Original subtitles

- [man 1] Happy? - [man 2] Yep.

- [man 1] All right, here we go. - And take one.

[interviewer] How would you describe yourself?

[chuckles]

How would I describe myself?

You've been described as a pseudo-archaeologist.

- I have. - Someone who cherry-picks your data.

Your books are read by millions, but dismissed by academics.

Did you know that you were picking a fight with academia?

Because a lot of people don't want to hear this.

You have been at the front of the line for decades

and you exposed me to a lot of these controversial ideas

that have now been substantiated.

Well, I'm Graham Hancock.

I don't claim to be an archaeologist or a scientist.

I am a journalist,

and the subject that I'm investigating is human prehistory.

My suspicion is humans are a species with amnesia.

We have forgotten something incredibly important in our own past.

And I think that that incredibly important forgotten thing

is a lost, advanced civilization of the Ice Age.

I've spent decades searching for proof of this lost civilization

at sites around the globe.

Oh, wow.

Now my aim is to piece together these clues...

And that seems extremely strange.

...to show you evidence that challenges the traditional view of human history.

It pushes back these dates, far, far back.

[Graham] Ancient structures built with surprising sophistication...

It's the most amazing archeoastronomy site in North America.

...revealing the fingerprints of an advanced prehistoric civilization.

This pillar is like our Rosetta Stone.

The possibility of civilization emerging earlier than we think

gets stronger.

It's going to absolutely demand a rewrite of history as we know it.

Yeah.

Of course, this idea is upsetting to the so-called experts

who insist that the only humans who existed during the Ice Age

were simple hunter-gatherers.

That automatically makes me enemy number one to archaeologists.

Why not say, "We don't know. This is a spectacular mystery,"

and leave it at that.

It's my job to offer an alternative point of view.

Perhaps there's been a forgotten episode in human history.

But perhaps the extremely defensive,

arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia

is stopping us from considering that possibility.

I'm trying to overthrow... the paradigm of history.

[Graham] For 30 years, I've been looking for something

I was told couldn't possibly exist.

An advanced human civilization, much older than our own, lost to history.

The mainstream version of history, says that after the end of the Ice Age...

on their own initiative, our hunter-gatherer ancestors

suddenly began farming and raising livestock,

creating settlements and eventually cities,

until the first civilizations emerged around 6,000 years ago.

But new discoveries keep on pushing that horizon back.

One such discovery has been made here in Indonesia.

On the most populated island, Java,

about four hours south of Jakarta, near the village of Karyamukti.

I've come here to investigate one of the most remarkable

and controversial archaeological discoveries of our time.

The initial evidence

has utterly confounded mainstream archaeologists

because it calls into question everything they've taught us

about the prehistory of humanity.

It's a site that raises a disturbing question.

What if an advanced civilization

flourished here in Indonesia during the Ice Age?

A civilization that was lost to history

until now.

This is Gunung Padang.

The name means "mountain of light" or "mountain of enlightenment"

in the local Sundanese dialect.

Local people speak with awe of its mysterious atmosphere...

and pilgrims come from far and wide to honor the spirit of the mountain.

They purify themselves at an ancient spring at the base...

before heading up the hill...

three hundred and sixty feet.

The climb up it is steep and hard work.

But worth it once you reach the top.

Because Gunung Padang is like no place else on Earth.

For a long while, archaeologists thought it was just another hill in the jungle.

But there was a problem with that view.

You get to the summit and you see these blocks scattered across the landscape.

Oddly hexagonal stone slabs strewn about everywhere.

Thousands of them.

It's quite a spectacle.

But not out of place in Indonesia's volcanic landscape

where blocks like these are naturally formed.

They're called columnar jointing

and are created when volcanic rock, in this case, basalt,

cools and cracks into distinctive shapes.

At first sight, this open terrace could be mistaken

for a natural formation of volcanic rock,

which is why archaeologists were so slow to investigate it.

But take a closer look, and it becomes obvious

that these rocks have been cut, repurposed as building materials

and placed by human hands.

Among the jumbled masses of fallen stone,

traces of structures show up all over this hill.

Mounds, rectangular rooms, and long walls

on carefully laid out terraces,

all clearly man-made.

When archaeologist Ali Akbar and his team began working here in 2012,

they assumed that any structures on this hill

would prove to be less than 2,500 years old.

[thunder rumbles]

We don't know about the absolute dating in this site.

This site was abandoned for so long and perhaps forgotten.

[Graham] The team also assumed that the ancient builders of Gunung Padang

had found the blocks of columnar jointing naturally present at the site.

But then they discovered something strange.

The columnar joint is imported from another region,

from another location.

[Graham] That means that every one of these blocks, up to 50,000 of them,

and each weighing up to a third of a ton, were carried up this hill.

