Ancient Apocalypse (2022) s01e01 Episode Script

1
- [man 1] Happy?
- [man 2] Yep.
- [man 1] All right, here we go.
- And take one.
[interviewer] How would you
describe yourself?
[chuckles]
How would I describe myself?
You've been described
as a pseudo-archaeologist.
- I have.
- Someone who cherry-picks your data.
Your books are read by millions,
but dismissed by academics.
Did you know that you were
picking a fight with academia?
Because a lot of people
don't want to hear this.
You have been
at the front of the line for decades
and you exposed me
to a lot of these controversial ideas
that have now been substantiated.
Well, I'm Graham Hancock.
I don't claim to be
an archaeologist or a scientist.
I am a journalist,
and the subject that
I'm investigating is human prehistory.
My suspicion is
humans are a species with amnesia.
We have forgotten something
incredibly important in our own past.
And I think that
that incredibly important forgotten thing
is a lost,
advanced civilization of the Ice Age.
I've spent decades searching
for proof of this lost civilization
at sites around the globe.
Oh, wow.
Now my aim is
to piece together these clues
And that seems extremely strange.
to show you evidence that challenges
the traditional view of human history.
It pushes back these dates, far, far back.
[Graham] Ancient structures
built with surprising sophistication
It's the most amazing
archeoastronomy site in North America.
revealing the fingerprints
of an advanced prehistoric civilization.
This pillar is like our Rosetta Stone.
The possibility of civilization
emerging earlier than we think
gets stronger.
It's going to absolutely demand
a rewrite of history as we know it.
Yeah.
Of course, this idea is upsetting
to the so-called experts
who insist that the only humans
who existed during the Ice Age
were simple hunter-gatherers.
That automatically makes me
enemy number one to archaeologists.
Why not say, "We don't know.
This is a spectacular mystery,"
and leave it at that.
It's my job
to offer an alternative point of view.
Perhaps there's been
a forgotten episode in human history.
But perhaps the extremely defensive,
arrogant and patronizing attitude
of mainstream academia
is stopping us
from considering that possibility.
I'm trying to overthrow
the paradigm of history.
[Graham] For 30 years,
I've been looking for something
I was told couldn't possibly exist.
An advanced human civilization,
much older than our own, lost to history.
The mainstream version of history,
says that after the end of the Ice Age
on their own initiative,
our hunter-gatherer ancestors
suddenly began farming
and raising livestock,
creating settlements
and eventually cities,
until the first civilizations emerged
around 6,000 years ago.
But new discoveries
keep on pushing that horizon back.
One such discovery
has been made here in Indonesia.
On the most populated island, Java,
about four hours south of Jakarta,
near the village of Karyamukti.
I've come here to investigate
one of the most remarkable
and controversial
archaeological discoveries of our time.
The initial evidence
has utterly confounded
mainstream archaeologists
because it calls into question
everything they've taught us
about the prehistory of humanity.
It's a site that raises
a disturbing question.
What if an advanced civilization
flourished here in Indonesia
during the Ice Age?
A civilization that was lost to history
until now.
This is Gunung Padang.
The name means "mountain of light"
or "mountain of enlightenment"
in the local Sundanese dialect.
Local people speak
with awe of its mysterious atmosphere
and pilgrims come from far and wide
to honor the spirit of the mountain.
They purify themselves
at an ancient spring at the base
before heading up the hill
three hundred and sixty feet.
The climb up it is steep and hard work.
But worth it once you reach the top.
Because Gunung Padang
is like no place else on Earth.
For a long while, archaeologists thought
it was just another hill in the jungle.
But there was a problem with that view.
You get to the summit and you see these
blocks scattered across the landscape.
Oddly hexagonal stone slabs
strewn about everywhere.
Thousands of them.
It's quite a spectacle.
But not out of place
in Indonesia's volcanic landscape
where blocks like these
are naturally formed.
