1 00:00:14,480 --> 00:00:18,000 [Graham] At sites all around the globe, we've seen what I believe 2 00:00:18,080 --> 00:00:21,160 are the fingerprints of a lost civilization 3 00:00:22,360 --> 00:00:24,400 dating back to the last Ice Age. 4 00:00:25,280 --> 00:00:26,760 The last great mystery is 5 00:00:26,840 --> 00:00:29,440 what happened to this advanced civilization? 6 00:00:30,880 --> 00:00:34,760 There may be clues in the origin myths of ancient cultures, 7 00:00:35,360 --> 00:00:38,520 because many of them tell the same basic story. 8 00:00:40,680 --> 00:00:42,520 According to these legends, 9 00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:44,040 once upon a time, 10 00:00:44,120 --> 00:00:47,680 humanity shared the Earth with a more advanced society, 11 00:00:49,480 --> 00:00:54,160 whether Atlanteans, or giants, or gods on Earth. 12 00:00:55,600 --> 00:00:58,840 Until a horrific global cataclysm occurred, 13 00:00:59,520 --> 00:01:00,920 a great flood, 14 00:01:02,440 --> 00:01:06,160 only a chosen few were spared to repopulate the Earth. 15 00:01:06,880 --> 00:01:10,040 Who were later visited by other survivors, 16 00:01:10,760 --> 00:01:15,120 mysterious great teachers, usually arriving by sea, 17 00:01:15,200 --> 00:01:18,680 to help them lay the foundations for the rebirth of humanity 18 00:01:19,400 --> 00:01:21,800 and civilization as we know it today. 19 00:01:22,680 --> 00:01:23,720 [thunderclap] 20 00:01:24,880 --> 00:01:26,400 Science now confirms 21 00:01:26,480 --> 00:01:29,680 that just such a series of apocalyptic events 22 00:01:29,760 --> 00:01:34,760 did occur at the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,800 years ago... 23 00:01:36,960 --> 00:01:41,040 an epoch known to geologists as the Younger Dryas. 24 00:01:48,280 --> 00:01:49,920 Only in its aftermath, 25 00:01:50,000 --> 00:01:54,480 did our ancestors suddenly begin farming and raising livestock, 26 00:01:55,040 --> 00:01:56,280 creating societies 27 00:01:56,360 --> 00:01:59,040 and building massive megalithic structures, 28 00:01:59,760 --> 00:02:01,640 often aligned to the stars. 29 00:02:04,640 --> 00:02:05,800 Why then? 30 00:02:07,160 --> 00:02:11,760 It's a mystery mainstream archeologists have no real explanation for, 31 00:02:11,840 --> 00:02:13,880 other than "that's just what happened." 32 00:02:15,280 --> 00:02:17,680 But I have a radically different proposal. 33 00:02:18,360 --> 00:02:20,960 We need to ask ourselves was that really the dawn of history? 34 00:02:23,120 --> 00:02:24,760 Or was it long before that? 35 00:02:45,080 --> 00:02:46,320 It's possible 36 00:02:46,400 --> 00:02:50,440 that all traces of the lost advanced civilization I'm looking for 37 00:02:51,080 --> 00:02:55,000 were swept away in the cataclysms of the Younger Dryas. 38 00:02:55,760 --> 00:02:59,520 But surely the geological evidence of that apocalyptic moment 39 00:02:59,600 --> 00:03:00,760 should still exist. 40 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:03,120 And I believe it does. 41 00:03:05,160 --> 00:03:08,280 Here, in the northwest corner of America, 42 00:03:08,840 --> 00:03:13,360 in a part of eastern Washington state known as the Channeled Scablands. 43 00:03:19,080 --> 00:03:22,360 It's a unique apocalyptic landscape, 44 00:03:22,440 --> 00:03:26,560 a spectacular area covering 2,000 square miles. 45 00:03:29,080 --> 00:03:33,960 These landscapes speak to an enormous, 46 00:03:34,040 --> 00:03:37,000 almost unspeakable, cataclysm. 47 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:45,720 It's an area that's long fascinated geologists, 48 00:03:46,880 --> 00:03:49,080 with giant scars in the rock, 49 00:03:49,680 --> 00:03:54,880 massive potholes, and epic waterfalls. 50 00:03:58,240 --> 00:04:02,160 All of it conspires to look, well, unearthly. 51 00:04:02,240 --> 00:04:03,720 Not of this world. 52 00:04:05,440 --> 00:04:07,440 This immense fossilized waterfall, 53 00:04:08,680 --> 00:04:10,920 appropriately named Dry Falls, 54 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:14,720 ranks high amongst the natural wonders of the Channeled Scablands, 55 00:04:15,800 --> 00:04:17,160 and indeed of the world. 56 00:04:19,080 --> 00:04:22,880 It's so enormous that it's almost impossible to comprehend its scale. 57 00:04:25,920 --> 00:04:30,040 The Falls are just one section of a monstrous ravine 58 00:04:30,120 --> 00:04:33,200 gouged out of the earth, hundreds of feet deep, 59 00:04:33,280 --> 00:04:36,560 50 miles long, and almost three miles wide, 60 00:04:37,560 --> 00:04:38,600 called Grand Coulee. 