America Before Quotes

“Science in the twenty-first century does NOT encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of “the facts”—particularly when those facts call into question long-established notions”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that 'burned up the earth' in the remote past and that is destined to return:
'The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail ...
Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong with nature on the earth, and a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The Holy Spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. ... The comet burnt everything to the ground. There wasn't a thing left ...
There is a prophecy that the comet will destroy the earth again. But it's a restoration. The greatest blessing this island [Turtle Island/America] will ever have. People don't listen to their spiritual guidance today. There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars when the comet comes down again.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.'
[...]
The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“The Piri Reis map of 1513 features the western shores of Africa and the eastern shores of North and South America and is also controversially claimed to depict Ice Age Antarctica--as an extension of the southern tip of South America.
The same map depicts a large island lying east of the southeast coast of what is now the United States. Also clearly depicted running along the spine of this island is a 'road' of huge megaliths. In this exact spot during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age a large island was indeed located until approximately 12,400 years ago. A remnant survives today in the form of the islands of Andros and Bimini. Underwater off Bimini I have scuba-dived on a road of great megaliths exactly like those depicted above water on the Piri Reis map.
Again, the implication, regardless of the separate controversy of whether the so-called Bimini Road is a man-made or natural feature, is that the region must have been explored and mapped before the great floods at the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise and submerged the megaliths.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“The entire pre-Columbian literature of Mexico, a vast library of tens of thousands of codices, was carefully and systematically destroyed by the priests and friars who followed in the wake of the conquistadors. In November 1530, for example, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, who had shortly before been apointed 'Protector of the Indians' by the Spanish crown, proceeded to 'protect' his flock by burning at the stake a Mexican aristocrat, the lord of the city of Texcoco, whom he accused of having worshipped the rain god. In the city's marketplace Zumárraga 'had a pyramid formed of the documents of Aztec history, knowledge and literature, their paintings, manuscripts, and hieroglyphic writings, all of which he committed to the flames while the natives cried and prayed.'
More than 30 years later, the holocaust of documents was still under way. In July 1562, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in the Yucatan), Bishop Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings, and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He boasted of destroying countless 'idols' and 'altars,' all of which he described as 'works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity.' Noting that the Maya 'used certain characters or letters, which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences' he informs us: 'We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously and which gave them great pain.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“A single high NH4 peak, traced to biomass burning across North America, begins at the [Younger Dryas] onset. It is the largest biomass-burning episode from North American sources in the entire record.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum--'a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,' as he puts it now--'so we know that was the length of the impact event because there's very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It's pretty well locked in place.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Birdman,” of whom multiple depictions have survived in the Mississippi Valley. He is unmistakably part falcon, part man, just like the god Horus of the Nile Valley.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“...as so often in science, statements touted as facts turn out to be opinions contradicted by other opinions that are also touted as facts.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“A view of the Amazon as an “uncivilized” and “savage” place—indeed as the very epitome of savagery—has been deeply ingrained in the European psyche for centuries. It is therefore not surprising the Carvajal was disbelieved when his journal finally surfaced in 1895.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“On Carvajal’s account, therefore, not only did the Amazon have cities but its cities were comparable in size to those of Europe at the same time. He also reports that the chieftain Machiparo ruled over “many settlements and very large ones which together contribute for fighting purposes fifty thousand men of the age of from thirty years up to seventy, because the young men do not go to war.” Aside from the interesting anthropological observation about the age at which men in sixteenth-century Amazonian society went to war, this statement has important implications for our understanding of the population of the region. Machiparo’s domain was just one among many through which the Orellana expedition passed, yet if Carvajal reported correctly it could muster an army 50,000 strong. This is a greater number than Denmark and Norway combined, or Sweden and Finland combined, or Brandenburg-Prussia, or even the Tsardom of Russia, could field in the same period.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“More than seventy different indigenous Amazonian cultures use ayahuasca—many giving different names to the brew (yajé, natema, caapi, cipo, shori, etc.).”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“yajé).”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Very often these luminous designs, rich in data, take the form of geometry. I speak from experience, having participated in more than seventy ayahuasca sessions since 2003, continuing to work with the brew for the valuable lessons it teaches me long after Supernatural was researched, written, and published. Here’s part of my account of the first time I drank ayahuasca in the Amazon: I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach…. Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor…. Time passes but I don’t keep track of it. I’ve improvized a pillow from a rolled-up sleeping bag and I now find I’m swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I’ve ever seen—dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of spiral galaxies on the move. Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll—as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.13 Other notes I made following my ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon refer to a “geometrical pulse,”14 to “a recurrence of the geometrical patterns,”15 to “a background of shifting geometrical patterns,”16 and to “complex interlaced patterns of geometry…. I zoom in for a closer view…. They’re rectangular, outlined in black, like windows. There’s a circle in the centre of each rectangle.”17”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“A dominant individual, with a prestigious position, can delay the progress of knowledge for decades but ultimately cannot stop the buildup of contrary evidence and opinions that will lead to a new paradigm.