Original subtitles

[Graham] At sites all around the globe, we've seen what I believe

are the fingerprints of a lost civilization

dating back to the last Ice Age.

The last great mystery is

what happened to this advanced civilization?

There may be clues in the origin myths of ancient cultures,

because many of them tell the same basic story.

According to these legends,

once upon a time,

humanity shared the Earth with a more advanced society,

whether Atlanteans, or giants, or gods on Earth.

Until a horrific global cataclysm occurred,

a great flood,

only a chosen few were spared to repopulate the Earth.

Who were later visited by other survivors,

mysterious great teachers, usually arriving by sea,

to help them lay the foundations for the rebirth of humanity

and civilization as we know it today.

[thunderclap]

Science now confirms

that just such a series of apocalyptic events

did occur at the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,800 years ago...

an epoch known to geologists as the Younger Dryas.

Only in its aftermath,

did our ancestors suddenly begin farming and raising livestock,

creating societies

and building massive megalithic structures,

often aligned to the stars.

Why then?

It's a mystery mainstream archeologists have no real explanation for,

other than "that's just what happened."

But I have a radically different proposal.

We need to ask ourselves was that really the dawn of history?

Or was it long before that?

It's possible

that all traces of the lost advanced civilization I'm looking for

were swept away in the cataclysms of the Younger Dryas.

But surely the geological evidence of that apocalyptic moment

should still exist.

And I believe it does.

Here, in the northwest corner of America,

in a part of eastern Washington state known as the Channeled Scablands.

It's a unique apocalyptic landscape,

a spectacular area covering 2,000 square miles.

These landscapes speak to an enormous,

almost unspeakable, cataclysm.

It's an area that's long fascinated geologists,

with giant scars in the rock,

massive potholes, and epic waterfalls.

All of it conspires to look, well, unearthly.

Not of this world.

This immense fossilized waterfall,

appropriately named Dry Falls,

ranks high amongst the natural wonders of the Channeled Scablands,

and indeed of the world.

It's so enormous that it's almost impossible to comprehend its scale.

The Falls are just one section of a monstrous ravine

gouged out of the earth, hundreds of feet deep,

50 miles long, and almost three miles wide,

called Grand Coulee.

Geologists believe that all these dramatic formations

were created by flooding

that took place sometime during the last Ice Age.

Precisely when and how this deluge occurred, however, remains a mystery,

one that has sparked controversy amongst geologists for decades.

What really happened here?

And could it be related to what happened to that lost advanced civilization

of the Ice Age?

To help wrap my head around it all,

amateur geologist and author Randall Carlson,

who's been exploring the Scablands for decades,

joins me in an area of the Grand Coulee known as Lenore Lake.

Whatever the cause, there's no question in anyone's mind

that this is the result of catastrophic flooding

on a scale that's almost inconceivable.

[Graham] My first impression, looking even at the map,

is that this is an area that's been ripped and torn and scarred.

What's the story of this incredible landscape?

Right now, most of the conventional models go

- the source of this water here... - Yeah.

...that created the Scablands, was Lake Missoula.

[Graham] During the last Ice Age,

massive ice sheets covered the northern half of North America,

from coast to coast.

Millions of square miles of ice, locking in enough water to fill an ocean.

And at the southern edge of the ice sheets,

huge fresh water lakes formed.

One glacial lake, Missoula,

contained as much water as modern lakes Erie and Ontario combined,

covering much of what is today northwestern Montana.

The current theory is that Lake Missoula was blocked up

by some sort of natural ice dam that burst.

[Randall] You remove the ice dam,

all the water's going to be flowing out here to the west like this.

[Graham] And to account for all this damage to the landscape,

geologists theorized that the ice dam re-formed and burst again and again,

causing dozens of floods over a period of several thousand years,

gradually shaping the Scablands into what we see today.

So it all came out of Lake Missoula,

and because one emptying of Lake Missoula wouldn't be enough,

they postulate up to 80 or 90 emptyings of it.

That certainly helps.

[Graham] It's a curiously contrived explanation

for such a wild landscape.

There's a strong what is called "uniformitarian trend" in geology.

Modern geologists don't like cataclysms very much.

They prefer long, slow, gradual explanations of things,

and they prefer the view that, as things are today,

so they have always been in the past,

even though it seems to me that that view is completely absurd.

Randall believes the geological evidence here

speaks not to centuries of gradual floods,

but to a single massively violent deluge that lasted just a few weeks.

- It's not just water, is it? - Oh, no.

- Yeah. - Pretty much as far as the eye could see,

it's going to be a roiling, boiling, turbulent scene.

