Speaker 1: I think this is the beginning of the holiday season.
Speaker 1: And if you're enjoying turkey this weekend like I am,
Speaker 1: it's Thanksgiving weekend. I guess you could say it. And
Speaker 1: I would like to wish you all happy Thanksgiving and
Speaker 1: time to get ready for the holidays and gatherings and
Speaker 1: socializing and consuming lots of calories lots of protein. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just the way it is. I've tried for years
Speaker 1: to stay away from sugar and cookies and pastries and candies.
Speaker 1: It's impossible. You don't want to be rude to people.
Speaker 1: You go to someone's house for a holiday and you're like, no,
Speaker 1: I won't have a slice of that wonderful cake, that
Speaker 1: that black forest cake with my turkey, or my prime rib.
Speaker 1: No I won't have that eggnog and brandy. I already
Speaker 1: told you how I feel about eggnog and brandy. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, that stuff is amazing. So it's tough. It's tough,
Speaker 1: but it's the time to celebrate, and you can't be
Speaker 1: too strict. You have to indulge a little bit, and
Speaker 1: that's important. You know, it's time to be with friends
Speaker 1: and family and kind of kick back and think back
Speaker 1: how the year was and you know, gather with some
Speaker 1: of the people that you really care about, and that's
Speaker 1: really important. Hey, this is a cliff you're host of
Speaker 1: earth ancients, and not only do we wish you happy holidays,
Speaker 1: but as they comes, and I think it's important to
Speaker 1: think about all the wonderful events that have happened. And
Speaker 1: some are the ones that are not that great, but
Speaker 1: we don't want to keep those in our mind too long.
Speaker 1: But today we are going to revisit the subject of Atlantis.
Speaker 1: And we had my guests earlier this year, Jack Kelly,
Speaker 1: presenting a documentary that actually did very very well. I
Speaker 1: think there were several million people that watched it on Netflix,
Speaker 1: and then it was transferred to YouTube where you can
Speaker 1: see most of it for free. Now. That documentary is
Speaker 1: called The Atlantis Puzzle, a true story of Ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: Africa and climate change across deep Time. And at that
Speaker 1: time we were speaking about the documentary and what they
Speaker 1: had found in Northern Africa, and at that time I
Speaker 1: was still kind of on the fence because they really
Speaker 1: had not found any ruins, any pyramids, any stone buildings,
Speaker 1: any stone structures whatsoever. And this is why today's program
Speaker 1: is so important because, according to Jack, he has located
Speaker 1: and documented fifty percent more content than what was featured
Speaker 1: in the documentary. And this is what I've been looking for,
Speaker 1: Which are the stone foundations and ruins of ancient civilizations.
Speaker 1: There are, and we'll hear about this today. There's a
Speaker 1: few pyramids that have been found in the Sahara Western
Speaker 1: Sahara area of Africa, and this is critical for us
Speaker 1: to believe this Rechat area, which is the circular geological
Speaker 1: formation that is highlighted in George Sarantida's book and research
Speaker 1: as the original mythologicaltis. So we're gonna hear more about
Speaker 1: that today. I have a gallery that I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: up with some of the new photos. But he is
Speaker 1: still convinced that this area, the circular feature that sure
Speaker 1: looks very abnormal, very unusual, is the true Atlantis. Now,
Speaker 1: the other thing that comes up a great deal when
Speaker 1: we're talking about the time period for Atlantis, which is
Speaker 1: the I think they believe it's a one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years up until present, is that the Sahara, what we
Speaker 1: call a desert, was not a desert at all. It
Speaker 1: was actually very lush green. There were forests. There were
Speaker 1: areas that had huge foliage and land grass, which would
Speaker 1: be excellent for you know, growing crops, for you know,
Speaker 1: existing and supporting a large pop And the information in
Speaker 1: the book is which was just released a few months ago,
Speaker 1: is very detailed and actually has the evidence from geologists,
Speaker 1: from anthropologists, from archaeologists who are out there right now
Speaker 1: in Africa foraging through the land and looking for these
Speaker 1: items that are out there. So today's program is the
Speaker 1: Atlantis Puzzle, and my returning guest is producer writer Jack Kelly.
Speaker 1: It's time to look forward to twenty twenty six for
Speaker 1: new tours and we have our seventh annual Grand Egyptian
Speaker 1: Tour coming up in April twenty eighth through May tenth.
Speaker 1: This is an opportunity to see the largest statuary in
Speaker 1: the world. We're going to go out and see old
Speaker 1: Kingdom ruins as well where we have pyramids, was we're
Speaker 1: left of temples and some monumental megaliths in obelisks and
Speaker 1: cut stone that rarely are visited by the general public.
Speaker 1: For all the information and details, including a wonderful iterary,
Speaker 1: go to Earth Ancients dot com forward Slash Tours look
Speaker 1: for the semath annual Grant Egyptian Tour banner. Click it
Speaker 1: you'll see the full itinerary. We've just added Armando May
Speaker 1: to discuss the recent discoveries and scans of the Cufu
Speaker 1: and Caffree Pyramids, which we will visit personally. He will
Speaker 1: be our special guest and more in Cairo. There's a
Speaker 1: lot more to check out, a lot more that's being added,
Speaker 1: but this is a very very good, solid and inexpensive tour.
