Quotes from Graham Hancock

Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures.

People think I'm a freemason, and I'm not. People think I believe the end of the world is coming on 21 December 2012, and I don't.

If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition.

Science has often resisted new ideas and fought bitterly to prevent them coming on board.

Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today.

I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not aware of any current which is about radically changing the model. It's just me, really.

The god believed by the Ancient Egyptians to have taught the principles of astronomy to their ancestors was Thoth: He who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is therein, and the measurer of the earth.

We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality that the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoretically there could be other realms, other dimensions, as all religious traditions and quantum physics alike maintain. Theoretically, the brain could be as much a receiver as a generator of consciousness and thus might be fine-tuned in altered states to pick up wavelengths that are normally not accessible to us.

The Julian calendar, which it replaced, computed the period of the earth's orbit around the sun at 365.25 days. Pope Gregory XIII's reform substituted a finer and more accurate calculation: 365.2425 days. Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days.

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.

I poured out a libation on the mountain top Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I heaped up wood and cane and cedar and myrtle Ã¢â'¬Â¦ When the gods smelled the sweet savour they gathered like flies over the sacrifice

We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing--evolving--to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.

in order that the lower edge of each stone should hitch like a pawl into a ratchet cut into the top of the walls; hence no stone can press on the one below it, so as to cause a cumulative pressure all down the roof; and each stone is separately upheld by the side walls which it lies across.27 And this was the work of a people whose civilization had only recently emerged from neolithic hunter-gathering?

Olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel

I looked in depth into the ancient and 100 per cent Indian origins of Vedic civilisation in my book Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age. There was no such thing as an Aryan invasion of India. That whole racist idea is completely bust.

at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up and down the Nile.53 I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts by 'her name of the New Year'.54 Together with other relevant utterances (e.g., 66955), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar

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.

The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a 'development', it was a legacy.

from conditions that are calculated to have been warmer and wetter than today's 13,000 years ago,70 to conditions that were colder and drier than those at the last glacial maximum just a few hundred years later.

at root, what unites us are our unproven irrational beliefs of one kind or another of non-material dimensions of reality, inhabited by incorporeal beings that interact with us and frame our destiny in mysterious ways

at root, what unites us are our unproven irrational beliefs of one kind or another in non-material dimensions of reality, inhabited by incorporeal beings that interact with us and frame our destiny in mysterious ways.

As a paleontologist, [...] I ask the question--why weren't there humans here earlier? I mean, we have dispersal of Eurasian animal species into North America and dispersal of North American species into Eurasia at earlier times. So why shouldn't humans have been here as well? [Quoting Tom Deméré]

More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.25

the Karens of Burma