They're called columnar jointing
and are created when volcanic rock,
in this case, basalt,
cools and cracks into distinctive shapes.
At first sight,
this open terrace could be mistaken
for a natural formation of volcanic rock,
which is why archaeologists
were so slow to investigate it.
But take a closer look,
and it becomes obvious
that these rocks have been cut,
repurposed as building materials
and placed by human hands.
Among the jumbled masses of fallen stone,
traces of structures
show up all over this hill.
Mounds, rectangular rooms, and long walls
on carefully laid out terraces,
all clearly man-made.
When archaeologist Ali Akbar and his team
began working here in 2012,
they assumed that
any structures on this hill
would prove to be
less than 2,500 years old.
[thunder rumbles]
We don't know
about the absolute dating in this site.
This site was abandoned
for so long and perhaps forgotten.
[Graham] The team also assumed that
the ancient builders of Gunung Padang
had found the blocks of columnar jointing
naturally present at the site.
But then
they discovered something strange.
The columnar joint
is imported from another region,
from another location.
[Graham] That means that every one
of these blocks, up to 50,000 of them,
and each weighing up to a third of a ton,
were carried up this hill.
When Dr. Akbar's team
first surveyed the site,
they quickly found evidence
that humans had been present,
in what's called a cultural layer,
but not where they expected.
We are very surprised that this site
consists of two cultural layers.
The first layer on the surface,
it's from 500 BC.
But at four meters depth,
we found another cultural layer.
It is from 5,200 BC.
It is very surprising.
We are very shocked.
It is very old.
[Graham] Seven thousand years ago,
far from being builders
on such an epic scale,
there's no evidence
that the people of this region
were anything other than
simple hunter-gatherers.
What could have motivated them
to make the immense effort
of bringing all these blocks here?
I'm not really sure
about the function of this site.
However, we've still not found
a skeleton or human bone,
so this is not a burial site.
Perhaps it is for ceremonies or rituals.
We're dealing with truly a mystery here.
A mystery that needs to be explained.
It wasn't until another investigation
looked even deeper into the site
that an extraordinary new possibility
began to force itself on the researchers.
That they might be confronted
by the work
of a civilization lost to history.
Dr. Danny Hilman Natawidjaja
studied at Caltech,
but now works for
Indonesia's Geotechnology Research Center.
As a geologist, Dr. Hilman knew
there was something very strange
about Gunung Padang.
Exploring the site,
he found that the columnar basalt blocks
don't just blanket the top of the hill.
They also wrap around its terraced slopes
covering an area of at least 37 acres.
This exposed section
between two of the terraces
appears to be some sort of retaining wall.
There are some archaeologists who
are convinced this is entirely natural.
I know this is natural rock,
but they're suggesting the whole layout
of the thing is natural as well.
They are natural, but the position now
is not in the natural position.
- [Graham] And normally vertical.
- Vertical, yes.
- That's right.
- Here it's laid on its side.
- Also, it's not cut like this.
- Yeah.
Here, all is cut into one
or one-and-a-half meters.
[Graham] Right.
There's something else unusual
that Dr. Hilman noticed
between the blocks.
[Dr. Hilman] The natural position,
there is no ground mass in between.
It will be very tight together.
But here, in between these columnar rocks,
there is a mortar
- that holds them together, like cement.
- Yeah.
The thickness is, like, five centimeters,
and it's very consistent.
[Graham] Right, so they're kind of
leveling out the construction blocks
with the mortar between them.
Put there deliberately by human beings
- as part of a construction process.
- Yes. Yeah.
So Danny began to investigate this,
and this is where
the surprises began to appear.
What Dr. Hilman started to realize
as he put together all his data,
was that Gunung Padang
is much more than just a hill.
This is the ancient site of Gunung Padang.
The north side features a stairway
climbing more than 300 feet,
until it reaches
the first of five terraces.
Over an area
about 490 feet long by 130 feet wide.
The entire hill is ringed
by retaining walls of columnar basalt.