Speaker 1: Our tours are about half the cost of everyone else.
Speaker 1: So for more information go to Earth Ancients dot com
Speaker 1: Forward Slash Tours, come out and join us. We featured
Speaker 1: a documentary earlier in the year called The Atlantis Puzzle
Speaker 1: with the producer Jack Kelly, and it was very well received.
Speaker 1: It was probably the best example of proof that there
Speaker 1: was a place called Atlantis, and I had to say
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it. And we are bringing Jack back because
Speaker 1: he's just released a new book called The Atlantis Puzzle,
Speaker 1: a true story of Ancient Greece, Africa and climate change
Speaker 1: across deep Time. And I had a chance to look
Speaker 1: at it, and not only do we want to talk
Speaker 1: about it, but he has a lot of new material
Speaker 1: in this book that is important to discuss and very relevant.
Speaker 1: So Jack, welcome back to Earth Ancient. Is great to
Speaker 1: have you on the program. How you doing, Cliff, I'm
Speaker 1: doing great. Thanks for having me talk about this book.
Speaker 1: Was this always in the mix when you started the
Speaker 1: documentary or did it just come out from the work
Speaker 1: that you produced in the documentary.
Speaker 2: The research that went into the film I think asked
Speaker 2: to be brought out in a book format. So, first
Speaker 2: of all, as most people know, George Serantidis is the
Speaker 2: mastermind behind all these recent discoveries and thought processes around
Speaker 2: the real geography of Atlantis, so I always like to
Speaker 2: give him credit first and foremost. And George's book is
Speaker 2: a too divorce. I mean, it's it's on an academic
Speaker 2: level of detail and so forth. So as I was
Speaker 2: doing the research for this project, I had to leave
Speaker 2: a lot of things out of the film that I
Speaker 2: felt were really worth talking about or including in a
Speaker 2: chapter or a sidebar in a book where you could
Speaker 2: go into more detail. And so after the film was done,
Speaker 2: you know, I kind of kept you know, it's like
Speaker 2: one of those things where you think you're you think
Speaker 2: you're done going to the cookie jar and then you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: maybe just one more. And I just kept thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: there's so much interesting stuff here that we couldn't fit
Speaker 2: into the film. Let me put this down into book
Speaker 2: format and in that sense kind of build on what
Speaker 2: both George and the film had accomplished.
Speaker 1: Let's highlight the documentary. You feature George. We actually had
Speaker 1: him on the program. He's a Greek researcher and he
Speaker 1: found this portion of I guess it's North Africa that
Speaker 1: has this geological formation that basically follows the somewhat the
Speaker 1: writing of Guy. It's not Homer Plato, thank you. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of Homer. I've been reading about Homer lately. But
Speaker 1: Plato talks about these concentric rings and the channels and
Speaker 1: the various landforms that come up in this location. What
Speaker 1: else does the documentary begin to talk about. Let's highlight that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So The Atlantis Puzzle came out last year and you
Speaker 2: can find it on Amazon and to Be and you know,
Speaker 2: dozens of different networks, and it's been pretty well received.
Speaker 2: And that documentary tells George Serrantidus's story, and for those
Speaker 2: who aren't familiar with him, George is a Greek researcher
Speaker 2: who had a deep interest in Plato, and he was
Speaker 2: always really puzzled by the Atlantis story because he thought, well,
Speaker 2: this doesn't really fit exactly in with a lot of
Speaker 2: Plato's other writings and stories. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that makes it different, because Plato does reference myths in
Speaker 2: some of his other philosophic writings, is that the Atlantis
Speaker 2: story had very specific dates attached to it. So that
Speaker 2: was sort of the first interesting thing. So George was
Speaker 2: going back and spending some time on this, and he
Speaker 2: had spent a lot of time looking at Plato's use
Speaker 2: of mythology, and when he started digging into the Atlantis
Speaker 2: story to really try and pick it apart, he realized
Speaker 2: that there were some key mistranslations in the story that
Speaker 2: had led it to be considered in the realm of fantasy.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to offend anybody, but led to
Speaker 2: a lot of weird, fringe theories and things that we
Speaker 2: know are not scientific. Right, A continent never existed in
Speaker 2: the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that sank in a
Speaker 2: single day and night. Right, That's just not how physics works.
Speaker 2: But as George dug into this deeper, he came up
Speaker 2: with a sort of schematic geography and you know, not
Speaker 2: to spoil the film for people. Essentially, through the process
Speaker 2: of elimination and referencing some other ancient historical and geographic texts,
Speaker 2: he he narrowed down the geography to essentially western northwestern Africa,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of reasons that we go into
Speaker 2: in the film as to why that is probably the
Speaker 2: case and how the reasons that that fits the story.