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Despite the wanton destruction during the past 200 years, some outstanding sites have been saved in Louisiana,1 Mississippi,2 Alabama,3 Tennessee,4 Illinois,5 and Ohio,6 and there are also significant sites in Florida,7 Georgia,8 Texas,9 Arkansas,10 Kentucky,11 and Indiana.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“I couldn’t help but reflect on the significance of the location favored by Plato. I had considered other possibilities, as readers of my previous books know, but I had to admit that an immense island lying far to the west of Europe across the Atlantic Ocean does sound a lot like America.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Across the ages and regardless of geography, in everything that really matters, it bears repeating that we are all members of a SINGLE human family—a family of intrepid adventurers who have been exploring the world in one form or another for the best part of a million years.18 In the course of this long odyssey we’ve moved so far apart, across oceans, over mountains, and to the opposite ends of jungles, deserts, and ice caps that we’ve forgotten how closely related we in fact are. In this sense, like the simple human message of the burials, the message of genetics also speaks to a hidden unity within our apparent diversity—and sometimes in ways that defy our expectations.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“What now appears to be certain is that Neanderthals, Homo sapiens (as modern humans are classified taxonomically), and Denisovans all shared and descended from a common ancestor a million years or so ago.58 The divergence of the Neanderthal line from the modern human line began at least 430,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 765,000 years ago.59 The divergence of the Neanderthal line from the Denisovan line occurred between 381,000 and 473,000 years ago.60 Humans today are therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, hybrids who have inherited genes from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and archaic Homo sapiens.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Viable offspring capable of reproduction resulted from all these liaisons and in August 2018, Denisova Cave obliged yet again by yielding up a bone fragment, more than 50,000 years old and in sufficiently good condition for genome sequencing. It turned out to have belonged to a female, about 13 years of age, who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.57”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other “older,” “less-evolved” human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans—literally morons by comparison with ourselves.20 Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new “image” of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.21”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“After landing and collecting our bags Santha and I were met groundside by our local connection, Sergey Kurgin. I say “connection” because you have to have one if you’re going to travel in Russia. You can’t just get up and go. Some solid citizen, or business, or tour operator must take responsibility for you and officially invite you, and you must have a prearranged and preplanned itinerary to preapproved destinations or your visa won’t be issued—nor, if you somehow manage to slip through the net, will any hotel accommodate you on your route. Sergey owns a small private travel business called Sibalp, and I’d contacted him on the internet to help set up the trip.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“If the Edfu Texts contain a record of these events, as I have proposed, then we should take seriously the message they transmit, that there were survivors of the cataclysm who made it their mission to bring about: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods. ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.'
These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundamentals of civilization, including religion, agriculture, and architecture.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“The Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere.
This immense and extraordinary deluge, 'possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,' swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today--a devastated blank slate [...] littered with 10,000-ton 'glacial erratics,' immense fossilized waterfalls, and 'current ripples' hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high.
If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone.
If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“At locations scattered all across North America from Alaska to New Mexico and from Florida to the state of Washington, more than 1,500 Clovis sites have been found. These sites have yielded more than 10,000 Clovis points and tens of thousands of other artifacts from the Clovis toolkit (40,000 at Topper alone [...]). yet among all these archaeological riches, it bears repeating that the sum total of Clovis human remains found in 85 years of excavations is limited to the Anzick-1 partial skeleton.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age--perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we've seen--or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural know-how, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It's therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of 'package' is involved here.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“My broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison's marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“At a deeper level what this whole exchange revealed to me was something disturbing about the way science works. I hadn't quite grasped the role of fear before. But I could see it in action everywhere here: fear of being 'noticed and monitored by colleagues,' fear of unwanted negative celebrity, fear of indignity, fear of loss of reputation, fear of loss of career--and not for committing some terrible crime but simply for exploring unorthodox possibilities and undertaking 'somewhat controversial research' into what everyone agrees were extraordinary events 12,800 years ago.
Worse still, this pervasive state of fear has somehow ingrained itself so deeply into the fabric of science that those who have embraced unorthodox possibilities themselves are often among the least willing to consider unorthodox possibilities embraced by others--lest by doing so they 'contaminate' their own preferred unorthodoxy.
How will it ever be possible to discover the truth about the past when so much fear gets in the way?”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“SHERIDEN CAVE, OHIO: There are [Younger Dryas Boundary] peaks in magnetic spherules, meltglass, nanodiamonds, Pt, and Ir. A charcoal-rich black mat dates to the [Younger Dryas] onset and contains peak abundances of charcoal, AC/soot, carbon spherules, and nanodiamonds that are closely associated with the last known Clovis artifacts in the cave. The black-mat layer is in direct contact with the wildfire-charred bones of two mega-mammals, the flat-headed peccary (Platygonus compressus) and the giant beaver (Castoroidies ohioensis), that are the last known examples anywhere in the world of those extinct species.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization