Ancient Apocalypse (2022) s02e01 Episode Script
Chapter I
1
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] For those who don't know me,
I'm Graham Hancock.
I've been exploring the possibility
of a lost civilization in prehistory
for more than 30 years.
Archaeology claims if there were
such a thing as a lost civilization,
they would have found it already.
Well, I profoundly disagree with that.
[music continues]
And now, my quest continues
[airplane engine revving]
in a part of the world often overlooked
by historians of humanity's origins
The oldest dates that we got
were about 13,200 before present.
[Graham] exploring some of the world's
most intriguing ancient wonders.
There's numerology.
There's mathematics. There's astronomy.
This could be considered
a lost technology.
[Graham] And making new discoveries.
Wow.
[triumphant music playing]
It's impossible. It's impossible.
I mean, as a kid,
I always thought the timeline was off.
[Graham] All with a radical
new proposition in mind.
Could the key to discovering
a lost civilization
of the Ice Age lie here,
in the Americas?
[triumphant music crescendos]
[triumphant music ends]
[theme song playing]
[theme song ends]
- [thunder rumbling]
- [electronic warble]
[somber music playing]
[Graham] The quest for our origins
and the quest
for the origins of civilization,
are fundamental to what it is,
to being human.
But I think it's part of the human nature.
If we're convinced
that something doesn't exist,
we don't look for it.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] My search for those origins
has led me here,
to one of the most striking places
in North America.
White Sands.
This is a land of austere beauty
and strangeness
that's been hiding a secret
for thousands of years.
A secret now unveiled
that's forcing a rewrite
of the prehistory of the Americas.
[tense music intensifies]
[Graham] Until the 1990s,
we were taught that deep in the Ice Age,
humans migrated from North Asia to Alaska,
across the Bering land bridge,
then, around 13,500 years ago,
walked south through an ice-free corridor,
before spreading across the Americas.
A scenario held so firmly for so long
that few archaeologists went looking
for traces of any earlier human migration.
[tense music continues]
For a very long time,
there's been this conviction
that evidence would not be found
of a human presence
older than 13,500 years ago.
Turns out, that idea was wrong.
Very wrong.
[tense music intensifies, stops]
[Graham] White Sands National Park's
resource manager, David Bustos,
began working here in 2005,
hoping to share with others his passion
for this pristine wilderness
and its wildlife.
But he soon found himself
on the trail of something else,
something that seemed crazy at first.
I think about 2006, I heard a story
about footprints of a Bigfoot. [chuckles]
And there was a government trapper
that found these amazing prints.
He described them being 22 inches across
and eight inches wide.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- What could that be? Must be a Bigfoot.
And I think lot of people gave him
a hard time. There's no Bigfoot.
But I was thinking,
"I've seen these." [chuckles]
Yeah.
[David] And so we went out,
and when we brushed out the footprints,
you could see
they had incredible claw marks.
[Graham] Obviously, this was no Bigfoot.
He did find a big footprint
of a giant ground sloth.
- That's what they were.
- Giant ground sloths.
[Graham] They knew
the prints must be very old.
Giant ground sloths went extinct
around 11,500 years ago.
Then David and his colleagues found
even larger prints nearby from mammoths,
also long extinct.
Some of the gait and stride can be
13 feet long. Really incredible.
Look a little bit further, you'll find
the giant camel, American camel.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- Sometimes you'll see dire wolves.
[Graham] All these tracks are
from megafauna,
giant mammals which suddenly vanished
at the end of the last Ice Age.
Many are little more than compacted sand,
buried and protected by layers
of sediment over thousands of years,
until erosion brought them back
to the surface.
[intriguing music playing]
Among these ancient mammoth tracks,
David also spotted
another intriguing set of prints,
and he and his colleagues
decided to take a closer look.
When we brushed out
these other footprints,
we've seen really nice, clear
toe impressions in the heel.
[triumphant music playing]
- [Graham] Human footprints?
- Human footprints.
At the same age,
it appeared to be, as the megafauna.
It was really amazing.
- Incredible.
- [David] Yes.
[triumphant music ends]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] These fossilized human footprints
must have been made
in the time of the mammoths
and the giant sloths.
At least 11,500 years ago.
And there are thousands of them.
[tense music continues]
There's something intimate and special
about White Sands. It's not tools.
It's not a broken femur
from a prey animal that's been butchered.
It's human footprints. It's us.
We are seeing the human presence
very intimately and very directly
in those footprints.
[tense music continues]
But when were they left here exactly?
Just how old are these footprints?
There's no technology
that can date them directly.
So the National Park Service
teamed up with the US Geological Survey
to search for more evidence.
[tense music intensifies]
[Graham] And they struck gold,
finding layer upon layer of animal
and human tracks going deep into the past.
[camera shutter clicks]
Buried among them
were seeds from an aquatic grass
[camera shutter clicks]
seeds that could be carbon dated.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] And the results were astounding.
[David] We know that the footprints
were here for thousands of years,
at least from 23,000 years
to 21,000 years.
Wow.
[suspenseful music slows down]
The discovery of human footprints
at White Sands is a huge step forward
in our understanding
of the peopling of the Americas.
We're looking at
absolutely incontrovertible evidence
that humans were present
in New Mexico deep in the Ice Age,
as much as 23,000 years ago.
It's proof that long before
it was possible to spread south
into the Americas
through that ice-free corridor,
humans were already here.
[suspenseful music continues]
This changes the history of the Americas,
and it changes the history of the world.
These are human beings just like us,
but human beings concealed
behind the veil of time.
And our task now is to lift that veil back
and re-establish that connection
with our ancestors and the remote past.
[suspenseful music ends]
The footprints hold
special meaning and significance
for the Indigenous communities
of this area.
Kim Pasqual-Charlie of the Pueblo of Acoma
consulted with the team
on this groundbreaking discovery.
[Graham] Tell me about the relationship
of the Acoma to the land.
How long have your people been here?
Are there myths and traditions
about an origin story of your people?
Yes. Our origin story started
somewhere in the north area.
And through our migration story
that has been passed down
from generation to generation,
we settled here and there,
coming down here.
- And that's where my people stayed.
- Yeah.
We've been in the Southwest
for a very long time.
[Graham] Yeah.
To Kim and her people,
these prints are far more
than archaeological records.
- Your ancestors left their footprints.
- [Kim] Mm-hmm.
I understand you were involved in finding
some of those footprints?
Yes. There's no words to describe it.
We've come to see
where our ancestor once walked this earth.
[tense music playing]
And to place my hands
in the little footprints of children.