When Dr. Akbar's team first surveyed the site,

they quickly found evidence that humans had been present,

in what's called a cultural layer, but not where they expected.

We are very surprised that this site consists of two cultural layers.

The first layer on the surface, it's from 500 BC.

But at four meters depth,

we found another cultural layer.

It is from 5,200 BC.

It is very surprising. We are very shocked.

It is very old.

[Graham] Seven thousand years ago,

far from being builders on such an epic scale,

there's no evidence that the people of this region

were anything other than simple hunter-gatherers.

What could have motivated them to make the immense effort

of bringing all these blocks here?

I'm not really sure about the function of this site.

However, we've still not found a skeleton or human bone,

so this is not a burial site.

Perhaps it is for ceremonies or rituals.

We're dealing with truly a mystery here. A mystery that needs to be explained.

It wasn't until another investigation looked even deeper into the site

that an extraordinary new possibility began to force itself on the researchers.

That they might be confronted

by the work of a civilization lost to history.

Dr. Danny Hilman Natawidjaja studied at Caltech,

but now works for Indonesia's Geotechnology Research Center.

As a geologist, Dr. Hilman knew there was something very strange

about Gunung Padang.

Exploring the site, he found that the columnar basalt blocks

don't just blanket the top of the hill.

They also wrap around its terraced slopes

covering an area of at least 37 acres.

This exposed section between two of the terraces

appears to be some sort of retaining wall.

There are some archaeologists who are convinced this is entirely natural.

I know this is natural rock,

but they're suggesting the whole layout of the thing is natural as well.

They are natural, but the position now is not in the natural position.

- [Graham] And normally vertical. - Vertical, yes.

- That's right. - Here it's laid on its side.

- Also, it's not cut like this. - Yeah.

Here, all is cut into one or one-and-a-half meters.

[Graham] Right.

There's something else unusual that Dr. Hilman noticed

between the blocks.

[Dr. Hilman] The natural position, there is no ground mass in between.

It will be very tight together.

But here, in between these columnar rocks, there is a mortar

- that holds them together, like cement. - Yeah.

The thickness is, like, five centimeters, and it's very consistent.

[Graham] Right, so they're kind of leveling out the construction blocks

with the mortar between them. Put there deliberately by human beings

- as part of a construction process. - Yes. Yeah.

So Danny began to investigate this,

and this is where the surprises began to appear.

What Dr. Hilman started to realize as he put together all his data,

was that Gunung Padang is much more than just a hill.

This is the ancient site of Gunung Padang.

The north side features a stairway

climbing more than 300 feet,

until it reaches the first of five terraces.

Over an area about 490 feet long by 130 feet wide.

The entire hill is ringed by retaining walls of columnar basalt.

Using an estimated 50,000 blocks,

it's a massive terraforming project

that remodeled a volcanic hill

into what can best be described as a step pyramid.

So this is all man-made terraces here.

[Dr. Hilman] Yeah.

It's not the same shape of pyramids

like Mayan or Giza pyramids.

No. It's a similar idea that it rises in terraces to a pyramid-shape, yeah.

- Yeah. But it has circular features. - Indeed.

There's a question of definitions here. How do we define a pyramid?

But if we define it as a structure that rises in a series of terraces to a summit,

that's what we're looking at at Gunung Padang.

And the fact that such an ancient pyramid exists here at all

could radically alter what we know about the capabilities of our ancestors.

Archaeologists currently believe the oldest pyramid in the world

dates to around 4,700 years ago.

And it's not in Egypt, but in Peru.

But Dr. Hilman has found evidence that Gunung Padang could be even older.

So how old is it really?

Who built it? And why?

Dr. Hilman and his team

turn to technology usually deployed in geological surveys

to look for answers deep inside the structure.

So, we have three methods here.

- The GPR. - Yeah, that's ground-penetrating radar.

- Ground-penetrating radar, yes. - Yeah.

- And resistivity tomography. - [Graham] Yeah.

[Dr. Hilman] And also the seismic tomography.

[Graham] Previously, archaeologists had dug down into the site only a few meters

and in a few isolated trenches.

This new technology covers much more ground...

- Thirty meters, yeah. - Thirty meters.

...and goes far deeper.

We're going to do the ground-penetration radar,

the GPR surveys.

[Graham] Ground-penetrating radar

emits pulses of radio waves into the ground.

When they hit something, they bounce back, and that data is recorded and analyzed.

We chose the frequency of 40 megahertz to penetrate down to 30 meters.

Okay. Let's go.

[Graham] The more Dr. Hilman and his team learn from their scans of the interior,

the more mysterious it's become.

The nature of the structures underground became more and more complex.

