Two versions of the cover of Graham Hancock's America Before: The Key to earth's Lost Civilization.

ANDREW COLLINS REVIEWS

AMERICA BEFORE - THE KEY TO EARTH'S LOST CIVILIZATION

THE NEW BOOK FROM GRAHAM HANCOCK

"It is truly an important benchmark in our understanding of who we are and where we came from."

Andrew Collins

I have now finished Graham Hancock's new book America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization, published by Coronet Books. I know it has been out for a few months, and I should have done this much sooner, but Graham and I agreed that we would not read each other's respective new books until both had gone for publication. In this way there could be no way that either of us could influence the other's work, something that is incredibly important if two authors are working on similar themes, as we certainly were at the time.

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization went to press before Denisovan Origins, the book I have co-authored with Greg L. Little, one of the country's most informed sources on the origins and development of North America's mound building cultures. Indeed, I was still tinkering with Denisovan Origins in May 2019, when further announcements were being made about the discovery in China's Ganzu Province of the first ever Denisovan mandible (lower jaw), it meant I could not start reading Graham's book until after this time. This I have now done.

What can I say about it? Well, to start with it is excellent; yet another benchmark work that any serious aficionado of forbidden archaeology, ancient mysteries and the spiritual and magical background to humanity's relationship to the cosmos not only has to have on their bookshelves, but also, more importantly, must read! Yes, looking at this doorstop of a book, coming out at nearly 600 pages in length, might seem daunting, but I assure you doing so will be worth it. I loved it, and fully concur with Graham's approach, attitude and findings concerning all the subjects he deals with here. Not that I accept every word he writes as gospel. I don't. However, as a book to educate people on what shaped our past there can be nothing better. What I like, and think so important, about Graham's approach to the mysteries of the past is that he doesn't just believe any old theory and throw it into his books. He is discerning in an incredibly important manner. For instance, a few years back he went out to a certain central European country to see alleged "pyramids" at the behest of the lead researcher promoting the site as a place of global importance. To me, and to many of my colleagues, these "pyramids" were nothing more than natural hills being trafficked as something they are not. If Graham had come back and proclaimed them to be artificial, I would have sunken to the floor in despair, but he didn't. He came back fully convinced that, although the "pyramids" were very extremely interesting, they were no more than natural features of the local landscape. I was so relieved to hear this, as had he come back with the opposite opinion and pronounced them artificial then the entire ancient mysteries community might also have become convinced that those "pyramids" were crafted by human hands.

The Mysteries of Serpent Mound

So what about America Before? What does it say? Well, Graham's journey begins with his investigation of Ohio's enigmatic Serpent Mound, which introduces us to a theme that will recur throughout the book, with this being the heavy politics behind the age and significance of North America's Pre-Conquest heritage. In the case of Serpent Mound this comes in the form of conflicting dates, and denials of claims concerning the site's celestial alignments.

Two takeaways for me here: one being that Serpent Mound is built within the crater left behind by some impact event in the deep past, something that the mound-builders seemed dimly aware of, and, secondly, that the serpent head's very clearly is aligned towards the setting sun at the summer solstice. It is a fact made clear by the beautiful photographs Santha Faiia, Graham's wife, was able to take with a drone positioned directly above the head of the monument on the day of the year in question. Yet this alignment works best not in the age that the monument is seen to have been constructed, some 2000 years ago, but due to the sun's very subtle movement back and forth along the horizon due to so-called obliquity of the ecliptic, much earlier, indeed around 13,000 years ago.

Of course, 13,000 years ago is instantly recognisable as important to anyone who is familiar with either Graham's books or books by many other key writers in the same field. It is the approximate time frame- actually some 12,800 years ago - of the Younger Dryas compect impact event that devastated the prehistoric world, destroying in the process North America's highly advanced Clovis culture. These are matters that Graham will have cause to come back to in some detail later on in the book.

Yet the true emphasis on Serpent Mound's powerfully old genesis is not so much the importance of that single date, but that much of America's most ancient past is actually far older than anyone could ever have imagined just a few generations ago. Until the 1930s it was commonly believed that no human activity had occurred in North America any earlier than around 6000 years ago. Then with the discovery of North America's Clovis culture the date of the arrival of the First Americans was pushed back to around 11,000 years ago, revised later to 13,200 years ago. This became known as the Clovis horizon, with any evidence challenging what became known as the Clovis First hypothesis being dismissed, ridiculed and discredited. This ridiculous situation changed in 1998 with confirmation of the existence of more ancient levels of occupation at a site named Monte Verde in Chile. These were conservatively placed at around 14,500 years old, but in reality were as much as 18,500 years old.

