America Before

The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilisation

Graham Hancock

Hodder & Stoughton 2019

Hb, 608pp, £25, plates, illus, notes, bib, ind ISBN 9781473660571

President Trump would delight in this book’s inyourface, centrestage USA message: truly an America First read.

Unusually within this genre of “alternative” (aka pseudo) archaeology, the title does not misrepresent the contents. Hancock’s grand pitch is that the world’s shamanled, “precociously early civilisation” (who were telepathic and telekinetic) was extant in the middle of the Ice Age and centred in the midUSA, but was destroyed 12,800 years ago by a “dangerous bolide” (comet) that melted the huge

North American ice sheets with biblical flooding and sudden, Atomic Winterstyle climate change (north of the Equator), leaving just enough traces to allow for years of books by himself and others. (Surely telekinesis is about the only effective weapon there can be against comet strikes!)

Hancock states that he is coming to the end of his life’s work, and as a sign of weariness there is the constant referral to his earlier books. His nontravelogue text has a languor about it as he manages to be parochial, folksy and demagogic, colouring his prose towards the purple. There is more than a hint of hearing an oldtime preacher at an Appalachian revivalist tent meeting spitting venom and threatening vengeance at all nonbelievers (aka archaeologists and most scientists). Hancock “takes up serpents” starting with the “almost” astronomically aligned Serpent Mound, Ohio. There is a detailed, honeydipped account of his visits to the Altai foothills in Siberia (fresh farm food, poor roads but welcoming natives) to visit the Denisova caves, “arguably the most important archaeological site in the world”, detouring to photograph granitic snakelike outcrops. Are these shapes manmade? he asks (no, they are naturally intersecting conjugate joint sets and pareidolia).

Hancock’s travelogues are enjoyable and give a welcome break to the often laboured exposition of his main themes. The pilgrimage to the “cathedrallike” cave is a central pillar for Hancock, for (together with linguistics and ethnobotany) his book builds upon two pieces of 21stcentury science, namely large numbers of ancient and modern DNA data and the investigation into the cause(s) and results of the Younger Dryas event.

The Younger Dryas, a deep reversal in the Late Pleistocene warming episode, began about 12,900 years ago and ended very suddenly about 11,600 years ago with a global warming of 10°C within a century, perhaps even a single decade. This is Hancock’s third book to feature the Younger Dryas Stadial and its possible extraterrestrial cause, and irrespective of his use of the data, he presents a timely reminder of how swiftly climate change can happen – and has happened.

Elsewhere there is much Amazonian talk of lost cities, magical uberfertile soils and transforming herbals, all subtle hints of an earlier more majestic and mystical time for the region. He cites shared similarities between the DNA and language diversity of the peoples of Amazonia and Oceania to suggest direct seaborne links (naturally using highly accurate, but now lost, maps). As is common in this genre there are other crosstemporal/ spatial proofs of an ancient knowledge including similarities between the Mississippi Mound builders and the Pharaonic Egyptians.

To his credit, although there is much use of secondary and tertiary sources, primary papers are cited as shown by 60 pages of notes – a useful resource. Naturally he finds old Aunt Sallies to knock down, and his use of scientific data and authority is biased; almost all his positions in the various scientific debates are “paradigmbusting”, but he fails to appreciate, or perhaps ignores, nuance within scientific arguments. Indeed nuance is a foreign concept, encapsulated in his spectacular reinterpretation of the adage “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”; he suggests that the total lack of any “old” (meaning midPleistocene) archaeology in the USA is a major proof that it was indeed the core site for the urcivilisation.

Enjoy the illustrations, many by Hancock’s wife Santha Faiia, envy their travels, but above all comb, read and balance the primary sources in the footnotes and Hancock’s text.

Rob Ixer

★★★★★