Using an estimated 50,000 blocks,
it's a massive terraforming project
that remodeled a volcanic hill
into what can best be described
as a step pyramid.
So this is all man-made terraces here.
[Dr. Hilman] Yeah.
It's not the same shape of pyramids
like Mayan or Giza pyramids.
No. It's a similar idea that it rises
in terraces to a pyramid-shape, yeah.
- Yeah. But it has circular features.
- Indeed.
There's a question of definitions here.
How do we define a pyramid?
But if we define it as a structure that
rises in a series of terraces to a summit,
that's what we're looking at
at Gunung Padang.
And the fact that
such an ancient pyramid exists here at all
could radically alter what we know
about the capabilities of our ancestors.
Archaeologists currently believe
the oldest pyramid in the world
dates to around 4,700 years ago.
And it's not in Egypt, but in Peru.
But Dr. Hilman has found evidence
that Gunung Padang could be even older.
So how old is it really?
Who built it? And why?
Dr. Hilman and his team
turn to technology
usually deployed in geological surveys
to look for answers
deep inside the structure.
So, we have three methods here.
- The GPR.
- Yeah, that's ground-penetrating radar.
- Ground-penetrating radar, yes.
- Yeah.
- And resistivity tomography.
- [Graham] Yeah.
[Dr. Hilman] And also
the seismic tomography.
[Graham] Previously, archaeologists had
dug down into the site only a few meters
and in a few isolated trenches.
This new technology
covers much more ground
- Thirty meters, yeah.
- Thirty meters.
and goes far deeper.
We're going to do
the ground-penetration radar,
the GPR surveys.
[Graham] Ground-penetrating radar
emits pulses of radio waves
into the ground.
When they hit something, they bounce back,
and that data is recorded and analyzed.
We chose the frequency of 40 megahertz
to penetrate down to 30 meters.
Okay. Let's go.
[Graham] The more Dr. Hilman and his team
learn from their scans of the interior,
the more mysterious it's become.
The nature of the structures underground
became more and more complex.
Although the columnar basalt
is always there,
always used as a construction material.
Seismic tomography, in particular,
has uncovered an intriguing spot
deep inside the hill.
[Dr. Hilman] It has a seismic velocity
of about 200 meters per second.
Right. Which in layman's terms
means what exactly?
That's a void.
- A void. An empty space.
- Empty.
And you can get a sense
of the shape of that empty space?
Yes, as you see here, it's rectangular.
- [Graham] It's a rectangle.
- Yes.
- And the spot is just right
- Yeah.
- because in the center of this site
- Right.
beneath the Terrace One,
there is also a chamber
- Yes.
- connecting to this chamber
beneath the second terrace.
[Graham] What Dr. Hilman
and his team have discovered
are at least three
large rectangular chambers.
One around ten meters down,
perhaps an entrance hall of some kind,
it seems to have an access tunnel
leading to a larger main chamber.
And another passage
connecting to a third chamber,
between 20 to 30 meters deep.
All three located
right along the central axis of the site.
I'm very intrigued by all these chambers.
I so much wish
you could get the archaeologists
to actually excavate this site.
When we see these chambers
- Yeah.
- three chambers,
it's just like, we were amazed.
You know you've found
something significant at that point.
- Sure.
- Yeah, it's unmistakable.
Yeah.
But to historians and the archaeologists
who first excavated this site,
Dr. Hilman's discovery
just doesn't make sense.
The accepted timeline of human history
tells us that the tribe
of hunter-gatherers
living atop the hill
around 7,000 years ago
wouldn't have been capable
of building a structure
of this colossal size and complexity.
And yet, here it is.
A mystery crying out for investigation.
To put a date on this hill
that's not a hill,
Dr. Hilman and his team
turned to another geological tool,
core drilling.
As expected, samples of the top two layers
dated from 3,000 years ago
back to around 8,000 years ago.
But when they drilled to 15 meters,
around 50 feet or so,
they found something
completely unexpected.