61 00:04:40,600 --> 00:04:43,880 Geologists believe that all these dramatic formations 62 00:04:43,960 --> 00:04:45,400 were created by flooding 63 00:04:45,960 --> 00:04:49,640 that took place sometime during the last Ice Age. 64 00:04:50,840 --> 00:04:55,040 Precisely when and how this deluge occurred, however, remains a mystery, 65 00:04:55,120 --> 00:04:58,960 one that has sparked controversy amongst geologists for decades. 66 00:04:59,040 --> 00:05:01,360 What really happened here? 67 00:05:02,840 --> 00:05:07,600 And could it be related to what happened to that lost advanced civilization 68 00:05:07,680 --> 00:05:08,960 of the Ice Age? 69 00:05:12,480 --> 00:05:14,720 To help wrap my head around it all, 70 00:05:14,800 --> 00:05:17,720 amateur geologist and author Randall Carlson, 71 00:05:17,800 --> 00:05:21,320 who's been exploring the Scablands for decades, 72 00:05:21,400 --> 00:05:26,040 joins me in an area of the Grand Coulee known as Lenore Lake. 73 00:05:27,240 --> 00:05:30,320 Whatever the cause, there's no question in anyone's mind 74 00:05:30,400 --> 00:05:33,400 that this is the result of catastrophic flooding 75 00:05:33,480 --> 00:05:35,680 on a scale that's almost inconceivable. 76 00:05:35,760 --> 00:05:38,200 [Graham] My first impression, looking even at the map, 77 00:05:38,280 --> 00:05:42,080 is that this is an area that's been ripped and torn and scarred. 78 00:05:42,160 --> 00:05:44,200 What's the story of this incredible landscape? 79 00:05:44,280 --> 00:05:46,560 Right now, most of the conventional models go 80 00:05:46,640 --> 00:05:48,600 - the source of this water here... - Yeah. 81 00:05:48,680 --> 00:05:51,720 ...that created the Scablands, was Lake Missoula. 82 00:05:54,880 --> 00:05:56,680 [Graham] During the last Ice Age, 83 00:05:56,760 --> 00:06:00,440 massive ice sheets covered the northern half of North America, 84 00:06:00,520 --> 00:06:01,760 from coast to coast. 85 00:06:03,920 --> 00:06:09,160 Millions of square miles of ice, locking in enough water to fill an ocean. 86 00:06:11,560 --> 00:06:14,400 And at the southern edge of the ice sheets, 87 00:06:14,480 --> 00:06:16,640 huge fresh water lakes formed. 88 00:06:18,480 --> 00:06:20,920 One glacial lake, Missoula, 89 00:06:21,000 --> 00:06:25,640 contained as much water as modern lakes Erie and Ontario combined, 90 00:06:26,520 --> 00:06:29,880 covering much of what is today northwestern Montana. 91 00:06:33,080 --> 00:06:36,400 The current theory is that Lake Missoula was blocked up 92 00:06:36,480 --> 00:06:39,800 by some sort of natural ice dam that burst. 93 00:06:45,600 --> 00:06:46,920 [Randall] You remove the ice dam, 94 00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:50,400 all the water's going to be flowing out here to the west like this. 95 00:06:53,520 --> 00:06:56,440 [Graham] And to account for all this damage to the landscape, 96 00:06:57,040 --> 00:07:03,720 geologists theorized that the ice dam re-formed and burst again and again, 97 00:07:03,800 --> 00:07:08,760 causing dozens of floods over a period of several thousand years, 98 00:07:08,840 --> 00:07:12,960 gradually shaping the Scablands into what we see today. 99 00:07:14,440 --> 00:07:16,280 So it all came out of Lake Missoula, 100 00:07:16,360 --> 00:07:19,200 and because one emptying of Lake Missoula wouldn't be enough, 101 00:07:19,280 --> 00:07:21,600 they postulate up to 80 or 90 emptyings of it. 102 00:07:21,680 --> 00:07:22,760 That certainly helps. 103 00:07:25,120 --> 00:07:28,240 [Graham] It's a curiously contrived explanation 104 00:07:28,320 --> 00:07:30,440 for such a wild landscape. 105 00:07:33,080 --> 00:07:37,560 There's a strong what is called "uniformitarian trend" in geology. 106 00:07:37,640 --> 00:07:40,880 Modern geologists don't like cataclysms very much. 107 00:07:40,960 --> 00:07:45,120 They prefer long, slow, gradual explanations of things, 108 00:07:45,200 --> 00:07:47,960 and they prefer the view that, as things are today, 109 00:07:48,040 --> 00:07:49,640 so they have always been in the past, 110 00:07:49,720 --> 00:07:52,640 even though it seems to me that that view is completely absurd. 111 00:07:54,040 --> 00:07:56,720 Randall believes the geological evidence here 112 00:07:56,800 --> 00:08:00,080 speaks not to centuries of gradual floods, 113 00:08:00,160 --> 00:08:06,560 but to a single massively violent deluge that lasted just a few weeks. 114 00:08:06,640 --> 00:08:08,960 - It's not just water, is it? - Oh, no. 115 00:08:09,040 --> 00:08:11,080 - Yeah. - Pretty much as far as the eye could see, 116 00:08:11,800 --> 00:08:15,640 it's going to be a roiling, boiling, turbulent scene. 117 00:08:17,400 --> 00:08:20,040 Moving water choked with thousands of icebergs. 