentified, civilization.15
It was a hypothesis. What would help to strengthen it, and perhaps even confirm it, would be evidence of other civilizations with no direct relationship in which the same legacy could be identified.
This evidence, I submit, now exists in the astonishing proximity of the religious beliefs, iconography, and symbolism of the Mississippi Valley to the religious beliefs, iconography, and symbolism of ancient Egypt outlined in part 6. These deep structural connections are, in my view, unexplainable by any means other than a shared legacy from a very ancient source—a source predating the separation of peoples when the Americas became isolated from the “Old World” by the rising oceans at the end of the Ice Age.
Let’s take a brief look at the most ancient Native American book still in existence—the Dresden Codex, so called because it’s kept in a museum in the German city of Dresden.16
It is a thought-provoking document for many reasons, not least the scientific character of the mathematics and astronomy incorporated in it. For example, the eminent Mayanist Sylvanus Griswold Morley noticed that on pages 51–58 of the codex, “405 revolutions of the moon are set down; and so accurate are the calculations involved that although they cover a period of nearly 33 years, the total number of days recorded (11,959) is only 89/100th of a day less than the true time computed by the best modern method.”17
Also of great interest is the way that numbers set out in the Dresden Codex keep on getting longer and longer in the final pages:
Until, in the so-called “serpent numbers,” a grand total of nearly twelve and a half million days (thirty-four thousand years) is recorded again and again
… Finally, on the last page of the manuscript, is depicted the Destruction of the World, for which these highest numbers have paved the way.
Here we see the rain serpent, stretching across the sky, belching forth torrents of water. Great streams of water gush from the sun and the moon. The old goddess, she of the tiger claws and forbidding aspect, the malevolent patroness of floods and cloudbursts, overturns the bowl of the heavenly waters. The crossbones, dread emblem of death, decorate her skirt, and a writhing snake crowns her head.
Below, with downward-pointing spears symbolic of the universal destruction, the black god stalks abroad, a screeching bird raging on his fearsome head. Here, indeed, is portrayed with graphic touch the final all-engulfing cataclysm.18
It’s curious—this mixture of science, cataclysm, and time. “Calculations far into the past or lesser probings of the future occur in many a Maya hieroglyphic text,” notes archaeologist J. Eric S. Thompson:
On [a] stela at Quiriga a date … over 90 million years ago is computed; on another a date over 300 million years before that is given. … These are actual computations, stating correctly day and month positions, and are comparable to calculations in our calendar giving the month positions on which Easter would have fallen at equivalent distances in the past. The brain reels at such astronomical figures, yet these reckonings were of sufficient frequency and importance to require special hieroglyphs for their transcription.19
All that can be said for sure is that embedded in the Mayan material, together with core religious beliefs very similar to those of the ancient Egyptians—and now we know very similar to those of the ancient Mississippians also—is evidence of an interest in complex scientific calculations and immense expanses of time. I’m reminded of the passage from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted in chapter 3, in which the Sun God Ra is praised for his travels through the “untold spaces” of the cosmic void “requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over”—a chronology on a similar order to the Mayan scheme of things but, one would have thought, irrelevant to the concerns of agricultural societies. And the same goes for the immense geometrical mounds and enclosures of the ancient Egyptian Duat that are matched by the immense geometrical mounds and enclosures of the Hopewell of Ohio and the immense geometrical mounds and enclosures now emerging from the Amazon rainforest.
What the evidence suggests to me is that something extraordinary, something that the theories of mainstream archaeology cannot account for, was going on behind the scenes of prehistory. All the indications are that Mexico, with its ancient tradition of literacy, was once a vast archive of the “antiquities and sciences” of former times and that the records the Spaniards destroyed in their zealous stupidity may have been as integral to the memory of humanity as the library of Alexandria. I think it is very possible, had the Mayan documents survived in sufficient quantities, that they would have shed light on the mystery of the lost common source of inspiration that appears to have kick-started civilizations in both the Old World and the New.
In the event, however, out of the tens of thousands of Mayan codices in existence in 1519 just four are still with us in the twenty-first century.20
After the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the conquest of Peru soon followed, again accompanied by the destruction of a high civilization—in this case the Inca—in the lineage of the First Americans. Though they had their quipus (a means of communication and calculation using knotted string), the Inca were not a literate people like the Maya and thus possessed no documents for the Spaniards to destroy. As in Mexico, however, a sustained and determined 454 effort was made to stamp out local religions and traditions and replace them with Roman Catholicism. Once again, this effort, officially sanctioned as “the extirpation of idolatry,” called for cultural destruction on a grand scale, calculated to erase the memory banks of the population within a generation or two and replace their deep connection to their own past with the new dispensation.21
The Spaniards did venture into North America, of course—most eccentrically and unproductively in the form of an expedition led by Hernando de Soto, who landed in Florida in 1539 with more than 600 men.22 After losing half his force along the way, de Soto spent the next 3 years until his own death in Louisiana in 1542 wandering all over the southeast and deep south of what is now the United States, passing many of the great mound sites, and engaging in ruinous pitched battles with the locals. The most disastrous by-product of his visit, however, may have been smallpox, which his expeditionaries appear to have brought with them and which afterward devastated the indigenous population of the region.23
We may say, therefore, that from its earliest days the European conquest of the Americas was an agent of chaos, genocide, and cultural extinction for Native Americans and that this, too, was very much part of the process that wiped down the “crime scene,” leaving us scratching our heads trying to make sense of the few clues left behind.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: WITNESS AMNESIA
THE EXTIRPATION OF VITAL EVIDENCE concerning the past of our species across huge swaths of the Americas was by no means limited to the effects of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, or to the subsequent much later cataclysms of militant Christianity and smallpox. Once the calamitous century of the initial encounters was over, a more insidious but equally deadly process of erosion began to grind down the little of the past that the previous millennia had spared. During the sixteenth century, apart from a few failed raids like de Soto’s, North America was not much affected, but from the early seventeenth century onward, following the first European settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, everything changed.
Thereafter, with monotonous, depressing regularity, either for their agricultural potential or for the prospect of gold, lands held sacred in the possession of Native American tribes for eons were snatched from them and their inhabitants driven off or slaughtered. These murderous land grabs only accelerated and became crueler as the seventeenth century was followed by the eighteenth and as the eighteenth century rolled on into the nineteenth:
From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.24
In his important book American Holocaust, which documents the genocide, David Stannard, professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii, reminds us that scholarly estimates of the size of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas have changed radically in recent decades:
In the 1940s and 1950s conventional wisdom held that the population of the entire hemisphere in 1492 was little more than 8 million—with fewer than 1 million people living in the region north of present-day Mexico. Today few serious students of the subject would put the hemispheric figure at less than 75 million to 100 million (with approximately 8 million to 12 million north of Mexico), while one of the most well-regarded specialists in the field recently has suggested that a more accurate estimate would be around 145 million for the hemisphere as a whole and about 18 million for the area north of Mexico.25
Gone forever—and good riddance—is the long-held myth of North America as a pristine wilderness inhabited by a handful of “savages” when the first settlers from Europe arrived.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The new picture, derived from a combination of archaeology, ethnography, genetics, and the reports of early travelers, is of a busy and boisterous continent with a growing population, widespread trade networks, and abundant resources.
Like the Inca, though lacking their centralized, structured state, the Native North Americans were people of the spoken word who carried their wisdom and their records not in documents but in oral traditions carefully nurtured, memorized, and passed on from generation to generation. Today we grope in the dark when we try to discover what they knew, what they taught, and what they had preserved from primeval times because the genocide inflicted upon them radically disrupted and in many cases completely destroyed the normal intergenerational processes of transmission.
The accounts of the genocide are repulsive; reading the details today leaves one stunned, nauseated, and horrified. Professor Stannard holds nothing back in American Holocaust, a comprehensive record of European wickedness in the Americas, but it’s not my purpose here to zoom in on the many massacres and betrayals he describes, or to dwell on the horrific symptoms of the imported infectious diseases that killed indigenous people by the millions.
The point I wish to make is simply that this happened, that it was both physical and cultural genocide, and that its long-term effect on the descendants of those who survived was to sever their connections to the traditions, wisdom, memories, and even the languages of their ancestors.
Lest there be any doubt that cultural annihilation was always the purpose, hand in hand with the continent-wide theft of land, we need only consider the shameful history of the so-called Indian boarding schools. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition sets out the bare facts:
Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1926, the Indian Office estimated that nearly 83% of Indian children were attending boarding schools. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture.26
A founder and advocate of the boarding schools movement, US army captain Richard Henry Pratt, summarized the spirit of the whole enterprise in a speech in 1892:
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.27
This, then, was an ethnically targeted brainwashing exercise on a gigantic scale—an exercise deliberately designed to make Native Americans forget their ancient heritage. For the purposes of our inquiry here, if it were indeed from North America that a lost civilization vanished, then not only has the crime scene been thoroughly wiped down but also—to extend the analogy— the principal witnesses have been badly beaten about the head and are suffering from amnesia.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: LAND GRABS
EVEN AS THE GENOCIDE AND imposed “unremembering” gathered pace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a parallel force was also active removing many prominent physical traces—notably the great mounds and earthworks—that Native Americans of former ages had left. This parallel force was primarily greed for land, where the fate of the monuments was either to be plowed down for agriculture or demolished to make way for industry, housing, or commerce. Among the unknown unknowns of North American prehistory, therefore, is how many of the mounds and earthworks were already gone—plowed under, demolished, ransacked—before responsible and thorough surveyors began to investigate them from about the mid-nineteenth century onward.
Renowned among these early surveyors were Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, whose classic Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first ever publication of the Smithsonian Institution, appeared in print in 1848. In their preface they note of the mounds and earthworks that:
The importance of a complete and speedy examination of the whole field cannot be over-estimated. The operations of the elements, the shifting channels of the streams, the levelling hand of public improvement, and most efficient of all the slow but constant encroachments of agriculture, are fast destroying these monuments of ancient labor, breaking in upon their symmetry and obliterating their outlines. Thousands have already disappeared, or retain but slight and doubtful traces of their former proportions.”28
One of the reasons that Ancient Monuments is still useful today is that it provides the locations of many important mounds and earthworks that no longer exist. In 2011, in a paper published in American Antiquity, Jarrod Burks and Robert Cooke looked into the specific case of Ohio, where Squier and Davis had reported “approximately 88 earthwork sites” in 1848. Perhaps because of the fame brought to them by Ancient Monuments, 16 of these sites —18 percent of the total—are “now preserved whole or in part within parks.” Another 18 sites (20 percent) “are mostly or completely destroyed, with urban development and gravel mining being the primary destructive processes.” The remaining 54 sites (62 percent) are “now invisible at the surface.”29
So, to summarize, out of 88 Ohio sites put on record in 1848 by Squier and Davis, 54 are now “invisible,” 18 more are “destroyed,” and only 16 (just 18 percent of the total) are still in place–implying an effective loss of 82 percent or, in plain English, 82 out of every 100 sites.
What, then, are we to make of David J. Meltzer’s presumably authoritative introduction to the 150th anniversary reissue of Ancient Monuments, which informs us that Ohio’s Ross County alone was estimated by Squier and Davis in 1848 to contain “one hundred enclosures and five hundred mounds”?30
If that’s the correct figure, then all the other numbers change. Sixteen sites remaining out of 600 is quite a different matter from 16 out of 88 and amounts to a 97 percent loss.
On July 23, 2018, wanting to get to the bottom of this, I emailed Jarrod Burks, coauthor of the 2011 Antiquity paper.
His first point was to remind me that the focus in his paper was not on earthworks in Ohio in general but only on those “depicted in Squier and Davis—88 sites. There are many hundreds of earthwork sites (those with enclosures) in Ohio … and we keep finding more.”
As to the specific issue of the discrepancy between Meltzer’s figures and his own, Burks explained:
I was counting actually sites with enclosures depicted in maps in Squier and Davis. This comes from individual maps of sites, like the map of High Bank Works, and from unique sites depicted on their composite maps of select areas— like the area around Chillicothe. For example, they show the Steel Group site on that map but they do not have a separate, more detailed map of Steel.
So, when I say “enclosure site” I am referring to places with one through X enclosures. Hopewell Mound Group is one site though it has several enclosures. Cedar Bank is one site that has only one enclosure. Following this approach, Squier and Davis depict 88 sites with enclosures in their maps. There is no way there are 100 enclosure sites in Ross County, but there may be 100 enclosures. So far I have only found solid evidence for 37–38 enclosure sites in Ross County, and this includes some previously undocumented ones we have found in aerial photos and subsequently surveyed with geophysics. In fact, most of the 37–38 have been surveyed. … Still working on getting access to a few of them.
The Archaeological Atlas of Ohio (William C. Mills 1914) reports 586 enclosure sites in Ohio. Many of these are unconfirmed and/or lost since 1914, but we are working to find many of them. We have also found more not recorded in 1914. So, the total number of enclosure sites once in Ohio conservatively is 500– 1000. It could be double or more.
I had also asked Burks if he knew where I might find estimates of the sort that he had made in Ohio for the Mississippi Valley as a whole—that is, how many mounds and earthworks remain and how many have been destroyed since the mid-nineteenth century.
“Getting numbers for all of the Mississippi Valley is a daunting task,” he replied, “especially if you include mounds. There are/were many tens of thousands of mounds in the eastern US. You might start by contacting the state historic preservation office in each state.”
I was surprised that no archaeologist had yet done this basic legwork and that there was no authoritative volume or paper I could immediately be referred to—since presumably at least some measure of what has been lost must be fundamental to the correct assessment of what remains. I therefore asked for confirmation that I would be representing the facts correctly if I were to “tell my readers that reliable figures simply don’t exist for the whole Mississippi Valley and that no archaeologist or other researcher has ever attempted to estimate what has been lost across the whole region as a result of agricultural, industrial and other encroachments since the mid-19th century.”
Burks replied immediately:
That’s a pretty broad statement. I don’t know that “no archaeologist or other researcher” has done that. George Milner produced a book on mounds 10–15 years ago. Perhaps he makes a statement like that? But I doubt it given how nearly impossible it is to track that. For example, in Ohio we say there once were 10,000+ mounds (a 19th century estimate). The state has only about 2000 that have been recorded in the modern list. Many have been destroyed but we are constantly recording new ones, many of which likely were known in the 19th century. So, hard to put numbers to it, but it’s true that many, many mounds have been destroyed.31
George R. Milner’s book The Moundbuilders arrived on my desk the following morning, but contains no information that adds significantly to what we already know about the loss of mound sites since the nineteenth century. Nor was David Meltzer able to come up with a figure, observing in reply to my query that “200+ years ago there was no systematic count of these earthworks, so we have no idea what the denominator should be for the equation of sites still extant / sites once present.”32
The good news is that sites are still being discovered (or probably more often rediscovered). The bad news is that it may be “nearly impossible” to track the “many, many” that have been destroyed.
All estimates are guesswork, but I suspect that Gregory Little’s diligent and thoroughly researched Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds and Earthworks, though not a mainstream source, is close to the truth when it calculates that 90 percent of all the Mississippi Valley sites have been destroyed and that only 10 percent remain.33
And lest such a ballpark figure sound too extreme let us remember, despite the conservationist rhetoric of our supposedly more enlightened age, that mounds and earthworks are still being destroyed in the twenty-first century.
Walmart seems to have a penchant for this. In 2001, for example, the Fenton Mounds, a pair of Native American burial mounds in Fenton, Missouri, dated between AD 600 and 1400, were leveled to make way for a Walmart Supercenter.34 A few years later, in August 2009, city leaders in Oxford, Alabama, approved the destruction of a 1,500-year-old Native American ceremonial mound because, once again, Walmart wanted the location.35 The developers began work, removing a substantial section of the mound, but a month later, following a public outcry, the media reported a change of heart:
A re-consecration ceremony was held this past weekend at a damaged Indian mound in Oxford, Alabama. … The 1,500-year-old sacred and archaeologically significant site was partially demolished during a taxpayer-funded economic development project, with the excavated dirt to be used as fill for construction of a Sam’s Club, a retail warehouse store owned by Walmart.36
What’s indicated here is a state of mind across a segment of the American population that sees no inherent cultural value in antiquities and believes firmly that the past has nothing to teach us that outweighs our need for yet another large store. I don’t mean to pick on Americans. Exactly the same state of mind exists in Britain, France, China, and virtually every other country in the world.
By encouraging disdain for the past, however, the cost of such an outlook in fast-growing America since the nineteenth century has been the mass destruction of ancient sites, notably including the loss of many thousands of the mounds and earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. Exactly how many thousands will probably remain a “known unknown” forever. But whatever the true number, it represents yet another level at which the “crime scene” of ancient America has been wiped down.