Cerutti Mastodon Site

Since that time dozens of sites pre-dating the Clovis age have been found across both North America and South America, the oldest and most controversial being the 130,000-year-old mastodon kill site unearthed at Cerutti near San Diego, California. Found here during the construction of a new highway in 1974 were mastodon bones displaying clears signs of butchery, as well as crude bone-smashing rocks and one mastodon femur balls - one facing upright, the other in the opposite direction facing downwards; something clearly suggestive of human behaviour.

Graham goes to San Diego's Natural History Museum, where he interviews Tom Deméré, the paleontologist who headed the specialist team that investigated the Cerutti site. I am so pleased Graham achieved this interview as this section of the book is compelling, edgy even, since its moves him into areas of American prehistory that were always likely to draw him into all sorts of unwanted attacks from those who just can't handle the peopling of the Americas beginning as much as 130,000 years old.

In Denisovan Origins the Cerutti mastodon site is covered in the part of the book written by Greg Little, and because our book went to press slightly later than Graham's it contains additional information on the matter, which has become important in the light of the fact that the discovery is now under further attack following the publication of a new paper that says that marks on the bones were simply the result of heavy road machinery bearing down on the bones as the new highway was under construction. In all honesty this explanation is not even well thought out, although it does need to be properly addressed, something that Greg has done.

Genetics

Genetics plays a big role in Graham's book. He shows that working alongside paleo-anthropology genetics has spearheaded a complete new understanding of who exactly the first Americans were, and where exactly they came from. It has also now shown that there was not just one migration of peoples on to the continent, but at least two. What is more there is compelling evidence that one incoming human group bore Australo-Melanesian ancestry, meaning that their closest living ancestors lived in places like Island South Asia, Melanesia, and Australia. How exactly this population arrived in the Americas is the big question, with the geneticists and paelo-anthropologists generally in agreement that they all must have come from northeastern Asia via the Beringia land bridge that once joined the Russian Far East with Alaska. This, as we see below, is almost certainly not the entire story.

Denisovans

America Before also contains two useful chapters on the Denisovans and the story behind their discovery at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. Graham, who along with Santha actually visited the cave, talks also about the sophistication of the Denisovan chloritolite bracelet and the Denisovans' use of bone needles. However, he leaves the matter there, other than to add that to date very little Denisovan DNA has been found in indigenous peoples of the Americas, with one major exception; this being the Surui of the Amazon. He does mention that some Denisovan ancestry is to be found among the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes and St Lawrence River area of North America. In Denisovan Origins the presence both of Denisovan DNA and of the mysterious mitochondrial haplogroup known only as X present in both the Ojibwa and their close neighbours the Cree. It is a mystery that calls for a fresh look at who exactly their ancestors might have been, and where exactly they came from.

Amazonian earthworks

Graham then uses this new knowledge to focus on the discovery in the Amazon basin over the past two decades of literally hundreds of geometrical earthworks, their existence being revealed by the tragic clearance of large sections of the Rainforest. Some of these earthworks are many thousands of years old, and might have their roots in cultures of the Amazon going back at least 10,000 years. Moreover, these earthworks are very similar to the designs not only of some of the largest and most enigmatic mound complexes in North America, but also of structures like Stonehenge and Avebury in the United Kingdom. Some of the Amazonian structures target celestial events such as the solstices and equinoxes, or are aligned perfectly towards the four cardinal points. One even has the same approximate footprint on the ground of the Great Pyramid. Graham shows that many of their designs might well have been inspired by deep recurring visions experienced by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon using the psychoactive substance ayahuasca.

Black Earth

Much other evidence is presented in support of the sophistication of the Amazon's advanced cultures, including the existence in agricultural environments of the mysterious and highly fertile "black earth", known also as terra preta. This is a carbon-rich soil used extensively for cultivation both in ancient times and also in the modern era by indigenous peoples today. It is certainly artificial and extremely old, nobody doubts that. Yet debate still rages over whether its high carbon content, so important for cultivation across thousands of years, is simply the result of human refuse and waste or it was deliberately cultivated and refined by some now lost civilization of the Amazon. If so, then who was this advanced prehistoric culture, and where did it come from?