118 00:08:21,160 --> 00:08:24,000 All the stuff in between these cliffs was ripped out. 119 00:08:24,080 --> 00:08:25,240 [Graham] Yeah. 120 00:08:26,520 --> 00:08:30,320 [Randall] A tremendously unimaginably violent event. 121 00:08:32,840 --> 00:08:34,280 To give you an idea, 122 00:08:34,360 --> 00:08:38,200 if you took every single river on Earth from every continent, 123 00:08:38,280 --> 00:08:40,039 add that together, 124 00:08:40,600 --> 00:08:43,080 you'd still have to times that by at least ten 125 00:08:43,159 --> 00:08:45,919 to get the volume of water flowing through here. 126 00:08:46,000 --> 00:08:48,799 Wow! That really puts it in perspective. 127 00:08:54,600 --> 00:08:57,680 It's a truly awe-inspiring forbidding landscape, 128 00:08:57,760 --> 00:09:00,480 that speaks to me of an ancient apocalypse. 129 00:09:01,880 --> 00:09:05,800 An apocalypse on a scale that's almost impossible to imagine today. 130 00:09:09,760 --> 00:09:15,000 During the Ice Age, this would have been an area of softly rolling grassland, 131 00:09:15,080 --> 00:09:18,760 speckled with roaming herds of antelope and mastodons, 132 00:09:19,920 --> 00:09:22,600 until the violence arrived. 133 00:09:29,520 --> 00:09:33,360 The floodwaters gouged out an immense waterfall 134 00:09:33,440 --> 00:09:36,360 that would've been the size of ten Niagara Falls, 135 00:09:36,440 --> 00:09:39,920 two-and-a-half times taller, seven times wider, 136 00:09:40,520 --> 00:09:43,400 and 3,000 times more powerful. 137 00:09:47,640 --> 00:09:49,200 How quickly do you think that occurred? 138 00:09:49,280 --> 00:09:51,480 I think it happened very, very quickly. 139 00:09:51,560 --> 00:09:54,160 - Could it have been created in weeks? - Yes. 140 00:09:58,640 --> 00:10:01,080 [Graham] The clearest evidence is right here, 141 00:10:01,160 --> 00:10:03,320 at a place called Wallula Gap, 142 00:10:04,680 --> 00:10:10,000 where the floodwaters carved out a massive canyon 1,200 feet deep, 143 00:10:11,680 --> 00:10:15,320 leaving behind these immense basalt outcroppings... 144 00:10:17,720 --> 00:10:19,480 known as the Twin Sisters. 145 00:10:21,000 --> 00:10:23,120 Proof of the speed and ferocity 146 00:10:24,160 --> 00:10:27,920 of what was likely the biggest flash flood in human history. 147 00:10:32,840 --> 00:10:35,240 Randall's research shows that the formation 148 00:10:35,320 --> 00:10:42,080 simply couldn't be the work of millennia of gradual erosion, as geologists claim. 149 00:10:44,560 --> 00:10:46,960 And when this great deluge was over, 150 00:10:47,560 --> 00:10:48,600 the receding waters 151 00:10:48,680 --> 00:10:52,800 didn't just leave behind isolated towers of harder rock. 152 00:10:54,280 --> 00:10:58,080 Nearby, in a spot known as the Camas Prairie, 153 00:10:58,160 --> 00:11:01,080 are giant ripples in the landscape. 154 00:11:02,800 --> 00:11:05,520 They're so uniform and so perfectly formed, 155 00:11:05,600 --> 00:11:09,120 anybody who goes to the beach and sees the tide going out 156 00:11:09,200 --> 00:11:13,680 will see that that receding tide leaves a series of ripples in the sand, 157 00:11:13,760 --> 00:11:16,680 and those ripples may be half an inch high 158 00:11:16,760 --> 00:11:18,200 and a few feet long. 159 00:11:18,280 --> 00:11:21,400 What we have on the Camas Prairie is current ripples 160 00:11:21,480 --> 00:11:26,480 that are 30 to 50 feet high and 300 feet long. 161 00:11:28,240 --> 00:11:31,680 They're the same phenomenon caused by the recession of waters. 162 00:11:31,760 --> 00:11:35,080 But the ripples on the landscape speak of a huge event, 163 00:11:35,160 --> 00:11:39,440 an enormous amount of water that ran over that landscape and then withdrew. 164 00:11:40,880 --> 00:11:42,440 Truly apocalyptic. 165 00:11:42,520 --> 00:11:43,800 Apocalyptic, yes. 166 00:11:43,880 --> 00:11:47,960 If somebody did survive here or there by luck of the draw, 167 00:11:48,040 --> 00:11:49,720 they could emerge in the aftermath 168 00:11:49,800 --> 00:11:52,400 thinking that the entire world had been destroyed. 169 00:11:57,360 --> 00:12:02,880 [Graham] The Scablands show all the signs of a massive, devastating flood 170 00:12:02,960 --> 00:12:04,960 of very short duration, 171 00:12:06,680 --> 00:12:09,880 much like the ones described in myths around the world. 172 00:12:15,440 --> 00:12:21,360 And it's unlikely all that water came from Lake Missoula, as geologists claim. 173 00:12:21,960 --> 00:12:23,840 You remove the ice dam, 174 00:12:23,920 --> 00:12:27,000 all the water is going to be flowing out here to the west like this, 175 00:12:27,080 --> 00:12:30,440 yet we find along the south wall, right in here, 176 00:12:31,160 --> 00:12:33,400 we find massive gravel deposits. 