Those sections had been laid out
around 11,600 years ago
pushing the origins of this site back
to the end of the last Ice Age.
And Dr. Hilman's discoveries
didn't stop there.
Going further down, around 100 feet or so,
he hit the earliest layer of construction.
Let's try and put dates
on when this was shaped.
Okay. Layer four could be before 20,000.
- Could be before 20,000.
- [Dr. Hilman] Very old.
[Graham] Those drill cores
were pulling up datable materials
that dated way back
as far as 24,000 years ago.
Organic materials clearly associated with
structural elements now deeply buried.
And this convinced Danny,
and I must say it convinces me,
that Gunung Padang goes back
to a remotely ancient origin.
Danny's findings are
utterly extraordinary and bewildering.
Hitherto, archaeologists had regarded it
as a long established fact
that no large-scale structures
were built anywhere in Southeast Asia
until around 4,000 years ago.
Your datings of this structure
put it right back to the Ice Age.
So for me, this raises a sense
of enormous excitement.
- Yeah.
- I can't help wondering
whether those chambers contain
some evidence or information
that might have a bearing
- Yeah.
- on my search for a lost civilization.
- I think we know little about our history.
- Right.
I think we miss a big thing here.
[Graham] This is an idea mainstream
archaeology finds very hard to accept.
The notion that it's a man-made structure
is no longer
seriously disputed by anybody.
But what archaeology finds very hard
to swallow and very hard to accept
is that the origins of this structure
could date back as much as 24,000 years.
To the depths of the last Ice Age.
What the scholars seem reluctant
to get to grips with
is that the Ice Age
was a very special time
when the world was very different.
You see, back then, 20,000 years ago,
Earth didn't look the same as it does now.
The island of Java wasn't an island.
It was the southernmost part
of a vast Southeast Asian continent.
A continent
that geologists call Sundaland.
During the last Ice Age,
sea levels were about 120 meters,
400 feet, lower than they are today.
So what is now the Java Sea
was actually an enormous landmass
extending out from the mainland of Asia.
Sundaland covered an area
around 695,000 square miles,
about the size
of the western United States.
It was an entire subcontinent.
We know that tribes of hunter-gatherers
thrived on Sundaland's abundant wildlife,
as far back as 45,000 years ago,
and probably much further back than that.
Why shouldn't another
more technologically advanced culture
have been present here as well?
In a cold and forbidding world,
this huge Southeast Asian landmass
would have been amongst
several warm and inviting locations
where early humans
might have had a real stab
at developing an advanced
and sophisticated civilization.
I think that whoever built Gunung Padang
shared our planet
with the hunter-gatherers,
who we know were
also widely present at that time.
It's not such a wild idea.
Even today, the technologically advanced
nations of the world
coexist with hunter-gatherer societies,
like the San in Namibia,
or the Lacandón in Mexico,
or the Kazakhs in western Mongolia.
Different cultures
at different levels of development,
have always lived alongside one another.
Gunung Padang suggests
that some culture was around
in the area of the Sunda Shelf,
which was capable of creating
a gigantic megalithic structure.
One that specialized in building
with blocks of columnar basalt.
It's a style of construction
I've seen before in this part of the world
on the tiny Pacific island of Pohnpei,
at a site known as Nan Madol.
It too was constructed
using volcanic basalt blocks
laid out one atop the other,
just as at Gunung Padang.
Archaeologists believe
most of the construction
visible at Nan Madol today
dates to around 900 years ago,
when the blocks were quarried
at a neighboring island.
But during my explorations
on previous visits,
I found several of its megalithic pillars
extending out below the water line,
suggesting that earlier versions
may have been constructed
when sea levels were lower,
during the last Ice Age.
Could Gunung Padang's architects
have made it across
the South Pacific to Micronesia?
And if so, what happened to them?
Well, I believe it has something
to do with what happened
around 12,800 years ago,
when the Ice Age suddenly
and quite dramatically shifted gears.