Trans-Pacific Contact

The discovery that certain indigenous peoples of the Amazon such as the Surui and Karitiana possess Australo-Melanesian DNA suggests that their ancestors reached the continent from Island Southeast Asia; this, of course, being formally a much larger landmass called Sunda. Academics do not deny the presence of Australo-Melanesian DNA in these peoples, or that it originated in southeast Eurasia. What they do deny, however, is that it came directly from Sunda. In their opinions, Australo-Melanesian peoples must have moved slowly around the Pacific seaboard until eventually they met up with eastern and northeastern Asian peoples attempting to cross the Beringia land bridge. They simply cannot conceive of these peoples might have had maritime capabilities and used the islands of the Pacific as stepping stones to reach either the western coast of South America or the Californian coast of North America. This is despite the fact that, as Graham makes clear, Homo erectus must have possessed maritime capabilities to reach Flores in Indonesia as much as 700,000 ago, while Neanderthals were, we now know, navigating the Mediterranean as much as 125,000 years ago. Clearly, if these maritime capabilities existed so far back in the evolution of the homo species, then by the time we come to the end of the last ice age this skills will surely have been inherited by our own ancestors. Graham uses this opportunity to speak of the maps of the ancient sea kings, compiled from much earlier source maps, which show areas of the world such as Antarctica and the Sunda landmass in Island Southeast Asia as they will have appeared before the end of the last ice age. There is also a whole appendix on this topic.

The bigger question of whether or not these Australo-Melanesian peoples, who perhaps reached South America circa 30,000-20,000 years ago, were also carrying Denisovan DNA has yet to be settled. Certainly, one Amazonian group shown to have Australo-Melanesian DNA, the Surui, also displays Denisovan DNA. However, the Karitiana display Australo-Melanesian DNA, but no traceable Denisovan ancestry. It is an enigma requiring another approach. As I write about elsewhere, a rare dental trait seen in the first confirmed Denisovan mandible, found as early as 1980 in a cave at Xiahe in China's Ganzu Province, and found also in certain Asian populations, could now be the key to establishing not only the geographic reach of the Denisovans, but also the final fate of their hybrid descendants. This will include those that reached the Americas.

Path of Souls

It is about this point in the book that Graham turns his attentions to the spiritual, religious and magical beliefs and practices of the First Americans. He realises that it involved a journey of the soul to an afterlife reached following a leap of faith to a star portal in the constellation of Orion, actually the object Messier 42 in Orion's belt. Thereafter the soul navigated the Milky Way, known generally in Native American tradition as the Path of Souls, before reaching a place of final judgement where the Milky Way forks into two separate streams. The exact point is marked by the bright star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus. This is identifed as a celestial birdman, or bird shaman, which is shown repeatedly in Mississippian religious art. Thereafter the soul, dependent on its judgement, takes one of two paths. One leads to oblivion, while the other leads to the afterlife.

What Graham also realises on a visit to the Moundville mound complex in Alabama is that this Path of Souls death journey mimics the journey of the soul as found in ancient Egyptian funeral texts. This also involves a journey first to the constellation of Orion and then a crossing of the Milky Way in its capacity as the Winding Waterway. As in the Native American death journey, the then reaches a place of judgement before either being cast to oblivion or achieving rebirth in the next life. According to New Kingdom funerary texts such as the Am-duat, the "Book of that which is in the Duat (or Underworld)," this point of judgement and rebirth occurs in the so-called Fifth Division or Hour of the night, whilst the soul traverses the so-called Land of Sokar (also given the name Rostau, "the mouth of the passages," the ancient Egyptian name for Giza). Graham points out that here, in the Am-duat's Fifth Hour, is found a woman who cleaves open the skull of the deceased in a manner similar to that of a figure encountered at the place of judgement in the Native American death journey and known as the Brain Smasher or Skull Crusher.