Although the columnar basalt is always there,

always used as a construction material.

Seismic tomography, in particular, has uncovered an intriguing spot

deep inside the hill.

[Dr. Hilman] It has a seismic velocity of about 200 meters per second.

Right. Which in layman's terms means what exactly?

That's a void.

- A void. An empty space. - Empty.

And you can get a sense of the shape of that empty space?

Yes, as you see here, it's rectangular.

- [Graham] It's a rectangle. - Yes.

- And the spot is just right... - Yeah.

- ...because in the center of this site... - Right.

...beneath the Terrace One, there is also a chamber...

- Yes. - ...connecting to this chamber

beneath the second terrace.

[Graham] What Dr. Hilman and his team have discovered

are at least three large rectangular chambers.

One around ten meters down,

perhaps an entrance hall of some kind,

it seems to have an access tunnel leading to a larger main chamber.

And another passage connecting to a third chamber,

between 20 to 30 meters deep.

All three located right along the central axis of the site.

I'm very intrigued by all these chambers.

I so much wish you could get the archaeologists

to actually excavate this site.

When we see these chambers...

- Yeah. - ...three chambers,

it's just like, we were amazed.

You know you've found something significant at that point.

- Sure. - Yeah, it's unmistakable.

Yeah.

But to historians and the archaeologists who first excavated this site,

Dr. Hilman's discovery just doesn't make sense.

The accepted timeline of human history

tells us that the tribe of hunter-gatherers

living atop the hill around 7,000 years ago

wouldn't have been capable of building a structure

of this colossal size and complexity.

And yet, here it is.

A mystery crying out for investigation.

To put a date on this hill that's not a hill,

Dr. Hilman and his team turned to another geological tool,

core drilling.

As expected, samples of the top two layers dated from 3,000 years ago...

back to around 8,000 years ago.

But when they drilled to 15 meters, around 50 feet or so,

they found something completely unexpected.

Those sections had been laid out around 11,600 years ago...

pushing the origins of this site back to the end of the last Ice Age.

And Dr. Hilman's discoveries didn't stop there.

Going further down, around 100 feet or so, he hit the earliest layer of construction.

Let's try and put dates on when this was shaped.

Okay. Layer four could be before 20,000.

- Could be before 20,000. - [Dr. Hilman] Very old.

[Graham] Those drill cores were pulling up datable materials

that dated way back as far as 24,000 years ago.

Organic materials clearly associated with structural elements now deeply buried.

And this convinced Danny, and I must say it convinces me,

that Gunung Padang goes back to a remotely ancient origin.

Danny's findings are utterly extraordinary and bewildering.

Hitherto, archaeologists had regarded it as a long established fact

that no large-scale structures were built anywhere in Southeast Asia

until around 4,000 years ago.

Your datings of this structure put it right back to the Ice Age.

So for me, this raises a sense of enormous excitement.

- Yeah. - I can't help wondering

whether those chambers contain some evidence or information

that might have a bearing...

- Yeah. - ...on my search for a lost civilization.

- I think we know little about our history. - Right.

I think we miss a big thing here.

[Graham] This is an idea mainstream archaeology finds very hard to accept.

The notion that it's a man-made structure

is no longer seriously disputed by anybody.

But what archaeology finds very hard to swallow and very hard to accept

is that the origins of this structure could date back as much as 24,000 years.

To the depths of the last Ice Age.

What the scholars seem reluctant to get to grips with

is that the Ice Age was a very special time

when the world was very different.

You see, back then, 20,000 years ago, Earth didn't look the same as it does now.

The island of Java wasn't an island.

It was the southernmost part of a vast Southeast Asian continent.

A continent that geologists call Sundaland.

During the last Ice Age,

sea levels were about 120 meters, 400 feet, lower than they are today.

So what is now the Java Sea was actually an enormous landmass

extending out from the mainland of Asia.

Sundaland covered an area around 695,000 square miles,

about the size of the western United States.

It was an entire subcontinent.

We know that tribes of hunter-gatherers thrived on Sundaland's abundant wildlife,

as far back as 45,000 years ago, and probably much further back than that.

Why shouldn't another more technologically advanced culture

have been present here as well?

In a cold and forbidding world, this huge Southeast Asian landmass

would have been amongst several warm and inviting locations

where early humans might have had a real stab

at developing an advanced and sophisticated civilization.

I think that whoever built Gunung Padang

shared our planet with the hunter-gatherers,

who we know were also widely present at that time.

It's not such a wild idea.

Even today, the technologically advanced nations of the world

coexist with hunter-gatherer societies, like the San in Namibia,

or the Lacandón in Mexico,

or the Kazakhs in western Mongolia.

Different cultures at different levels of development,

have always lived alongside one another.