Things had gradually been getting warmer
for quite a long period of time.
And then suddenly,
two things happen at once.
First, global temperatures plunge
to the level that they were
at the peak of the Ice Age,
and they do so almost literally overnight.
And secondly, there's a sudden
and inexplicable rise in sea level.
Now, normally, in an Ice Age,
when you enter an episode of freezing,
you do not expect to see a large amount
of water dumped in the world ocean
because that water
has been turned into ice.
What happened was a literal great flood.
Between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago,
the oceans of the world rose dramatically
in a series of immense deluges
one after another.
Eventually, the great continent
of Sundaland
was engulfed by the sea, a lost world.
It prompts the obvious question.
Could there be more temples and structures
out there in the Java Sea
still waiting to be discovered?
Goodness knows what was lost
to the rising sea levels.
[tribal music playing]
[man singing in Javanese language]
[Graham] This epoch of immense floods
would have traumatized all of humanity.
[speaking in Javanese language]
And indeed there's testimony that it did.
[speaking in Javanese language]
Nearly every ancient culture
preserved traditions of a great flood
that swallowed up the Earth.
Here in Indonesia,
the Batak people have their own version
of this global flood myth.
[speaking in Javanese language]
Once, long ago,
the Earth grew old and dirty.
So the creator god, Debata,
sent a great flood
to cleanse the Earth
of every living thing.
The last human pair had taken refuge
on the highest mountain.
But just as the waters
were about to drown them,
the god repented from ending humankind.
He conjured a clod of earth into being,
laid it on the rising flood
forming the islands of Indonesia,
and thus the pair were saved.
And the pair had children together
to repopulate the Earth,
becoming the ancestors
of the Batak people.
It's a story of an ancient apocalypse
that one finds again and again
in traditions from all over the world,
passed down for thousands of years.
Of course, there's the account
of Noah in the Bible.
But Indian folklore
also tells of a fisherman, Manu,
who survived a great flood
after being warned by a god.
From the Sumerians to the Babylonians,
the ancient Greeks to the Chinese,
all have similar versions
of the same tale.
The notion that all of this
is just a coincidence,
just invented independently
by individual cultures doesn't make sense.
All these things
are probably tales of stories
that people passed down
from generation to generation
that survived this time.
Yeah. Truly global cataclysmic events
- involving rapid rises in sea level
- Yeah.
did occur, and suddenly,
the worldwide tradition of a global flood
stops being just a myth
and starts being a memory.
- Yeah.
- An account of real events.
I'm fascinated
by Indonesia's ancient history,
and the secrets it's beginning
to reveal to us at Gunung Padang.
But the way archaeology works,
there is going to continue to be
huge resistance to new evidence,
and that's really problematic
because science
should be open to new evidence
and it should be
willing to change its mind
when new evidence suggests
that a change of mind is needed.
What sort of reaction have you had
from the archaeological profession?
- They are still not accepting it.
- Right.
I regret because archaeologists,
or any other researchers,
just stop researching.
That's very sad, because at the very least
there's an intriguing mystery here,
which archaeology
should be paying attention to.
If we could prove clearly,
and accept there is
advanced human cultures before 11,000 BC,
that will be a big step.
[thunder rumbling]
I've been arguing
that there was a massive global cataclysm
about 12,500 years ago
that wiped out almost all traces.
We're left with these haunting memories
which we try to dismiss
and say, "No, they're not memories.
"They're just folklore.
They're just a myth, just tradition."
I think they're memories.
I think they're real memories
of something terrible
that happened to our ancestors
at the end of the last Ice Age.
Preserved in legends, in art and in stone.
And they don't just talk of a great flood.
They also reference survivors
of the cataclysm,
wise travelers who sowed the seeds
of humanity's rebirth.
It's a tradition
that's particularly strong
in the same ancient culture
that created the largest
man-made pyramid on Earth.
It's where I'm headed next,
and it's not Egypt.