Now, very clearly the reader of both Graham's books and those of Greg Little and myself will be familiar with all of these concepts, which Greg and I have been presenting in books, in articles and in online videos since 2012. This is, however, something that Graham does acknowledge in America Before. Of course, I have been banging on about Cygnus being an important point of entry to the sky world ever since the publication of The Cygnus Mystery in 2006. However, back then I did it partly at the expense of the Orion constellation, especially in the case of the Giza pyramid complex and the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians of the Pyramid Age. I have Greg to thank for introducing me to the existence of the Path of Souls Native American death journey through his own extensive work into this subject. He also suggested to me that Orion and Cygnus most likely played a dual role in the soul's death journey both in ancient Egypt and in North America; that journey being connected by the presence between them of the Milky Way. Having agreed with Greg, these ideas were brought together for the first time in our book Path of Souls: The Native American Death Journey (2014). One other point worth mentioning here is that in the Am-duat text the ancient Egyptian birdman equivalent to the one encountered at the place of judgement in Native American tradition is Sokar, who is shown in the Fifth Hour rising on a multi-headed serpent. As far back as 2006 I identified him as a representation of the Cygnus constellation.

The fact that the very same death journey of the soul is found both in ancient Egyptian tradition and also among at least 30 to 40 Native American tribes is something that prompted Graham in America Before to speculate that this cosmological belief system must have derived not from either of these ancient peoples, located on different continents, but from a much earlier common source. This he proposes has to be at least 12,000 years old, since this is the only way it can have existed dually both in ancient Egypt and on the American continent, which has essentially been isolated for as much as 12,000 years. If this is correct - and it is something I propose also in The Cygnus Key (2018), and do so again in Denisovan Origins, then it implies that this universal belief in a cosmic journey of the soul starting with Orion constellation and culminating at a Place of Judgement marked by the stars of Cygnus must pre-date this epoch.

If so, then you have to start asking yourselves why exactly these constellations were picked out for this purpose. Orion became important because it is located on the edge of the Milky Way, close to where the sun crosses this starry stream in one of only two places in any one year (the other being in the vicinity of Sagittarius and Scorpius). Cygnus became important, pre-12,000 years ago, most likely because it had only just relinquished its role as guardian of the northern celestial pole. This had circumnavigated a section of the Milky Way (the only time it does so in the whole of its 26,000 year cycle) between around 18,000 BC, passing initially through the constellation of Cepheus, before reaching Cygnus around 16,500 BC and remaining within the constellation until exiting the Milky Way sometime around 14,500 years ago. This is just 2500 years before the date Graham provides for the latest possible inception date of the Path of Souls death journey. Clearly, the important role Cygnus had played when guardian of the northern celestial pole had lingered long enough for the constellation's importance, and that of Orion and the Milky Way, to continue to thrive in various different parts of the ancient world.

The Lost Civilization

So what happened to this knowledge? Why was it distilled so widely across the world? The answer Graham gives in America Before is that it was fragmented and almost lost in the aftermath of the Younger Dryas comet impact event that decimated North America and the northern hemisphere as a whole around 12,800 years ago. It is matter that Graham covered in great detail in his book Magicians of the Gods (2015), and was, of course, writing about also in earlier books. Graham now takes all the latest evidence and brings this all together in a very important way. Today in fact there is simply so much evidence that this event took place that it is almost becoming mainstream, and not primarily a matter for writers of the forbidden archaeology or ancient mysteries communities.

Such a cataclysm does, however, have to be factored into the idea of the destruction of any presumed ice age lost civilization of the type proposed by Graham in his books. The bigger question, however, is where exactly was this lost civilization located? Before answering that question one has to decide whether it might be synonymous with Plato's Atlantis. If one does, then in Graham's case he has to recall that in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) he identified Antarctica as a potential candidate for Atlantis, while in Magicians of the Gods, twenty years later, he favours the Sunda landmass in what is today Island Southeast Asia. It is for this reason that he is careful only to imply that North America might make better sense of what Plato writes about Atlantis.

Graham's claim that all material evidence of the lost civilization's former existence in North America was most likely destroyed in the Younger Dryas comet impact event, which decimated North America, is a compelling thought. That said, there should still be traces of its sophisticated technologies and achievements found during archaeological excavations of occupational layers existing immediately beneath the dark layer of ash and impact debris that marks not only the date of the Younger Dryas boundary, but also the termination of the Clovis culture (this is known as the Black Mat in North America and the Usselo Horizon in Europe and elsewhere). Yet there is very little evidence of a lost civilization here, other than cultural artefacts of the Clovis culture, and in particular examples of its distinctive signature fluted projectile point.