WIPING DOWN THE CRIME SCENE: BAD ARCHAEOLOGY
THOSE OF US WHO EXPLORE alternative approaches to prehistory are frequently accused by archaeologists and their friends in the media of being “pseudoscientists.” What, however, could provide a better example of truly damaging and misleading pseudoscience than the “Clovis First” paradigm that ruled American archaeology for more than 40 years with a wholly false doctrine taught to generations of students as fact? We saw in part 2 how this pseudoscientific theory of the peopling of the Americas, based on wildly irresponsible extrapolations from tiny data sets yet promoted by a powerful lobby of leading archaeologists, was, for a very long while, held to be so right, so correct, and so self-evidently true that any researchers who questioned it faced ridicule, ostracism by their colleagues, withdrawal of research grants, and ruined careers.
This kind of behavior in scholarship not only fails to serve the truth but actively undermines the search for it and, as such, has also played a significant part in wiping down the ancient American “crime scene.” How much was missed, and has since been built over or plowed under during those 40-plus years when it was considered heresy to investigate deposits older than Clovis for signs of a human presence? And how much wide-ranging and open-minded investigation into the true age and origins of the First Americans was postponed or entirely nipped in the bud at the same time? How many unexplored avenues do we owe to the absurd Clovis First dogma? How many doors did it close on how many promising initiatives? And how much public interest and curiosity in other possibilities did the pat answer “Clovis First” snuff out?
It’s been the same problem with another archaeological theory—the so called Pleistocene Overkill theory whereby all the megafauna were supposedly slaughtered by those same ruthlessly efficient Clovis hunters (who nevertheless proved insufficiently ruthless and efficient to survive the Younger Dryas onset). I’ve not gone into the details here—just too much academic bickering to impose upon the reader—but this theory, also, though not yet quite as dead as “Clovis First” (since it still has some advocates), has been “conclusively rejected” by increasing numbers of scholars in recent years.37
Although he lists archaeology and North American prehistory among his fields of study, Terry Jones, professor and department chair of social sciences at California Polytechnic State University, brings the benefit of an outsider’s perspective when he observes:
The Paleoindian Period (often defined as anything pre-dating 10,000 cal BP [i.e., 10,000 years ago]) is basically the domain of a small number of specialists who interpret it for everyone else. For the last 40 years these researchers have focused their interpretations on two closely related and intricately inter-connected theories: Clovis First and Pleistocene Overkill. During this time, Paleoindian research has also deteriorated into an intense if not hostile debate over these two competing but not mutually exclusive ideas. Much of the energy in this protracted dialog has been devoted to debunking or nullifying alternative hypotheses associated with these two theories. While this is standard practice in science, the degree to which the Paleoindian debate has been focused on deconstruction of opposing ideas rather than development of empirically solid, new ones has been extreme.38
This, too, is part of the wiping down of the North American “crime-scene.” Some limited but perhaps case-breaking clues to what really happened here around 12,800 years ago may remain. To the extent that the “detectives” involved in this paleo-CSI are more interested in ego contests than the truth, however, the truth may take a very long time to emerge.
Besides, there’s another aspect to the problem in the visceral resistance shown by a number of influential scholars to any suggestion that a cataclysm of any kind ushered in the onset of the Younger Dryas. These scholars themselves apparently believe, and so far as possible would like us to believe, that nothing really bad happened at the Younger Dryas Boundary—that, yes, there were extinctions, and yes, Clovis abruptly disappeared, but there is no mystery here, just a fairly routine and predictable combination of overkill and climate change. Terry Jones, a member of the Comet Research Group, refutes such reasoning at length in a paper in the Journal of Cosmology 39 and strongly advocates the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which, he points out:
has been introduced into North American archaeology at a time when the failings of the overkill model have been acknowledged by the majority of researchers. … Alternatives to overkill have long been focused on climate change associated with the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, but this idea has always been problematic because large animal populations had lived through previous interglacials without massive die offs. Something different seems to have happened in North America at the end of the Pleistocene, and that something was not a blitzkrieg by human hunters.
An extraterrestrial impact event seems to provide an exceptionally parsimonious explanation for a variety of patterns in the archaeological and paleontological records that are not accommodated by overkill.40
IN THE CROSSHAIRS
ANOTHER “PATTERN” FOR WHICH THE YDIH provides a parsimonious explanation is formed by the deep structural connections demonstrated in part 6 between the spiritual beliefs and “astro-geometry” of the ancient Egyptians and the spiritual beliefs and “astro-geometry” of the ancient Mississippians. The case I’ve sought to make throughout this book is that these two river valley civilizations were among several in the ancient world that inherited a shared legacy of knowledge and ideas from an earlier, “lost” civilization. Regardless of when that legacy was activated, or how its integrity was preserved over the many generations before it first manifests in the archaeological record, I’ve argued that its origins go back to the last Ice Age and predate the physical separation of the Old World from the New. The additional element of parsimony that the YDIH brings to this case, therefore, comes in the form of the impact-related earth changes documented at the Younger Dryas Boundary. These involved not only radical climate change and sea-level rise, not only global wildfires and a subsequent “impact winter,” not only mass extinctions of large animal species and the abrupt disappearance of Clovis but also, in the combination of all these ills, a realistic mechanism deadly, substantial, drastic, and sustained enough to devastate and destroy even a technologically advanced civilization.
If a disaster on such a scale were to recur today, our civilization would not survive it and all our works would crumble into ruin within a few millennia. I therefore see no reason in principle why the global cataclysm indicated in the Greenland ice cores that we know unfolded at the onset of the Younger Dryas between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago should not have brought an end to that previous high civilization of the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”—the civilization of the “Ancient Ones,” the civilization of the “First Time”—that is recalled with awe in myths and traditions from all around the world.
Although there were significant impacts in Greenland, the Pacific, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and the Near East, the evidence points conclusively toward North America as the epicenter of the Younger Dryas cataclysm and to the North American ice cap specifically as the target for the largest swarm of comet fragments.
Almost by default, therefore, although the crime scene has been brutally compromised, and although the lead investigators have a priori ruled the possibility out, North America is the most likely location on earth where a civilization could have thrived during the Ice Age and been destroyed at the onset of the Younger Dryas.
Not only that. 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. 41
These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundamentals of civilization, including religion, agriculture, and architecture. In Heaven’s Mirror (1998) I speculate that it is perhaps as a result of their efforts that we find the basic doctrines of the same sky-ground religion, essentially the same beliefs about the afterlife journey of the soul, and the same architectural and geometrical principles as far afield as South America, Easter Island, Micronesia, Japan, Cambodia, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Malta, Spain, and Britain.
Because the earth is a sphere it is technically true that any point could be selected as central to the radiation of these ideas. As I’ve been researching 466 this book, however, my perspective has changed and what I see now when I look at the globe are two great oceans, the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other, with the longitudinal sprawl of the Americas running between them and forming, literally, the center of the world.
North America, we now know, was scoured, burned, frozen, and flooded by the Younger Dryas cataclysm and has since been systematically ransacked by Western greed and poorly served by Western scholars. Although less severely affected by the impacts of the Younger Dryas, South America also suffered all these assaults. And just as in North America, where millions of square kilometers have been rendered opaque to archaeologists because the “crime scene” has been so successfully wiped down, so, too, in South America we have 5 million square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest that remain almost as unfamiliar to archaeology as the dark side of the moon.
The two great continents of the Americas are not separate and have never been separate, either before or after the Ice Age. North America is in itself a huge landmass, with vast regions where little or no archaeology has ever been done. If a lost civilization was here in the Ice Age we cannot rule out the possibility that its physical artifacts and remains might yet be found. Given that many Native American cultures share myths of the destruction of a former world, a subterranean interval in the womb of the earth, and then an emergence into our present world,42 the most fruitful direction in which to look might be for places of shelter and refuge deep underground.
The other region with immense scope for further inquiry is the Amazon. When North America passed through that cataclysmic episode between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago, South America would have seemed like the obvious place for survivors of the lost civilization to take refuge. This would have been all the more likely if, as I speculate, South American hunter gatherers had already been “adopted” and gifted with useful know-how in much the same way that Clovis appears to have been.
Even if the human story is badly broken in North America, with big pieces obviously missing, it’s possible that a more complete account awaits us in the Amazon.
I can hear the mainstream protests already: “The whole idea of a lost civilization is nonsense!” “Pseudoscience!” “A waste of research funds!”
But the mainstream, which has wasted research funds for decades fruitlessly pursuing nonsensical fantasies like “Clovis First,” should have learned by now to keep an open mind.
