PYRAMID ONE
INTERNATIONAL RADIO NETWORK
PRESENTS
AN ARTICLE BY
GRAHAM
HANCOCK
From Indonesia To Turkey New Archaeological Discoveries Uncover The Mysteries Of A Lost Civilisation
By Graham Hancock
16 January 2014
Illustrated (see end of article) with 26 photographs by Santha Faiia
shot on location at Gobekli Tepe in September 2013 and at Gunung Padang
in December 2013
Artist's impression of Gunung Padang as it would have looked in antiquity by and courtesy of architect Pon S Purajatnika. ©
Click for full size image.
"Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be
wrong," says Danny Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research
Centre for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. "Old
stories about Atlantis and other a great lost civilizations of
prehistory, long dismissed as myths by archaeologists, look set to be
proved true."
I'm climbing with Dr Natawidjaja up the steep slope of a 300-ft high
step-pyramid set amidst a magical landscape of volcanoes, mountains and
jungles interspersed with paddy fields and tea plantations a hundred
miles from the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia.
The pyramid has been known to archaeology since 1914 when megalithic
structures formed from blocks of columnar basalt were found scattered
amongst the dense trees and undergrowth that then covered its summit.
Local people held the site to be sacred and called it Gunung Padang, the
name it still goes by today, which means "Mountain of Light", or
"Mountain of Enlightenment", in the local Sundanese language. The
summit, where the megaliths were found arranged across five terraces had
been used as a place of meditation and retreat since time immemorial,
archaeologists were told, and again this remains true today.
However neither the archaeologists, nor apparently the locals realized
the pyramid was a pyramid. It was believed to be a natural hill,
somewhat modified by human activity, until Natawidjaja and his team
began a geological survey here in 2011. By then the summit had long
since been cleared and the megalithic terraces recognized to be ancient
and man-made, but no radiocarbon dating was ever done and the previously
accepted age of the site - about 1,500 to 2,500 BC -- was based on
guesswork rather than on excavations.
The first scientific radiocarbon dating was done by Natawidjaja himself
on soils underlying the megaliths at or near the surface. The dates
produced - around 500 to 1,500 BC - were very close to the
archaeological guesswork and caused no controversy. However a surprise
was in store as Natawidjaja and his team extended their investigation
using tubular drills that brought up cores of earth and stone from much
deeper levels.
First the drill cores contained evidence - fragments of columnar basalt -
that man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface.
Secondly the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to
yield older and older dates - 3,000 BC to 5,000 BC, then 9,600 BC as the
drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then, 15,000 BC and finally
at depths of 90 feet and more an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000
BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.
"This was not at all what my colleagues in the world of archaeology
expected or wanted to hear" says Natawidjaja, who earned his PhD at Cal
Tech in the United States and who, it becomes apparent, regards
archaeology as a thoroughly unscientific discipline.
The problem is that those dates from 9,600 BC and earlier belong to the
period that archaeologists call the "Upper Palaeolithic" and take us
back deep into the last Ice Age when Indonesia was not a series of
islands as it is today but was part of a vast southeast Asian continent
dubbed "Sundaland" by geologists.
Sea level was 400 feet lower then because huge ice caps two miles deep
covered most of Europe and North America. But as the ice caps began to
melt all the water stored in them returned to the oceans and sea-level
rose, submerging many parts of the world where humans had previously
lived. Thus Britain was joined to Europe during the Ice Age (there was
no English Channel or North Sea). Likewise there was no Red Sea, no
Persian Gulf, Sri Lanka was joined to southern India, Siberia was joined
to Alaska, Australia was joined to New Guinea - and so on and so forth.
It was during this epoch of sea-level rise, sometimes slow and
continuous, sometimes rapid and cataclysmic, that the Ice Age continent
of Sundaland was submerged with only the Malaysian Peninsula and the
Indonesian islands as we know them today high enough to remain above
water.
