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00:00Graham Hancock is a controversial pseudo-archaeologist. He claims that there was a
00:06mother culture on Earth long before our oldest recorded civilizations. His theories suggest
00:12that aliens came before humans, that the pyramids are built to mirror star constellations,
00:19and that no matter how intelligent we think we are, we aren't. But what do you think?
00:26Clearly, we already know of various examples of advanced civilizations prior to ours,
00:31comparatively speaking. But today, we're not talking about the likes of Ancient Greece,
00:35Egypt, Mesopotamia, or the Minoans, all of which gave massive contributions to the history of the
00:40world. Instead, our question requires us to think hypothetically, and to accept that before all of
00:45everything we know from even the most ancient histories, there was some sort of catastrophic
00:49or even purposeful event which wiped out everything we know of the world.
00:54Picture a race of animals or humanoids with the same sort of modern amenities we currently enjoy.
00:58A society that somehow disappeared, it might have even been more technologically advanced
01:03than we are now. If it was, then what does that make us? We could also be destined for a similar
01:09sort of mysterious or disastrous end, as we are now. But, what if we were destined for a
01:15more advanced civilization? What if we were destined for a more advanced civilization?
01:19We could also be destined for a similar sort of mysterious or disastrous end,
01:23as we also exist only to sow the seeds for another civilization to follow. It sure sounds
01:29ominous, but let's not panic about the end times just yet. Instead, we'll dial it back to a basic
01:34question. What actually constitutes an advanced civilization? It's definitely a subjective term,
01:40but broadly speaking, it's any group that forms and flourishes as one, based on the making of
01:45connections. Here, in our lives as we know them, successful past civilizations had developed
01:50various avenues of trade or social structure which grew and improved with knowledge of the outside
01:55world. Their inhabitants understood how their behavior affected neighboring peoples,
02:00and their shared goals generally amounted to social progress. Historians and scientists give
02:05theories behind apparent large-scale extinction events resulting in the disappearance of many
02:09famous advanced civilizations. The ancestral Puebloan people in North America, for example,
02:14seemingly created elaborate buildings and cave carvings until cannibalism and infighting
02:19decimated their numbers. The Cahokia settlement from present-day Missouri are thought to have
02:24suffered a similar fate in pre-Columbus times, when their population fell due to flooding and
02:29overuse of their natural resources. If there's one single disaster capable of totally wiping out
02:34an entire group, then it's an asteroid strike. And there's a sometimes controversial British
02:39author who believes that this could well have been the case. Graham Hancock's work often references
02:44ancient structures such as the Cahokia's Woodhenge, England's Stonehenge, or the Easter
02:48Island Statues. But Hancock goes further back to explain them, by building on the Mother Culture
02:54Theory. This is when the effects of an extinct culture continue to be felt long after that
02:58civilization is gone, leaving behind lessons which are followed by future societies, knowingly or not
03:04so. More specifically, Hancock has worked with another writer, Belgium's Robert Bauval, on the
03:10Orion Correlation Theory. This theory states that the layout of the Pyramids of Giza purposefully
03:15mirrors the stars in Orion's belt. For Hancock, it supports the suggestion that there was a long-lost
03:20Mother Culture before ancient Egypt. In terms of Hancock's theory, it means that the Egyptians
03:25were influenced by a greater, but to us unknown, power before them, from which they inherited the
03:30astronomical, mathematical, and practical knowledge needed to build and align the Great
03:35Pyramids with the stars in the sky. There's been a lot of pushback to Hancock's ideas, though,
03:40with astronomers from South Africa and Los Angeles arguing that there isn't even an exact star-to-
03:45pyramid match in the first place. For those not on board, there's also the idea that the absence
03:50of X doesn't mean that Y is true. In other words, we can't assume that impressive structures such as
03:55the Pyramids have mysterious origins just because we believe that society at a time couldn't possibly
04:00have built them. Hancock's isn't the only explanation offered for some sort of extinct
04:05civilization, though. There's also the Silurian Hypothesis, proposed in 2018 by astrophysicist
04:10Adam Frank and NASA's Gavin Schmidt. Yes, the title is a direct reference to an advanced reptilian
04:16race from the BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who, but the purpose of Frank and Schmidt's paper wasn't so
04:21much to present a literal presentation of ancient astro-lizards, but rather to use the hypothesis
04:26to look into our own behaviour as a species. If there were past civilizations, would we even be
04:31able to detect them? Would they have left recognisable marks on the Earth? These were
04:35the questions Frank and Schmidt set out to answer, but they wound up turning their focus to the
04:40people alive right now. The pair freely admit that pre-existing lizard people as a genuine idea is
04:46doubtful at best, highlighting that there are no fossilised remains, uncovered relics, or any
04:50environmental clues to offer up as physical proof. Even considering the incredible amount of still
04:56unrecovered fossils from the age of the dinosaurs, there simply aren't the required radiation levels
05:00in the Earth's geological makeup to support the idea that anything, intelligent lizards or
05:05otherwise, lived here before us. But that doesn't make the Silurian Hypothesis just a pointless
05:10thought exercise, because it's a line of thinking that does have ramifications for how we live our
05:15lives today. Generations after us might one day view what we've left behind as proof that we
05:20were the early advanced civilization. In the grand scheme of history, grouping everyone alive today
05:25as though from the same era as the ancient Egyptians, for example. As it is, the majority
05:30of scientists generally agree that complex industrialisation before humans just isn't
05:34plausible. For most, we really are the first to be living the way that we do. The universe is over
05:3913 billion years old, but complex life has only existed for about 400 million of those years,
05:45and modern humans have only been significantly industrialising the planet for about 300 years.
05:51Historical human impact can already be seen and traced in things like the soil and air,
05:56by scientists studying the development of the Anthropocene, the name given to the geological
06:00age of our influence on the planet. And the carbon footprint we leave upon the Earth could
06:04well be studied long after we're extinct. However, advocates for a previous civilization still ask,
06:10but what about before that? Couldn't another race of creatures simply have had their own Anthropocene,
06:15lived it until extinction and allowed the Earth to start over? It's a thought not that far
06:19removed from our human fascination with the stars and space. Just as we continually question whether
06:24or not we're alone in the universe, we can also wonder whether we're really an evolutionary one-off
06:29in the history of the Earth. For some, the idea that there was something significant before us,
06:33and that we're just part of an ongoing cycle, is comforting. And the same way as imagining an
06:37alien world with intelligent life also is. The Fermi Paradox attempts to rationalise the
06:42probability of space travel and extraterrestrials. At its core, the paradox argues that, given the
06:48vastness of the universe, there must be multiple Earth-like planets capable of sustaining life.
06:53The paradox part is that, if this is true, why haven't we been visited yet? Are these alien
06:58worlds as advanced as ours but not yet advanced enough for space travel? Are they actually capable
07:03of reaching Earth but choose not to? It's a theory which relies on giant leaps of faith, but
07:08could the Fermi Paradox also be applied to some extent to the Earth itself? For all the apparent
07:13proof that there wasn't an unknown global civilisation before ours, might it actually have
07:17been advanced enough to knowingly erase evidence of its geological footprint? And, if it's clever
07:22enough for that, could it also be clever enough to have hopped off this planet to watch from afar as
07:26all of human life replays itself, unaware of what had gone before it? Probably not,
07:31but our own civilisation still has time to examine how we're remembered.
07:47And how we want our legacy to be viewed by the historians of the future.
07:52What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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