177 00:12:34,080 --> 00:12:35,680 This water's flowing south. 178 00:12:35,760 --> 00:12:38,160 And that's exactly where you diverge from the mainstream. 179 00:12:38,240 --> 00:12:41,880 You see the source of the flooding on the ice cap, not this lake. 180 00:12:41,960 --> 00:12:42,960 [Randall] Right. 181 00:12:43,040 --> 00:12:45,160 It's now being admitted and recognized 182 00:12:45,240 --> 00:12:47,920 that, oh, well, maybe there were other lakes up here. 183 00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:51,800 And what we are going to really have to do is look to the north. 184 00:12:51,880 --> 00:12:53,600 - To look to the ice cap itself. - Yes. 185 00:12:53,680 --> 00:12:55,760 [Graham] To come back to the mainstream theory, 186 00:12:55,840 --> 00:12:58,880 they put those floods in a specific time frame, 187 00:12:58,960 --> 00:13:02,240 in the 18,000 to 15,500-year-old window. 188 00:13:02,320 --> 00:13:06,000 Yes. I think we need to take a hard look at some of those dates. 189 00:13:06,080 --> 00:13:08,000 'Cause I can't think of anything in that period 190 00:13:08,080 --> 00:13:09,960 which would have provided the massive energy 191 00:13:10,040 --> 00:13:11,640 needed to release this amount of water. 192 00:13:13,040 --> 00:13:17,040 What needs to happen now is putting the puzzle pieces together... 193 00:13:17,120 --> 00:13:19,160 - Yes. - ...to get the grand view, 194 00:13:19,240 --> 00:13:20,680 the coherent big picture. 195 00:13:24,080 --> 00:13:28,440 [Graham] That bigger picture that Randall is looking for could be emerging. 196 00:13:30,160 --> 00:13:32,920 Instead of the Scablands continuing to be framed 197 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:35,480 as a puzzlingly isolated regional phenomenon 198 00:13:35,560 --> 00:13:38,400 with no obvious external cause, 199 00:13:38,480 --> 00:13:41,520 Randall's argument sets this devastated landscape 200 00:13:41,600 --> 00:13:45,440 in context of the much wider, indeed global, devastation 201 00:13:45,520 --> 00:13:47,880 that occurred near the end of the last Ice Age. 202 00:13:50,040 --> 00:13:54,920 Not 18,000, or 15,500 years ago... 203 00:13:56,520 --> 00:13:59,280 but around 12,800 years ago 204 00:14:00,960 --> 00:14:02,960 at the onset of the Younger Dryas. 205 00:14:05,720 --> 00:14:09,200 Could the destruction so evident in the Scablands 206 00:14:09,280 --> 00:14:12,360 have been part of that larger ancient apocalypse 207 00:14:12,440 --> 00:14:16,760 that I suspect erased an entire advanced civilization? 208 00:14:21,640 --> 00:14:24,040 Another scarred landscape of ancient America 209 00:14:24,120 --> 00:14:26,160 might hold the final clue. 210 00:14:29,400 --> 00:14:30,920 Twelve hundred miles south, 211 00:14:31,560 --> 00:14:35,120 in the scrub-covered desert along the US-Mexico border, 212 00:14:36,680 --> 00:14:39,320 at a site called Murray Springs. 213 00:14:44,840 --> 00:14:48,960 Allen West is a member of an interdisciplinary research group 214 00:14:49,040 --> 00:14:52,560 that stunned the scientific community in 2007, 215 00:14:52,640 --> 00:14:57,160 publishing a paper about an extraordinary discovery here, 216 00:14:58,080 --> 00:15:03,760 in an area of exposed earth that contains what's known as a "black mat." 217 00:15:04,480 --> 00:15:07,280 This black mat layer that you see through here... 218 00:15:07,360 --> 00:15:09,560 - Yeah. - ...represents the extinction layer. 219 00:15:09,640 --> 00:15:15,440 Below that, there are mammoth bones, there are American horse bones, 220 00:15:15,520 --> 00:15:20,200 American camel, the dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats. 221 00:15:20,280 --> 00:15:25,760 And so far, not a single one of those has been found in place above that layer. 222 00:15:26,560 --> 00:15:29,000 In addition to the extinctions of the megafauna, 223 00:15:29,080 --> 00:15:31,240 there was also an extinction of human beings. 224 00:15:31,320 --> 00:15:35,320 We think that probably 50 to 60% of the people 225 00:15:35,400 --> 00:15:38,480 across the northern hemisphere died at this time. 226 00:15:38,560 --> 00:15:41,760 Right. That's a very dramatic figure. 227 00:15:41,840 --> 00:15:44,320 So we knew something had happened, we didn't know what. 228 00:15:44,400 --> 00:15:46,440 So in a sense, you were confronted by a mystery... 229 00:15:46,520 --> 00:15:48,840 - Yes, yeah, yep. - ...that you wanted to explore. 230 00:15:50,760 --> 00:15:54,920 When the black mat was first discovered and analyzed in the 1960s, 231 00:15:55,960 --> 00:16:00,440 scientists carbon-dated it to around 12,800 years ago, 232 00:16:00,520 --> 00:16:03,800 the exact moment of the onset of the Younger Dryas. 