- You know? And it gets very emotional.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- [Kim] You know? It's
- Yeah.
I'm sorry, Graham, but it just [chuckles]
There are times it makes you wanna cry.
- [Graham] Absolutely.
- You know?
[Graham] But once
the footprints are exposed,
the same process of erosion
that revealed them
will slowly start to erase them.
These footprints which testify
to the ancient presence of your people
are also fragile.
- Right.
- They could easily be lost.
[Kim] You know, maybe 50 years from now,
the next generation
won't be able to see the footprints.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- [Kim] But the stories will continue.
Our stories will continue.
[wind howling]
[Graham] But the barren landscape
begs a question.
Why would all these humans
and animals have come here?
[suspenseful music playing]
Remember, North America
was different during the Ice Age.
The north half of the continent
was smothered by ice.
And this part of New Mexico
was very different.
At first glance,
this vast, open desert with patches
of brush and wind-sculpted dunes
seems pitiless and otherworldly.
[Graham] But if we wind the clock back
to the height of the Ice Age,
conditions here were very different.
The Tularosa Basin held a giant body
of fresh water known as Lake Otero
surrounded by vegetation.
[mammoth trumpeting]
Ancient mammoths, ground sloths,
and camels came to this watering hole
to feast on the grasses and trees.
- [mammoth trumpeting]
- [birds chirping]
And, as we now know, humans followed them.
Establishing the age of the footprints
was a complex scientific problem.
David and a team of experts spent
more than a decade building the evidence.
But when, in 2021, they published
their findings in the journal Science,
not all reactions were favorable.
[David] I think with anything
that's so unique and unusual,
it takes a lot of science
to be able to support it.
[Graham] The carbon dating of the seeds
was challenged.
But the team confirmed their results
using other samples of pollen and sediment
quieting their critics.
Is there still controversy
around the 23,000-year-old dates?
I think until you have a time machine,
there always will be.
But beyond all these dates
also, if you look,
you still see a mammoth footprint
a meter, a meter and a half
above human footprints.
- And there's more mammoth prints below
- Below. Yeah.
so megafauna and people
have been on this horizon
- for thousands of years together.
- Yeah.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The White Sands discovery
helps to solve
one of the most perplexing mysteries
of prehistory,
the sudden extinction
of America's Ice Age megafauna
between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.
The suggestion of archaeology was that
human beings hunted down all the megafauna
and butchered them.
I don't know of any hunter-gatherer group
that would willingly exterminate
its food supply.
So the notion that humans were responsible
for the extinction of the megafauna,
uh, has always seemed,
to me, quite bizarre.
[tense music ends]
[Graham] The tracks here prove
that humans and those animals overlapped
for at least 10,000 years
before their extinction.
I think a much better explanation
for the extinction
of the Ice Age megafauna
is the global cataclysm that took place
around about 12,800-12,900 years ago,
known as the Younger Dryas.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music playing]
There was a sudden plunge
in global temperatures,
a sudden rise in sea levels,
and the world very rapidly became
an extremely difficult place to live.
It's a time we call
the ancient apocalypse.
North America was hardest hit,
which could explain
both the extinction of its megafauna
and also, the big gaps
in human history here.
[tense music ends]
We are going to have to completely change
the story of the peopling of the Americas
in the light of this new evidence.
Archaeologists are opening their eyes
and their minds
to the possibility
of a much older human presence.
[David] We're just touching the tip
of the surface of what's to be learned.
I think throughout the Southwest
as people look,
they're gonna find sites
that are just as old as White Sands also.
So it's like you've opened
a door on the past,
- which nobody's stepped through before?
- Yeah.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] Paradigm shifts
don't happen instantly.
It's the accumulation of evidence
that finally discredits an old paradigm
and allows eyes to open
to new possibilities.
That's what we're witnessing
in the Americas now.
What's been discovered here at White Sands
is part of a much bigger story,
a global story
that I've been investigating
for more than 30 years.
If we want to clear the fog of amnesia
that surrounds our remote past,
we need to look much deeper
and much further back
than we've ever done before,
right here in the Americas
where the timeline of prehistory
keeps on receding
with every new discovery.
[tense music ends]
New discoveries
that are not just being followed
by archaeologists.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] So, Keanu.
Graham.
Let's talk about the past.
- Okay.
- Why does the past matter to you?
Well, you know.
I remember as a young child
just being inquisitive.
And as I have grown up,
it comes to the question
of a fundamental sense of
"who are we?"
Yeah. And what's driven me on this quest
of my own for more than 30 years,
um, is to try to get back
to some sort of source.
Source of what?
The source of who we are.
- And the timeline.
- [Graham] Timeline's all wrong.
That's why those footprints in White Sands
were so significant to me.
[Keanu] Mm.
My feeling is that 23,000 years is
just the beginning.
We're gonna go back
much further than that.
Yeah. I have that
I have that feeling too.
And we are just at the edge of
of rediscovering so much of our lost past.
[Keanu] Mm.
And in a way, America is the place
where that story is unfolding.
Well, that's an exciting idea.
[tense music playing]
I think you're on a quest, Graham,
to teach
and to bring understanding, perhaps.
[Graham] Well,
the issue about the Americas is
that there is so much of our past
that we've forgotten.
And my role, such as it is,
has been to try to recover,
uh, some of that lost memory.
When I think of the past like that,
it sounds exciting.
Absolutely. For me,
the past is all about mystery.
It's not about what we do know.
It's about what we don't know.
The huge areas that
have not been explored or investigated.
The possibilities
that haven't been explored.
Yeah.
[tense music continues]
[Graham] We need
to start looking specifically for evidence
in places where
we might not have looked before.
During the Ice Age,
the northern part of North America
was a frozen wasteland.
The places to look
are down near the tropics.
Down near the equator.
Places that were warm,
comfortable, nurturing, hospitable.
Perhaps even a vast region
that was long believed to be
an archaeological wasteland,
but where astounding secrets
of the human past
are now beginning to be revealed.
This is the Amazon.
[tense music intensifies]
You're looking at more than
six million square kilometers of land
that are still under
dense canopy rainforest.
That immense land area is a huge mystery
at the heart of the human story.
And little by little,
we're beginning to realize
how enormous that mystery really is.
[tense music continues]
For decades, the dominant view
of archaeologists was that
the Amazon's only historical inhabitants
were small semi-nomadic tribes
of hunter-foragers,
much like those still surviving
in the rainforest today.
But I believe the dominant view is wrong.
[tense music intensifies]
[tense music continues]
[Graham] I'm headed to the far west
of Brazil and the state of Acre.
