America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

So why should the Americas have escaped this global migration, and this seemingly unstoppable march toward high civilization, until so late? The answer, perhaps, is that the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička who, in 1903, was selected to head the newly created Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

Part of our predicament, therefore, as a species with amnesia, is that huge areas of the planet that we know for sure were used by and lived upon by our ancestors—the submerged continental shelves, the Sahara desert, the Amazon rainforest—have, for a variety of practical and ideological reasons, been badly served by archaeology. The truth is, we know VERY little about the real prehistory of any of these places, and the tiny patches that have thus far been surveyed and excavated within them are no legitimate basis upon which to draw conclusions and express certainties about the vast areas that remain unsurveyed and unexcavated.

Manioc, also known as cassava, is a starchy crop, a good staple providing almost twice as many calories as potatoes weight for weight.33 But it is also so low in protein content that, as one specialist warns, “in manioc-dominated diets, protein-deficiency can lead to malnutrition and also aggravate symptoms related to manioc cyanogenic toxicity.”34

My argument has long been that the Edfu Building Texts reflect real events surrounding a real cataclysm that unfolded between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, a period known to paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas and that the Texts call the “Early Primeval Age.” I have proposed that the seeds of what was eventually to become dynastic Egypt were planted in the Nile Valley in that remote epoch more than 12,000 years ago by the survivors of a lost civilization and that it was at this time that structures such as the Great Sphinx and

its associated megalithic temples and the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid were created. I have further proposed that something resembling a religious cult or monastery, recruiting new initiates down the generations, deploying the memes of geometry and astronomy, disseminating an “as-above-so-below” system of thought, and teaching that eternal annihilation awaited those who did not serve and honor the system, would have been the most likely vehicle to carry the ideas of the original founders across the millennia until they could be brought to full flower in the Pyramid Age.

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 Zumarraga, who had shortly before been appointed “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 Zumarraga “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.”6 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.”7 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.8 Any of us today interested in the truth about the past share the pain of those horrified Native Americans—for what, we cannot help but wonder, was written in their lost books concerning “the antiquities and sciences” of the ancients? What exactly went up in smoke there?

All the indications are that Mexico, with its ancient tradition of literacy, was once a vast archive of the “antiquities and sciences” of former times and that the records the Spaniards destroyed in their zealous stupidity may have been as integral to the memory of humanity as the library of Alexandria. I think it is very possible, had the Mayan documents survived in sufficient quantities, that they would have shed light on the mystery of the lost common source of inspiration that appears to have kickstarted civilizations in both the Old World and the New.

We may say, therefore, that from its earliest days the European conquest of the Americas was an agent of chaos, genocide, and cultural extinction for Native Americans and that this, too, was very much part of the process that wiped down the “crime scene,” leaving us scratching our heads trying to make sense of the few clues left behind.

Walmart seems to have a penchant for this. In 2001, for example, the Fenton Mounds, a pair of Native American burial mounds in Fenton, Missouri, dated between AD 600 and 1400, were leveled to make way for a Walmart Supercenter.34 A few years later, in August 2009, city leaders in Oxford, Alabama, approved the destruction of a 1,500-year-old Native American ceremonial mound because, once again, Walmart wanted the location.35 The developers began work, removing a substantial section of the mound, but a month later, following a public outcry, the media reported a change of heart:

In the twenty-first century, Christianity and Islam—upstart religions of the past 2,000 years—exercise effective monopolies over the spiritual lives of more than half the world’s population. Their simple formula of one creator god (male, of course), and of a heavenly paradise for His faithful paired with a hellish place of punishment for disbelievers and evildoers, brilliantly removes the need for serious thought. All that’s required to join the elect is to tick the right boxes and maintain a state of rigid, abiding, unquestioning BELIEF in the authority of the sacred texts and the utterances of the priests and the mullahs self-appointed to interpret them.

OUR SOCIETY PREFERS TO IGNORE and marginalize the problem of death. It is an ever-present reality for all of us—much less when we are young, much more as we grow old—and yet we do all we can to avoid it. We know in an abstract sense that it awaits us, but meanwhile we prefer to dwell as little as possible on its implications and to live our lives as though they will never end.