233 00:16:06,080 --> 00:16:07,760 Which is why I'm here. 234 00:16:09,760 --> 00:16:12,080 The black mat might help solve 235 00:16:12,160 --> 00:16:16,680 not only the mystery of what kicked off that cataclysmic epoch in the first place, 236 00:16:18,400 --> 00:16:23,400 but also specifically what might have released the immense flood... 237 00:16:27,280 --> 00:16:29,480 that created the Scablands. 238 00:16:30,960 --> 00:16:32,520 As part of their research, 239 00:16:32,600 --> 00:16:36,760 Allen's group conducted a thorough chemical analysis of the black mat. 240 00:16:38,680 --> 00:16:42,200 So you came here and you began to investigate the mat. 241 00:16:42,840 --> 00:16:46,120 What we found is melted glass spherules. 242 00:16:46,720 --> 00:16:51,080 So this is our first clue that some high-temperature event had happened. 243 00:16:52,440 --> 00:16:54,120 But we didn't know what it was. 244 00:16:55,480 --> 00:16:58,880 So a temperature sufficient to melt earth basically, 245 00:16:58,960 --> 00:17:00,160 is that what you're saying? 246 00:17:00,240 --> 00:17:02,040 Hot enough to melt a car 247 00:17:02,120 --> 00:17:04,680 into a molten puddle of metal in the parking lot. 248 00:17:04,760 --> 00:17:05,600 Wow. Right. 249 00:17:05,680 --> 00:17:07,080 What else do you find here? 250 00:17:07,160 --> 00:17:10,319 Well, there was a peak in platinum and in iridium. 251 00:17:10,400 --> 00:17:13,000 Were you expecting to find platinum and iridium here? 252 00:17:13,079 --> 00:17:14,760 No, no, we were not. 253 00:17:15,599 --> 00:17:18,400 That's something you just don't see on this planet very often. 254 00:17:19,359 --> 00:17:22,520 Then we knew that there's only one thing on Earth that can do that, 255 00:17:22,599 --> 00:17:25,040 and that's some kind of cosmic impact. 256 00:17:25,680 --> 00:17:28,319 [Graham] Something, an asteroid or fragments of a comet 257 00:17:28,400 --> 00:17:31,200 coming in through the atmosphere and either bursting in the air 258 00:17:31,280 --> 00:17:32,920 or smacking directly into the ground? 259 00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:34,000 That's right, yep. 260 00:17:35,920 --> 00:17:38,800 [Graham] A comet, a species killer. 261 00:17:40,600 --> 00:17:43,440 Would that explain the apocalyptic cataclysms 262 00:17:43,520 --> 00:17:46,080 that took place at the end of the Younger Dryas? 263 00:17:46,880 --> 00:17:50,320 It's happened before to the dinosaurs. 264 00:17:54,560 --> 00:17:57,760 Nobody disputes that it was a cosmic impact, an asteroid or a comet, 265 00:17:57,840 --> 00:18:01,480 that caused the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. 266 00:18:03,200 --> 00:18:05,720 That event left a distinct layer in the earth, 267 00:18:05,800 --> 00:18:08,160 which is still visible in certain places today, 268 00:18:08,240 --> 00:18:11,560 and a very similar layer is found at Murray Springs. 269 00:18:14,880 --> 00:18:16,360 Once Allen's research group 270 00:18:16,440 --> 00:18:20,280 realized the implications of the black mat layer at Murray Springs, 271 00:18:21,080 --> 00:18:24,840 they launched a painstaking, long-term investigation 272 00:18:25,720 --> 00:18:28,000 to see if it showed up anywhere else. 273 00:18:29,800 --> 00:18:32,920 And it did, all over the world. 274 00:18:37,120 --> 00:18:41,360 To date, black mat sites have been found across North America, 275 00:18:41,440 --> 00:18:44,720 from California to Michigan to New Jersey, 276 00:18:44,800 --> 00:18:49,040 and from Belgium in northern Europe to Syria in the Middle East. 277 00:18:50,520 --> 00:18:53,440 That's a lot of potential impact sites, 278 00:18:53,520 --> 00:18:58,440 all dated to around the same time, roughly 12,800 years ago. 279 00:19:01,280 --> 00:19:04,640 We began to realize this had to have been some kind of huge event. 280 00:19:04,720 --> 00:19:09,040 The total picture got clearer to us that something catastrophic had happened. 281 00:19:11,440 --> 00:19:16,320 [Graham] But if there was a comet strike, where's the impact crater? 282 00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:20,160 I think we saw the answer to that... 283 00:19:22,880 --> 00:19:24,560 up in the Scablands. 284 00:19:26,840 --> 00:19:29,920 If the primary impacts at the beginning of the Younger Dryas 285 00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:31,760 were on ice caps, 286 00:19:31,840 --> 00:19:35,320 when the ice melts away, there's no crater left to see. 287 00:19:37,040 --> 00:19:39,040 It would support Randall's theory 288 00:19:39,120 --> 00:19:43,760 that the sudden catastrophic flooding responsible for the Scablands 289 00:19:43,840 --> 00:19:48,200 came not from that lake, but from the ice cap itself. 