I watched Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. Interested in two strands of human development: space, and human advances towards civilization, the series drew me in. The sky and what evolves up there and from there was as fascinating for early humans as space exploration is to some of us today.
Graham Hancock, the force behind the series, has devoted 30 years of his life to tracing the missing link. Not our evolutionary gene pool but humans that might have been wiped out by an enormous apocalypse ridding the earth of a species that had grown too aggressive for its own good, with some forewarned to escape its fury.
He thinks that in the aftermath, with Earth unrecognisably changed, survivors were visited from the sea by a superior people who advanced their skills. He ruminates with experts on how this visiting, highly intelligent civilization may be a source of durable monuments, the giant figures on Easter Island, sites around the world similar though far distant from each other.
In his extensive travels, he links legends and myths of various ancient peoples to his theory of a punishing apocalypse and its meta visitors. Some modern, indigenous peoples he meets speak of these word-of-mouth ancestral stories. He ponders on developments enacted simultaneously in regions oceans apart that might not be mere coincidence but rather travel and guidance.
His detractors are very vocal about his ‘amateur archaeologist’ status. He says he’s not an archaeologist, he’s a journalist. As a European, I have previously been mostly interested in Europe’s archaeological contribution to progressing civilization; the Americas was a New World to our forebearers.
Hancock envisions civilizations there older than those encountered and documented by colonists. Drone-revealed, geometric shapes hidden under the Amazon canopy appear not natural, but earthworks laid out with intelligence and knowledge of the sky, their physical alignment (axis shift included) on earth tracing movements in the heavens.
He exhibits ancient rock/cave art, the amazing exactness of stonework, comparing the early, simple upper levels of identified masonry to highly sophisticated, older lower layers. Art, architecture and sky-watching require evolved imagination.
Some of us have an inexplicable affinity with old stones. When I first entered the ancient passage tomb of Ireland’s Newgrange where, during a bright mid-winter solstice dawn, light fills the chamber, and its observers with delight, running my hand over the massive stone interior, I wondered how it was built.
Motifs in Newgrange and on other ancient European stone monuments are similar to those Hancock filmed on rocks and in caves in the Americas, as well as art forms not unlike the ground layout designs revealed by Amazon drone images.
As with the Americas, Europe’s stone structures also bear sun, serpentine and grid like art. Shamanistic hallucination (knowledge of plants) and intercession with the dead, documented by Hancock, were practiced also in ancient Ireland.
Lore of my village says that Cesair, Noah’s granddaughter, was the first woman to reach Ireland before the Flood, forewarned? Ireland’s patron saint, Patrick prophesied that when the rest of the world caught fire, Ireland would suffer a kinder fate, death by drowning.
Hancock says an external force could have reprimanded the aggressive peoples damaging this planet with fire and water. The Bible tells stories of mighty retribution. Earth has been struck by space rocks with disastrous consequences. Hancock worries we may have reached the threshold of destructiveness again.
Jeremy Deaton in The Irish Times wrote that Earth is spinning quicker due to a shift of fluid in its inner core, global warming is interfering with how fast the Earth rotates and tilts, that our day is no longer exactly 24 hours, and clock fixers fiddling with leap seconds caused computer glitches in 2012 and 2015. Melting polar ice is acting as a counterweight to the movement of the inner core.
Looking at the unjust, pollution-heavy wasteland of Gaza, be forewarned! Who-/whatever it is up there in charge of wrathful space skittles, may be dropping one on us any day now.