30
THE KEY TO EARTH’S LOST CIVILIZATION
466s
SINCE I BEGAN WORK ON Fingerprints of the Gods in the early 1990s I’ve been an advocate for the unorthodox notion that an advanced civilization flourished during the Ice Age and was destroyed in the cataclysms that brought the Ice Age to an end. I’ve written my books to make the case and provide supporting evidence for this possibility. I’ve suggested a number of locations that I feel would be worth looking into—including, most controversially, Antarctica—and I invested nearly 10 years of my life in arduous and sometimes highly risky scuba-diving adventures searching for man-made structures submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age.
So I’ve walked the walk, but it’s been a bit like tracking the Invisible Man. There are signs of his presence everywhere—he has touched this, he has reshaped that, this was how he did mathematics, these were his beliefs—but the Man himself remains concealed. There’s not even the option to guess the appearance and character of the lost civilization by wrapping its face in bandages like the hero of the H. G. Wells novel. It’s much more elusive. Physical traces that might point to its homeland have either been so completely demolished or so thoroughly hidden from view that they are extremely difficult to find, especially so by an archaeological community already pre convinced of their nonexistence and therefore unwilling to look for them.
What’s tantalizing, however, is that the influence of the lost civilization declares itself repeatedly in the commonalities shared by supposedly unconnected cultures all around the ancient world. The deeper you dig, the more obvious it becomes that they did not get these shared features from one another but from a remote common ancestor of them all. We see only the effects and modes of expression of that inheritance, not its source, and all searches for the key to the mystery have thus far been in vain.
My proposal, simply, is that America offers us that key, and that it does so because of the unique circumstances of its prehistory. Unlike the interconnected landmasses of Africa and Eurasia, and unlike Australia, which was relatively accessible by sea from the extreme southeast of Asia, we’ve seen that the Americas were isolated during much of the Ice Age—a geological epoch that lasted, let us not forget, from around 2.6 million years ago until around 12,000 years ago.1 In this long geological epoch, however, there were several periods of temporary climate warming when the macro continent of North, Central, and South America would have become accessible. Two of these periods of enhanced accessibility occurred within the known time frame of past human migrations and it is the most recent (the so-called Bølling-Allerød interstadial, dated from around 14,700 years ago to around 12,800 years ago 2 ) that archaeologists focused their attention on for far too long in their attempts to reconstruct the true story of the peopling of the Americas. I think paleontologist Tom Deméré is on to something HUGE with this plea that he makes to the scientific community, discussed in chapter 5:
what we’re saying to everyone, really, is open your mind to the possibility that instead of the peopling of the Americas being associated with the last deglaciation event [the Bølling-Allerød interstadial] … what we should actually be looking at is the deglaciation event before that—between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago.3 You get the same sort of scenario with a landbridge and ice sheets retreating and you get that same sweet spot between really low sea levels and a blockage by ice sheets, and ice sheets gone and the flooding of the landbridge.
Deméré’s suggestion still remains unpalatable to some archaeologists, yet it satisfactorily explains the growing mass of evidence that the Americas were peopled many tens of millennia before the Bølling-Allerød interstadial (see chapters 4, 5, and 6). More than that, this hitherto unimagined possibility of a very old (rather than very young) human presence in the New World helps make sense of the complex genetic heritage of Native Americans— explored in chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10. Embedded in this evidence is the mind dilating mystery of the strong Australasian DNA signal present among certain isolated tribes of the Amazon rainforest. It’s a recent discovery and highly significant because it raises the possibility, as discussed in chapter 10, that transoceanic voyages were being undertaken more than 12,000 years ago —a notion hitherto considered impossible by archaeologists. If the technology and geodetic know-how to make such voyages were indeed present in the world during the Ice Age (see appendix 2), then we are, by definition, dealing with a lost civilization.
And this of course brings us to the mystery of the Amazon itself. Was it in some way “touched” by a civilization advanced enough to have explored all the world’s oceans during the Ice Age? And if so, has any evidence of that influence remained? In chapters 11 through 17 I address these questions and present evidence that human settlement in the Amazon is extremely ancient, that great cities and large populations once flourished there, that ancient scientific knowledge of the properties of plants persists among Amazonian peoples to this day, that there was very early domestication of useful agricultural species, that the rainforest itself is an anthropocentric, cultivated, ordered “garden,” and that a “miraculous” man-made soil—terra preta—was developed in the Amazon in deep antiquity, bringing fertility to otherwise agriculturally unproductive lands and imbued with astonishing powers of self-renewal that modern scientists marvel at and do not yet fully understand.
In parallel, and again a recent discovery, is the presence of gigantic geometrical earthworks and astronomically aligned stone circles in the Amazon. I show in chapters 15 and 16 that these remarkable structures share significant scientific “memes” with the henges and stone circles of the British Isles and with other works of ancient, sacred architecture all around the world. I suggest this is not coincidental, nor due to the direct influence of one region upon the other, but that it bears witness instead to a shared legacy, a shared package of sacred geometrical and astronomical blueprints, inherited in both these widely separated regions from an earlier civilization lost to history.
Chapter 17 returns to the theme of plant gnosis in the Amazon, looks into the mysteries of the vision-inducing brew ayahuasca, and hears the words of ayahuasca shamans, who see geometric patterns as portals to other realms of existence—specifically to the afterlife realm or land of the dead.
Indeed, the very name ayahuasca means “Vine of the Dead” or “Vine of Souls.”
In chapters 18 through 21 I explore the deep structural similarities between the Amazonian geoglyphs and the great mounds and geometric earthworks of the Mississippi Valley. It’s not simply a matter of appearances. Mississippian religious ideas, like those of the ancient Amazon, were focused on the mystery of death and on certain very specific notions concerning the afterlife journey—and destination—of the soul.
I show that these notions are extremely ancient in North America and trace them back into remote prehistory through a succession of sites such as Poverty Point, Lower Jackson Mound, Watson Brake, and Conly, where the same astronomical and geometric “memes” consistently reappear.
Chapter 22 recounts my own close encounter, as a teenager, with the mystery of death and how my interest in this mystery was reawakened when I first studied the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead many years later. I describe the Duat, the afterlife realm as depicted by the ancient Egyptians, and the soul’s ascent to the constellation Orion and thence through a portal, or “doorway in the sky,” to a journey along the Milky Way. And I describe my astonishment, on a visit to Moundville in Alabama, to learn that what appeared to be exactly the same system of ideas involving Orion, the Milky Way, and a journey to the realm of the dead was also a predominant motif of the Mississippian civilization.
In chapters 23 and 24 I offer a detailed investigation of Mississippian and ancient Egyptian ideas concerning the afterlife journey—and destiny—of the soul. The parallels, in my view, are too remarkable, too many, and too detailed to be explained by coincidence. Nor do they point to a direct influence of ancient Egypt on the Mississippian civilization or vice versa— chronologically impossible because they existed at completely different times. As with the geoglyphs, what is indicated here is a legacy of ideas inherited in both these widely separated areas from a remote common source as yet unidentified by archaeologists.
Could that common source, that lost civilization, have had its Ice Age homeland in North America?
I set out to answer that question in chapters 25 through 27, where I present detailed evidence of the immense cataclysm that shook the earth around 12,800 years ago—a cataclysm that was global in its consequences but that had its epicenter in North America.
For more than two decades, while eliciting patronizing sneers and sometimes extreme hostility from the scholarly establishment, I’ve consistently maintained that “my” proposed lost civilization was erased from history in a global cataclysm somewhere around 12,500 years ago. At first, the very suggestion that there had been a cataclysm at all, and that it might be of immense relevance to the past of our species, was singled out for particular ridicule, but then came a mass of new evidence that shifted the balance of the argument decisively. Within the resolution limits of radiocarbon calibration (where at such a remove margins of error of two or three centuries are the norm), the date for the cataclysm of around 12,500 years ago that I first put into print in 1995 is extremely close to the date of around 12,800 years ago that scientists have much more recently established for the impacts of multiple fragments of the giant disintegrating comet that precipitated the catastrophic onset of the Younger Dryas.
It seems, then, that there was a global cataclysm—and at more or less the very time I had proposed.
But so what? Just because I got lucky on the timing of the cataclysm doesn’t mean I was right that it wiped out an advanced prehistoric civilization. Show us its homeland, the skeptics therefore quite reasonably demanded.
This book is, in part, my response to that challenge.