290 00:19:50,240 --> 00:19:54,520 It's going to absolutely demand a rewrite of history as we know it. 291 00:19:54,600 --> 00:19:55,600 Yeah. 292 00:19:57,400 --> 00:20:00,680 Still, one impact alone couldn't have created 293 00:20:00,760 --> 00:20:04,520 all the black mat sites mapped out by Allen's research team. 294 00:20:06,400 --> 00:20:08,960 Their discoveries led to a startling idea. 295 00:20:09,040 --> 00:20:13,480 Perhaps it wasn't one cosmic impact that left all these traces around the world, 296 00:20:13,560 --> 00:20:14,800 but many. 297 00:20:14,880 --> 00:20:18,600 A brief intense storm of cosmic debris that the Earth ran into. 298 00:20:18,680 --> 00:20:21,800 They called it the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. 299 00:20:24,120 --> 00:20:26,880 [Allen] Don't think Earth was actually hit by the comet itself, 300 00:20:26,960 --> 00:20:29,920 but rather hit by tens of thousands of fragments. 301 00:20:30,000 --> 00:20:32,920 Think that 12,800 years ago, 302 00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:37,040 Earth wandered into the debris trail of a giant comet. 303 00:20:43,520 --> 00:20:46,920 [Graham] It would have been like thousands of atomic bombs going off. 304 00:20:48,200 --> 00:20:53,320 In just a few hours, a truly Earth-shaking event, 305 00:20:55,240 --> 00:21:00,160 releasing water vapor and clouds of dust that would have shrouded the skies, 306 00:21:00,920 --> 00:21:03,360 causing temperatures to plunge. 307 00:21:04,800 --> 00:21:07,920 Imagine living in Miami and you're enjoying the beach, 308 00:21:08,960 --> 00:21:12,080 and suddenly the climate changes to Anchorage, Alaska. 309 00:21:13,280 --> 00:21:16,960 - [Graham] Just, overnight, really. Yeah. - Yeah, in a matter of probably months. 310 00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:23,600 [Graham] When Allen and his colleagues 311 00:21:23,680 --> 00:21:26,400 from what was now called the Comet Research Group, 312 00:21:26,480 --> 00:21:27,840 first published their findings, 313 00:21:27,920 --> 00:21:32,440 predictably they were met with scorn and derision. 314 00:21:33,240 --> 00:21:36,680 Scientists unfortunately are taught to be cynical about things. 315 00:21:36,760 --> 00:21:39,280 Skepticism is healthy, cynicism is not. 316 00:21:41,000 --> 00:21:43,560 [Graham] What's even more unsettling about their discovery 317 00:21:43,640 --> 00:21:46,960 is the likely origin of that cometary debris. 318 00:21:48,120 --> 00:21:49,960 The Taurid meteor stream, 319 00:21:51,920 --> 00:21:55,720 a patch of sky which the Earth passes through twice a year 320 00:21:55,800 --> 00:21:58,120 in late June and late October. 321 00:21:59,080 --> 00:22:02,200 It's estimated there are probably 200 objects 322 00:22:02,280 --> 00:22:04,120 with diameters of at least a kilometer, 323 00:22:04,200 --> 00:22:06,560 whirling around in the Taurid meteor stream. 324 00:22:11,920 --> 00:22:13,120 The evidence brought forward 325 00:22:13,200 --> 00:22:15,360 by the scientists of the Comet Research Group 326 00:22:15,440 --> 00:22:22,200 amounts to nothing less than an immense global cataclysm around 12,800 years ago, 327 00:22:22,280 --> 00:22:25,720 an apocalypse big enough to have obliterated almost all traces 328 00:22:25,800 --> 00:22:28,400 of an advanced civilization of the Ice Age, 329 00:22:28,480 --> 00:22:30,520 and to explain at a stroke 330 00:22:30,600 --> 00:22:33,800 all the mysteries I've spent the last 30 years investigating. 331 00:22:36,240 --> 00:22:40,240 It might be why the ancient civilizations that emerged afterward 332 00:22:40,320 --> 00:22:44,360 were so scientifically focused on the skies. 333 00:22:45,360 --> 00:22:48,080 This is an area we really need to pay attention to 334 00:22:48,160 --> 00:22:50,440 because there's something dangerous up there 335 00:22:50,520 --> 00:22:52,320 and it can end civilization. 336 00:22:55,800 --> 00:22:58,800 At Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, we've already seen 337 00:22:58,880 --> 00:23:03,840 how the ancients may have memorialized this apocalypse in stone. 338 00:23:03,920 --> 00:23:08,520 By recording the constellations in the sky at the time on Pillar 43. 339 00:23:09,720 --> 00:23:12,680 But the pillars may contain another coded message 340 00:23:13,400 --> 00:23:16,080 that Dr. Martin Sweatman was keen to show me, 341 00:23:16,160 --> 00:23:19,000 something that he believes is a record 342 00:23:19,080 --> 00:23:23,520 of precisely when and from where the meteor shower came. 343 00:23:25,840 --> 00:23:29,280 What you've got here, you've got snakes emanating 344 00:23:29,360 --> 00:23:32,480 from the body and the legs of the fox. 345 00:23:33,440 --> 00:23:35,880 And if we go on to the other side of the pillar, 346 00:23:35,960 --> 00:23:39,720 and again we have the snakes kind of emanating from these birds. 