Ancient Apocalypse (2022) s02e02 Episode Script
Chapter II
1
[pensive music playing]
[Graham] These enormous structures
in the Amazon
speak to a monumental human endeavor.
[dramatic sting]
But how many of them are there?
[pensive music continues]
Tell us what you found.
- [Fabio] You see the trees?
- [Graham] Yeah.
- [Fabio] And now the terrain.
- [Pärssinen] Now we take it down.
Wow.
- Wow.
- Incredible.
[pensive music continues]
[Graham] Professor Pärssinen and the team
have found nine new geoglyphs
that were hidden
beneath the jungle canopy.
[electronic warble]
Here we have round octagonal.
This octagon, it's about 100 meters.
- Yeah.
- 100 meters in diameter.
Diameter.
Incredible. And nobody knew it was there
until you got up there with your LiDAR.
Nobody knew about this.
Yeah. It's incredible
what this technology can reveal.
Let's move up
and look at this interesting feature.
[electronic warble]
[Graham] These two nearly overlap
and appear to be connected,
perhaps to other sites.
This is road
with embankments on both sides.
- An ancient road?
- Ancient road, yes.
Leading to the large embankment square.
- Yes.
- Stunning.
[Graham] If these geoglyphs were built
at the same time as others nearby,
the roads suggest
an organized civilization thrived here
at least 2,500 years ago.
And there's evidence
they might've been around
for very much longer.
We found that many of these sites
have been established
already 10,000 years ago.
[Graham] We can't be sure
whether we're looking at
reconstructions of much older geoglyphs.
But what we do know is that
human beings were present in that area.
And that evidence goes back
more than 10,000 years, uh, into the past
and brings us very close
to the end of the last Ice Age.
However old they may be,
the scale of the enterprise
is truly astonishing.
So this raises the question,
how many people would it take
to do something like this?
We speak, uh, about hundreds of thousands.
Yes. Literally hundreds
of thousands of inhabitants.
Amazing.
[Graham] Professor Pärsinnen
isn't suggesting
all of those people physically built
the geoglyphs.
But a population that size
must have existed here long-term
to both provide for and support
the necessary workforce.
[birds chirping]
Within a few hundred meters
of known geoglyphs,
our LiDAR team were finding more geoglyphs
that nobody even knew about.
So what on earth can we expect to discover
if we go hundreds of miles
into that dense rainforest?
[triumphant music playing]
This has changed totally
our understanding of Amazonia.
We're dealing with a huge phenomenon here,
which has to change
the history of the Americas
and changing the history of the world.
[Pärssinen chuckles]
[triumphant music ends]
[theme song playing]
[theme song ends]
- [thunder rumbling]
- [electronic warble]
[suspenseful music playing]
We can't possibly begin to tell
the story of the Americas
until we have much more complete knowledge
of what was going on in the Amazon
not 1,000 years ago, but 10,000 years ago,
20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago.
We need to keep going back.
We need not to close our minds
to these possibilities.
[tense music continues]
And there's tantalizing evidence
of that deeper history
1,000 miles northeast of Acre.
I've come to
the Monte Alegre National Park
on the north bank of the Amazon.
Although much of the Amazon basin is flat
and cloaked in trees,
here, distinctive rocky outcrops
tower over the canopy.
Archaeologist and anthropologist
Dr. Christopher Davis
has spent years investigating
a potentially history-changing discovery
high on one of these ridges.
[menacing music playing]
This is Serra do Paituna
hill of the Blackwater Lake
a towering rocky crag adorned with
an array of seemingly ancient
painted images.
[menacing music continues]
Thank you for leading the way.
[music ends]
[Graham] We're obviously surrounded
by just this amazing art here.
What led you to this investigation
and this exploration?
I started doing archeology,
um, as a graduate student.
And I had no idea
that there was rock art in the Americas.
And so I was blown away by that.
[mysterious music playing]
[Graham] The images are known
as pictographs.
Some are very simple.
Maybe a serpent slithering
across the rock.
Others depict
more complex geometric patterns.
The big question is
when were these images painted?
[music intensifies]
The art itself can't be dated.
So Dr. Davis and his team
looked for other evidence.
What's your dating
of this site based on at the moment?
It's from the excavation
that we did back behind here.
There were fragments of carbonated wood,
mostly palm wood, some carbonated seeds.
We found evidence of a fire
back there as well.
[Graham] The results were
truly unexpected.
[Dr. Davis] From the radiocarbon dating,
the oldest dates that we got
were about 13,200 before present.
Fascinating.
Dating back more than 13,000 years,
we're looking at
some of the oldest artwork
found anywhere in the Americas.
Artwork created during the last Ice Age.
By people, we're told,
who just suddenly appeared here
deep in the Amazon wilderness.
[triumphant music playing]
You can imagine, you know,
thousands of years ago,
this would've been much brighter,
much more vibrant.
[camera shutter clicks]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The images were painted
using red and yellow ocher
and seemingly treated to make them last.
[tense music ends]
I've done experiments here
where you just take the ocher
and draw it on the rock,
and it washes away.
Right. So there has to be a binder.
There has to be a binder
and a very good one.
- We suspect they mixed it with tree resin
- Uh-huh.
and the resin forms into
almost like amber but it's kind of clear.
[Graham] So that suggests
those who created these paintings had,
first of all, experience
in how to do paintings like this,
and they developed some knowledge
of how to make the paint last.
Absolutely. Um, and in addition to that,
it shows preparation and time.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] Most compelling to me
are the many handprints
that intimate human contact expressed
by the handprints in the rock art.
It's almost as though
they were touching the wall,
and through the wall, touching us,
sending a message to the future.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] More Paleolithic art
has been found in the Western Amazon.
Like this intricate mural
in the jungles of Colombia,
where 12,600-year-old images depict humans
alongside what appear to be
creatures of the Ice Age.
[tense music intensifies]
We are seeing an eyewitness account
of the coexistence of human beings
with now long-extinct Ice Age megafauna.
And to the east of the Amazon,
these paintings push the date back further
to more than 25,000 years ago.
[tense music continues]
Which means 2,000 years before
those hunter-gatherers were walking
the White Sands of New Mexico,
there were other people already living
in the forests of South America
creating art like this.
And in great numbers.
