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Title: America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization
Author: Graham Hancock
Publication Date: 2019
Producer: Audible Ltd. (2019)
Narrated by: Graham Hancock
Recording Time: 17 hours, 16 minutes
Publisher’s summary
The Sunday Times top 10 best seller
Was an advanced civilisation 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 – amongst 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 Rainforest, 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 civilisation 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 Civilisation 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 Limited
My Review
America Before is the culmination of the life’s work of author and researcher Graham Hancock. He has spent the last thirty years writing about a lost civilization in the Earth’s remote past, and in this book he makes the case that the civilization – a sea-faring one technologically similar to ours from the 18th century, though in some way smore advanced – existed in North America at the end of the most recent Ice Age.
The argument is far-reaching and fascinating. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with some aspects of the case he makes, it’s the sort of case that you want to hear anyway. Once heard, it makes the mainstream explanation of our deeper past seem both dogmatic and uncurious. The entire book is worth your time, but I will highlight a few points made that stood out to me:
- He makes a convincing case the Americas were peopled well before the most recent Ice Age opened a land bridge between modern day Alaska and Siberia. This is key because it allows a window in time for a presently unknown civilization to have developed into an advanced one.
- He makes the case that a North American civilization – if it did indeed exist – would have been utterly destroyed and wiped clean from the archaeological record by the emerging consensus that North America was devastated by comet impacts twelve thousand years ago.
- He makes the case that several pieces of evidence point toward there being a shared historical heritage between the Old World and the New. Those things include remarkably similar religious beliefs (he highlights the Egyptian and Mississippi Valley in particular), shared symbolism (ex: hand with an eye on the palm), and shared mound building practices, found in North and South America, as well as Europe and the Middle East, wherein mounds were aligned with celestial events. I could go on, but he makes a compelling case that this cannot all be coincidence.
- Hancock highlight an interesting DNA-based mystery, namely that a couple of tribes deep in the South American Amazon share a genetic lineage with Australasians. The mystery of this is that this genetic trait is not also shared with other indigenous people farther north – from where migration is said to have come. He argues that the best explanation for this is a direct trans-oceanic trip across the Pacific by Australasians, rather than a migration that traveled north, then east, then south down the coast of the entire Americas. Thus the Americas were peopled by two routes, with one of the two being inexplicable.
- Hancock makes a convincing argument for advanced science in the Amazon – including therein strong evidence that the Amazon began as an enormous garden (the view is based on the hyper-dominance of fruit-bearing trees), the existence of a mysterious and ancient but highly advanced fertilizer used to cultivate the otherwise bad Amazonian soil, and the unexplained know-how of the tribal people there with respect to certain types of food cultivation and the creation of ayahuasca.
- He links a lot of the geometric mound building around the world both to a shamanistic religion passed down around the world, and also to global use of hallucinogenic experiences wherein people see shared geometric images.
From beginning to end, it’s a completely fascinating read and his research is an invaluable service to the curious of the world.
The book is not without flaws, though, I am not sure that Hancock deserves blame for all of them. Much of the text is taken up with complaints about mainstream archaeology. If you’ve read Hancock’s other works, this will be familiar terra preta. I simultaneously believe many of his complaints are completely justified while also believing that I’d rather not hear about it. This is an instance though wherein I think the diatribes about archaeology, as a field, are more for novices to alternative history books than for the experienced. Other authors – such as Preston Douglas in Lost City of the Monkey God – also imply the discipline seems to have a toxicity to it.
My other complaint with the book is given cautiously. It is abundantly clear to me that Graham Hancock carries a deep disdain for the modern world, and in particular, Christianity and Islam. That disdain is most evident in the portions of the book wherein he gives one-sided accounts of North American history which come across as blaming the white Europeans and the Americans for everything that has happened in their dealings with indigenous people, over the last five hundred years. Hancock is also his own audiobook narrator and the venom in many cases when he got onto these subjects was undisguised. That is not to say that the Europeans and Americans are not guilty of significant wrongdoing, in many cases, as they most certainly were, but I think he could have approached this more even-handedly. That said, I think this dissatisfaction with the Western world is the driving force and motivation of his research, and perhaps there is no Graham Hancock without that that attitude. I am happy to take the good with the occasionally annoying as the good far exceeds the other.
Continuing on that topic, and ironically given what I just wrote, Graham Hancock is often accused in recent years by the archaeology community of being a white supremacist, or at the very least, supporting ideas rooted in white supremacy. The accusation is absurd (a global Native American civilization before the Ice Age = white supremacy?), and largely made by a small but loud number of academics who often seem to have not even read his work. Apparently being an expert in archaeology makes one an expert on someone’s racism, even if the archaeologists are completely and utterly unfamiliar with the work of the alleged racist in question. For those who have actually read Hancock, he seems almost to hold white Western society in contempt while romantically yearning for a golden age pre-cataclysmic society of Shamanic wisdom. Yet, as he is white and male and old and British, those are the sort of lazy slings and arrows the archaeology community throws at him, with the hope it will convince people not to read his books (or watch his Netflix series.) Like I wrote earlier, the diatribes on the toxic gatekeeping archaeology field in this book are tedious to read, but they’re also completely understandable.
On the whole, while I definitely enjoyed the book and learned a lot, Hancock did not convince me that a global civilization once existed in North America. It is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, however, if Hancock is right, you would expect to see a DNA lineage, connected to the Americas, found around the planet to help make his case. Perhaps that case remains to be made, but it is not made here. I think there may be a better case – based on Hancock’s book here – that such a civilization might have existed in Australasia. As Hancock notes, we see DNA indications from the Amazon that trans-oceanic travel may have been developed in the south Pacific, long before it was thought possible. You can transplant much of his argument for North America as the homebase of a long lost global civilization, to Australasia, without losing much along the way.
At present, America Before remains the most recent book published by Hancock. He wrote throughout the book in a tone that might lead one to believe this was his last big research project. I hope that is not the case, as I thoroughly enjoy his ability to think outside of the box and to then put together good research to bolster his ideas. However, as he also mentions in this book, he has struggled with significant health issues, including severe seizures, so this might be his grand literary finale. If so, I hope he has a long healthy retirement and I look forward to hopefully living long enough to see how much of his speculation ends up proving to be accurate. He has a long track record of being correct in the face of his naysayers. Maybe at some point, submerged in the ocean on the American coastal shelf, we will someday find the evidence to prove him right one more time.