Like most of the Amazon basin,
it had long been blanketed
by sprawling rainforest
until vast expanses
began to be burned down
to make way for cattle ranches.
[fire crackling]
Coming to the Amazon rainforest is both
an exhilarating and depressing experience.
The amount of land
that's been cleared of trees
is an unfolding modern day disaster
with no easy solution.
But as new swathes of land
have been cleared,
it's led to something
that no one expected.
[tense music continues]
[Graham] I'm here to meet Dr. Alceu Ranzi,
a paleogeographer who began his career
studying the Amazon's Ice Age animals.
[airplane engine revving]
[Graham] He wants
to show me evidence of a mystery
that remains unsolved today.
[tense music intensifies]
- Whoa!
- Whoa!
[both laugh]
Roller coaster.
[Graham] From up here,
the ongoing devastation is unmissable.
You can see
how much of it has been cleared.
- So much. So much.
- [Graham] Yes.
Twenty years from now,
all the forest will disappear.
But this clearance has opened
a little window on a great mystery.
In 1986,
Dr. Ranzi was flying over this region
when he caught a glimpse
of something unexpected.
I was arriving in Rio Branco by jet,
commercial jet.
Yes.
- Sitting in the window seat.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- And looking at the environment like this.
- [Graham] Yes.
[Dr. Ranzi] Like this.
And then I see a big circle.
[dramatic music playing]
My God. What's this? Huh?
- And the jet is so fast. Gone.
- Yeah.
Disappear.
[Graham] He didn't yet realize it,
but in those few seconds,
Dr. Ranzi had spotted something,
that if our old notions
of the Amazon are true,
simply shouldn't exist.
- Wow.
- [Dr. Ranzi] Yeah.
[Graham] Giant geometrical shapes,
as much as 1,000 feet across,
formed by trenches
and massive piles of earth,
now known as geoglyphs.
Fantastic design. My God.
Fantastic design. And so big.
[Graham] And enormous.
- So enormous. Enormous.
- [Graham] Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
[tense music ends]
- Beautiful. Beautiful thing.
- [Dr. Ranzi] Beautiful.
[tense music playing]
And what I'm seeing is a square
surrounded by an oval.
[Dr. Ranzi] Ah, look. Another one.
- Yes. They're everywhere.
- [Dr. Ranzi] Everywhere.
Another one here.
Another one here.
Wow. Incredible.
[Graham] The perfect geometry
is only visible
from hundreds of feet in the air.
And yet, somehow,
this was all created by people
with their feet stuck firmly
on the ground.
[tense music ends]
This, to me,
raises a feeling of deep respect.
How do they have the perspective
to see how they would look from above?
It's a powerful experience.
I've visited many temples and pyramids
and sacred sites around the world,
and this has a very special feeling.
You know, very special.
[triumphant music playing]
I mean, it touches my heart.
[spluttering] I'm
I'm looking at something majestic.
It's as though the curtain is being
pulled back from the from the Mona Lisa.
Suddenly, I'm seeing something
that I didn't know was there,
and it had an enormous
emotional impact upon me.
It was as though
the ancients were speaking to me directly.
"Look what we could do.
Don't underestimate us."
"We were scientists."
[tense music playing]
When you first told archaeologists
about this phenomenon, what did they say?
- The first one was a famous archaeologist.
- [Graham] Yes.
- [Dr. Ranzi] I showed her the picture
- Yeah. Yeah.
and she looked and said, "Where is it?
In the Amazon? It's impossible."
It's impossible? Look at the picture.
Help me, please.
- I don't know what this is.
- Yes.
[Graham] The evidence is undeniable
and spread across an area
the size of West Virginia.
[tense music playing]
At first, it was thought these mounds
might be defensive ramparts.
But there's no evidence of warfare here.
And the ditches lie inside the mounds,
so they're not moats.
And there's no evidence
that they were used as settlements.
[tense music ends]
It's impossible to avoid speculation when
we look at the Amazon geoglyphs. Why?
Because there are no written documents
from their original creators
that tell us why they made them.
We don't know why they made them.
[intriguing music playing]
What's your thought about
how many there are in the whole area?
- Thousands.
- [Graham] Thousands.
- Thousands. Thousands.
- [Graham] All right.
Thousands.
[music crescendos, stops]
[Graham] It raises many questions.
How old are these geometrical earthworks?
Are they older or younger
than the Amazon rainforest
that long concealed them?
[suspenseful music playing]
What was the size of the workforce
that created them in the first place?
And what skills were required
to direct the work successfully?
[Graham] This is not new work.
This is people who
already knew what they were doing.
They've done it many times before.
I would love to know
what was in their minds
when they were making this.
Yeah.
[Graham] It's such a huge effort
and energy.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Graham] The geoglyph building project
is a compelling mystery,
one that scores of researchers
are now grappling with.
Back on the ground,
we're meeting Professor Martti Pärssinen,
an archaeologist and anthropologist
from the University of Helsinki,
who's been searching for answers
alongside Dr. Ranzi for two decades.
[Graham] Clearly, we're looking
at an enormous phenomenon here,
not something small.
And a phenomenon that shows
knowledge of geometry
and also a high level of organization
must have been involved.
[Pärssinen] I think so
because many of these are so complicated.
[Graham] Very complicated.
It is necessary to have pre-planned
how to do it and how to organize it.
[music ends]
[Graham] After examining
hundreds of geoglyphs,
Professor Pärssinen has uncovered
a key piece of evidence
that points to the type of society
that built these structures,
ancient raised roads connecting
many of the geoglyphs.
[mysterious music playing]
This area is full of roads.
- Hunters and gatherers do not build roads.
- [Graham] Mm-hmm.
[Pärssinen]
They don't have any need for that.
It needs already society
with a much more higher level of thinking.
- [Graham] I see.
- And relationships between each other.
- So that is a really complex society.
- [Graham] Yeah.
And if I'm right, this was not
expected before in the Amazon.
No, it was totally a surprise for us.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] To figure out more
about who the builders were,
Professor Pärssinen's team has been
excavating the areas around the geoglyphs,
including this one known as Tequinho.
Archaeologically, tell me what
you do find, uh, inside the earthworks?
From Tequinho,
we found 40,000, uh, shards of ceramics.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Graham] These shards
were around 2,000 years old.
The earthwork itself was dated
to around 2,500 years ago.
But the pottery
was unexpectedly sophisticated.
- Most of it is of high quality
- Right.
- and polychrome ceramics.
- Right.