[tense music crescendos, subsides]
This should open up exploration
of what those human beings
might have been doing in the Americas
over these tens of thousands of years
that archaeologists
previously didn't think
there were any human beings there at all.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] At Serra do Paituna,
Dr. Davis is sure of one thing.
Whoever they were
and whatever they were doing,
the rock painters here suddenly stopped.
[Dr. Davis] So the first people
who were at this region, they were here,
they were doing the art,
and then about 12,700 years ago,
they were gone.
So was the area abandoned at that time?
[Dr. Davis] It appears to be so.
For quite some time.
For thousands of years.
[Graham] To me, 12,700 years ago
is a highly significant date.
There's always margins of error in dates.
But that's very close to the beginning
of the Younger Dryas climate anomaly.
So I can't help wondering
if there's a connection.
[music intensifies]
[Graham] Back then,
temperatures suddenly plunged,
while unexpectedly,
fires raged across the planet.
[fire crackling]
And sea levels rose.
[music ends]
[birds chirping]
We can hear echoes
of this catastrophic epoch
[pensive music playing]
in the oral traditions of Amazonia.
[birds chirping]
There are countless myths and legends
about an ancient cataclysm
that are still told all across the Amazon.
And there's one
that I find particularly intriguing.
[dramatic music playing]
[Graham] According to
the Indigenous Tiriyó people,
long ago, the sky spirits told a shaman
that a terrible flood
would soon be unleashed,
a punishment for the people's wickedness.
Some heeded his warning
and fled to safety atop Mount Kantani.
[people screaming]
But most perished in the deluge.
Eventually, the flood receded,
leaving the survivors to start over.
[music ends]
It is a worldwide tradition.
There was a golden age.
There was a time when humans lived
in harmony with one another.
But that it somehow fell
from its high standards,
and it was punished with a great flood,
with a global destruction,
which wiped it from the face of the Earth.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The global distribution of
this shared myth can't be a coincidence.
I believe these ancient stories may be
our last surviving memories
of very real events
that occurred all over the world
around the end of the Ice Age,
during a period of cataclysms
that we've been calling
the Ancient Apocalypse.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music ends]
[thunder rumbling]
[menacing music playing]
The evidence is mounting more and more
that the Earth crossed the path
of cometary debris.
And the argument is that
it was multiple impacts of fragments
of this cometary debris that set off
the Younger Dryas climate emergency
12,800 years ago.
[menacing music continues]
[Graham] It's an idea we keep encountering
called the Younger Dryas
Impact Hypothesis.
In both the Southern
and Northern Hemispheres,
scientists have found
black matte layers like this one,
showing traces of nanodiamonds,
platinum, and iridium,
suggesting a nearby cosmic impact
or airburst.
But here, in the Amazon,
other evidence might be present,
etched into these walls.
[menacing music ends]
We have several images of comets,
but one panel particularly,
there's a comet
that is positioned facing upward.
The tail is going down.
The head is going up.
[Graham] Yeah.
Above the comet image
is a painting of the sun.
And this was baffling when I first saw it
because normally you wouldn't see a comet
until after the sun sets.
[Graham] Most comets are
easily distinguishable by their tails,
usually only visible above
the setting sun streaming away from it.
Surely it would be impossible to see
a comet below the sun in broad daylight.
So that gave me the idea, "When would you
possibly see a comet head up
before the sun sets?"
- Maybe during an eclipse.
- Mm-hmm.
And so I started looking
in astronomy software,
and there was an eclipse that occurred
facing that image about 13,027 years ago.
[Graham] Right.
[Dr. Davis] And a comet
that was near the sun.
If there was an eclipse
that darkened the sun,
you could possibly see suddenly
this comet,
and it would be head up facing the sun.
- So
- That's what we see in the art?
The art does seem to show that.
[Graham] Could this painting be
a record of the comet
that many believe broke apart,
pummeling the Earth with debris
and triggering the Younger Dryas?
I think the ancients were already
getting warnings from the sky.
They were becoming aware
that something had changed in the heavens,
and perhaps they were painting
the first signs of the apocalypse
that was to come.
[tense music crescendos]
[tense music ends]
[Graham] The timing certainly fits with
when humans abandoned this rocky outcrop.
I know archaeologists
don't like to speculate
and I'm gonna ask you to speculate,
but do you think the Younger Dryas
had anything to do with
that sudden cessation of activity?
You can't ignore it, certainly,
because it does come
right at that period of time.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music playing]
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music ends]
[somber music playing]
[Graham] At a personal level,
what's your estimation
of the people who created this art?
How do you envisage them in your mind?
It's kind of hard to imagine
how brave you would have to be
coming to a new environment.
I mean, they were pioneers.
[crickets chirping]
[Graham] But how did these pioneers
get here in the first place?
[intriguing music playing]
In 2015, scientists investigating
just that question dropped a bombshell.
They found that members
of certain Indigenous Amazonian tribes
share a specific DNA marker
with people from the other side
of the Pacific Ocean.
[music intensifies]
The fact that we find it amongst
remote tribes in the Amazon rainforest
and in Papua New Guinea,
Taiwan, and Australia
suggests very strongly
that there was a direct crossing
across the Pacific Ocean.
Even more surprising
is where this DNA signal isn't.
This DNA signal is not found anywhere
in North America.
If the Americas were peopled
entirely by land,
we should find this DNA signal present
in North America
as well as in South America.
What's more, the DNA signal is very old,
dating back at least 10,000 years.
Nobody is supposed to have
been able to cross the Pacific Ocean
from one side to the other
10 or 11,000 years ago.
For that to have happened
just turns the whole story on its head.
If there's one place on Earth
that might hold clues
as to who crossed the Pacific back then
[music crescendos]
it's here.
[tense music playing]
I've come to one of the world's
most remote inhabited islands
2,300 miles west of South America
and 2,600 miles east of Tahiti.
On Easter Sunday, 1722, Dutch explorers
stumbled across this small speck of land,
lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So they named it Easter Island.
But they were stunned to discover
that it was inhabited
by a people who today
call their home Rapa Nui.
[tense music ends]
[waves crashing]
[Graham] I mean,
look at the basic geography.
It's just sitting there
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
this tiny little dot of land.
And so the first extraordinary thing
about it is,
how did people find it at all?
How did anybody ever end up
settling on Easter Island
in this huge wilderness
of the Pacific Ocean?
[suspenseful music playing]
That Pan-Pacific DNA signal convinces me
that this island could play a key role
in my efforts to reconstruct the story
of a lost civilization of the Ice Age.
Why?
Because of these.
[dramatic music playing]
Vast megalithic statues
that tower over the landscape
for which Rapa Nui is famous today.
[music ends]
[Graham] Across the Pacific,
several islands are home to collections
of remarkable megalithic structures.
However, the greatest concentration
of such monuments is found here.
The islanders call them Moai.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] There are
more than 1,000 of them
on a remote rock
that's smaller than Washington, DC.
Many stand together along the coastline,
facing inland
while others are found
seemingly at random,
as if a massive project
had been abandoned midway through.
[music crescendos, stops]
For me, Easter Island is just one
of the most enchanted places on Earth.
The great Moai statues,
these human figures carved
out of the soft volcanic rock.
It's confronting us
with a mystery right there,
which needs to be explained.
[intriguing music continues]
Who were the sculptors
of these giant statues?
What were they trying to achieve,
and why did they expend
such mighty efforts to achieve it?
These are puzzles
to which no definite solution,
only speculation, has ever been offered.
[music continues]
[birds chirping]
[mysterious music playing]
[Graham] This gap in our knowledge
is mostly due to the devastation
wrought here by outsiders.
During the 19th century,
the Rapa Nui people were reduced
to a tiny remnant
by slave raids and disease.
The few who clung on, did so,
by taking refuge
in underground lava tubes like this.
[water dripping]
[Graham] I often say
that we're a species with amnesia,
and that is particularly true
of Easter Island
because of its tragic history.
Because from the moment
that Easter Island encountered
Western culture,
uh, disaster set in.
[water dripping]
The elders who had preserved the memories
were all taken away.
Some slaves were later repatriated,
but brought with them deadly diseases,
with the result
that the remaining islanders
were all but wiped out.
[dramatic music playing]
Leo Pakarati is
an Indigenous documentarian
whose family has carefully preserved
the oral traditions of Rapa Nui
for generations.
He's painfully aware of what was lost
during those dark times
of the slave raids.
The only memory that is preserved
of the origins of Easter Island
is the memory
that survived the 19th century.
In a historical moment,
we are only 111 persons on the island.
- It's a big disaster.
- For the culture.
It's a cultural disaster too
because you need many people
to keep the knowledge.
Few people, few knowledge.
- Yeah.
- And we lose a big part of our history.
[somber music playing]
[Graham] And yet,
despite these overwhelming odds,
the Rapa Nui have retained memories
concerning this tiny island's
most intriguing mystery.
Tell me what the old tradition says
about the Moai.
The real name for the Moai
is "te aringa ora o te Tupuna."
- Mm-hmm.
- "The living face of our ancestors."
That is the name.
The idea is
the Moai represent a real person.
Yeah.
And in life,
this person is special, important.
[Graham] According to Rapa Nui lore,
these important ancestors
were memorialized in the Moai
with distinctive features
related to their rank.
- Some of the Moai have short ears.
- Yeah.
Some have long ears. What's that about?
[Leo] This is because of our different
social classes on the island.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- Some people have time for long earrings.
They have long nails too.
- It's a social class act.
- [Graham] Yes.
So those long fingers on the Moai,
those are actually nails?
[splutters] They have long fingers,
and some Moai have
very long nails and curves too.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] I find it impossible
to avoid seeing
parallels with similar statues
of great antiquity found elsewhere.
On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi,
we find 4,000-year-old megalithic figures
in a remarkably similar posture
and with similar hand positions.
Even on the other side of the world,
in Turkey,
a statue known as Urfa Man
that dates back to the Ice Age
strikes a similar pose,
his hands clasped across his belly.
[tense music continues]
An equally intriguing parallel is found
also in Turkey,
in the ten-ton megalithic pillars
of Göbekli Tepe.
These pillars are 11,600 years old.
Could the similarities
of these designs across time and space
be evidence
of a single common ancestor culture,
leaving a legacy of ideas
for later peoples to express?
[tense music crescendos, stops]
[pensive music playing]
No records exist that could explain
the origins of such imagery.
[music continues]
But according to Rapa Nui oral tradition,
the Moai, in addition to being
megalithic memorials,
channel a sacred spiritual power
from their ancestors,
an energy known as mana.
Tell me more about mana.
Mana is very important.
Mana is the energy.
All the people have mana.
Any rock, any elements
in the universe have mana.
So the Moai are invested with mana?
[Leo] Yeah. People, when they die,
the family send
to make a Moai with the intention,
the soul, the mana, the spirit
of this person entering the Moai.
[Graham] But interestingly,
that mana only starts to flow
after the Moai are set in place
and properly finished.
In the moment,
the Moai is safe on the platform,
the tupuna, the ancestors,
carve in the holes for the eyes first,
and later they put in coral
for the white part
and sometimes obsidian
or other rocks for the eyes.
- [Graham] Right. Yeah.
- In this moment, it's no more Moai.
Now it's Aringa ora o te Tupuna.
The living face of our ancestors.
- Once it has the eyes?
- Once it has the eyes.
- Right.
- And from the platform, from the Ahu,
the Moai look in direction to the town
and protect the family.
That is the function of the Moai.
[music fades]
[Graham] Clearly, the Moai are
deeply sacred to the Rapa Nui.
But does that mean
they originally carved them?
Or could the Moai have already been here?
If so, we'd need to rethink
the entire timeline
of the peopling of Rapa Nui.
Let's consider an alternative scenario
in which it was first explored
by a small group
of highly sophisticated navigators,
much further back in prehistory
than is presently accepted.
[tense music playing]
[man chanting]
[all chanting]
[Graham] Based on genetic testing,
we know that the Rapa Nui people
[chanting]
are descended from
those great ancient navigators,
the Polynesians.
The Polynesians were fantastically
advanced navigators and seafarers
and settled many parts
of the Pacific Ocean
during the Polynesian expansion
about 3,000 years ago.
Carbon dating
of the oldest human settlements here
strongly suggests that Rapa Nui was one
of the last islands they reached
around 1,100 years ago.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
A new study proposes
that the first people arrived
even more recently,
just 800 years ago or less.