Moving water choked with thousands of icebergs.

All the stuff in between these cliffs was ripped out.

[Graham] Yeah.

[Randall] A tremendously unimaginably violent event.

To give you an idea,

if you took every single river on Earth from every continent,

add that together,

you'd still have to times that by at least ten

to get the volume of water flowing through here.

Wow! That really puts it in perspective.

It's a truly awe-inspiring forbidding landscape,

that speaks to me of an ancient apocalypse.

An apocalypse on a scale that's almost impossible to imagine today.

During the Ice Age, this would have been an area of softly rolling grassland,

speckled with roaming herds of antelope and mastodons,

until the violence arrived.

The floodwaters gouged out an immense waterfall

that would've been the size of ten Niagara Falls,

two-and-a-half times taller, seven times wider,

and 3,000 times more powerful.

How quickly do you think that occurred?

I think it happened very, very quickly.

- Could it have been created in weeks? - Yes.

[Graham] The clearest evidence is right here,

at a place called Wallula Gap,

where the floodwaters carved out a massive canyon 1,200 feet deep,

leaving behind these immense basalt outcroppings...

known as the Twin Sisters.

Proof of the speed and ferocity

of what was likely the biggest flash flood in human history.

Randall's research shows that the formation

simply couldn't be the work of millennia of gradual erosion, as geologists claim.

And when this great deluge was over,

the receding waters

didn't just leave behind isolated towers of harder rock.

Nearby, in a spot known as the Camas Prairie,

are giant ripples in the landscape.

They're so uniform and so perfectly formed,

anybody who goes to the beach and sees the tide going out

will see that that receding tide leaves a series of ripples in the sand,

and those ripples may be half an inch high

and a few feet long.

What we have on the Camas Prairie is current ripples

that are 30 to 50 feet high and 300 feet long.

They're the same phenomenon caused by the recession of waters.

But the ripples on the landscape speak of a huge event,

an enormous amount of water that ran over that landscape and then withdrew.

Truly apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic, yes.

If somebody did survive here or there by luck of the draw,

they could emerge in the aftermath

thinking that the entire world had been destroyed.

[Graham] The Scablands show all the signs of a massive, devastating flood

of very short duration,

much like the ones described in myths around the world.

And it's unlikely all that water came from Lake Missoula, as geologists claim.

You remove the ice dam,

all the water is going to be flowing out here to the west like this,

yet we find along the south wall, right in here,

we find massive gravel deposits.

This water's flowing south.

And that's exactly where you diverge from the mainstream.

You see the source of the flooding on the ice cap, not this lake.

[Randall] Right.

It's now being admitted and recognized

that, oh, well, maybe there were other lakes up here.

And what we are going to really have to do is look to the north.

- To look to the ice cap itself. - Yes.

[Graham] To come back to the mainstream theory,

they put those floods in a specific time frame,

in the 18,000 to 15,500-year-old window.

Yes. I think we need to take a hard look at some of those dates.

'Cause I can't think of anything in that period

which would have provided the massive energy

needed to release this amount of water.

What needs to happen now is putting the puzzle pieces together...

- Yes. - ...to get the grand view,

the coherent big picture.

[Graham] That bigger picture that Randall is looking for could be emerging.

Instead of the Scablands continuing to be framed

as a puzzlingly isolated regional phenomenon

with no obvious external cause,

Randall's argument sets this devastated landscape

in context of the much wider, indeed global, devastation

that occurred near the end of the last Ice Age.

Not 18,000, or 15,500 years ago...

but around 12,800 years ago

at the onset of the Younger Dryas.

Could the destruction so evident in the Scablands

have been part of that larger ancient apocalypse

that I suspect erased an entire advanced civilization?

Another scarred landscape of ancient America

might hold the final clue.

Twelve hundred miles south,

in the scrub-covered desert along the US-Mexico border,

at a site called Murray Springs.

Allen West is a member of an interdisciplinary research group

that stunned the scientific community in 2007,

publishing a paper about an extraordinary discovery here,

in an area of exposed earth that contains what's known as a "black mat."

This black mat layer that you see through here...

- Yeah. - ...represents the extinction layer.

Below that, there are mammoth bones, there are American horse bones,

American camel, the dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats.

And so far, not a single one of those has been found in place above that layer.

In addition to the extinctions of the megafauna,

there was also an extinction of human beings.

We think that probably 50 to 60% of the people

across the northern hemisphere died at this time.

Right. That's a very dramatic figure.

So we knew something had happened, we didn't know what.

So in a sense, you were confronted by a mystery...

- Yes, yeah, yep. - ...that you wanted to explore.

