I recently mentioned the Younger Dryas event that followed the end of the Last Ice Age, that had some significant impacts on the global environment causing cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, and warming in the Southern. It coincided with a critical moment some 12,000 years (12 kya) ago when humans were expanding across America, and filling in the final voids across Eurasia and Oceania. A few millennia later, agriculture would be discovered, and the shift from nomad hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers would take place, and shape the course of our history. Villages, writing, civilization would soon appear.
There have been different theories trying to explain the cause of the Younger Dryas event. I mentioned them in my post, the impact theory, though criticized, sounds interesting. Catastrophism is rejected by mainstream science due to philosophical reasons. Catastrophic events are unpredictable and cannot be explained by the deterministic methods of hard science. But sometimes a catastrophe takes place: One wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Mya). The Toba volcano's eruption 50-100 kya is another example. The Deccan Traps lava sheets 65 Mya are just some examples of them.
Hancock and the ancient pre-Dryas Civilization
But, when a wild hypothesis uses one of these events to justify a weird idea, that idea becomes pseudo-scientific. This is precisely what happens in Graham Hancock's book about a pre-Younger Dryas advanced civilization that spanned the world, and thrived tens of thousands of years ago. Hancock proposes that was exterminated by the meteor that provoked the Younger Dryas. (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization).
In his previous works Hancock describes this civilization as advanced, and its survivors taught primitive people the basics of civilization after the catastrophe.
These advanced people were "Caucasians" and they inspired the "bearded whit men" effigies found in South America (See his Fingerprints of the Gods), which smacks of racism. They also used their mental power to move objects and read minds (telekinesis and telepathy)!! This is almost like Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods from the late 1960s rebooted but using human instead of alien agencies! I have posted critically about "White Indians" and "Bearded men", finding them baseless theories with a hint of racial discrimination.
American native people were smart human beings. They built mounds and mounuments, they discovered agriculture and domesticated animals by themselves, they used script for records, and developed religions, and astronomy (for practical purposes like all civilizations). They developed artistic skills, worked metals and built water craft. We don't need to imagine any advanced civilization teaching them anything. There were no extinct ancient superhumans behind the mound-builders in the U.S. or the Amazonian natives, or common beliefs from these ancients that shaped religions. After all, the human mind is a common factor linking all cultures globally, and its repertoire is rather limited when it comes to religions —sun, moon, lighting, life after death, etc.
But piling speculation upon genuine facts, Hancock's book suggests that: "Recent scientific discoveries show that North America was first peopled at least 130,000 years ago... they are unexplained connections between the spiritual beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and the spiritual beliefs of the mound-builder cultures of North America's Mississippi Valley... The remains of hundreds of gigantic geometrical earthworks have recently been found in the Amazon jungle. They have unexplained resemblances to the equally grand and mysterious earthworks of Ohio, such as the Serpent Mound, and the Newark and High Bank Works, and to other geometrical and astronomical monuments as far afield as Stonhenge in England and Angkor in Cambodia"
Objections
I am no expert, and my blog has plenty of speculation, but I try to be realistic and base my speculation of facts and sound science. But in Hancok's book this is not the case.
Bringing together Stonehenge built 5,000 years ago, and Angkor Wat built 900 years ago, is ridiculous. They are two unrelated structures, one, is a roughly hewn megalithic set of stone circles with a few hundred gigantic rocks built during the Neolithic, the other a temple-citadel with galleries steeples, bass-reliefs and millions of sandstone blocks, by a modern nation contemporary with the Crusades in Europe. They could not be more different.
Regarding Egyptian and mound-builder religions and their similarities. We can only conjecture about the latter. The Egyptions left documents in writing, the mounds lack written evidence. We can only speculate about mounds and alignments pointing at stars, solstices and equinoxes. We know the Mayas had an advanced astronomy, so did the Chinese, does that make them similar to the Egyptians?
Mounds and Mound-builders
The Amazon earthworks are impressive (Watling et al., 2017):
"With ditches up to 11 m wide, 4 m deep, and 100–300 m in diameter, and with some sites having up to six enclosures, the geoglyphs of western Amazonia rival the most impressive examples of pre-Columbian monumental architecture anywhere in the Americas. Excavations of the geoglyphs have shown that they were built and used sporadically as ceremonial and public gathering sites between 2000 and 650 calibrated years before present (BP), but that some may have been constructed as early as 3500–3000 BP. Evidence for their ceremonial function is based on an almost complete absence of cultural material found within the enclosed areas, which suggests they were kept ritually “clean,” alongside their highly formalized architectural forms (mainly circles and squares)—features that distinguish the geoglyphs from similar ditched enclosures in northeast Bolivia. Surprisingly, little is known about who the geoglyph builders were and how and where they lived, as contemporary settlement sites have not yet been found in the region. It is thought that the geoglyph builders were a complex network of local, relatively autonomous groups connected by a shared and highly developed ideological system. Although some have proposed a connection between the geoglyphs and Arawak-speaking societies, the ceramics uncovered from these sites defy a close connection with Saladoid–Barrancoid styles normally associated with this language family, and instead present a complex mixture of distinct local traditions. Furthermore, it is likely that the geoglyphs were used and reused by different culture groups throughout their life spans."
They are a local, regional, trans-cultural phenomenon, unrelated to North American mounds of the U.S.
Serpent Mound was built ~1120 AD (Source) by a local Fort Ancient Culture, and the High Bank Earthworks, built by the local Hopewell Culture 1600 to 2000 years ago (AD 400-1000).
The Amazonian mounds of Colombia are far older. But, there are also more recent mounds, ditches, canals and causeways built between AD 400 and 1400 in the Bolivian savannah of Moxos (Prümers, et al., 2022). It is an area subject to seasonal flooding so the locals built ridges (camellones) to grow crops above the flood level, and channels to drain them. Semiurban, farmland not mounds with religious functionality. Then are the Ecuadorian Amazonian mounds (Rostain et al., 2024) are part of an agricultural society that flourished between 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD, with a road system dozens of kilometers long linking villages, and drainage systems; it was a local (endogenous) development. Finally the Brazilian mounds (Peripato et al., 2023) and earthworks, which may number 10 to 24 thousand in the Amazon region. They are many different types: fortified plaza-villages, roads, drainage systems, geoglyphs, defensive and ceremonial walls, dated to 500 to 1500 AD.
A theory from the 1800s
Hancock's work echoes the publications of the late 1800s, when American scientists studied the earth mounds of East-Central USA and attributed them to an advanced race. They considered the Native Americans lacked the ability and civilization to have built them.
Below is an imaginary scene of "An American Battle Mound" from "Traditions of De-coo-dah..." by William Pidgeon (1858), which, by the way, in its Chapter XXXV mentions "The extinction of the Mound Builders" in which the author discusses geologic factors (the Noachian Flood) that wiped out the antediluvian civilization of mound-builders!!
Another example of that mindset is the following quote from "Extinct races of America — the mound builders by Charles Morris, 1870: "Abundant evidence has been found of the previous existence throughout a great portion of the territory of the United States, of a race of people much more civilized than the Indians, and differing widely from them in character. This race has left monuments of its existence upon our soil in an intricate system of earthworks, designed for defence, worship, sepulchre, and other unknown purposes..."
Summarizing, Hancock rehashed obsolete ideas from the 1800s about ancient civilizations, barbarian Amerindians, and Noachian Floods, tying them together with Egypt, Tihuanaco, and Asian civilizations. Good material for a gullible public, with a thirst for this type of entertainment.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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