[singing in local language]
[Graham] And yet, fragments
of a different earlier origin story
that seem to contradict
the archaeological timeline
have been kept alive here.
I'm privileged to witness
a celebration of it.
[singing in local language]
[singing continues]
The oral traditions speak
of a primeval homeland called Hiva,
a large island destroyed by a global flood
that forced their ancestors to flee.
[tense music playing]
In this account,
the great king of Hiva, Hutu Matu'a,
was warned that his island nation
would suffer a terrible deluge
and be submerged forever.
[tense music continues]
Guided by a vision,
he sent seven chosen men
out in seafaring canoes,
heading towards the rising sun
in search of a new home.
[people screaming]
[Graham] After weeks at sea,
they landed safely
on the island of Rapa Nui,
where they were later joined
by Hutu Matu'a and hundreds of his people
to reestablish their civilization.
[wind howling]
[waves crashing]
So we have a tradition
of a great flood and an exploration,
and we have to ask ourselves,
"Did such an event happen?"
You really have to go back
to the end of the last Ice Age
to get the kind of flood
that would submerge an entire land.
[tense music playing]
The name of that sunken island, Hiva,
in Rapa Nui language means far-off land,
suggesting it wasn't a land
the Polynesians were familiar with.
But the arrival of a band of seven
by sea after a time of great cataclysm
is a tradition encountered
all over the ancient world
from the Apkallu of Mesopotamia
to Egypt's seven sages
and India's seven rishis.
[tense music continues]
Such traditions often speak
of a small band of flood survivors
arriving in a distant land
in a time of chaos
with a mission to restart civilization.
[Indigenous people singing]
Coincidence? Could these origin stories
be memories of real events
experienced by many ancient cultures
around the world?
[singing in local language]
[Graham] Crucially, the legend
of Hotu Matu'a and Hiva
doesn't include a date.
[singing continues]
[Graham] This causes me
to raise questions in my mind
about when Easter Island
was first settled.
[singing continues]
[Graham] I'm not disputing
the Polynesian expansion.
I'm not disputing
that the population of Easter Island today
is a Polynesian population.
But the question is, could it
have been settled earlier than that?
[cheering]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] Alas, the Moai themselves
can't help us answer this question.
The characteristic Moai are cut from
a relatively soft type of rock
called tuff,
a form of volcanic ash turned to stone.
They can't be dated in and of themselves.
In the absence of direct evidence
for when these megalithic statues
were carved,
archaeologists relied on
dating the organic matter
embedded in the Ahu platforms,
on which many of the Moai stand.
For example,
Ahu Nau Nau has been dated
to between 400 and 900 years old.
[music ends]
[dramatic music playing]
So that's when historians believe
the islanders began to carve the Moai.
But if that were true,
it means that after a few centuries,
living simply with no traces
of building the necessary skills,
the Rapa Nui people suddenly embarked
on this mammoth project,
which continued until just a few decades
before the Europeans arrived.
Many of the platforms
are really quite rough
and ready by comparison with the statues.
And we have to ask ourselves the question,
"Are the platforms actually the same age
as the statues that stand on top of them?"
Or is it possible
that the statues were re-erected
by latecomers to Easter Island,
giving us a totally false idea
of how old the statues are
based on the platforms alone?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] After all, throughout history,
many objects of great cultural value
have later been moved and displayed
in a newer setting.
- [music intensifies]
- [bells tolling]
In Venice, the four tetrarchs
of St. Mark's Basilica
were actually carved in Constantinople
900 years before they were installed here.
And the Renaissance fountain in front of
Rome's Pantheon isn't nearly as old
as the ancient Egyptian obelisk
it supports.
Many of these huge statues
were moved around, relocated,
placed in different positions.
And I think we have
to remain open to the possibility
that the statues
may already have been there
when the first Polynesians arrived.
And that they were kind of adopted
by those new settlers
and taken in to their culture.
Supporting this idea is Ahu Nau Nau,
which uses another Moai head,
deeply weathered,
as one of its foundation stones,
recycled for this purpose.
[music crescendos, subsides]
Another hint that the Moai could be
much older than previously thought
can be found at the extinct volcano,
where nearly all of the megaliths
were first quarried and shaped.
[suspenseful music playing]
Here, in the southeastern corner
of the island, is an extinct volcano
called Rano Raraku.
It's a dramatic feature on the landscape.
[suspenseful music ends]
And on its slopes are the remains
of hundreds of partially completed Moai.
It truly is one of
the world's most mysterious places.
[triumphant music playing]
[Graham] Nearly 400 Moai
are scattered about the volcano
in various stages of completion.
[triumphant music crescendos, subsides]
[pensive music playing]
Many only peek above ground level,
their squat torsos
embedded in deep sediment.
This sedimentation could result
from landslides,
mudflows, or even tsunamis.
But although they might lean,
most of the statues remain upright,
not randomly tumbled over,
as you would expect
if such an event were the cause.
So what really happened here?
For centuries,
the sediment concealed the evidence.
Until 1914,
when archaeologists began excavations.
As this photograph shows,
some Moai are
much more than just head and shoulders
and include the whole torso
lodged deep in the hillside
a finding that was only fully revealed
to the world in the 1950s
by the famous ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
Thor Heyerdahl was
a remarkable human being.
I was lucky to meet him more than once.
He was willing to challenge convention.
He was convinced
that there were some missing pieces
in the story of our past.
And he tried to show us
that deep in prehistory,
uh, ancient humans were capable
of achievements
that we have tended to allocate
to much later periods.
[triumphant music playing]
[Graham] Like this mysterious
Moai building project.
Archaeologists tell us
that the last of the Moai were sculpted
around 400 years ago.
But it seems implausible,
on such a small island,
that such a massive amount
of sedimentation could have accumulated
around them in such a short time.
None of these Moai show evidence
of intentional burial.
So is there another explanation?
[triumphant music intensifies]
Could it be that what we're looking at
is the end result
of a process of sedimentation
that would have taken
not hundreds of years, but thousands?
The problem with that theory?
There's no evidence
of human habitation dating so far back.
[dramatic music playing]
Or is there?