The established archaeological view of the state of human civilization
until the end of the last Ice Age about 9,600 BC was that our ancestors
were primitive hunter gatherers incapable of any form of civilization or
architectural feats. In the following millennia settled agriculture was
very gradually developed and perfected. Around 4,000 BC the increasing
sophistication of economic and social structures, and growing
organizational abilities, made possible the creation of the earliest
megalithic sites (such as Gigantija on the Maltese island of Gozo for
example) while the first true cities emerged around 3500 BC in
Mesopotamia and soon afterwards in Egypt. In the British Isles Callanish
in the Outer Hebrides and Avebury in southwest England, both dated to
around 3,000 BC, are the oldest examples of true megalithic sites. The
megalithic phase of Stonehenge is thought to have begun around 2,400 BC
and to have continued to around 1,800 BC.
Within this well worked out and long-established chronology there is no
place for any prehistoric civilization such as Atlantis. But
interestingly the Greek philosopher Plato, whose dialogue of Timias and
Critias contains the earliest surviving mention of the fabled sunken
kingdom, dates the catastrophic destruction and submergence of Atlantis
by floods and earthquakes to "9,000 years before the time of Solon" -
i.e. to 9,600 BC, the end of the last Ice Age. Since the Greeks had no
access to modern scientific knowledge about the Ice Age and its rapidly
rising sea levels (often accompanied by cataclysmic earthquakes as the
weight of the melting ice caps was removed from the continental
landmasses) the date Plato gives is, to say the least, an uncanny
coincidence.
In Danny Natawidjaja's view, however, it is no coincidence at all. His
research at Gunung Padang has convinced him that Plato was right about
the existence of a high civilization in the depths of the last Ice Age -
a civilization that was indeed brought to a cataclysmic end involving
floods and earthquakes in an epoch of great global instability between
10,900 BC and 9,600 BC.
This epoch, which geologists call the "Younger Dryas" has long been
recognized as mysterious and tumultuous. In 10,900 BC, when it began,
the earth had been emerging from the Ice Age for roughly 10,000 years,
global temperatures were rising steadily and the ice caps were melting.
Then there was a sudden dramatic return to colder conditions - even
colder than at the peak of the Ice Age 21,000 years ago. This short,
sharp deep freeze lasted for 1,300 years until 9,600 BC when the warming
trend resumed, global temperatures shot up again and the remaining ice
caps melted very suddenly dumping all the water they contained into the
oceans.
"It is difficult," Natawidjaja says, "for us to imagine what life on
earth must have been like during the Younger Dryas. It was a truly
cataclysmic period of immense climate instability and terrible, indeed
terrifying, global conditions. It's not surprising that many large
animal species, such as the mammoths, went extinct during this precise
time and of course it had huge effects on our ancestors, not just those
'primitive' hunter gatherers the archaeologists speak of but also, I
believe, a high civilization that was wiped from the historical record
by the upheavals of the Younger Dryas."
What has brought Natawidjaja to this radical view is the evidence he and
his team have uncovered at Gunung Padang. When their drill cores began
to yield very ancient carbon dates from clays filling the gaps between
worked stones they expanded their investigation using geophysical
equipment - ground penetrating radar, seismic tomography and electrical
resistivity - to get a picture of what lay under the ground. The results
were stunning, showing layers of massive construction using the same
megalithic elements of columnar basalt that are found on the surface but
with courses of huge basaltic rocks beneath them extending down to 100
feet and more beneath the surface. At those depths the carbon dates
indicate that the megaliths were put in place more than 10,000 years ago
and in some cases as far back as 24,000 years ago.
Columnar basalt does form naturally - the famous Giant's Causeway in
Northern Ireland is an example - but at Gunung Padang it has been used
as a building material and is laid out in a form never found in nature.
"The geophysical evidence is unambiguous," Natawidjaja says. "Gunung
Padang is not a natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of
construction here go back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since
the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to
the kinds of sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to
build the pyramids of Egypt or the largest megalithic sites of Europe, I
can only conclude that we're looking at the work of a lost civilization
and a fairly advanced one."
"The archaeologists won't like that," I point out.
"They don't!" Natawidjaja agrees with a rueful smile. "I've already got
myself into a lot of hot water with this. My case is a solid one, based
on good scientific evidence, but it's not an easy one. I'm up against
deeply entrenched beliefs."
The next step will be a full-scale archaeological excavation. "We have
to excavate in order to interrogate our remote sensing data and our
carbon dating sequences and either to confirm or deny what we believe
we've found here," says Natawidjaja, "but unfortunately there's a lot of
obstacles in our way."