Gunung Padang suggests

that some culture was around in the area of the Sunda Shelf,

which was capable of creating a gigantic megalithic structure.

One that specialized in building with blocks of columnar basalt.

It's a style of construction I've seen before in this part of the world

on the tiny Pacific island of Pohnpei, at a site known as Nan Madol.

It too was constructed using volcanic basalt blocks

laid out one atop the other, just as at Gunung Padang.

Archaeologists believe most of the construction

visible at Nan Madol today dates to around 900 years ago,

when the blocks were quarried at a neighboring island.

But during my explorations on previous visits,

I found several of its megalithic pillars extending out below the water line,

suggesting that earlier versions may have been constructed

when sea levels were lower, during the last Ice Age.

Could Gunung Padang's architects

have made it across the South Pacific to Micronesia?

And if so, what happened to them?

Well, I believe it has something to do with what happened

around 12,800 years ago,

when the Ice Age suddenly and quite dramatically shifted gears.

Things had gradually been getting warmer for quite a long period of time.

And then suddenly, two things happen at once.

First, global temperatures plunge

to the level that they were at the peak of the Ice Age,

and they do so almost literally overnight.

And secondly, there's a sudden and inexplicable rise in sea level.

Now, normally, in an Ice Age, when you enter an episode of freezing,

you do not expect to see a large amount of water dumped in the world ocean

because that water has been turned into ice.

What happened was a literal great flood.

Between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, the oceans of the world rose dramatically

in a series of immense deluges one after another.

Eventually, the great continent of Sundaland

was engulfed by the sea, a lost world.

It prompts the obvious question.

Could there be more temples and structures out there in the Java Sea

still waiting to be discovered?

Goodness knows what was lost to the rising sea levels.

[tribal music playing]

[man singing in Javanese language]

[Graham] This epoch of immense floods would have traumatized all of humanity.

[speaking in Javanese language]

And indeed there's testimony that it did.

[speaking in Javanese language]

Nearly every ancient culture preserved traditions of a great flood

that swallowed up the Earth.

Here in Indonesia,

the Batak people have their own version of this global flood myth.

[speaking in Javanese language]

Once, long ago, the Earth grew old and dirty.

So the creator god, Debata, sent a great flood

to cleanse the Earth of every living thing.

The last human pair had taken refuge on the highest mountain.

But just as the waters were about to drown them,

the god repented from ending humankind.

He conjured a clod of earth into being,

laid it on the rising flood forming the islands of Indonesia,

and thus the pair were saved.

And the pair had children together to repopulate the Earth,

becoming the ancestors of the Batak people.

It's a story of an ancient apocalypse that one finds again and again

in traditions from all over the world, passed down for thousands of years.

Of course, there's the account of Noah in the Bible.

But Indian folklore also tells of a fisherman, Manu,

who survived a great flood after being warned by a god.

From the Sumerians to the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks to the Chinese,

all have similar versions of the same tale.

The notion that all of this is just a coincidence,

just invented independently by individual cultures doesn't make sense.

All these things are probably tales of stories

that people passed down from generation to generation

that survived this time.

Yeah. Truly global cataclysmic events

- involving rapid rises in sea level... - Yeah.

...did occur, and suddenly, the worldwide tradition of a global flood

stops being just a myth and starts being a memory.

- Yeah. - An account of real events.

I'm fascinated by Indonesia's ancient history,

and the secrets it's beginning to reveal to us at Gunung Padang.

But the way archaeology works,

there is going to continue to be huge resistance to new evidence,

and that's really problematic

because science should be open to new evidence

and it should be willing to change its mind

when new evidence suggests that a change of mind is needed.

What sort of reaction have you had from the archaeological profession?

- They are still not accepting it. - Right.

I regret because archaeologists,

or any other researchers, just stop researching.

That's very sad, because at the very least there's an intriguing mystery here,

which archaeology should be paying attention to.

If we could prove clearly,

and accept there is advanced human cultures before 11,000 BC,

that will be a big step.

[thunder rumbling]

I've been arguing

that there was a massive global cataclysm about 12,500 years ago

that wiped out almost all traces.

We're left with these haunting memories...

which we try to dismiss and say, "No, they're not memories.

"They're just folklore. They're just a myth, just tradition."

I think they're memories.

I think they're real memories of something terrible

that happened to our ancestors at the end of the last Ice Age.

Preserved in legends, in art and in stone.

And they don't just talk of a great flood.

They also reference survivors of the cataclysm,

wise travelers who sowed the seeds of humanity's rebirth.

It's a tradition that's particularly strong

in the same ancient culture

that created the largest man-made pyramid on Earth.

It's where I'm headed next,

and it's not Egypt.