[music ends]
[closing theme playing]
[closing theme ends]
[pensive music playing]
[Graham] These enormous structures
in the Amazon
speak to a monumental human endeavor.
[dramatic sting]
But how many of them are there?
[pensive music continues]
Tell us what you found.
- [Fabio] You see the trees?
- [Graham] Yeah.
- [Fabio] And now the terrain.
- [Pärssinen] Now we take it down.
Wow.
- Wow.
- Incredible.
[pensive music continues]
[Graham] Professor Pärssinen and the team
have found nine new geoglyphs
that were hidden
beneath the jungle canopy.
[electronic warble]
Here we have round octagonal.
This octagon, it's about 100 meters.
- Yeah.
- 100 meters in diameter.
Diameter.
Incredible. And nobody knew it was there
until you got up there with your LiDAR.
Nobody knew about this.
Yeah. It's incredible
what this technology can reveal.
Let's move up
and look at this interesting feature.
[electronic warble]
[Graham] These two nearly overlap
and appear to be connected,
perhaps to other sites.
This is road
with embankments on both sides.
- An ancient road?
- Ancient road, yes.
Leading to the large embankment square.
- Yes.
- Stunning.
[Graham] If these geoglyphs were built
at the same time as others nearby,
the roads suggest
an organized civilization thrived here
at least 2,500 years ago.
And there's evidence
they might've been around
for very much longer.
We found that many of these sites
have been established
already 10,000 years ago.
[Graham] We can't be sure
whether we're looking at
reconstructions of much older geoglyphs.
But what we do know is that
human beings were present in that area.
And that evidence goes back
more than 10,000 years, uh, into the past
and brings us very close
to the end of the last Ice Age.
However old they may be,
the scale of the enterprise
is truly astonishing.
So this raises the question,
how many people would it take
to do something like this?
We speak, uh, about hundreds of thousands.
Yes. Literally hundreds
of thousands of inhabitants.
Amazing.
[Graham] Professor Pärsinnen
isn't suggesting
all of those people physically built
the geoglyphs.
But a population that size
must have existed here long-term
to both provide for and support
the necessary workforce.
[birds chirping]
Within a few hundred meters
of known geoglyphs,
our LiDAR team were finding more geoglyphs
that nobody even knew about.
So what on earth can we expect to discover
if we go hundreds of miles
into that dense rainforest?
[triumphant music playing]
This has changed totally
our understanding of Amazonia.
We're dealing with a huge phenomenon here,
which has to change
the history of the Americas
and changing the history of the world.
[Pärssinen chuckles]
[triumphant music ends]
[theme song playing]
[theme song ends]
- [thunder rumbling]
- [electronic warble]
[suspenseful music playing]
We can't possibly begin to tell
the story of the Americas
until we have much more complete knowledge
of what was going on in the Amazon
not 1,000 years ago, but 10,000 years ago,
20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago.
We need to keep going back.
We need not to close our minds
to these possibilities.
[tense music continues]
And there's tantalizing evidence
of that deeper history
1,000 miles northeast of Acre.
I've come to
the Monte Alegre National Park
on the north bank of the Amazon.
Although much of the Amazon basin is flat
and cloaked in trees,
here, distinctive rocky outcrops
tower over the canopy.
Archaeologist and anthropologist
Dr. Christopher Davis
has spent years investigating
a potentially history-changing discovery
high on one of these ridges.
[menacing music playing]
This is Serra do Paituna
hill of the Blackwater Lake
a towering rocky crag adorned with
an array of seemingly ancient
painted images.
[menacing music continues]
Thank you for leading the way.
[music ends]
[Graham] We're obviously surrounded
by just this amazing art here.
What led you to this investigation
and this exploration?
I started doing archeology,
um, as a graduate student.
And I had no idea
that there was rock art in the Americas.
And so I was blown away by that.
[mysterious music playing]
[Graham] The images are known
as pictographs.
Some are very simple.
Maybe a serpent slithering
across the rock.
Others depict
more complex geometric patterns.
The big question is
when were these images painted?
[music intensifies]
The art itself can't be dated.
So Dr. Davis and his team
looked for other evidence.
What's your dating
of this site based on at the moment?
It's from the excavation
that we did back behind here.
There were fragments of carbonated wood,
mostly palm wood, some carbonated seeds.
We found evidence of a fire
back there as well.
[Graham] The results were
truly unexpected.
[Dr. Davis] From the radiocarbon dating,
the oldest dates that we got
were about 13,200 before present.
Fascinating.
Dating back more than 13,000 years,
we're looking at
some of the oldest artwork
found anywhere in the Americas.
Artwork created during the last Ice Age.
By people, we're told,
who just suddenly appeared here
deep in the Amazon wilderness.
[triumphant music playing]
You can imagine, you know,
thousands of years ago,
this would've been much brighter,
much more vibrant.
[camera shutter clicks]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The images were painted
using red and yellow ocher
and seemingly treated to make them last.
[tense music ends]
I've done experiments here
where you just take the ocher
and draw it on the rock,
and it washes away.
Right. So there has to be a binder.
There has to be a binder
and a very good one.
- We suspect they mixed it with tree resin
- Uh-huh.
and the resin forms into
almost like amber but it's kind of clear.
[Graham] So that suggests
those who created these paintings had,
first of all, experience
in how to do paintings like this,
and they developed some knowledge
of how to make the paint last.
Absolutely. Um, and in addition to that,
it shows preparation and time.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] Most compelling to me
are the many handprints
that intimate human contact expressed
by the handprints in the rock art.
It's almost as though
they were touching the wall,
and through the wall, touching us,
sending a message to the future.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] More Paleolithic art
has been found in the Western Amazon.
Like this intricate mural
in the jungles of Colombia,
where 12,600-year-old images depict humans
alongside what appear to be
creatures of the Ice Age.
[tense music intensifies]
We are seeing an eyewitness account
of the coexistence of human beings
with now long-extinct Ice Age megafauna.
And to the east of the Amazon,
these paintings push the date back further
to more than 25,000 years ago.
[tense music continues]
Which means 2,000 years before
those hunter-gatherers were walking
the White Sands of New Mexico,
there were other people already living
in the forests of South America
creating art like this.
And in great numbers.
