It feels as though human civilization must have been around forever, doesn’t it?
Everywhere you look on planet Earth, on every single continent and across every single ocean,
you can see evidence of the human hand at work. But really, human history is a mere and fleeting
chapter in the entire history of the world. And recorded human history is even shorter still.
Which is why, no matter how well we think we know our story, there’s always another version
of it waiting to be unearthed. This is Unveiled, and today we’re
answering the extraordinary question; did an advanced civilization exist 12,000 years ago?
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When we consider the first great civilizations, we usually go to ancient Egypt… or the ancient
Sumerians of Mesopotamia. We travel up to five thousand years into the distant past,
charting the rise and fall of empires and the invention of things like cities, money,
and a writing system. But, for some, we haven’t yet gone back far enough. And one of the most
controversial claims of modern times is that there existed an extremely advanced group - one
that had perhaps spread all across the world map - around twelve thousand years ago.
The claim is chiefly made by the pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock,
in his 2015 book “Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilisation”.
Hancock proposes that in about the year 10,800 BC, some kind of super-society of humans
(with technology far beyond what history says they should’ve had) was wiped off the face of our
planet. He suggests that since then humanity has simply been rebuilding itself out of the ashes,
trying to regain its former glory… with the book particularly focussing on the origins of various
monuments such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey and the Great Pyramids in
Egypt (which Hancock claims are much older than conventional history says they are).
The idea is tied up with two other hotly debated topics - the many legends of a Great Flood having
spread across Earth in the past, and what’s known as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
First, the Great Flood. Various myths, legends, and stories - including the biblical story of
Noah - describe how at some time in the ancient past a monumental flood caused untold devastation.
In some versions, the waters wiped out almost everything alive at the time of the disaster.
Hancock suggests that these stories do stem from the real world… and from an event that happened on
Earth 12,000 years ago, when (he says) an ancient, advanced civilization were among those to perish.
Second, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. This is the contested and controversial claim that,
again around 12,000 years ago, the surface of Earth was bombarded with large fragments of an
even larger, disintegrating asteroid. We know that Earth did pass through an abrupt and rapid
climate change at this time… and that, in North America, South America and Europe especially,
there were rapid declines and extinctions of some species, including of the woolly mammoth.
But we don’t yet have a confirmed, watertight explanation for why or what happened. The Impact
Hypothesis is, then, just one suggestion. One possible solution for how this seemingly
strange time in Earth’s past came to be. Significantly, it’s an idea that isn’t widely
supported in the scientific community. But, nevertheless, for Hancock, it’s the crucial idea,
and the key alleged moment in ancient history … because an asteroid bombardment may well have been
powerful enough to have triggered the flooding (and resulting climate change) needed to kill
off a proposed civilization, so the theory goes. Importantly, Hancock wasn’t the first to suggest
the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis itself. Its origins go way back to the mid-nineteenth century,
and to the infamous fringe scientist, Ignatius L. Donnelly. Donnelly is best known for his various
theories on the lost city of Atlantis, but he also penned the 1883 book, “Ragnarok: The Age of Fire
and Gravel”. In it, he also describes a version of history wherein a great asteroid strikes Earth
some 12,000 years ago… bringing with it fire, destruction, toxic air, and devastating floods.
Donnelly argues, as well, that this catastrophic event signalled the end
of an advanced civilization that had previously been living unchecked on Earth… suggesting that
while the world smoked and blistered around them, they retreated to caves and gradually
forgot all that they had known before. The details between Hancock and Donnelly’s accounts do differ,
but the general idea is much the same. According to them, an advanced civilization lived on Earth
long before conventional history says it did, until all record of it was wiped out thanks to
one (or multiple) asteroid strikes. According to most of the rest of the
scientific community, however, there’s just one problem… there’s so little by way of strong,
scientific evidence that Hancock and Donnelly’s lost world ever did exist. Writing for “Scientific
American” in 2017, the founder of the Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer, mounts one of the
internet’s more comprehensive counterarguments. He first of all labels it “inconceivable” that a
whole civilization could ever be lost without a trace (with or without an asteroid strike).
He then argues that there have so far been no impact craters found to correspond directly
with where or when the asteroids are said to have hit, in this particular case. And he rounds off by
addressing the species extinctions that certainly did take place around 12,000 years ago… but argues
that they’re much more likely to have been the result of overhunting by early humans. The animals
that did disappear didn’t die off alongside humans in an almighty disaster, they were killed off by
human hunter-gatherers - according to Shermer. There’s no doubt that there are mysteries still
to be solved when it comes to the Younger Dryas period, in general. Around 12,000 years ago,
there was a relatively sudden drop in global temperatures, and a return to glacial,
ice age conditions. This certainly would have affected the early humans operating at this time,
and the plant and animal species alive on Earth back then. There were animal extinctions,
and it’s thought that some human populations did decline - without wholly disappearing.
But the majority of the scientific community remains hesitant to explain it all away as the
aftereffects of an asteroid strike. And, almost in unison, researchers are loathe to entertain
the idea that a hyper-advanced civilization could’ve been erased as part of it all.
In fact, there’s some argument that, whatever happened to cause it, the Younger Dryas actually
accelerated humanity’s journey toward the reasonably advanced levels of today.
Rather than finishing off a civilization, it bred one. Because something else that happened roughly
12,000 years ago was the invention of farming. The Agricultural Revolution is understandably
difficult to pinpoint to any one specific date, but we do know that at around 10,000 years BC
human populations decided to settle. Life for them was now less about hunting on the move,
and more about cultivating plants and crops for a more reliable source of food. As far as we can
tell, this was a new development… so if there had been an advanced civilization beforehand,
then it presumably must have passed them by. What’s more likely is that humans
started to farm in response to the changing conditions on Earth. And in so doing they
made a crucial step toward building the real-world civilizations that we know and recognise today.
Of course, it’s human nature to question what’s around us. And,
until such day as we invent a way to travel back in time to witness it for ourselves,
there will always be alternate theories on what life was really like in the ancient world. It’s
too much of a staggering thought that we can only really chart the last five thousand years
of history in detail, when we know that we, homo sapiens, have walked this world for at least
three hundred thousand years. And that the Earth as a whole has been here for 4.5 billion years.
And so, the Younger Dryas period provokes from within us plenty of questions… Why did
the conditions of Earth so suddenly change? How did some species survive while others didn’t?
And what might we have lost along the way? But the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is still
very much up for debate. And the suggestions of a decimated, high society put forward by Hancock,
Donnelly and others are quickly and scathingly dismissed by most of the scientific community.
And that’s why an advanced civilization probably didn’t exist 12,000 years ago.
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