MORE THAN ENOUGH TIME FOR
A CIVILIZATION TO DEVELOP
HITHERTO ICE AGE NORTH AMERICA has been seen as an uninhabited archaeological vacuum, awaiting the arrival of culture with the first human migrations across the Bering land bridge. Because of the entrenched belief that these migrations came relatively late, at a time when our ancestors had been “out of Africa” and already established in Europe, Asia, and Australia for tens of millennia, there was no reason to seek the origins of civilization in 473 such an unlikely place. In the light of the new evidence on the very ancient peopling of the Americas that we have explored, however, and of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, I suggest that the balance of the argument has once again shifted decisively. Whereas before it was reasonable to ask why the homeland of the lost civilization should have been in North America, the more pertinent question today is why should it not have been in North America—the continent that suffered more severe disruption than any other and that had so much of its rich prehistory pounded, pulverized, and swept away by the devastating events of 12,800 years ago.
Not for the first time in this investigation I’m reminded of what Tom Deméré told me when he showed me the finds from the Cerutti Mastodon Site at The Nat in San Diego:
If you go to a place and you absolutely rule out in advance that humans were there 130,000 years ago, then you’re clearly not going to find evidence that they were. But if you go with an open mind and dig deep enough in the right places, then who knows what you might turn up.
Tom was talking about the conclusion that he and his team had reached concerning the mastodon remains now on show in his museum, namely, as we saw in chapter 5, that they had been scavenged by human beings 130,000 years ago. His point was that an ingrained perception that no humans could have reached the Americas by such an early date had for too long inhibited investigation of alternative scenarios—and that perhaps much more evidence of a very early presence would be found if a more targeted and determined search were made.
Using rocks intelligently to smash mastodon femurs so that the marrow can be extracted is certainly not the work of a lost civilization of any kind. It is the work of ancestral humans, perhaps anatomically modern, perhaps not. But the real importance of the Cerutti Mastodon Site is that it provides the first solid evidence—solid enough to make it into the pages of Nature—of a truly ancient human occupation of the New World. If humans were in North America 130,000 years ago (more than twice as long as the span of the known human presence in Europe), that gives them 117,000 years to have evolved a high civilization before the Younger Dryas cataclysm struck.
And why should they not have done so? What is particularly special or inviolable about the so-called march toward civilization that seems to begin with the onset of the Neolithic at the end of the Younger Dryas? Why did it happen then and not before? Why shouldn’t there have been an earlier “march towards civilization” that began with an earlier peopling of the Americas—not with the last deglaciation event but, as Tom Deméré suggested, with “the deglaciation event before that, between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago?”
Thereafter, until the next episode of deglaciation (the Bølling-Allerød interstadial) in the 2,000 years immediately preceding the Younger Dryas, all scholars agree that the vast landmass of the Americas, straddling half the globe, was cut off from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and by mountains of ice. Migrants from Asia, even when Beringia was accessible, could not get in. But for those humans who were already south of the ice cap 120,000 years ago, the Americas must have been a paradise, safe from incursions by any other peoples and blessed with an astonishing abundance and variety of natural resources. The New World offered conditions utterly different from those available on any other continent, so I see no reason why the very first of the First Americans should not also have followed a radically different path from other humans—a path that more rapidly veered away from hunting and gathering and that led ultimately to the emergence of a precociously early civilization.
MYSTERIOUS POWERS
IF THE YOUNGER DRYAS EARTH changes wiped a prehistoric civilization from the record, then can anything useful ever be said about the character of that civilization?
Thus far (extrapolating from the belief systems of its descendants) I’ve suggested that its spirituality must have involved profound explorations of the mystery of death. I’ve suggested that accurate ancient maps depicting the earth as it looked during the Ice Age imply that it had developed a level of maritime technology at least as advanced as that possessed by European seafarers in the late eighteenth century. I’ve suggested that it had mastered sophisticated geometry and astronomy. I’ve also suggested that such a “lost” civilization, maturing in isolation for tens of thousands of years in North America, might have taken a very different path from our own and might have developed technologies that archaeologists would be unable to recognize because they operated on principles or manipulated forces unknown to modern science.
In his 1920 study The Interpretation of Radium, Nobel Prize winner Frederick Soddy, one of the pioneers of nuclear physics, speculated as to the former existence of “a wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilization of which all other relic has disappeared.”4 He drew attention to the seemingly limitless stores of nuclear energy that were in his time understood to be possessed by certain elements such as radium and compared these to the fabulous “philosopher’s stone” credited in ancient traditions with mysterious powers of transmutation and regeneration. The similarity, he felt, was no coincidence but “an echo from one of many previous epochs in the unrecorded history of the world”5 :
Can we not read into [such traditions] … justification for the belief that some former forgotten race of men attained not only to the knowledge we have so recently won, but also to the power that is not yet ours? Science has reconstructed the story of the past as one of a continuous Ascent of Man to the present-day level of his powers. In face of the circumstantial evidence existing of this steady upward progress of the race, the traditional view of the Fall of Man from a higher former state has come to be more and more difficult to understand. From our new standpoint the two points of view are by no means so irreconcilable as they appeared. A race which could transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. If we can judge from what our engineers accomplish with their comparatively restricted supplies of energy, such a race could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden. Possibly they could even explore the outer realms of space. … The legend of the Fall of Man … may be all that has survived of such a time before, for some unknown reason, the whole world was plunged back again under the undisputed sway of Nature, to begin once more its upward toilsome journey through the ages.6
In the 2020s (as would not have been the case in the 1920s) there’s a good chance archaeologists would recognize an ancient technology designed to exploit nuclear power—and if they didn’t, they would certainly be able to call in someone who did. This is because our own science has now advanced to a level where nuclear power is familiar to us. By contrast, Soddy’s imagining of a lost high civilization of prehistoric antiquity that had fully penetrated the mysteries of the atom was written in the infancy of our risky dance with nukes—25 years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 35 years before the first nuclear power stations came online. A man of his time, therefore, when the almost magical potential of the new technology was becoming apparent but when its downsides were largely unknown, Soddy was all idealism. He could not have anticipated that the immense power of the atom, once fully harnessed, would never be used to transform deserts, thaw the poles, or “make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden,” but would instead be deployed primarily for destructive purposes in the form of bombs and missiles, or for generating electricity at the long-term cost of poisoning the earth.
It is not necessarily the case that an earlier advanced civilization would have chosen the nuclear path so enthusiastically envisaged for it by Soddy. Nor must it inevitably have taken the path of leverage and mechanical advantage that historical civilizations have so doggedly trudged down for the past few thousand years on their way to the “machine age.” I return again to my point. Since we are considering the possibility of “a wholly unknown and unsuspected civilization,” we must also consider the possibility that it might have developed wholly unknown and unsuspected ways of manipulating matter and energy—which we might therefore be unable to recognize even if the evidence was right before our eyes.
Perhaps this is why modern archaeologists, trained to analyze ancient construction techniques through the reference frame of leverage and mechanical advantage, are unable to provide convincing explanations for a number of significant architectural problems of the ancient world.
Take the case of the massive beams, quarried from solid granite and weighing in the range of 70 tons each, incorporated into the core of Egypt’s Great Pyramid in the series of “relieving chambers” stacked on top of the “King’s Chamber” more than 50 meters (164 feet) above ground level. None of the wishful scholarly claims of megaliths somehow being slid “easily” into place on wooden rollers or on lubricated sand will work at this elevation. The fact of the matter is that the hulking beams forming the floors and ceilings of the relieving chambers are where they are—and that in order to get there they had to be lifted more than 50 meters into the air.
Or consider the Trilithon at Baalbek in Lebanon. Here, 20 feet above the ground, three immense ashlars weighing more than 800 tons each have been placed end to end within a wall of smaller blocks and so tightly fitted that the joints can barely be seen. It wouldn’t be an easy feat even with twenty-first century technology, so how could it possibly have been accomplished thousands of years ago?
Let us also not forget the marvel of Sacsayhuamán, perched on a ridge above the city of Cuzco in the Peruvian Andes at an altitude of 3,700 meters (12,140 feet). I have made the case in previous books that this supposed Inca site was already enormously ancient at the time of the Incas and has been wrongly attributed to them. Of particular relevance here are its colossal megalithic walls arranged in a series of zigzags and consisting of intricately formed polygonal blocks. No two blocks among the thousands at Sacsayhuamán are the same shape, some weigh more than 300 tons, and all are so tightly interlocked in all dimensions that the edge of a piece of paper cannot be slipped between the joints. Efforts by archaeologists to reconstruct how the work at Sacsayhuamán was done have proved as ludicrous as a failed attempt in 1978 to build a midget-size scale model of the Great Pyramid— and once again this is because the only reference frame deemed acceptable, involving leverage and mechanical advantage, is unable to account for many of the more complex anomalies.
There is an answer, but it involves looking outside the box.