So that polychrome is
a rather advanced form of ceramics.
Yes, normally polychrome ceramic is
considered to be part of civilization.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The multicolored ceramics raised
an unexpected parallel
with another far-off culture known for
their deep knowledge of geometry,
the ancient Greeks.
Generally, historians and archaeologists
say that, you know,
the Greeks were amongst
the first to create geometry,
but clearly,
we have to reconsider that view.
I think you're right because
this Geoglyph culture
is exactly the same time
when the Greek culture had
archaeological period
that has been called
Geometric Greek period.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The fact
that two cultures so far apart
were making geometric art
and producing sophisticated pottery
around the same time
seems more than a coincidence.
It's fascinating that we're seeing
this parallel development of ideas
between cultures unconnected.
Yes, exactly.
[Graham] I'm not suggesting the Greek
and Amazonian cultures were in contact.
But could both perhaps have shared
a legacy of knowledge
inherited from
a vastly older civilization,
one that traveled the Earth
in the night of time,
leaving traces
of its wisdom wherever it went?
Now, the way
that archaeology explains this is to say,
"Well, look, we all have
the same human minds,
and so we're all going to do
the same things."
And the fact
that they did them at the same time
in widely separated geographical locations
is just explained
by that shared neurology.
I'm afraid that just doesn't work for me.
It's obvious from looking at the design
that there must be a background to this.
This isn't something that just appears
out of nowhere suddenly one night.
So how far back can you trace
the prehistory of this area?
And is there any evidence
that these places were special
before the geoglyphs were put there?
That's a very good question
because we excavated up to one meter
- [Graham] Mm-hmm.
- and after that, the ceramic disappeared.
But then I noticed
that the charcoal continued.
[Graham] Mm-hmm.
And we went down and down and down,
and then we started to take
radiocarbon samples,
and finally we found
that many of these sites
have been established already
10,000 years ago.
My goodness. Wow. From the deep past.
- From the deep past, exactly.
- Yeah. Fascinating.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] So, 10,000 years ago,
not long after the end of the Ice Age,
it looks like these same sites
may already have held
some great significance
to the people who visited them.
That adds more to the picture then.
So in a sense, what we're looking at now
is the latest incarnation
of a very long-term association
with the land,
- a very long-term project in a way.
- [Pärssinen] Yes.
We have evidence of a highly organized,
sophisticated Indigenous civilization
taking all the initiatives that
we would expect of a high civilization.
[Graham] This research
is truly groundbreaking
for our growing understanding
of human history.
We have to reconsider
our whole ideas of the ancient Amazon
and our whole ideas
of ancient civilizations.
To me, this is one
of the most exciting discoveries
that has been made in the last 100 years.
It's really, really something special.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] And the work is far from over.
We are now aware of a phenomenon
that we didn't know existed 20 years ago.
The next question is
how many of them are there?
How many
of these earthworks actually exist?
[triumphant music playing]
To date, more than 1,000 geoglyphs
have been discovered
in the Acre region alone.
Eight miles from the airfield,
Professor Pärssinen is hoping to add
to the tally
in an unexplored part of the forest
near an exposed geoglyph
called Fazenda Cipoal.
[triumphant music ends]
Our understanding stopped
on the border of the forest,
and now we want to know what's there.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] To detect
what's beneath the trees,
the team is depending on a technology
that sees through them.
LiDAR.
By using this system,
we can clear the vegetation out
and get the results from the bottom.
And in that way,
we can see the topography exactly.
[Graham] With LiDAR, you can see
what's under the canopy
without destroying a single tree.
You don't have
to tear down the rainforest.
You don't have to destroy anything.
Joining the hunt is Fabio De Novaes Filho,
who will be surveying the forest
with his drone-based LiDAR system.
[Fabio] We are going to fly at 80 meters.
That's good.
Maybe we can have
about 100 to 200 points per square meter.
That's excellent.
The topography will be very precise.
[adventurous music playing]
[blades whirring]
[Graham] The device fires laser beams
down between the leaves,
detecting changes in elevation.
[music continues]
The data is then used to create
a 3D map of the landscape,
revealing any anomalies.
[music ends]
These drones will change everything
in archaeology.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] While the team looks to see
what might be hidden beneath the canopy,
I'm investigating a different question.
Why were the geoglyphs built
in the first place?
Archaeological excavations offer no clue
as to why they were created.
But the Indigenous people in this area
hold knowledge and memories
that help to shed light
on the significance and meaning
of these remarkable earthworks.
I've come to the geoglyph known as Jaco Sá
to meet one of its caretakers.
[intriguing music continues]
Antônio Apurinã is from the Apurinã people
and works within FUNAI,
Brazil's national Indigenous agency.
[Antônio in Portuguese]
The Apurinã are a people
whose origins are closely tied to nature,
to the earth.
[in English] What is
the opinion of the Apurinã
about these constructions?
What is your feeling about them?
[in Portuguese] I am standing in a place
for which I have the utmost respect.
For us, it is a sacred place.
It wasn't made for war.
It wasn't made for defense.
It was made to express something cultural.
[Graham in English] If the geometrical
shapes have no practical function,
such a huge effort to create them
suggests a higher purpose.
There may be a clue in
the spiritual traditions of the Apurinã.
[in Portuguese] So, we compare this here
as if it were a circle of the Apurinã
when they dance and pay homage
to a deceased chief, a shaman,
to an important person
from the village who has died.
[somber music playing]
We see this space as somewhere
that would welcome us
once we have left the material world.
[in English] This is a view
very strongly held
amongst Indigenous cultures
across the Amazon to this day,
that, after death,
our soul makes a journey,
ultimately to an afterlife existence.
This is an idea that is found
all around the world,
and structures were created to aid
the journey of the soul after death.
[tense music playing]
Let's take the example of pyramids.
I don't know
of a single pyramidal structure
around the world that isn't connected
to the notion of death
and the afterlife journey of the soul.
This is particularly evident
in the ancient Egyptian pyramids,
but it's just as evident in the pyramids
of the Americas and of Mexico.
[tense music continues]
So it's interesting to learn from Antônio
that the Amazon geoglyphs
may have served a similar purpose
for the people who first created them
untold thousands of years ago.
[tense music ends]
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] Back at the airfield,
it's time to find out if our LiDAR survey
has detected yet more
of these sacred sites beneath the canopy.
So, Fabio, please, tell us what you found.
We surveyed the area using the LiDAR.
And you see the trees?
[Graham] Yeah.
[music crescendos]
And now
Wow. Incredible.
Wow.