When I ask what he means by obstacles he replies that some senior
Indonesian archaeologists are lobbying the government in Jakarta to
prevent him from doing any further work at Gunung Padang on the grounds
that they "know" the site is less than 5,000 years old and see no
justification for disturbing it.
"I don't deny that the megaliths at the surface are less than 5,000
years old," Natawidjaja hastens to add, "but I suggest they were put
here because Gunung Padang has been recognized as a sacred place since
time immemorial. It's the deepest layers of the structure at between
12,000 and more than 20,000 years old that are the most important. They
have potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of
history and I think it's vital that we be allowed to investigate them
properly."
Gunung Padang is not the only ancient site that raises huge question
marks over the story archaeologists tell us about our past. On the other
side of the world, in southeastern Turkey, another man-made hill has
been excavated during the past decade, this time by Professor Klaus
Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute. The site, called Gobekli
Tepe (which means "Potbellied Hill" in the local Kurdish language)
consists of a series of immense megalithic stone circles on the scale of
Stonehenge and was deliberately buried (creating the appearance of a
hill) around 8,000 BC by the mysterious ancient people who made it. The
circles themselves date back to 9,600 BC, however, with the oldest work
being the best. At least twenty further circles on a similar scale,
identified by ground penetrating radar, are still deeply buried. Some of
these, Klaus Schmidt told me when I visited Gobekli Tepe in September
2013, are likely to be much older than those already excavated.
At 7,000 or more years older than Stonehenge the megaliths of Gobekli
Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang mean that the
timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best
part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to
look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995
bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more
mysterious than we thought.
In essence what I proposed in that book was that an advanced
civilization had been wiped out and lost to history in a global
cataclysm at the end of the last Ice Age. I suggested there were
survivors who settled at various locations around the world and
attempted to pass on their superior knowledge, including knowledge of
agriculture, to hunter-gatherer peoples who had also survived the
cataclysm. Indeed even today we have populations of hunter gatherers, in
the Kalahari Desert, for instance, and in the Amazon jungle, who
co-exist with our advanced technological culture - so we should not be
surprised that equally disparate levels of civilization might have
co-existed in the past.
What I could not do when I wrote Fingerprints, because the evidence was
not then available, was identify the exact nature of the cataclysm that
had wiped out my hypothetical lost civilization, and this absence of a
specific "smoking gun" was one of the many aspects of my argument that
was heavily criticized by archaeologists. Since 2007, however, masses of
scientific evidence have come to light that have identified the smoking
gun for me in the form of a comet that broke into multiple fragments
now known to have hit the earth 12,980 years ago. The impacts (some on
the North American ice cap, some elsewhere) caused floods and tidal
waves and threw a vast cloud of dust into the upper atmosphere that
enshrouded the entire earth for more than a thousand years, preventing
the sun's rays from reaching the surface, and setting off the Younger
Dryas deep freeze.
I believe it is possible that Gobekli Tepe may prove to be the work of
the survivors of a great civilization lost during the Younger Dryas
(interestingly the so-called "origins of agriculture" have been traced
back by archaeologists to the vicinity of Gobekli Tepe and to the exact
period in which Gobekli Tepe was created). But it is to Gunung Padang
that I now look for a possibly even more stunning confirmation of my
theory. Danny Natawidjaja's geological survey has revealed not only
deeply buried massive constructions and very ancient carbon dates at
Gunung Padang but also the presence of three hidden chambers, so
rectilinear in form that they are most unlikely to be natural. The
largest of these lies at a depth of between 70 and 90 feet beneath the
summit of the pyramid and measures approximately 18 feet high, 45 feet
long and 30 feet wide.
Could it be the fabled "Hall of Records" of Atlantis? If Dr
Natawidjaja's geological excavation is allowed to proceed, despite
strenuous attempts by local archaeologists to prevent it, then we should
know the answer to that question, one way or another, by the end of
2014.
Note: GRAHAM HANCOCK is working on a sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods,
provisionally titled Magicians of the Gods, to be published in October
2015 by Coronet in the UK, by Saint Martin's Press in the US, by
Kadokokawa Shoten in Japan and by Corbaccio in Italy.