When the black mat was first discovered and analyzed in the 1960s,

scientists carbon-dated it to around 12,800 years ago,

the exact moment of the onset of the Younger Dryas.

Which is why I'm here.

The black mat might help solve

not only the mystery of what kicked off that cataclysmic epoch in the first place,

but also specifically what might have released the immense flood...

that created the Scablands.

As part of their research,

Allen's group conducted a thorough chemical analysis of the black mat.

So you came here and you began to investigate the mat.

What we found is melted glass spherules.

So this is our first clue that some high-temperature event had happened.

But we didn't know what it was.

So a temperature sufficient to melt earth basically,

is that what you're saying?

Hot enough to melt a car

into a molten puddle of metal in the parking lot.

Wow. Right.

What else do you find here?

Well, there was a peak in platinum and in iridium.

Were you expecting to find platinum and iridium here?

No, no, we were not.

That's something you just don't see on this planet very often.

Then we knew that there's only one thing on Earth that can do that,

and that's some kind of cosmic impact.

[Graham] Something, an asteroid or fragments of a comet

coming in through the atmosphere and either bursting in the air

or smacking directly into the ground?

That's right, yep.

[Graham] A comet, a species killer.

Would that explain the apocalyptic cataclysms

that took place at the end of the Younger Dryas?

It's happened before to the dinosaurs.

Nobody disputes that it was a cosmic impact, an asteroid or a comet,

that caused the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

That event left a distinct layer in the earth,

which is still visible in certain places today,

and a very similar layer is found at Murray Springs.

Once Allen's research group

realized the implications of the black mat layer at Murray Springs,

they launched a painstaking, long-term investigation

to see if it showed up anywhere else.

And it did, all over the world.

To date, black mat sites have been found across North America,

from California to Michigan to New Jersey,

and from Belgium in northern Europe to Syria in the Middle East.

That's a lot of potential impact sites,

all dated to around the same time, roughly 12,800 years ago.

We began to realize this had to have been some kind of huge event.

The total picture got clearer to us that something catastrophic had happened.

[Graham] But if there was a comet strike, where's the impact crater?

I think we saw the answer to that...

up in the Scablands.

If the primary impacts at the beginning of the Younger Dryas

were on ice caps,

when the ice melts away, there's no crater left to see.

It would support Randall's theory

that the sudden catastrophic flooding responsible for the Scablands

came not from that lake, but from the ice cap itself.

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

Yeah.

Still, one impact alone couldn't have created

all the black mat sites mapped out by Allen's research team.

Their discoveries led to a startling idea.

Perhaps it wasn't one cosmic impact that left all these traces around the world,

but many.

A brief intense storm of cosmic debris that the Earth ran into.

They called it the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

[Allen] Don't think Earth was actually hit by the comet itself,

but rather hit by tens of thousands of fragments.

Think that 12,800 years ago,

Earth wandered into the debris trail of a giant comet.

[Graham] It would have been like thousands of atomic bombs going off.

In just a few hours, a truly Earth-shaking event,

releasing water vapor and clouds of dust that would have shrouded the skies,

causing temperatures to plunge.

Imagine living in Miami and you're enjoying the beach,

and suddenly the climate changes to Anchorage, Alaska.

- [Graham] Just, overnight, really. Yeah. - Yeah, in a matter of probably months.

[Graham] When Allen and his colleagues

from what was now called the Comet Research Group,

first published their findings,

predictably they were met with scorn and derision.

Scientists unfortunately are taught to be cynical about things.

Skepticism is healthy, cynicism is not.

[Graham] What's even more unsettling about their discovery

is the likely origin of that cometary debris.

The Taurid meteor stream,

a patch of sky which the Earth passes through twice a year

in late June and late October.

It's estimated there are probably 200 objects

with diameters of at least a kilometer,

whirling around in the Taurid meteor stream.

The evidence brought forward

by the scientists of the Comet Research Group

amounts to nothing less than an immense global cataclysm around 12,800 years ago,

an apocalypse big enough to have obliterated almost all traces

of an advanced civilization of the Ice Age,

and to explain at a stroke

all the mysteries I've spent the last 30 years investigating.

It might be why the ancient civilizations that emerged afterward

were so scientifically focused on the skies.

This is an area we really need to pay attention to

because there's something dangerous up there

and it can end civilization.

At Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, we've already seen

how the ancients may have memorialized this apocalypse in stone.

By recording the constellations in the sky at the time on Pillar 43.

But the pillars may contain another coded message

that Dr. Martin Sweatman was keen to show me,

something that he believes is a record

of precisely when and from where the meteor shower came.