[music ends]
[closing theme playing]
[closing theme ends]
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] For those who don't know me,
I'm Graham Hancock.
I've been exploring the possibility
of a lost civilization in prehistory
for more than 30 years.
Archaeology claims if there were
such a thing as a lost civilization,
they would have found it already.
Well, I profoundly disagree with that.
[music continues]
And now, my quest continues
[airplane engine revving]
in a part of the world often overlooked
by historians of humanity's origins
The oldest dates that we got
were about 13,200 before present.
[Graham] exploring some of the world's
most intriguing ancient wonders.
There's numerology.
There's mathematics. There's astronomy.
This could be considered
a lost technology.
[Graham] And making new discoveries.
Wow.
[triumphant music playing]
It's impossible. It's impossible.
I mean, as a kid,
I always thought the timeline was off.
[Graham] All with a radical
new proposition in mind.
Could the key to discovering
a lost civilization
of the Ice Age lie here,
in the Americas?
[triumphant music crescendos]
[triumphant music ends]
[theme song playing]
[theme song ends]
- [thunder rumbling]
- [electronic warble]
[somber music playing]
[Graham] The quest for our origins
and the quest
for the origins of civilization,
are fundamental to what it is,
to being human.
But I think it's part of the human nature.
If we're convinced
that something doesn't exist,
we don't look for it.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] My search for those origins
has led me here,
to one of the most striking places
in North America.
White Sands.
This is a land of austere beauty
and strangeness
that's been hiding a secret
for thousands of years.
A secret now unveiled
that's forcing a rewrite
of the prehistory of the Americas.
[tense music intensifies]
[Graham] Until the 1990s,
we were taught that deep in the Ice Age,
humans migrated from North Asia to Alaska,
across the Bering land bridge,
then, around 13,500 years ago,
walked south through an ice-free corridor,
before spreading across the Americas.
A scenario held so firmly for so long
that few archaeologists went looking
for traces of any earlier human migration.
[tense music continues]
For a very long time,
there's been this conviction
that evidence would not be found
of a human presence
older than 13,500 years ago.
Turns out, that idea was wrong.
Very wrong.
[tense music intensifies, stops]
[Graham] White Sands National Park's
resource manager, David Bustos,
began working here in 2005,
hoping to share with others his passion
for this pristine wilderness
and its wildlife.
But he soon found himself
on the trail of something else,
something that seemed crazy at first.
I think about 2006, I heard a story
about footprints of a Bigfoot. [chuckles]
And there was a government trapper
that found these amazing prints.
He described them being 22 inches across
and eight inches wide.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- What could that be? Must be a Bigfoot.
And I think lot of people gave him
a hard time. There's no Bigfoot.
But I was thinking,
"I've seen these." [chuckles]
Yeah.
[David] And so we went out,
and when we brushed out the footprints,
you could see
they had incredible claw marks.
[Graham] Obviously, this was no Bigfoot.
He did find a big footprint
of a giant ground sloth.
- That's what they were.
- Giant ground sloths.
[Graham] They knew
the prints must be very old.
Giant ground sloths went extinct
around 11,500 years ago.
Then David and his colleagues found
even larger prints nearby from mammoths,
also long extinct.
Some of the gait and stride can be
13 feet long. Really incredible.
Look a little bit further, you'll find
the giant camel, American camel.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- Sometimes you'll see dire wolves.
[Graham] All these tracks are
from megafauna,
giant mammals which suddenly vanished
at the end of the last Ice Age.
Many are little more than compacted sand,
buried and protected by layers
of sediment over thousands of years,
until erosion brought them back
to the surface.
[intriguing music playing]
Among these ancient mammoth tracks,
David also spotted
another intriguing set of prints,
and he and his colleagues
decided to take a closer look.
When we brushed out
these other footprints,
we've seen really nice, clear
toe impressions in the heel.
[triumphant music playing]
- [Graham] Human footprints?
- Human footprints.
At the same age,
it appeared to be, as the megafauna.
It was really amazing.
- Incredible.
- [David] Yes.
[triumphant music ends]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] These fossilized human footprints
must have been made
in the time of the mammoths
and the giant sloths.
At least 11,500 years ago.
And there are thousands of them.
[tense music continues]
There's something intimate and special
about White Sands. It's not tools.
It's not a broken femur
from a prey animal that's been butchered.
It's human footprints. It's us.
We are seeing the human presence
very intimately and very directly
in those footprints.
[tense music continues]
But when were they left here exactly?
Just how old are these footprints?
There's no technology
that can date them directly.
So the National Park Service
teamed up with the US Geological Survey
to search for more evidence.
[tense music intensifies]
[Graham] And they struck gold,
finding layer upon layer of animal
and human tracks going deep into the past.
[camera shutter clicks]
Buried among them
were seeds from an aquatic grass
[camera shutter clicks]
seeds that could be carbon dated.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] And the results were astounding.
[David] We know that the footprints
were here for thousands of years,
at least from 23,000 years
to 21,000 years.
Wow.
[suspenseful music slows down]
The discovery of human footprints
at White Sands is a huge step forward
in our understanding
of the peopling of the Americas.
We're looking at
absolutely incontrovertible evidence
that humans were present
in New Mexico deep in the Ice Age,
as much as 23,000 years ago.
It's proof that long before
it was possible to spread south
into the Americas
through that ice-free corridor,
humans were already here.
[suspenseful music continues]
This changes the history of the Americas,
and it changes the history of the world.
These are human beings just like us,
but human beings concealed
behind the veil of time.
And our task now is to lift that veil back
and re-establish that connection
with our ancestors and the remote past.
[suspenseful music ends]
The footprints hold
special meaning and significance
for the Indigenous communities
of this area.
Kim Pasqual-Charlie of the Pueblo of Acoma
consulted with the team
on this groundbreaking discovery.
[Graham] Tell me about the relationship
of the Acoma to the land.
How long have your people been here?
Are there myths and traditions
about an origin story of your people?
Yes. Our origin story started
somewhere in the north area.
And through our migration story
that has been passed down
from generation to generation,
we settled here and there,
coming down here.
- And that's where my people stayed.
- Yeah.
We've been in the Southwest
for a very long time.
[Graham] Yeah.
To Kim and her people,
these prints are far more
than archaeological records.
- Your ancestors left their footprints.
- [Kim] Mm-hmm.
I understand you were involved in finding
some of those footprints?
Yes. There's no words to describe it.
We've come to see
where our ancestor once walked this earth.
[tense music playing]
And to place my hands
in the little footprints of children.
- You know? And it gets very emotional.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- [Kim] You know? It's
- Yeah.
