Next up on my non-fiction reading list is America Before by Graham Hancock. In this book, Hancock make the case for an advanced civilization in the Americas that ended at the end of the most recent Ice Age.
- Narrated by: Graham Hancock
- Length: 17 hrs and 17 mins
Publisher’s summary
This program is read by the author.
Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally best-selling author, has made it his life’s work to find out – and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion.
We’ve been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago – among the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors. But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established picture, and we know now that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago – many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere.
Hancock’s research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the scientists responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs. In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon rain forest, he reveals that ancient “New World” cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected “Old World” cultures. Have archaeologists focused for too long only on the “Old World” in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the “New World”?
America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization is the culmination of everything that millions of people have loved in Hancock’s body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archaeological discoveries, and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.
©2019 Graham Hancock (P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
Unabridged Audiobook
This is one of my favorite topics because there is so much here we don’t know and that archaeology cannot yet satisfactorily explain. For example, we now know that there were village settlements across the Great Plains that vanished after initial contact with the Spanish occurred, a fact that forces us to reevaluate the sophistication of the cultures who lived there and how interconnected they may have been. As the summary above mentions, we know that archaeology was wildly wrong – for decades – about when settlement of the Americas began. We know there are still many hard to explain sites in the Americas – such as the Sage Wall in Montana – which might force us to reset dramatically the existing view of human settlement in North America. We know that tribes in South America share a genetic lineage with Pacific Islanders – strongly implying direct contact in the remote past.
Hancock’s perspective on the topic is unique. Not only does he argue that a global civilization existed before the end of the last Ice Age, he also argues that one of the potential traits of that civilization was a use of hallucinogenic drugs. To that end, he also makes the case that hallucinogenic drugs were a source of both religious and early scientific overlap that arguably existed between the pre-Columbian Americas and the Old World.
For a bit of a preview of the book, the following clip is from Hancock’s book tour interview with Joe Rogan.