[tense music crescendos, subsides]
This should open up exploration
of what those human beings
might have been doing in the Americas
over these tens of thousands of years
that archaeologists
previously didn't think
there were any human beings there at all.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] At Serra do Paituna,
Dr. Davis is sure of one thing.
Whoever they were
and whatever they were doing,
the rock painters here suddenly stopped.
[Dr. Davis] So the first people
who were at this region, they were here,
they were doing the art,
and then about 12,700 years ago,
they were gone.
So was the area abandoned at that time?
[Dr. Davis] It appears to be so.
For quite some time.
For thousands of years.
[Graham] To me, 12,700 years ago
is a highly significant date.
There's always margins of error in dates.
But that's very close to the beginning
of the Younger Dryas climate anomaly.
So I can't help wondering
if there's a connection.
[music intensifies]
[Graham] Back then,
temperatures suddenly plunged,
while unexpectedly,
fires raged across the planet.
[fire crackling]
And sea levels rose.
[music ends]
[birds chirping]
We can hear echoes
of this catastrophic epoch
[pensive music playing]
in the oral traditions of Amazonia.
[birds chirping]
There are countless myths and legends
about an ancient cataclysm
that are still told all across the Amazon.
And there's one
that I find particularly intriguing.
[dramatic music playing]
[Graham] According to
the Indigenous Tiriyó people,
long ago, the sky spirits told a shaman
that a terrible flood
would soon be unleashed,
a punishment for the people's wickedness.
Some heeded his warning
and fled to safety atop Mount Kantani.
[people screaming]
But most perished in the deluge.
Eventually, the flood receded,
leaving the survivors to start over.
[music ends]
It is a worldwide tradition.
There was a golden age.
There was a time when humans lived
in harmony with one another.
But that it somehow fell
from its high standards,
and it was punished with a great flood,
with a global destruction,
which wiped it from the face of the Earth.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The global distribution of
this shared myth can't be a coincidence.
I believe these ancient stories may be
our last surviving memories
of very real events
that occurred all over the world
around the end of the Ice Age,
during a period of cataclysms
that we've been calling
the Ancient Apocalypse.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music ends]
[thunder rumbling]
[menacing music playing]
The evidence is mounting more and more
that the Earth crossed the path
of cometary debris.
And the argument is that
it was multiple impacts of fragments
of this cometary debris that set off
the Younger Dryas climate emergency
12,800 years ago.
[menacing music continues]
[Graham] It's an idea we keep encountering
called the Younger Dryas
Impact Hypothesis.
In both the Southern
and Northern Hemispheres,
scientists have found
black matte layers like this one,
showing traces of nanodiamonds,
platinum, and iridium,
suggesting a nearby cosmic impact
or airburst.
But here, in the Amazon,
other evidence might be present,
etched into these walls.
[menacing music ends]
We have several images of comets,
but one panel particularly,
there's a comet
that is positioned facing upward.
The tail is going down.
The head is going up.
[Graham] Yeah.
Above the comet image
is a painting of the sun.
And this was baffling when I first saw it
because normally you wouldn't see a comet
until after the sun sets.
[Graham] Most comets are
easily distinguishable by their tails,
usually only visible above
the setting sun streaming away from it.
Surely it would be impossible to see
a comet below the sun in broad daylight.
So that gave me the idea, "When would you
possibly see a comet head up
before the sun sets?"
- Maybe during an eclipse.
- Mm-hmm.
And so I started looking
in astronomy software,
and there was an eclipse that occurred
facing that image about 13,027 years ago.
[Graham] Right.
[Dr. Davis] And a comet
that was near the sun.
If there was an eclipse
that darkened the sun,
you could possibly see suddenly
this comet,
and it would be head up facing the sun.
- So
- That's what we see in the art?
The art does seem to show that.
[Graham] Could this painting be
a record of the comet
that many believe broke apart,
pummeling the Earth with debris
and triggering the Younger Dryas?
I think the ancients were already
getting warnings from the sky.
They were becoming aware
that something had changed in the heavens,
and perhaps they were painting
the first signs of the apocalypse
that was to come.
[tense music crescendos]
[tense music ends]
[Graham] The timing certainly fits with
when humans abandoned this rocky outcrop.
I know archaeologists
don't like to speculate
and I'm gonna ask you to speculate,
but do you think the Younger Dryas
had anything to do with
that sudden cessation of activity?
You can't ignore it, certainly,
because it does come
right at that period of time.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music playing]
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music ends]
[somber music playing]
[Graham] At a personal level,
what's your estimation
of the people who created this art?
How do you envisage them in your mind?
It's kind of hard to imagine
how brave you would have to be
coming to a new environment.
I mean, they were pioneers.
[crickets chirping]
[Graham] But how did these pioneers
get here in the first place?
[intriguing music playing]
In 2015, scientists investigating
just that question dropped a bombshell.
They found that members
of certain Indigenous Amazonian tribes
share a specific DNA marker
with people from the other side
of the Pacific Ocean.
[music intensifies]
The fact that we find it amongst
remote tribes in the Amazon rainforest
and in Papua New Guinea,
Taiwan, and Australia
suggests very strongly
that there was a direct crossing
across the Pacific Ocean.
Even more surprising
is where this DNA signal isn't.
This DNA signal is not found anywhere
in North America.
If the Americas were peopled
entirely by land,
we should find this DNA signal present
in North America
as well as in South America.
What's more, the DNA signal is very old,
dating back at least 10,000 years.
Nobody is supposed to have
been able to cross the Pacific Ocean
from one side to the other
10 or 11,000 years ago.
For that to have happened
just turns the whole story on its head.
If there's one place on Earth
that might hold clues
as to who crossed the Pacific back then
[music crescendos]
it's here.
[tense music playing]
I've come to one of the world's
most remote inhabited islands
2,300 miles west of South America
and 2,600 miles east of Tahiti.
On Easter Sunday, 1722, Dutch explorers
stumbled across this small speck of land,
lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So they named it Easter Island.
But they were stunned to discover
that it was inhabited
by a people who today
call their home Rapa Nui.
[tense music ends]
[waves crashing]
[Graham] I mean,
look at the basic geography.
It's just sitting there
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
this tiny little dot of land.
And so the first extraordinary thing
about it is,
how did people find it at all?