347 00:23:40,440 --> 00:23:45,440 Ancient cultures did see comets as sky serpents. 348 00:23:45,520 --> 00:23:48,080 There's really no serious dispute about that. 349 00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:52,160 We can interpret this as meteors radiating from specific constellations... 350 00:23:52,240 --> 00:23:53,080 Yeah. 351 00:23:53,160 --> 00:23:55,840 ...tall bending birds probably representing Pisces. 352 00:23:55,920 --> 00:23:56,760 [Graham] Right. 353 00:23:56,840 --> 00:23:59,600 [Dr. Martin] And here we have the constellation Aquarius, 354 00:23:59,680 --> 00:24:01,840 we think that's what the fox represents. 355 00:24:01,920 --> 00:24:04,280 At the time Göbekli Tepe was built, 356 00:24:04,360 --> 00:24:09,480 these were the constellations from which the Taurid meteor stream radiated. 357 00:24:10,280 --> 00:24:11,400 They're essentially saying 358 00:24:11,480 --> 00:24:15,120 that the Taurid meteor stream radiates from Aquarius 359 00:24:15,200 --> 00:24:17,440 and then from Pisces, 360 00:24:17,520 --> 00:24:20,400 and it makes that change over the course of a few weeks. 361 00:24:21,320 --> 00:24:25,360 [Graham] A record of a storm of comet fragments that lasted weeks. 362 00:24:27,600 --> 00:24:31,240 That's a timeframe that fits all the evidence of the global cataclysm 363 00:24:31,320 --> 00:24:33,840 that hit Earth 12,800 years ago, 364 00:24:34,480 --> 00:24:39,000 including the violent flooding that tore up the Washington Scablands. 365 00:24:40,880 --> 00:24:43,880 And there might be more to that specific configuration 366 00:24:43,960 --> 00:24:47,640 of Sun and constellations featured on Pillar 43. 367 00:24:48,960 --> 00:24:51,240 It occurs at a solstice, 368 00:24:51,320 --> 00:24:55,960 only twice in a cycle of just under 26,000 years, 369 00:24:56,040 --> 00:24:58,600 each return lasting barely a century. 370 00:25:00,400 --> 00:25:01,680 I therefore find it eerie 371 00:25:01,760 --> 00:25:05,240 as archaeoastronomer Paul Burley first noted, 372 00:25:05,320 --> 00:25:08,000 that the exact same configuration 373 00:25:08,080 --> 00:25:11,680 seen at the summer solstice around 12,800 years ago 374 00:25:11,760 --> 00:25:17,960 has returned to our skies today, at the winter solstice. 375 00:25:20,480 --> 00:25:23,440 Could the imagery of Pillar 43 be a message 376 00:25:23,520 --> 00:25:27,760 contrived by the master astronomers of a lost civilization? 377 00:25:29,760 --> 00:25:33,680 A warning to the future, to us, 378 00:25:34,440 --> 00:25:36,920 that what goes around comes around? 379 00:25:38,680 --> 00:25:43,600 That when the Sun and stars next take up this configuration at the solstice, 380 00:25:43,680 --> 00:25:47,240 an apocalypse of sky serpents could return? 381 00:25:51,440 --> 00:25:52,760 So take heed. 382 00:25:54,480 --> 00:25:57,400 The notion should give us pause for thought. 383 00:25:58,680 --> 00:26:01,240 I don't want to be a prophet of gloom and doom, 384 00:26:01,320 --> 00:26:04,200 but are we in danger from the Taurid meteor stream today? 385 00:26:04,280 --> 00:26:06,240 It was danger to our ancestors. 386 00:26:06,320 --> 00:26:09,000 It caused a cataclysm on Earth 12,800 years ago. 387 00:26:09,080 --> 00:26:10,200 Can that happen again? 388 00:26:10,280 --> 00:26:11,880 We absolutely are in danger. 389 00:26:13,080 --> 00:26:16,320 In fact, the calculations of the astronomers 390 00:26:16,400 --> 00:26:19,000 are that we're in a danger window right now 391 00:26:19,080 --> 00:26:23,760 where the thicker part of the Taurids could be impacting Earth. 392 00:26:26,400 --> 00:26:28,640 [Graham] More and more scientists are now embracing 393 00:26:28,720 --> 00:26:30,960 the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis... 394 00:26:35,280 --> 00:26:40,120 and this accelerating interest is no longer confined to scientists. 395 00:26:44,080 --> 00:26:48,080 If something did hit Earth somewhere around 12,000 years ago, 396 00:26:48,160 --> 00:26:51,040 and reset civilization, it's an interesting theory. 397 00:26:51,120 --> 00:26:53,960 But I think it's a theory that's worth discussing. 398 00:26:54,760 --> 00:27:00,040 I just feel like there's so much emotion tied up into your theories, 399 00:27:00,120 --> 00:27:02,800 and so much emotion in the resistance. 400 00:27:02,880 --> 00:27:06,520 How does mainstream archaeology dismiss these things? 401 00:27:06,600 --> 00:27:08,720 Like, what's the common arguments? 