NARRATOR: April 2018, a groundbreaking paper
is published by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt
and astrophysicist Adam Frank that
tackles an intriguing question.
Might advanced civilizations have existed on Earth
in the remote past that have been
completely lost to history?
MICHAEL DENNIN: This paper asked a very interesting question,
which is, can we detect ancient civilizations that are
tens of thousands of years old?
And the intriguing answer is, really, no.
Because all evidence of these civilizations and remnants of
them would have been destroyed in that time frame.
DAVID CHILDRESS: The evidence for them would be hard to find,
they were saying.
Cataclysms and Earth changes in the past
would have erased the evidence for these civilizations.
MICHAEL DENNIN: We're only a couple hundred years
into a technological civilization.
That's not a very long time frame in the fossil record.
So if our civilization got wiped out,
we would possibly disappear from that record in the future.
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: Once humankind is gone,
all those skyscrapers, all the results of human civilization
will be gone after a thousand years.
So who knows what will be left after a hundred thousand years,
or in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years?
[music playing]
NARRATOR: According to mainstream archaeology,
the Earth's earliest civilization
emerged in the area of modern day Iraq around 3000 BC.
But the surviving histories of many ancient peoples
tell of an earlier age, one where mortals and beings known
as gods lived side by side.
Oral histories have been around generations upon
generations upon generations.
And they always talk about the before the before,
when gods and people walked the land.
Hesiod was a Greek author who wrote that there were
five ages of man, the Golden Age,
the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of Heroes,
and the Age of Iron.
In the Golden Age, basically, people
were living beautiful lives along with the gods.
And he thought this was real.
He didn't think this was a myth.
FELICIA BEARDLSEY: The Aztecs have other ages of man.
Other cultures have similar ways of breaking up time
and going back into deep time.
It's their understanding of their origins.
When we look into the historical records
of the Greeks and the Aztecs, they're
often talking about ages, often ages that
span many thousands of years.
And it opens up the possibility that humanity, in fact,
has gone through intermittent periods of dark and light
for many, many thousands of years, for millennia,
and it's just part of our experience here on Earth.
NARRATOR: Stories of an age before modern humans can even
be found in early Judaic texts, which describe
a race of humans that existed on the Earth
long before the biblical Adam.
ARIEL BAR TAZADOK: The pre-Adamic civilizations
are hinted to in the Bible.
There is a curious genealogy, which
is portrayed in the Book of Genesis, chapter 36,
which states, "These are the kings who
reigned in the land of Edom," prior to there
being a king in Israel.
There were intelligent, technologically advanced
civilizations of a humanoid nature here on Earth
prior to Adam.
According to Enochian literature,
we have a record of it being technologically advanced,
even to the point of having nuclear technology.
MARK CARLOTTO: I think there's extensive knowledge
from many cultures, many traditions
that something existed before our modern human civilization
developed.
There might have been other civilizations on Earth that
predated us that we're not the only technological civilization
on the planet, but just the latest one, that there have
been previous ones that existed that were destroyed
and that have become forgotten over time.
NARRATOR: Could it be that these ancient stories are
more than just fanciful tales and that our planet has
witnessed the rise and fall of more
than one so-called advanced civilization?
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: We have stories of the Golden era,
when the so-called gods still mingled among men.
So you have to wonder, what gods and what time
and who were they?
According to mainstream archaeology,
the gods were nothing but a figment
of our ancestors' imagination.
And I wholeheartedly disagree with this because our ancestors
were very clear in distinguishing gods of nature
and gods who actually descended from the sky physically
and taught mankind in various disciplines.
So if there's a prehistoric civilization, what I'm saying
is that that knowledge did come from the extraterrestrials.