At the Great Pyramid, at Baalbek, and at Sacsayhuamán, as well as at numerous other mysterious sites (such as the almost unbelievable Kailasa Temple, hewn out of solid basalt at Ellora in the Indian state of Maharashtra), intriguing ancient traditions persist. These traditions speak of meditating sages, the use of certain plants, the focused attention of initiates, miraculously speedy workmanship, and special kinds of chanting or tones played on musical instruments in connection with the lifting, placing, softening, and moulding of megaliths. My guess, confronted by the global distribution of such narratives and by the stark reality of the sites themselves, is that we’re dealing with the reverberations of an ancient technology we don’t understand, operating on principles that are utterly unknown to us.
Soddy, imagining a lost civilization that had developed machines powered by nuclear energy, speaks of exploring the outer realms of space and manipulating the global climate, but I beg to differ. I don’t think nuclear power was involved and I don’t think machines were involved, either. As I near the end of my life’s work, and of this book, I suppose the time has come to say in print what I have already said many times in public Q&A sessions at my lectures, that in my view the science of the lost civilization was primarily focused upon what we now call psi capacities that deployed the enhanced and focused power of human consciousness to channel energies and to manipulate matter.
Although psi research is still undertaken at a small number of universities and institutes in Britain, the United States, and Russia, it is generally ridiculed and sidelined by modern mainstream scientists. This categorically does not mean that “there’s nothing to psi” but instead speaks volumes about the nature of science today, which is heavily dominated by materialist thinkers whose reference frame has little room for “spooky action at a distance.” The phrase (which was Einstein’s) refers specifically to the paradoxes of quantum entanglement but applies equally well to other alleged “non-local” phenomena such as:
1. telepathy (“communication from one person to another of thoughts, feelings, desires, etc, involving mechanisms that cannot be understood in terms of known scientific laws”);
2. remote viewing (“the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception”);
3. telekinesis (“the movement of a body caused by thought or willpower without the application of physical force”);
4. healing powers (whereby patients are successfully cured of their ailments by nonphysical and nonmedical means)
My speculation, which I will not attempt to prove here or to support with evidence but merely present for consideration, is that the advanced civilization I see evolving in North America during the Ice Age had transcended leverage and mechanical advantage and learned to manipulate matter and energy by deploying powers of consciousness that we have not yet begun to tap. In action such powers would look something like magic even today and must have seemed supernatural and godlike to the hunter-gatherers who shared the Ice Age world with these mysterious adepts.
Keep in mind that we are talking about a Native American civilization growing to maturity at some point during the long interval between the scavenging of the Cerutti mastodon 130,000 years ago and the cataclysmic onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago. Though we may never know what set it on its own brilliant, idiosyncratic path, there is every reason to suppose that its people would have been closely related genetically, linguistically—and at first culturally—to other early Native American populations who remained at the hunter-gatherer stage. It follows, therefore, if this hypothetical civilization had sciences, that they should be rooted and grounded in a recognizably Native American reference frame, and therefore would likely have developed under the guidance of shamans and using the methods of shamanism.
Telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing, and healing powers are, of course, all capacities believed to be within the repertoire of master shamans. Indeed ayahuasca, which lies at the heart of Amazonian shamanism, first entered mainstream Western consciousness under the name Telepathine. In 1952, for example, on a quest in Ecuador for the visionary brew, William Burroughs wrote [his spellings; emphasis mine] that he had failed to “score for Yage, Bannisteria caapi, Telepathine, ayahuasca—all names for the same drug.”7
He was determined to find it, however, because of its “tremendous implications” and the “mystery” surrounding it, adding, “I’m the man who can dig it.”8
The reason behind the choice of the name Telepathine, which began to be applied to ayahuasca as early as 1905,9 was that Amazonian tribes making regular use of the brew repeatedly stated that it facilitated telepathic communication. The mechanistic Western mind of the twenty-first century scoffs at such claims, but leading ayahuasca researcher Benny Shanon, professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, concedes that “reports of paranormal experiences with Ayahuasca abound:”
Practically everyone who has had more than a rudimentary exposure to the brew reports having had telepathic experiences. Many such reports also appear in the anthropological literature. … Similarly many of my informants said that without overt verbal articulation they could pass messages to other people present in the Ayahuasca session. … Likewise, many indicated that they received such messages from other persons or beings. Usually, in visions in which drinkers feel that they are receiving messages or instructions from beings and creatures, the communication in question is said to be achieved without words—directly from thought to thought.10
In the modern world we are so fixated on our machines and devices that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without them. But if telepathy is real— a debate we won’t be able to get into here—and if its use and projection could be refined and made reliable, then who would need cell phones or Facebook or any of the other means of communication that are so ubiquitous today? Once again we would own our own conversations rather than having to depend on some intermediary or “platform” to relay them!
Might it not be the case that psi powers have always been part of the human heritage? Part of our “Golden Age”? Perhaps these powers atrophied after the Younger Dryas cataclysm broke our connection to our roots? And perhaps, in the aftermath of the cataclysm, the resourcefulness of our species was refocused on techniques of leverage and mechanical advantage and a negative feedback loop developed that ushered in the march of the machines and saw psi banished to the margins of human experience?
REVERSE ENGINEERING THE SYSTEM
I’LL NOT SPECULATE FURTHER HERE about the lost technology of a destroyed civilization. There are tantalizing hints and clues but unfortunately even the first archaeological steps that might make solid progress possible have never been taken. There’s more to work with, however, when we come to religious and spiritual beliefs that, according to the Edfu Building Texts, it was the duty of the survivors of the lost civilization to preserve and to replicate wherever in the world they could find receptive ground.
In the twenty-first century, Christianity and Islam—upstart religions of the past 2,000 years—exercise effective monopolies over the spiritual lives of more than half the world’s population. Their simple formula of one creator god (male, of course), and of a heavenly paradise for His faithful paired with a hellish place of punishment for disbelievers and evildoers, brilliantly removes the need for serious thought. All that’s required to join the elect is to tick the right boxes and maintain a state of rigid, abiding, unquestioning BELIEF in the authority of the sacred texts and the utterances of the priests and the mullahs self-appointed to interpret them.
Perhaps it’s the easiest option, requiring the smallest quantum of uncomfortable reflection, but it’s certainly not the only one, and neither is atheism—which also rests on unproven beliefs—in any way its opposite. The full range of human spiritual potential cannot be brutally reduced to believing that a god exists or to believing that a god does not exist. Agnosticism is often proposed as the only alternative, but there are far more subtle and even “scientific” ways forward, explored confidently by our ancestors many millennia ago, that deserve serious attention. Important elements survive in some of the more esoteric aspects of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism— notably in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which bears striking similarities to the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and descends, I suggest, from the same common source. There is much among the Maya (reported in Fingerprints of the Gods and in Heaven’s Mirror) that adds to the picture. Meanwhile, Amazonian shamanism and the strangely interlinked religions of the Nile and Mississippi Valleys open further vistas of understanding.
In particular, whether we speak of the visionary “leap” to the Milky Way and to the Underworld that lies beyond it made by Tukano shamans under the influence of ayahuasca, or of Mississippian ideas concerning the “Path of Souls,” or of the ancient Egyptian afterlife journey through the Duat, I think the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the material presented in previous chapters is that we are dealing with a complex and sophisticated system of shared ideas inherited from a remote common ancestor. And just as our DNA can be “reverse engineered” by geneticists to reveal much about our forebears, so, too, the shared segments of cultural DNA in the religions of the Mississippi Valley and ancient Egypt give us insights into the character of the vastly more ancient predecessor religion that spawned them both. That ancient religion—the religion of the lost civilization—was itself, I would contend, a highly specialized offshoot of Native American shamanism and its primary focus, as is the focus of all shamanism, was the mystery of death.
WHAT HAPPENS TO US WHEN WE DIE?
OUR SOCIETY PREFERS TO IGNORE and marginalize the problem of death. It is an ever-present reality for all of us—much less when we are young, much more as we grow old—and yet we do all we can to avoid it. We know in an abstract sense that it awaits us, but meanwhile we prefer to dwell as little as possible on its implications and to live our lives as though they will never end.