What you've got here, you've got snakes emanating

from the body and the legs of the fox.

And if we go on to the other side of the pillar,

and again we have the snakes kind of emanating from these birds.

Ancient cultures did see comets as sky serpents.

There's really no serious dispute about that.

We can interpret this as meteors radiating from specific constellations...

Yeah.

...tall bending birds probably representing Pisces.

[Graham] Right.

[Dr. Martin] And here we have the constellation Aquarius,

we think that's what the fox represents.

At the time Göbekli Tepe was built,

these were the constellations from which the Taurid meteor stream radiated.

They're essentially saying

that the Taurid meteor stream radiates from Aquarius

and then from Pisces,

and it makes that change over the course of a few weeks.

[Graham] A record of a storm of comet fragments that lasted weeks.

That's a timeframe that fits all the evidence of the global cataclysm

that hit Earth 12,800 years ago,

including the violent flooding that tore up the Washington Scablands.

And there might be more to that specific configuration

of Sun and constellations featured on Pillar 43.

It occurs at a solstice,

only twice in a cycle of just under 26,000 years,

each return lasting barely a century.

I therefore find it eerie

as archaeoastronomer Paul Burley first noted,

that the exact same configuration

seen at the summer solstice around 12,800 years ago

has returned to our skies today, at the winter solstice.

Could the imagery of Pillar 43 be a message

contrived by the master astronomers of a lost civilization?

A warning to the future, to us,

that what goes around comes around?

That when the Sun and stars next take up this configuration at the solstice,

an apocalypse of sky serpents could return?

So take heed.

The notion should give us pause for thought.

I don't want to be a prophet of gloom and doom,

but are we in danger from the Taurid meteor stream today?

It was danger to our ancestors.

It caused a cataclysm on Earth 12,800 years ago.

Can that happen again?

We absolutely are in danger.

In fact, the calculations of the astronomers

are that we're in a danger window right now

where the thicker part of the Taurids could be impacting Earth.

[Graham] More and more scientists are now embracing

the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis...

and this accelerating interest is no longer confined to scientists.

If something did hit Earth somewhere around 12,000 years ago,

and reset civilization, it's an interesting theory.

But I think it's a theory that's worth discussing.

I just feel like there's so much emotion tied up into your theories,

and so much emotion in the resistance.

How does mainstream archaeology dismiss these things?

Like, what's the common arguments?

The common argument is, "We are archeologists and we know best."

It's an argument from authority, "You must accept our dating system."

"We've done all the work and this is how it is."

It's so strange that people will only accept and talk about one narrative.

The narrative that they established a long time ago...

Yeah.

...and they won't let it be debated.

Maybe part of the reason is it threatens the notion

that we are the apex and pinnacle of the whole human story.

Maybe the notion of a lost civilization in the past

raises the uncomfortable question

that we might be a lost civilization of the future.

If we were to confront a massive global cataclysm

of the kind that took place,

that we now know took place at the end of the last Ice Age,

I think our civilization would actually be very unlikely to survive it.

So it's not hard to imagine that an earlier advanced civilization

might have been wiped out,

erased from memory

during this ancient apocalypse 12,800 years ago.

After those cosmic impacts on the ice caps,

sea levels rose, swallowing up all the low-lying coastal lands

that would have likely been settled by an advanced culture.

Places like Sundaland...

the Maltese peninsula, or the Grand Bahama Banks.

Perhaps in Indonesia

the survivors retreated to the hills,

leaving behind tantalizing clues to their sophisticated architecture.

Some survivors in Turkey

may have decided to carve out refuges underground

in case more meteors struck.

In the Mediterranean, on Malta,

the survivors might have built temples

aligned to the brightest new star in their night sky,

perhaps fearing that it might herald the next comet to strike.

They traversed the seas,

passing down their geographic knowledge to others.

Their appearances recorded in ancient traditions,

even etched in stone.

They directed less advanced cultures to memorialize what happened

with huge monuments

incorporating specific, dateable alignments,

and megalithic memorials recording those dates, buried as time capsules.

And these ancients helped reboot humanity in a scarred and devastated landscape.

In my travels and adventures over the decades,

I've learned to respect the wisdom and, yes, the science of the ancients.

They understood the threat from the skies,

and kept their attention focused very closely on the cosmos,

and on its sometimes deadly interactions with the Earth below.

Their myths and their monumental structures,

so carefully aligned to the stars and to the Sun,

bear witness to this obsession,

and memorialize the terrible events at the end of the Ice Age

that changed the human story forever, and gave birth to the modern world.

Perhaps our own advanced civilization should heed their warnings,

lest our own story end the same way.