Göbekli Tepe, in south-eastern Turkey, is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent decades: massive carved stone pillars arranged in circles, built more than 11,000 years ago. In this clip from his 2016 London Real interview, Graham Hancock explains why the site was the reason he wrote Magicians of the Gods, and why he believes it points to a lost civilisation.
It follows directly from his argument about Plato’s Atlantis, and it’s one of his most-watched clips.
▶ Watch the full episode: Graham Hancock – The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilisation
A date that matches Plato
Hancock starts with a striking coincidence. Plato said Atlantis sank around 11,600 years ago. Göbekli Tepe, he says, was founded at almost exactly that time.
Why it doesn’t fit
To show why the site is so puzzling, he compares it with Stonehenge. Stonehenge, around 4,500 years old, makes sense: it grew out of a farming society whose surpluses freed people to become astronomers, architects and engineers.
Göbekli Tepe is about 7,000 years older. Before it appeared, Hancock says, the region was home only to hunter-gatherers, with no farming and no monumental buildings. Then, suddenly, a sophisticated megalithic complex appears. Ground-penetrating radar, he says, suggests the whole site is far bigger than what has been excavated, around 50 times the size of Stonehenge.
Building it meant quarrying and moving stones of many tons, organising and feeding a workforce, and aligning structures with the sky. And agriculture appears in the same region at around the same time.
A transfer of knowledge
Hancock doesn’t believe hunter-gatherers simply woke up one day with these skills. His theory is that survivors of a lost civilisation, who already knew how to build with megaliths and farm, settled among the local people and tried to restart their civilisation. It didn’t fully work, he says, but they planted the seeds of agriculture, and in his words, “we are all the descendants of that.”
When Brian asks whether he means aliens, Hancock is clear: no, these were human beings.
The comet
What destroyed that earlier civilisation? Hancock points to a theory known as the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Around 12,800 years ago, he says, fragments of a giant comet struck the Earth, with impacts on the ice sheets of North America and northern Europe. He compares it with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke into fragments and hit Jupiter in 1994.
The result, as he describes it, was devastation across tens of millions of square kilometres, rising seas, and a deep freeze lasting about 1,200 years: a catastrophe big enough to erase most traces of an earlier civilisation.
What to take from it
Göbekli Tepe is real and genuinely remarkable, and it has forced archaeologists to rethink when people began building monuments. Hancock’s interpretation, a lost civilisation and a comet impact, remains controversial: many scientists dispute the impact hypothesis, and most archaeologists see Göbekli Tepe as the work of the local hunter-gatherers themselves. But the questions he raises are the ones that make the site so fascinating.
Who is Graham Hancock?
Graham Hancock is a British writer and former journalist, born in Edinburgh in 1950. His books on ancient civilisations, including Fingerprints of the Gods, Magicians of the Gods and America Before, have sold millions of copies, and he later presented the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse.
In this full 2016 episode, he talks with Brian Rose about Magicians of the Gods and the case for a lost civilisation. You can also watch another clip from the same interview: Graham Hancock – The Truth About Atlantis.
See everything Graham Hancock has done with London Real on his guest page: Graham Hancock on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Graham Hancock – The Mystery Of Göbekli Tepe And The Comet Theory
0:00 Graham Hancock: Of all the work I’ve done over the last quarter of a century, the reason I felt I had to do this one is Göbekli Tepe. We talked at the beginning of this discussion about Plato’s Atlantis story, and how he said Atlantis went down 9,000 years before the time of Solon. That’s 11,600 years ago in our time. That’s the date of the foundation of Göbekli Tepe. It’s very clear: it was founded 11,600 years ago, exactly the date Plato gives for the end of Atlantis. And Göbekli Tepe doesn’t fit. It just comes out of nowhere.
0:44 Graham Hancock: We understand a site like Stonehenge. It makes perfect sense. It’s about four and a half thousand years old. We know it was centred in an agricultural community, which generated surpluses. Those surpluses allowed labour to be freed: you could fund people to become astronomers or architects or engineers, rather than producing food all the time. So we can understand the social and economic context in which a huge megalithic site like Stonehenge emerged.
1:15 Graham Hancock: Go to Göbekli Tepe and you’re 7,000 years earlier. The entire area, prior to the appearance of Göbekli Tepe, is inhabited only by hunter-gatherers. There’s no agriculture whatsoever. They haven’t built anything, ever. And then suddenly, without any background or any preparation, appears this huge megalithic site, which is incredibly sophisticated. And it turns out, because a large part of it is still under the ground, seen with ground-penetrating radar, that the whole site is actually 50 times bigger than Stonehenge, and 7,000 years older.
1:54 Graham Hancock: So how do we account for this? Did a group of hunter-gatherers in Turkey wake up one morning magically inspired, suddenly knowing how to cut and quarry stone, move blocks weighing in some cases up to 50 tons, create gigantic stone circles in an area with no water, bring in a labour force and organise it and feed and water it, to create the world’s first perfectly north-south aligned building, which involves accurate astronomy? To do all of that, and at the same time to invent agriculture? Because at the same moment Göbekli Tepe pops up, agriculture suddenly appears in that same region of Turkey.
2:35 Graham Hancock: It’s obvious to me that wasn’t a group of hunter-gatherers who woke up one morning suddenly equipped with these skills. What we’re looking at is the transfer of technology. These were the survivors of a lost civilisation. They already knew how to create megaliths, they already knew how to do agriculture. They settled among the hunter-gatherer people, whom they may have reached out to before, and they created this project, and the project was to restart their civilisation. It didn’t quite work, but they got somewhere. They created this huge site, they invented agriculture. We are all the descendants of that. All of the agriculture in the world today began around Göbekli Tepe, 11,600 years ago.
3:22 Brian Rose: Are these aliens?
3:23 Graham Hancock: No.
3:24 Brian Rose: So, human beings who came from this lost civilisation and transferred technology to this other place?
3:28 Graham Hancock: Yes. First of all, it’s important to understand that the Earth changes which took place between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago were utterly cataclysmic, beyond all imagining. The science is now very clear. We had an interaction with the fragments of a very large comet, a giant comet which originally may have been as much as 100 miles in diameter. It was drawn into the inner solar system about 20,000 years ago. These things come from very far away, from a place called the Oort cloud, almost a light year away: a huge sphere of trillions of comets in the outer solar system. Gravitational disturbances can send comets out of those safe orbits, swinging in towards the inner solar system. It happens from time to time.
4:20 Graham Hancock: And the evidence now is that we got one of those, a big one, about 100 miles in diameter, about 20,000 years ago. It entered an orbit that crosses the orbit of the Earth, and for the next 8,000 years nothing bad happened; they missed each other. But 12,800 years ago, at least eight fragments of that comet hit. And we know comets break into fragments. Many of your audience are young, but those who were around in 1994 will remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jupiter with spectacular effect. It broke up into 20 fragments, and each one of those fragments hitting Jupiter was equivalent to more than the entire nuclear arsenal of the Earth going off at once.
5:08 Graham Hancock: Something similar happened to the Earth 12,800 years ago. At least eight pieces of this large comet, some of them up to a mile in diameter, hit the Earth. The primary impacts were on the North American ice cap. There were impacts on the northern European ice cap, and the furthest east we’ve documented is actually Syria. 50 million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface was devastated by this comet impact. Sea levels rose rapidly, and the Earth’s climate plunged into a dreadful deep freeze that lasted 1,200 years. This event was of a magnitude quite capable of having wiped out almost all traces of a former civilisation. And that’s why I think again about what Plato had to say, and about our civilisation.