The reference frame out of which such thinking emerges cannot be pinned on any of the Abrahamic religions but belongs to the scientism of the modern age, which holds that we are entirely material creatures, random accidents of chemistry and biology, that there is no transcendent meaning or purpose to our existence, that there is no such thing as the soul, that death is final, and that there is no “afterlife.” If those are your beliefs, which are only a subset of wider beliefs that strip the universe of spirit and conceive of it as some sort of gigantic, unconscious automaton, then of course it makes sense to abjure all thoughts of death and to postpone death for as long as possible, even though many ancient traditions, despised by the scientific mind-set, warn that unwillingness to die produces unfavorable results. “As here in America,” comments W. Y. Evans-Wentz, the translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
every effort is apt to be made by a materialistically inclined medical science to postpone, and thereby to interfere with, the death-process. Very often the dying is not permitted to die in his or her own home or in a normal, unperturbed mental condition when the hospital has been reached. To die in hospital, probably while under the mind-benumbing influence of some opiate, or else under the stimulation of some drug injected into the body to enable the dying to cling to life as long as possible, cannot but be productive of a very undesirable death, as undesirable as that of a shell-shocked soldier on a battlefield. Even as the normal result of the birth-process may be aborted by malpractices, so, similarly, may the normal result of the death-process be aborted.11
Matters would have been handled very differently, I propose, in an advanced Native American civilization that had not severed its roots with shamanism—as we have done—but had instead evolved forms of science and technology that emerged directly from shamanistic preoccupations and shamanistic experiences. Rather than turning its back on death, I expect that such a civilization would have confronted and investigated every aspect of the mystery, and would certainly have deployed trance techniques with scientific objectivity and discipline to explore and test the reality status of the “Otherworlds” and “Underworlds” encountered in vision.
It is further evidence of a remote common source behind some widespread religious motifs that one of the most famous myths of the ancient Greeks— the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice—was also present, long before European contact, in the ancient pre-Columbian cultures of North America.12 Some details vary, as of course do the names of the central characters and the general setting, but the underlying structure remains the same 13—(1) a wife or sweetheart (Eurydice) dies prematurely; (2) her husband or lover (Orpheus) follows her soul to the Underworld and persuades its ruler to let her return with him to the land of the living; (3) Eurydice’s release is agreed on condition that she walk behind Orpheus as they make the return journey from the Underworld and that under no circumstances should he set eyes on her until they reach the land of the living; (4) at the last moment, overcome with love, Orpheus cannot resist glancing over his shoulder at his wife and in that instant she is cast back into the Underworld that she can henceforth never leave.
So compellingly similar are the Native American and Greek versions that leading scholar of religions Ake Hultkrantz dedicated an immense monograph to the mystery, published in Stockholm in 1957, titled The North American Indian Orpheus Tradition.14 Meanwhile his contemporary, Canadian ethnographer Charles Marius Barbeau, proposed that the Greek and Native American stories must both be offshoots of some much older core narrative and concluded, “The worldwide diffusion from an unknown source of a tale so typically classical as Orpheus and Eurydice must have required millenniums.”15
Of course I agree that the wide distribution of localized versions of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth suggests the great antiquity of the common source from which they all descend. But what I find equally interesting is that the foundations of the narrative clearly lie in the concepts of the afterlife journey of the soul and the duality of spirit and matter so central to the religious beliefs of ancient Egypt and the ancient Mississippi Valley. Could it be that what we have in these superficially separate but deeply interconnected systems are the surviving threads from a once immense tapestry of thought about the human condition, our place in the cosmos, and the meaning of life and death?
And just as our own sciences today are capable of highly sophisticated interventions and manipulations in the realm of matter, might it not be that the sciences of the lost civilization were capable of equally effective interventions and manipulations in the realm of spirit—and possibly, therefore, had accumulated veridical information concerning dimensions of reality about which we ourselves are presently entirely ignorant?
For those who believe that all notions of “spirit” are fantasy, that consciousness expires with the physical body, and that any form of life after death is therefore impossible, the notion of investing time, resources, and ingenuity in developing a “science of death”—perhaps better termed a “science of the afterlife” or even a “science of immortality”—sounds like the worst kind of wishful thinking. The consequence, described so eloquently by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, is that from the materialistic perspective the only valid application of science to the problem of death is in the outfitting of hospitals and the preparation of medicines to “ease” the passing and—if the deceased is otherwise in good physical condition—to recycle his or her organs.
But what if our materialist science, which has a pedigree of only a few hundred years since the dawn of the so-called Age of Reason in the late seventeenth century, is fundamentally incomplete in its analysis of the nature of reality and of the phenomenon of death? And what if the far older tradition of the afterlife journey of the soul manifested in ancient Egypt and in the ancient Mississippi Valley, and by Amazonian shamans to this day, conceals deep truths?
If that were the case, then Western scientific materialism might have led us down a very dark and dangerous path indeed—one with repercussions across eternity.
In Tibetan Buddhism the afterlife realm is known as the Bardo—literally “the Between.” Just like the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Mississippian oral and iconographic traditions, the purpose of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is to serve as a guidebook and instruction manual for the soul on its postmortem journey through this strange parallel dimension.
“The Between,” explains prominent American Buddhist scholar Robert A. F. Thurman, is “a time of crisis after death when the soul (the very subtle mind-body) is in its most highly fluid state.”16 It is a time of extraordinary danger but also of extraordinary opportunity:
If the good person, who has a strong momentum of good evolutionary action, is unprepared for the Between, he or she can lose an enormous amount of evolutionary progress in the twinkling of an eye by becoming frightened and hiding in darkness. Similarly, a bad person, who has a great weight of negative evolution, if well prepared for the Between, can overcome immense eons of wretched lives by bravely shooting for the light. After all, a tiny achievement on the subtle plane can have a powerful impact on the gross. The soul in the Between can directly modify, just with creative imagination, what the Buddhists call “the spiritual genes” it carries with it. The Between voyager has temporarily an immensely heightened intelligence, extraordinary powers of concentration, special abilities of clairvoyance and teleportation, flexibility to become whatever can be imagined and the openness to be radically transformed by a thought or a vision or an instruction. This is indeed why the Between traveler can become instantly liberated just by understanding where he or she is in the Between, what the reality is, where the allies are, and where the dangers.17
Western science possesses unprecedented knowledge of the material realm over which it has achieved extensive mastery. We should not assume, however, that this means it is also automatically in possession of superior knowledge that refutes the Tibetan “Science of Death” (the phrase that Robert Thurman uses to describe the teachings in The Tibetan Book of the Dead 18). On the contrary, since Western science has shunned investigation of the afterlife because of the unevidenced preconception that there is no such thing, we should rather accept that Tibetan Buddhism, which has devoted long centuries of intelligent study to the matter, may be far ahead of us. Moreover, as I’ve argued, The Tibetan Book of the Dead descends from the same vastly older progenitor that also gave rise to the ancient Egyptian and Mississippian systems and therefore might potentially be harnessed, like them, to the task of reconstructing that progenitor.
My sense is that the lost civilization, as might be expected with its proposed shamanic origins, was not much interested in material things. Like many other Native American cultures, its primary goals were not to do with the acquisition of status or wealth but instead were focused, through vision quests and right living, on the perfection of the soul. From the complexity and deep wisdom that still shines through in its offspring religions, I suggest that it took these inquiries very far into regions of mystery that in our culture even quantum physicists and scientists engaged with virtual reality have barely begun to contemplate. In order to prepare its initiates thoroughly so that they might be “well equipped” for the ultimate journey of death—surely a matter of far greater significance than any material concerns—the direct exploration of parallel dimensions would, as noted earlier, almost certainly have been undertaken. Had this investigation been allowed to proceed uninterrupted it might by now have transcended space, time, and matter entirely, but 12,800 years ago a deadly mass of matter in the form of the Younger Dryas comet was flung at it and brought a pause to the great prehistoric quest.
A pause but not a halt—for if I’m right there were survivors who attempted, with varying degrees of success, to promulgate the lost teachings, planting “sleeper cells” far and wide in hunter-gatherer cultures in the form of institutions and memes that could store and transmit knowledge and, when the time was right, activate a program of public works, rapid agricultural development, and enhanced spiritual inquiry.
As to the fate of the lost civilization itself, I can only guess that its North American homeland, in which it may have evolved in comparative isolation for more than 100,000 years, was located in one or several of the immense areas south of the ice cap, from the Channeled Scablands of Washington State in the west, through Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, through the Great Lakes where one of most devastating impacts may have occurred, and east to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. I’ve suggested that this was a seafaring civilization, able to map the Ice Age world and spread its influence to remote shores, but if it had harbors on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America 13,000 years ago, they would have been submerged by the rapid rise in sea levels at the onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago and by the even more massive rise that marked the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago when the remnant ice caps of North America and Europe simultaneously collapsed into the oceans.
PAST IMPERFECT, FUTURE UNCERTAIN
THERE ARE LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF myths from every inhabited continent that speak of the existence of an advanced civilization in remote prehistory, of the lost golden age in which it flourished, and of the cataclysm that brought it to 487 an end. A feature shared by many of them—the story of Atlantis, for example, or of Noah’s flood—is the notion that human beings, by their own arrogance, cruelty, and disrespect for the earth, had somehow brought the disaster down upon their own heads and accordingly were obliged by the gods to go back to basics and learn humility again.
Where does this sense of ancestral guilt come from with its peculiar intimations of a mistaken direction taken by humanity in some remote period and purged by a global catastrophe? These are not the kinds of thoughts one would expect hunter-gatherers to devote much time to. A technologically advanced people, on the other hand, particularly if they had mastered the transmutation of matter, would have had vastly more potential for hubris and overreach. In the event of the cataclysmic downfall of their civilization, those who survived might well have reflected on their history and blamed themselves for what happened.
Who knows? Perhaps some hubristic excesses had occurred that would have justified such speculations?
A drift toward self-indulgent materialism?
The introduction of human sacrifice?
The appearance of a new and vigorously proselytizing cult denying the existence of the soul?
The enslavement and exploitation of hunter-gatherer tribes?
The arming of one group of hunter-gatherers—such as Clovis—to give it a competitive advantage over others?
There could be 1,000 reasons why the humbled survivors of a once powerful but now utterly destroyed civilization seeking refuge among hunter gatherers might have arrived with a sense of guilt.
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 that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong with nature on the earth, a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The Holy Spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine 488 men told everyone to prepare. … The comet burnt everything to the ground. There wasn’t a thing left …
There is a prophecy that the comet will destroy the earth again. But it’s a restoration. The greatest blessing this island [Turtle Island] will ever have. People don’t listen to their spiritual guidance today. There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars when that comet comes down again.19
Our science and technology in the twenty-first century are close to the point where, should we choose to do so and be willing to divert the necessary resources from—say—military expenditures, it would be within our capacity to sweep our cosmic environment clean of asteroids and cometary debris and thus spare future generations the existential threat of further impacts. What is not within our scientific and technological competence, however, is to restore the earth and its environment after a major impact has occurred. Astronomer William Napier, professor of astrobiology at the University of Cardiff and a world expert on comets and asteroids, reminds us that the consequences of a global celestial catastrophe would far outstrip our capacity to respond:
A modest impact has the potential to end civilisation, a giant one might put our species into an irreversible decline, like other primate species past and present. It took over three billion years of evolution to produce the sole terrestrial species capable of understanding the universe, and we do not know whether, if we are removed, intelligence is likely to evolve again. Nor do we know whether there are other intelligent species in our Galaxy. In the event that we are alone, and are removed by some catastrophe, then our Galaxy will return to its former dumb state and may never again leave it. In that sense, the survival of this particular species of ape is a cosmic imperative.20
We have already received fair warning from the universe in the form of the cataclysmic earth changes at the onset of the Younger Dryas. No serious researcher disputes that those earth changes occurred and, since 2007, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis has established itself as the most widely accepted explanation for everything that happened. But at first the earth scientists behind the hypothesis could only say that the evidence pointed to a cosmic impact of some kind, most likely a swarm of fragments from a disintegrating comet.
In 2010, however, in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, William Napier added his weight and specific details to the conclusion that a comet had indeed been involved—a giant comet, perhaps 100 kilometers in diameter, according to his calculations, that entered the inner solar system on an earth-crossing orbit somewhere between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago and thereafter underwent the series of fragmentations that spawned the Taurid meteor stream.21 This is a normal process for comets 22 and it’s Professor Napier’s case that intersection with the fragmenting debris of this exceptionally large comet around 12,800 years ago “provides a satisfactory explanation” for the postulated celestial origin of the Younger Dryas cataclysm.23
It’s my case that the hit humanity took then erased a remarkable civilization from the record and that we have remained mired in amnesia ever since. In the process what is being neglected, despite the increasingly urgent warnings of a handful of astronomers, is that most of the rubble from the ongoing fragmentation of the original comet remains in orbit in the Taurid meteor stream, including some pieces of enormous size capable of ending civilization again. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 25, it’s Napier’s conclusion that this “unique complex of debris” represents “the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.”24
In September 2017, drawing on imagery captured by the European Fireball Network, important new research on the Taurids, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, gave strong support to Napier’s warning. The title of the paper speaks for itself: “Discovery of a New Branch of the Taurid Meteoroid Stream as a Real Source of Potentially Hazardous Bodies.”25
The newly discovered branch is part of the Southern Taurids, encountered by the earth in late October and the first half of November, and it is just one of many indications that humanity’s relationship with the Younger Dryas comet is not over. On the contrary, all the evidence from the close observation and investigation of the Taurids now being undertaken by astronomers is that we may be about to enter—or indeed may already have entered—an episode of enhanced danger. Ahead of us, perhaps still some decades away, lie particularly dense and turbulent filaments of the stream believed to contain “dark” fragments of the original comet, in one case with a possible world-killing diameter of 30 kilometers.26
A TIME FOR CHANGE?
THIS BOOK HAS ROOTS IN much of my earlier work, particularly on ancient Mexico, the ancient Andean civilizations of South America, and ancient Egypt. However, it was not until early December 2016, during a visit I made to North Dakota and to the protest camp named Oceti Sakowin situated just beyond the present northern boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, that America Before crystallized in my mind as a definite concept, coupled with firm intent.
Readers may recall how, from July 2016 onward, a rainbow coalition of Sioux, other Native American tribes, and non–Native American people gathered at Oceti Sakowin in an attempt to stop the laying of an oil pipeline under Lake Oahe on the Missouri River half a mile north of Standing Rock in a location where it not only transgressed traditionally sacred lands, but also threatened the reservation’s water supply in the event of a spill.
Although extremely active and impassioned in the face of a clampdown by militarized security police, the protests of those who had become known as the “water protectors” failed to achieve their immediate objective, which was to have construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) halted completely. Quite to the contrary, on February 7, 2017, the official easement was granted, 27 work to complete the DAPL went ahead, and the first oil began to flow on June 1, 2017. 28 There were legal challenges from the Sioux and further protests and controversy following oil spills. 29 In December 2017 some interim restrictions were imposed on the pipeline operator to prevent further spills, 30 but as I write these words in July 2018, oil is still flowing through the pipeline and it seems that commercial interests have once again effectively trumped the interests and concerns of Native Americans. 31
Central to the entire protest at Standing Rock was the notion that we live at a time when there is an urgent need to change our ways, to adopt a more humble and no longer rapacious approach to the earth, and to receive a spiritual message passed down from the ancients and held in safekeeping by the First Americans.
It’s a message that resonates profoundly for me with so much that I’ve learned while researching this book.
“This is about everyone,” Cody Two Bears of the Standing Rock Sioux told me as he explained the larger purpose of the Oceti Sakowin protests:
It’s such an important time today—why people need to know this history. Because, for one, the history books would never tell you the correct story … the reason why. I talk to a lot of elders and a lot of spiritual leaders. We had to keep our ceremonies secret. We had to keep our stories a secret for so many years to preserve that. Because the government was fearful of what we had and who we are as a people. The laws will tell you that. There’s even a current standing law today in Montana, I don’t think they’ve taken it out of their law book, that if you see three Native Americans all together then you are able to shoot and kill them. Still legal in Montana! Those are the types of laws they created because they don’t want to see Native Americans gather because for some reason they were fearful of us.
But little do they know, our ceremonies and our ways of life protected us and Unci Maka [Mother Earth]. We prayed even for those people who were afraid of us, to help them … to pray for them to make sure they were okay.
That’s what our ceremonies are based around. It’s not witchcraft … it’s not casting spells on anybody, but that’s what they thought for many, many years. … For example, the Ghost Dances we used to have in Lakota and Dakota country. When we did that, the Washi’chu [white people—literally “those who always take the largest portion”] were so fearful. They thought we were casting spells, when all in all we were trying to keep the balance with the Earth and the Stars. We need to keep that in balance, because if we don’t start doing that today, we’re not going to have anywhere to live in the next hundred years.”
Some 12,800 years ago the balance between the Earth and the Stars was lost and a key chapter of the human story was lost with it. If it happens again, if our brief chapter, too, is lost, will all that remains of us at some vast remove in the future be an unhappy myth that tells of how, through our own greed and conceit, through our own recklessness and disregard for the planet in our care, and through our own excess of hate and dearth of love, we conspired in our own downfall?
that brings us to the end of the chapters. there are still 3 fairly long appendix for the reader to peruse as well as the footnotes for the above chapters
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/america-before-key-earth-lost-civilization.pdf