How did anybody ever end up
settling on Easter Island
in this huge wilderness
of the Pacific Ocean?
[suspenseful music playing]
That Pan-Pacific DNA signal convinces me
that this island could play a key role
in my efforts to reconstruct the story
of a lost civilization of the Ice Age.
Why?
Because of these.
[dramatic music playing]
Vast megalithic statues
that tower over the landscape
for which Rapa Nui is famous today.
[music ends]
[Graham] Across the Pacific,
several islands are home to collections
of remarkable megalithic structures.
However, the greatest concentration
of such monuments is found here.
The islanders call them Moai.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] There are
more than 1,000 of them
on a remote rock
that's smaller than Washington, DC.
Many stand together along the coastline,
facing inland
while others are found
seemingly at random,
as if a massive project
had been abandoned midway through.
[music crescendos, stops]
For me, Easter Island is just one
of the most enchanted places on Earth.
The great Moai statues,
these human figures carved
out of the soft volcanic rock.
It's confronting us
with a mystery right there,
which needs to be explained.
[intriguing music continues]
Who were the sculptors
of these giant statues?
What were they trying to achieve,
and why did they expend
such mighty efforts to achieve it?
These are puzzles
to which no definite solution,
only speculation, has ever been offered.
[music continues]
[birds chirping]
[mysterious music playing]
[Graham] This gap in our knowledge
is mostly due to the devastation
wrought here by outsiders.
During the 19th century,
the Rapa Nui people were reduced
to a tiny remnant
by slave raids and disease.
The few who clung on, did so,
by taking refuge
in underground lava tubes like this.
[water dripping]
[Graham] I often say
that we're a species with amnesia,
and that is particularly true
of Easter Island
because of its tragic history.
Because from the moment
that Easter Island encountered
Western culture,
uh, disaster set in.
[water dripping]
The elders who had preserved the memories
were all taken away.
Some slaves were later repatriated,
but brought with them deadly diseases,
with the result
that the remaining islanders
were all but wiped out.
[dramatic music playing]
Leo Pakarati is
an Indigenous documentarian
whose family has carefully preserved
the oral traditions of Rapa Nui
for generations.
He's painfully aware of what was lost
during those dark times
of the slave raids.
The only memory that is preserved
of the origins of Easter Island
is the memory
that survived the 19th century.
In a historical moment,
we are only 111 persons on the island.
- It's a big disaster.
- For the culture.
It's a cultural disaster too
because you need many people
to keep the knowledge.
Few people, few knowledge.
- Yeah.
- And we lose a big part of our history.
[somber music playing]
[Graham] And yet,
despite these overwhelming odds,
the Rapa Nui have retained memories
concerning this tiny island's
most intriguing mystery.
Tell me what the old tradition says
about the Moai.
The real name for the Moai
is "te aringa ora o te Tupuna."
- Mm-hmm.
- "The living face of our ancestors."
That is the name.
The idea is
the Moai represent a real person.
Yeah.
And in life,
this person is special, important.
[Graham] According to Rapa Nui lore,
these important ancestors
were memorialized in the Moai
with distinctive features
related to their rank.
- Some of the Moai have short ears.
- Yeah.
Some have long ears. What's that about?
[Leo] This is because of our different
social classes on the island.
- [Graham] Yeah.
- Some people have time for long earrings.
They have long nails too.
- It's a social class act.
- [Graham] Yes.
So those long fingers on the Moai,
those are actually nails?
[splutters] They have long fingers,
and some Moai have
very long nails and curves too.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] I find it impossible
to avoid seeing
parallels with similar statues
of great antiquity found elsewhere.
On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi,
we find 4,000-year-old megalithic figures
in a remarkably similar posture
and with similar hand positions.
Even on the other side of the world,
in Turkey,
a statue known as Urfa Man
that dates back to the Ice Age
strikes a similar pose,
his hands clasped across his belly.
[tense music continues]
An equally intriguing parallel is found
also in Turkey,
in the ten-ton megalithic pillars
of Göbekli Tepe.
These pillars are 11,600 years old.
Could the similarities
of these designs across time and space
be evidence
of a single common ancestor culture,
leaving a legacy of ideas
for later peoples to express?
[tense music crescendos, stops]
[pensive music playing]
No records exist that could explain
the origins of such imagery.
[music continues]
But according to Rapa Nui oral tradition,
the Moai, in addition to being
megalithic memorials,
channel a sacred spiritual power
from their ancestors,
an energy known as mana.
Tell me more about mana.
Mana is very important.
Mana is the energy.
All the people have mana.
Any rock, any elements
in the universe have mana.
So the Moai are invested with mana?
[Leo] Yeah. People, when they die,
the family send
to make a Moai with the intention,
the soul, the mana, the spirit
of this person entering the Moai.
[Graham] But interestingly,
that mana only starts to flow
after the Moai are set in place
and properly finished.
In the moment,
the Moai is safe on the platform,
the tupuna, the ancestors,
carve in the holes for the eyes first,
and later they put in coral
for the white part
and sometimes obsidian
or other rocks for the eyes.
- [Graham] Right. Yeah.
- In this moment, it's no more Moai.
Now it's Aringa ora o te Tupuna.
The living face of our ancestors.
- Once it has the eyes?
- Once it has the eyes.
- Right.
- And from the platform, from the Ahu,
the Moai look in direction to the town
and protect the family.
That is the function of the Moai.
[music fades]
[Graham] Clearly, the Moai are
deeply sacred to the Rapa Nui.
But does that mean
they originally carved them?
Or could the Moai have already been here?
If so, we'd need to rethink
the entire timeline
of the peopling of Rapa Nui.
Let's consider an alternative scenario
in which it was first explored
by a small group
of highly sophisticated navigators,
much further back in prehistory
than is presently accepted.
[tense music playing]
[man chanting]
[all chanting]
[Graham] Based on genetic testing,
we know that the Rapa Nui people
[chanting]
are descended from
those great ancient navigators,
the Polynesians.
The Polynesians were fantastically
advanced navigators and seafarers
and settled many parts
of the Pacific Ocean
during the Polynesian expansion
about 3,000 years ago.
Carbon dating
of the oldest human settlements here
strongly suggests that Rapa Nui was one
of the last islands they reached
around 1,100 years ago.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
A new study proposes
that the first people arrived
even more recently,
just 800 years ago or less.