402 00:27:09,360 --> 00:27:12,560 The common argument is, "We are archeologists and we know best." 403 00:27:12,640 --> 00:27:15,400 It's an argument from authority, "You must accept our dating system." 404 00:27:15,480 --> 00:27:18,200 "We've done all the work and this is how it is." 405 00:27:18,280 --> 00:27:24,040 It's so strange that people will only accept and talk about one narrative. 406 00:27:24,120 --> 00:27:27,280 The narrative that they established a long time ago... 407 00:27:27,360 --> 00:27:28,200 Yeah. 408 00:27:28,280 --> 00:27:29,760 ...and they won't let it be debated. 409 00:27:30,560 --> 00:27:33,200 Maybe part of the reason is it threatens the notion 410 00:27:33,280 --> 00:27:36,880 that we are the apex and pinnacle of the whole human story. 411 00:27:36,960 --> 00:27:40,160 Maybe the notion of a lost civilization in the past 412 00:27:40,240 --> 00:27:42,080 raises the uncomfortable question 413 00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:44,400 that we might be a lost civilization of the future. 414 00:27:48,880 --> 00:27:53,400 If we were to confront a massive global cataclysm 415 00:27:53,480 --> 00:27:55,200 of the kind that took place, 416 00:27:55,280 --> 00:27:58,040 that we now know took place at the end of the last Ice Age, 417 00:27:58,120 --> 00:28:02,120 I think our civilization would actually be very unlikely to survive it. 418 00:28:05,880 --> 00:28:11,040 So it's not hard to imagine that an earlier advanced civilization 419 00:28:11,120 --> 00:28:12,520 might have been wiped out, 420 00:28:13,040 --> 00:28:14,960 erased from memory 421 00:28:15,040 --> 00:28:18,560 during this ancient apocalypse 12,800 years ago. 422 00:28:22,120 --> 00:28:25,560 After those cosmic impacts on the ice caps, 423 00:28:25,640 --> 00:28:30,160 sea levels rose, swallowing up all the low-lying coastal lands 424 00:28:30,240 --> 00:28:33,200 that would have likely been settled by an advanced culture. 425 00:28:35,440 --> 00:28:37,320 Places like Sundaland... 426 00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:42,680 the Maltese peninsula, or the Grand Bahama Banks. 427 00:28:44,960 --> 00:28:46,800 Perhaps in Indonesia 428 00:28:46,880 --> 00:28:49,640 the survivors retreated to the hills, 429 00:28:49,720 --> 00:28:53,760 leaving behind tantalizing clues to their sophisticated architecture. 430 00:28:55,040 --> 00:28:57,200 Some survivors in Turkey 431 00:28:57,280 --> 00:29:00,760 may have decided to carve out refuges underground 432 00:29:00,840 --> 00:29:02,680 in case more meteors struck. 433 00:29:03,840 --> 00:29:05,600 In the Mediterranean, on Malta, 434 00:29:05,680 --> 00:29:08,240 the survivors might have built temples 435 00:29:08,320 --> 00:29:11,880 aligned to the brightest new star in their night sky, 436 00:29:11,960 --> 00:29:15,560 perhaps fearing that it might herald the next comet to strike. 437 00:29:16,880 --> 00:29:19,000 They traversed the seas, 438 00:29:19,080 --> 00:29:21,760 passing down their geographic knowledge to others. 439 00:29:23,440 --> 00:29:26,480 Their appearances recorded in ancient traditions, 440 00:29:26,560 --> 00:29:28,920 even etched in stone. 441 00:29:30,240 --> 00:29:35,160 They directed less advanced cultures to memorialize what happened 442 00:29:35,240 --> 00:29:36,520 with huge monuments 443 00:29:36,600 --> 00:29:39,920 incorporating specific, dateable alignments, 444 00:29:41,840 --> 00:29:47,520 and megalithic memorials recording those dates, buried as time capsules. 445 00:29:52,280 --> 00:29:58,000 And these ancients helped reboot humanity in a scarred and devastated landscape. 446 00:30:01,880 --> 00:30:04,600 In my travels and adventures over the decades, 447 00:30:04,680 --> 00:30:09,120 I've learned to respect the wisdom and, yes, the science of the ancients. 448 00:30:10,480 --> 00:30:12,600 They understood the threat from the skies, 449 00:30:12,680 --> 00:30:16,360 and kept their attention focused very closely on the cosmos, 450 00:30:16,440 --> 00:30:20,000 and on its sometimes deadly interactions with the Earth below. 451 00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:24,280 Their myths and their monumental structures, 452 00:30:24,360 --> 00:30:27,640 so carefully aligned to the stars and to the Sun, 453 00:30:27,720 --> 00:30:29,480 bear witness to this obsession, 454 00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:33,840 and memorialize the terrible events at the end of the Ice Age 455 00:30:33,920 --> 00:30:38,800 that changed the human story forever, and gave birth to the modern world. 456 00:30:42,040 --> 00:30:47,920 Perhaps our own advanced civilization should heed their warnings, 457 00:30:48,800 --> 00:30:52,480 lest our own story end the same way.