I'm sorry, Graham, but it just [chuckles]
There are times it makes you wanna cry.
- [Graham] Absolutely.
- You know?
[Graham] But once
the footprints are exposed,
the same process of erosion
that revealed them
will slowly start to erase them.
These footprints which testify
to the ancient presence of your people
are also fragile.
- Right.
- They could easily be lost.
[Kim] You know, maybe 50 years from now,
the next generation
won't be able to see the footprints.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- [Kim] But the stories will continue.
Our stories will continue.
[wind howling]
[Graham] But the barren landscape
begs a question.
Why would all these humans
and animals have come here?
[suspenseful music playing]
Remember, North America
was different during the Ice Age.
The north half of the continent
was smothered by ice.
And this part of New Mexico
was very different.
At first glance,
this vast, open desert with patches
of brush and wind-sculpted dunes
seems pitiless and otherworldly.
[Graham] But if we wind the clock back
to the height of the Ice Age,
conditions here were very different.
The Tularosa Basin held a giant body
of fresh water known as Lake Otero
surrounded by vegetation.
[mammoth trumpeting]
Ancient mammoths, ground sloths,
and camels came to this watering hole
to feast on the grasses and trees.
- [mammoth trumpeting]
- [birds chirping]
And, as we now know, humans followed them.
Establishing the age of the footprints
was a complex scientific problem.
David and a team of experts spent
more than a decade building the evidence.
But when, in 2021, they published
their findings in the journal Science,
not all reactions were favorable.
[David] I think with anything
that's so unique and unusual,
it takes a lot of science
to be able to support it.
[Graham] The carbon dating of the seeds
was challenged.
But the team confirmed their results
using other samples of pollen and sediment
quieting their critics.
Is there still controversy
around the 23,000-year-old dates?
I think until you have a time machine,
there always will be.
But beyond all these dates
also, if you look,
you still see a mammoth footprint
a meter, a meter and a half
above human footprints.
- And there's more mammoth prints below
- Below. Yeah.
so megafauna and people
have been on this horizon
- for thousands of years together.
- Yeah.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The White Sands discovery
helps to solve
one of the most perplexing mysteries
of prehistory,
the sudden extinction
of America's Ice Age megafauna
between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.
The suggestion of archaeology was that
human beings hunted down all the megafauna
and butchered them.
I don't know of any hunter-gatherer group
that would willingly exterminate
its food supply.
So the notion that humans were responsible
for the extinction of the megafauna,
uh, has always seemed,
to me, quite bizarre.
[tense music ends]
[Graham] The tracks here prove
that humans and those animals overlapped
for at least 10,000 years
before their extinction.
I think a much better explanation
for the extinction
of the Ice Age megafauna
is the global cataclysm that took place
around about 12,800-12,900 years ago,
known as the Younger Dryas.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music playing]
There was a sudden plunge
in global temperatures,
a sudden rise in sea levels,
and the world very rapidly became
an extremely difficult place to live.
It's a time we call
the ancient apocalypse.
North America was hardest hit,
which could explain
both the extinction of its megafauna
and also, the big gaps
in human history here.
[tense music ends]
We are going to have to completely change
the story of the peopling of the Americas
in the light of this new evidence.
Archaeologists are opening their eyes
and their minds
to the possibility
of a much older human presence.
[David] We're just touching the tip
of the surface of what's to be learned.
I think throughout the Southwest
as people look,
they're gonna find sites
that are just as old as White Sands also.
So it's like you've opened
a door on the past,
- which nobody's stepped through before?
- Yeah.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] Paradigm shifts
don't happen instantly.
It's the accumulation of evidence
that finally discredits an old paradigm
and allows eyes to open
to new possibilities.
That's what we're witnessing
in the Americas now.
What's been discovered here at White Sands
is part of a much bigger story,
a global story
that I've been investigating
for more than 30 years.
If we want to clear the fog of amnesia
that surrounds our remote past,
we need to look much deeper
and much further back
than we've ever done before,
right here in the Americas
where the timeline of prehistory
keeps on receding
with every new discovery.
[tense music ends]
New discoveries
that are not just being followed
by archaeologists.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] So, Keanu.
Graham.
Let's talk about the past.
- Okay.
- Why does the past matter to you?
Well, you know.
I remember as a young child
just being inquisitive.
And as I have grown up,
it comes to the question
of a fundamental sense of
"who are we?"
Yeah. And what's driven me on this quest
of my own for more than 30 years,
um, is to try to get back
to some sort of source.
Source of what?
The source of who we are.
- And the timeline.
- [Graham] Timeline's all wrong.
That's why those footprints in White Sands
were so significant to me.
[Keanu] Mm.
My feeling is that 23,000 years is
just the beginning.
We're gonna go back
much further than that.
Yeah. I have that
I have that feeling too.
And we are just at the edge of
of rediscovering so much of our lost past.
[Keanu] Mm.
And in a way, America is the place
where that story is unfolding.
Well, that's an exciting idea.
[tense music playing]
I think you're on a quest, Graham,
to teach
and to bring understanding, perhaps.
[Graham] Well,
the issue about the Americas is
that there is so much of our past
that we've forgotten.
And my role, such as it is,
has been to try to recover,
uh, some of that lost memory.
When I think of the past like that,
it sounds exciting.
Absolutely. For me,
the past is all about mystery.
It's not about what we do know.
It's about what we don't know.
The huge areas that
have not been explored or investigated.
The possibilities
that haven't been explored.
Yeah.
[tense music continues]
[Graham] We need
to start looking specifically for evidence
in places where
we might not have looked before.
During the Ice Age,
the northern part of North America
was a frozen wasteland.
The places to look
are down near the tropics.
Down near the equator.
Places that were warm,
comfortable, nurturing, hospitable.
Perhaps even a vast region
that was long believed to be
an archaeological wasteland,
but where astounding secrets
of the human past
are now beginning to be revealed.
This is the Amazon.
[tense music intensifies]
You're looking at more than
six million square kilometers of land
that are still under
dense canopy rainforest.
That immense land area is a huge mystery
at the heart of the human story.
And little by little,
we're beginning to realize
how enormous that mystery really is.
[tense music continues]
For decades, the dominant view
of archaeologists was that
the Amazon's only historical inhabitants
were small semi-nomadic tribes
of hunter-foragers,
much like those still surviving
in the rainforest today.
But I believe the dominant view is wrong.
[tense music intensifies]
[tense music continues]
[Graham] I'm headed to the far west
of Brazil and the state of Acre.
Like most of the Amazon basin,
it had long been blanketed
by sprawling rainforest
until vast expanses
began to be burned down
to make way for cattle ranches.
[fire crackling]
Coming to the Amazon rainforest is both
an exhilarating and depressing experience.
The amount of land
that's been cleared of trees
is an unfolding modern day disaster
with no easy solution.
But as new swathes of land
have been cleared,
it's led to something
that no one expected.
[tense music continues]
[Graham] I'm here to meet Dr. Alceu Ranzi,
a paleogeographer who began his career
studying the Amazon's Ice Age animals.
[airplane engine revving]
[Graham] He wants
to show me evidence of a mystery
that remains unsolved today.
[tense music intensifies]
- Whoa!
- Whoa!
[both laugh]
Roller coaster.
[Graham] From up here,
the ongoing devastation is unmissable.
You can see
how much of it has been cleared.
- So much. So much.
- [Graham] Yes.
Twenty years from now,
all the forest will disappear.
But this clearance has opened
a little window on a great mystery.
In 1986,
Dr. Ranzi was flying over this region
when he caught a glimpse
of something unexpected.
I was arriving in Rio Branco by jet,
commercial jet.
Yes.
- Sitting in the window seat.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- And looking at the environment like this.
- [Graham] Yes.
[Dr. Ranzi] Like this.
And then I see a big circle.
[dramatic music playing]
My God. What's this? Huh?
- And the jet is so fast. Gone.
- Yeah.
Disappear.
[Graham] He didn't yet realize it,
but in those few seconds,
Dr. Ranzi had spotted something,
that if our old notions
of the Amazon are true,
simply shouldn't exist.
- Wow.
- [Dr. Ranzi] Yeah.
[Graham] Giant geometrical shapes,
as much as 1,000 feet across,
formed by trenches
and massive piles of earth,
now known as geoglyphs.
Fantastic design. My God.
Fantastic design. And so big.
[Graham] And enormous.
- So enormous. Enormous.
- [Graham] Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
[tense music ends]
- Beautiful. Beautiful thing.
- [Dr. Ranzi] Beautiful.
[tense music playing]
And what I'm seeing is a square
surrounded by an oval.
[Dr. Ranzi] Ah, look. Another one.
- Yes. They're everywhere.
- [Dr. Ranzi] Everywhere.
Another one here.
Another one here.
Wow. Incredible.
[Graham] The perfect geometry
is only visible
from hundreds of feet in the air.
And yet, somehow,
this was all created by people
with their feet stuck firmly
on the ground.
[tense music ends]
This, to me,
raises a feeling of deep respect.
How do they have the perspective
to see how they would look from above?
It's a powerful experience.
I've visited many temples and pyramids
and sacred sites around the world,
and this has a very special feeling.
You know, very special.
[triumphant music playing]
I mean, it touches my heart.
[spluttering] I'm
I'm looking at something majestic.
It's as though the curtain is being
pulled back from the from the Mona Lisa.
Suddenly, I'm seeing something
that I didn't know was there,
and it had an enormous
emotional impact upon me.
It was as though
the ancients were speaking to me directly.
"Look what we could do.
Don't underestimate us."
"We were scientists."
[tense music playing]
When you first told archaeologists
about this phenomenon, what did they say?
- The first one was a famous archaeologist.
- [Graham] Yes.
- [Dr. Ranzi] I showed her the picture
- Yeah. Yeah.
and she looked and said, "Where is it?
In the Amazon? It's impossible."
It's impossible? Look at the picture.
Help me, please.
- I don't know what this is.
- Yes.
[Graham] The evidence is undeniable
and spread across an area
the size of West Virginia.
[tense music playing]
At first, it was thought these mounds
might be defensive ramparts.
But there's no evidence of warfare here.
And the ditches lie inside the mounds,
so they're not moats.
And there's no evidence
that they were used as settlements.
[tense music ends]
It's impossible to avoid speculation when
we look at the Amazon geoglyphs. Why?
Because there are no written documents
from their original creators
that tell us why they made them.
We don't know why they made them.
[intriguing music playing]
What's your thought about
how many there are in the whole area?
- Thousands.
- [Graham] Thousands.
- Thousands. Thousands.
- [Graham] All right.
Thousands.
[music crescendos, stops]
[Graham] It raises many questions.
How old are these geometrical earthworks?
Are they older or younger
than the Amazon rainforest
that long concealed them?
[suspenseful music playing]
What was the size of the workforce
that created them in the first place?
And what skills were required
to direct the work successfully?
[Graham] This is not new work.
This is people who
already knew what they were doing.
They've done it many times before.
I would love to know
what was in their minds
when they were making this.
Yeah.
[Graham] It's such a huge effort
and energy.
[suspenseful music continues]
[Graham] The geoglyph building project
is a compelling mystery,
one that scores of researchers
are now grappling with.
Back on the ground,
we're meeting Professor Martti Pärssinen,
an archaeologist and anthropologist
from the University of Helsinki,
who's been searching for answers
alongside Dr. Ranzi for two decades.
[Graham] Clearly, we're looking
at an enormous phenomenon here,
not something small.
And a phenomenon that shows
knowledge of geometry
and also a high level of organization
must have been involved.
[Pärssinen] I think so
because many of these are so complicated.
[Graham] Very complicated.
It is necessary to have pre-planned
how to do it and how to organize it.
[music ends]
[Graham] After examining
hundreds of geoglyphs,
Professor Pärssinen has uncovered
a key piece of evidence
that points to the type of society
that built these structures,
ancient raised roads connecting
many of the geoglyphs.
[mysterious music playing]
This area is full of roads.
- Hunters and gatherers do not build roads.
- [Graham] Mm-hmm.
[Pärssinen]
They don't have any need for that.
It needs already society
with a much more higher level of thinking.
- [Graham] I see.
- And relationships between each other.
- So that is a really complex society.
- [Graham] Yeah.
And if I'm right, this was not
expected before in the Amazon.
No, it was totally a surprise for us.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] To figure out more
about who the builders were,
Professor Pärssinen's team has been
excavating the areas around the geoglyphs,
including this one known as Tequinho.
Archaeologically, tell me what
you do find, uh, inside the earthworks?
From Tequinho,
we found 40,000, uh, shards of ceramics.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Graham] These shards
were around 2,000 years old.
The earthwork itself was dated
to around 2,500 years ago.
But the pottery
was unexpectedly sophisticated.
- Most of it is of high quality
- Right.
- and polychrome ceramics.
- Right.
So that polychrome is
a rather advanced form of ceramics.