[singing in local language]
[Graham] And yet, fragments
of a different earlier origin story
that seem to contradict
the archaeological timeline
have been kept alive here.
I'm privileged to witness
a celebration of it.
[singing in local language]
[singing continues]
The oral traditions speak
of a primeval homeland called Hiva,
a large island destroyed by a global flood
that forced their ancestors to flee.
[tense music playing]
In this account,
the great king of Hiva, Hutu Matu'a,
was warned that his island nation
would suffer a terrible deluge
and be submerged forever.
[tense music continues]
Guided by a vision,
he sent seven chosen men
out in seafaring canoes,
heading towards the rising sun
in search of a new home.
[people screaming]
[Graham] After weeks at sea,
they landed safely
on the island of Rapa Nui,
where they were later joined
by Hutu Matu'a and hundreds of his people
to reestablish their civilization.
[wind howling]
[waves crashing]
So we have a tradition
of a great flood and an exploration,
and we have to ask ourselves,
"Did such an event happen?"
You really have to go back
to the end of the last Ice Age
to get the kind of flood
that would submerge an entire land.
[tense music playing]
The name of that sunken island, Hiva,
in Rapa Nui language means far-off land,
suggesting it wasn't a land
the Polynesians were familiar with.
But the arrival of a band of seven
by sea after a time of great cataclysm
is a tradition encountered
all over the ancient world
from the Apkallu of Mesopotamia
to Egypt's seven sages
and India's seven rishis.
[tense music continues]
Such traditions often speak
of a small band of flood survivors
arriving in a distant land
in a time of chaos
with a mission to restart civilization.
[Indigenous people singing]
Coincidence? Could these origin stories
be memories of real events
experienced by many ancient cultures
around the world?
[singing in local language]
[Graham] Crucially, the legend
of Hotu Matu'a and Hiva
doesn't include a date.
[singing continues]
[Graham] This causes me
to raise questions in my mind
about when Easter Island
was first settled.
[singing continues]
[Graham] I'm not disputing
the Polynesian expansion.
I'm not disputing
that the population of Easter Island today
is a Polynesian population.
But the question is, could it
have been settled earlier than that?
[cheering]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] Alas, the Moai themselves
can't help us answer this question.
The characteristic Moai are cut from
a relatively soft type of rock
called tuff,
a form of volcanic ash turned to stone.
They can't be dated in and of themselves.
In the absence of direct evidence
for when these megalithic statues
were carved,
archaeologists relied on
dating the organic matter
embedded in the Ahu platforms,
on which many of the Moai stand.
For example,
Ahu Nau Nau has been dated
to between 400 and 900 years old.
[music ends]
[dramatic music playing]
So that's when historians believe
the islanders began to carve the Moai.
But if that were true,
it means that after a few centuries,
living simply with no traces
of building the necessary skills,
the Rapa Nui people suddenly embarked
on this mammoth project,
which continued until just a few decades
before the Europeans arrived.
Many of the platforms
are really quite rough
and ready by comparison with the statues.
And we have to ask ourselves the question,
"Are the platforms actually the same age
as the statues that stand on top of them?"
Or is it possible
that the statues were re-erected
by latecomers to Easter Island,
giving us a totally false idea
of how old the statues are
based on the platforms alone?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] After all, throughout history,
many objects of great cultural value
have later been moved and displayed
in a newer setting.
- [music intensifies]
- [bells tolling]
In Venice, the four tetrarchs
of St. Mark's Basilica
were actually carved in Constantinople
900 years before they were installed here.
And the Renaissance fountain in front of
Rome's Pantheon isn't nearly as old
as the ancient Egyptian obelisk
it supports.
Many of these huge statues
were moved around, relocated,
placed in different positions.
And I think we have
to remain open to the possibility
that the statues
may already have been there
when the first Polynesians arrived.
And that they were kind of adopted
by those new settlers
and taken in to their culture.
Supporting this idea is Ahu Nau Nau,
which uses another Moai head,
deeply weathered,
as one of its foundation stones,
recycled for this purpose.
[music crescendos, subsides]
Another hint that the Moai could be
much older than previously thought
can be found at the extinct volcano,
where nearly all of the megaliths
were first quarried and shaped.
[suspenseful music playing]
Here, in the southeastern corner
of the island, is an extinct volcano
called Rano Raraku.
It's a dramatic feature on the landscape.
[suspenseful music ends]
And on its slopes are the remains
of hundreds of partially completed Moai.
It truly is one of
the world's most mysterious places.
[triumphant music playing]
[Graham] Nearly 400 Moai
are scattered about the volcano
in various stages of completion.
[triumphant music crescendos, subsides]
[pensive music playing]
Many only peek above ground level,
their squat torsos
embedded in deep sediment.
This sedimentation could result
from landslides,
mudflows, or even tsunamis.
But although they might lean,
most of the statues remain upright,
not randomly tumbled over,
as you would expect
if such an event were the cause.
So what really happened here?
For centuries,
the sediment concealed the evidence.
Until 1914,
when archaeologists began excavations.
As this photograph shows,
some Moai are
much more than just head and shoulders
and include the whole torso
lodged deep in the hillside
a finding that was only fully revealed
to the world in the 1950s
by the famous ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
Thor Heyerdahl was
a remarkable human being.
I was lucky to meet him more than once.
He was willing to challenge convention.
He was convinced
that there were some missing pieces
in the story of our past.
And he tried to show us
that deep in prehistory,
uh, ancient humans were capable
of achievements
that we have tended to allocate
to much later periods.
[triumphant music playing]
[Graham] Like this mysterious
Moai building project.
Archaeologists tell us
that the last of the Moai were sculpted
around 400 years ago.
But it seems implausible,
on such a small island,
that such a massive amount
of sedimentation could have accumulated
around them in such a short time.
None of these Moai show evidence
of intentional burial.
So is there another explanation?
[triumphant music intensifies]
Could it be that what we're looking at
is the end result
of a process of sedimentation
that would have taken
not hundreds of years, but thousands?
The problem with that theory?
There's no evidence
of human habitation dating so far back.
[dramatic music playing]
Or is there?
[music ends]
[closing theme playing]
[closing theme ends]