Solutrean Hypothesis

Graham suggests that the immense sophistication of the Clovis point argues that it itself could constitute evidence of North America's lost civilization. This is a very interesting thought indeed. He does, however, leave to the Notes and References section of America Before another potential solution for the evolution of the Clovis point; this being that Clovis technology developed on another continent altogether, with this being central and western Eurasia.

Known as the Solutrean hypothesis, it contends that the match between pre-Clovis stone tool technology, especially the use of pressure flaking and retouching, is more or less identical to that of the Solutreans, who may well have reached the American continent by crossing the ice flow between southwest Europe and the eastern coast of North America either at the height of the Last Glacial Maxim, circa 22,000-18,000 years ago, or sometime slightly later. Sceptics argue that Clovis points only appear in North America several thousand years after the disappearance of the Solutreans circa 15,000 BC. Moreover, that the Clovis point is characterised by a single vertical scar or flute that dominates the lower half of the point on either side. The use of these flutes allows the point to be more easily hafted onto a spear shaft. Such flutes do not appear on Solutrean points. This is essentially true, although a number of Pre-Clovis bificial points that seem to be precursors of the Clovis point have been found in the eastern United States, particularly around the Chesapeake Bay area, which was once a much larger area of land reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean. These points do not have flutes and are more or less identical to Solutrean points (one is even made of a rock type identified as coming from a source in France). In addition to this there is now mounting DNA evidence (both nuclear and mitochondrial, especially the case of haplogroup X) suggesting a link between the Palaeolithic world of southwestern Europe and the ancestors of some First Americans, particularly those of the Ojibwa and Cree.

These are matters discussed in full by both Greg and myself in our respective sections of Denisovan Origins. I will also demonstrate that the Solutreans were not in fact Europeans as many might suspect, but were most likely derived from a human population formed from waves of migration that had begun as far east as Siberia and Mongolia. The trail of specialist tools left behind by the precursors of the Solutreans, the Proto-Solutreans or Eastern Gravettians, and also by their indirect successors, the Swiderians, has been recognised and written about by some of the world's leading experts in stone tool technologies, with pressure flaking, pressure retouching and the emergence of blade and microblade technologies being the key. The evolution in their morphology is like a paper trail beginning in southern Siberia and northern Mongolia and culminating beyond the Urals in Europe and southwest Asia.

The Shamanic Civilization

So if the Clovis Point is to become a symbol of earth's lost civilization, then we should perhaps be looking in the area of Siberia and Mongolia for its true source of origin, and I therefore think it beyond coincidence that here, down to around 45,000 years ago, was the home of the northern of the two main branches of the Denisovans. These were the Siberian Denisovans; the other branch being the Sunda Denisovans, whose homeland was in the vicinity of the Sunda landmass. The immense sophistication in advanced human behaviour displayed by the Siberian Denisovans (the bracelet, bone needles, advanced stone tool technologies, etc.) is tentative evidence of this theory.

This said, the idea that the lost civilization also flourished in either North America or South America should not be dismissed. I believe it did, although in my opinion we are not necessarily dealing with a pre-Younger Dryas high civilization of beautiful cities, paved roads, navigable waterways and tiered societies ruled by powerful monarchs as is described by Plato in his stories of fabled Atlantis. Instead I see it more in terms of a universal shamanic civilization (the term used in Denisovan Origins) with a shared cosmology based on powerful beliefs and practices associated with the origin of the soul in the cosmos and its inevitable journey back to the stars. Everything else therefore becomes an expression, a meme as Graham calls it, of this once shared cosmological vision, which clearly existed prior to the end of the last ice age. I strongly suspect that this is what Graham Hancock recognises as having existed in the deep past. Yet trying to pin it down to an exact geographical location based on Platos' account of Atlantis is today superflous to needs. The ancient mysteries world is now entering a completely new paradigm of thinking - one that I firmly believe we are all working towards highlighting at this time.

On a final note, quite literally, I didn't just read the text of America Before. I read through all of Graham's notes and references and I think it is fair to say that I doubt that any writer-researcher out there right now will even come close to backing up their ideas with so many academic reference sources. I say this as a writer myself, since I know how long it takes to track down, read and then reference primary source material for books such as ours.

My final words are that I strongly recommend that you read America Before as soon as possible and base all your ideas, beliefs, personal research and future reading opportunities on how you feel afterwards. It is truly an important benchmark in our understanding of who we are and where we came from.

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock is available now from Amazon.

Graham Hancock and Andrew Collins in California in April 2019.