Yes, normally polychrome ceramic is
considered to be part of civilization.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The multicolored ceramics raised
an unexpected parallel
with another far-off culture known for
their deep knowledge of geometry,
the ancient Greeks.
Generally, historians and archaeologists
say that, you know,
the Greeks were amongst
the first to create geometry,
but clearly,
we have to reconsider that view.
I think you're right because
this Geoglyph culture
is exactly the same time
when the Greek culture had
archaeological period
that has been called
Geometric Greek period.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The fact
that two cultures so far apart
were making geometric art
and producing sophisticated pottery
around the same time
seems more than a coincidence.
It's fascinating that we're seeing
this parallel development of ideas
between cultures unconnected.
Yes, exactly.
[Graham] I'm not suggesting the Greek
and Amazonian cultures were in contact.
But could both perhaps have shared
a legacy of knowledge
inherited from
a vastly older civilization,
one that traveled the Earth
in the night of time,
leaving traces
of its wisdom wherever it went?
Now, the way
that archaeology explains this is to say,
"Well, look, we all have
the same human minds,
and so we're all going to do
the same things."
And the fact
that they did them at the same time
in widely separated geographical locations
is just explained
by that shared neurology.
I'm afraid that just doesn't work for me.
It's obvious from looking at the design
that there must be a background to this.
This isn't something that just appears
out of nowhere suddenly one night.
So how far back can you trace
the prehistory of this area?
And is there any evidence
that these places were special
before the geoglyphs were put there?
That's a very good question
because we excavated up to one meter
- [Graham] Mm-hmm.
- and after that, the ceramic disappeared.
But then I noticed
that the charcoal continued.
[Graham] Mm-hmm.
And we went down and down and down,
and then we started to take
radiocarbon samples,
and finally we found
that many of these sites
have been established already
10,000 years ago.
My goodness. Wow. From the deep past.
- From the deep past, exactly.
- Yeah. Fascinating.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] So, 10,000 years ago,
not long after the end of the Ice Age,
it looks like these same sites
may already have held
some great significance
to the people who visited them.
That adds more to the picture then.
So in a sense, what we're looking at now
is the latest incarnation
of a very long-term association
with the land,
- a very long-term project in a way.
- [Pärssinen] Yes.
We have evidence of a highly organized,
sophisticated Indigenous civilization
taking all the initiatives that
we would expect of a high civilization.
[Graham] This research
is truly groundbreaking
for our growing understanding
of human history.
We have to reconsider
our whole ideas of the ancient Amazon
and our whole ideas
of ancient civilizations.
To me, this is one
of the most exciting discoveries
that has been made in the last 100 years.
It's really, really something special.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] And the work is far from over.
We are now aware of a phenomenon
that we didn't know existed 20 years ago.
The next question is
how many of them are there?
How many
of these earthworks actually exist?
[triumphant music playing]
To date, more than 1,000 geoglyphs
have been discovered
in the Acre region alone.
Eight miles from the airfield,
Professor Pärssinen is hoping to add
to the tally
in an unexplored part of the forest
near an exposed geoglyph
called Fazenda Cipoal.
[triumphant music ends]
Our understanding stopped
on the border of the forest,
and now we want to know what's there.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] To detect
what's beneath the trees,
the team is depending on a technology
that sees through them.
LiDAR.
By using this system,
we can clear the vegetation out
and get the results from the bottom.
And in that way,
we can see the topography exactly.
[Graham] With LiDAR, you can see
what's under the canopy
without destroying a single tree.
You don't have
to tear down the rainforest.
You don't have to destroy anything.
Joining the hunt is Fabio De Novaes Filho,
who will be surveying the forest
with his drone-based LiDAR system.
[Fabio] We are going to fly at 80 meters.
That's good.
Maybe we can have
about 100 to 200 points per square meter.
That's excellent.
The topography will be very precise.
[adventurous music playing]
[blades whirring]
[Graham] The device fires laser beams
down between the leaves,
detecting changes in elevation.
[music continues]
The data is then used to create
a 3D map of the landscape,
revealing any anomalies.
[music ends]
These drones will change everything
in archaeology.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] While the team looks to see
what might be hidden beneath the canopy,
I'm investigating a different question.
Why were the geoglyphs built
in the first place?
Archaeological excavations offer no clue
as to why they were created.
But the Indigenous people in this area
hold knowledge and memories
that help to shed light
on the significance and meaning
of these remarkable earthworks.
I've come to the geoglyph known as Jaco Sá
to meet one of its caretakers.
[intriguing music continues]
Antônio Apurinã is from the Apurinã people
and works within FUNAI,
Brazil's national Indigenous agency.
[Antônio in Portuguese]
The Apurinã are a people
whose origins are closely tied to nature,
to the earth.
[in English] What is
the opinion of the Apurinã
about these constructions?
What is your feeling about them?
[in Portuguese] I am standing in a place
for which I have the utmost respect.
For us, it is a sacred place.
It wasn't made for war.
It wasn't made for defense.
It was made to express something cultural.
[Graham in English] If the geometrical
shapes have no practical function,
such a huge effort to create them
suggests a higher purpose.
There may be a clue in
the spiritual traditions of the Apurinã.
[in Portuguese] So, we compare this here
as if it were a circle of the Apurinã
when they dance and pay homage
to a deceased chief, a shaman,
to an important person
from the village who has died.
[somber music playing]
We see this space as somewhere
that would welcome us
once we have left the material world.
[in English] This is a view
very strongly held
amongst Indigenous cultures
across the Amazon to this day,
that, after death,
our soul makes a journey,
ultimately to an afterlife existence.
This is an idea that is found
all around the world,
and structures were created to aid
the journey of the soul after death.
[tense music playing]
Let's take the example of pyramids.
I don't know
of a single pyramidal structure
around the world that isn't connected
to the notion of death
and the afterlife journey of the soul.
This is particularly evident
in the ancient Egyptian pyramids,
but it's just as evident in the pyramids
of the Americas and of Mexico.
[tense music continues]
So it's interesting to learn from Antônio
that the Amazon geoglyphs
may have served a similar purpose
for the people who first created them
untold thousands of years ago.
[tense music ends]
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] Back at the airfield,
it's time to find out if our LiDAR survey
has detected yet more
of these sacred sites beneath the canopy.
So, Fabio, please, tell us what you found.
We surveyed the area using the LiDAR.
And you see the trees?
[Graham] Yeah.
[music crescendos]
And now
Wow. Incredible.
Wow.
[music ends]
[closing theme playing]
[closing theme ends]