Speaker 2: Key point here, that's the geography of the story. A
Speaker 2: lot of people have sort of jumped to the conclusion
Speaker 2: that that means the story is completely true. What this
Speaker 2: is is a clue that sort of says, look, this
Speaker 2: is the geography that was being spoken about. Well, to me, Cliff,
Speaker 2: that means, hey, now you have to take this story
Speaker 2: seriously and you have to really do some work. You
Speaker 2: can't assume it's all true or all false. You really
Speaker 2: have to pick it apart and try and figure out
Speaker 2: which elements here are real because we have, you know,
Speaker 2: we have this sort of smoking gun that there's real
Speaker 2: geography here that matches up with the story in an
Speaker 2: extremely detailed way as far as natural geography right can fit,
Speaker 2: sort of perfect geometrical shapes. It's it's extremely close, and
Speaker 2: so I think the skeptics took that, and I've had
Speaker 2: some critics say, well, this is pseudo archaeology, this is fake.
Speaker 2: And I've had some insane people reach out to me
Speaker 2: and sort of say, I know about you know, all
Speaker 2: this history and nuclear wars and aliens and just transdimensional
Speaker 2: beings and the continent of Moo. They had a war
Speaker 2: with Atlantis. I'll reveal my sources if you reach out
Speaker 2: to me. And I've sort of said thanks, but no
Speaker 2: thanks Palace.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I get that a lot too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna sit back. But I think what's exciting
Speaker 2: about this is much like the story of Troy, you know,
Speaker 2: the Trojan War and Heinrich Schlieman's discovery of that in
Speaker 2: the eighteen seventies and eighties. He found that Troy was
Speaker 2: a real place. Now, does that mean that every line
Speaker 2: in the Iliot is true? No? Right, I mean the
Speaker 2: gods didn't swoop down and zap people with thunderbolts, and
Speaker 2: you know, I don't think anyone believes that happened. But
Speaker 2: now we believe that this is a real place. So
Speaker 2: there is a historical rooting to the story. And so
Speaker 2: that's the big question, Mark Cliff, is what were the
Speaker 2: historical roots that led to the myth that Plato has referenced.
Speaker 1: I think George Sarantius makes a very good point too.
Speaker 1: He revisited Eucretius in these other documents and read them
Speaker 1: and translated them into the original Greek, which was really
Speaker 1: very important because we get a great deal of new
Speaker 1: information that comes out in the documentary. That was a
Speaker 1: highlight that I think was important.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah, we really tried to
Speaker 2: without dumbing George's you know, analysis and his grammar, you know,
Speaker 2: and all the hard work he did, dumbing it down
Speaker 2: too much or getting lost in the weeds, but trying
Speaker 2: to convey the discoveries that he made. And a great
Speaker 2: example is just the word Pelagos. So in the old translations,
Speaker 2: people said, well, atlantic Pelagos. Plato must have been talking
Speaker 2: about the Atlantic Ocean, because I know the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 2: Everybody knows the Atlantic Ocean, and nobody here at Oxford
Speaker 2: or wherever in eighteen fifty three has ever heard of
Speaker 2: an Atlantic Pelagos. Well, what George was able to do
Speaker 2: was put together modern knowledge about climate change that is
Speaker 2: really mind blowing, and map that onto the story and say, well, look,
Speaker 2: this doesn't say okeanos. And the Greeks knew what the
Speaker 2: Atlantic Ocean was, right, the tin trade with Britain had
Speaker 2: been going on since the Bronze Age or earlier, so
Speaker 2: they knew the ocean was there. The Carthaginians knew the
Speaker 2: ocean was there. I mean, Plato knew the ocean was there.
Speaker 2: He uses the word okeanos and other Platonic books dialogues,
Speaker 2: he doesn't use it here. Well, Plato's not a guy
Speaker 2: to just throw around random words. He means something specific,
Speaker 2: and pelagos is the word that modern Greeks use for
Speaker 2: like the Aegean sea or the Ionian sea. Right, It's
Speaker 2: a specific type of a body of water partially enclosed
Speaker 2: by And so George started looking for okay, what body
Speaker 2: of water could could fit this, and he couldn't find one.
Speaker 2: But then he started to think about overlaying time. If
Speaker 2: you go back eleven or twelve thousand years. One of
Speaker 2: the most shocking things about this whole story to me
Speaker 2: that I was sure was maybe dubious. I was proven wrong.
Speaker 2: I mean, the green Sahara is a staggering climatic climactic
Speaker 2: change that for people who don't know, takes place in
Speaker 2: these twenty thousand year cycles. So if you go back
Speaker 2: to the time of the myth of Atlantis ninety six
Speaker 2: hundred BC, North Africa was green. It was like Savannah.
Speaker 2: There were massive lakes, and one of these lakes in particular,
Speaker 2: empties out in the location of modern Tunisia at the
Speaker 2: Gulf of Gabez, not far from Sicily, and that geography
Speaker 2: matches up extremely specifically to the geography that Plato's talking
Speaker 2: about in the Atlantis myth. So I think from that standpoint,
Speaker 2: we've for anybody with an open mind, I think we've
Speaker 2: erased pretty much all shadow of a doubt about where
Speaker 2: that geography was.
Speaker 1: And and you.
Speaker 2: Know, the the philological and the historical and climactic facts
Speaker 2: that support that identification.
Speaker 1: It's funny because what's the formation called in North the
Speaker 1: Africa is the reshat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was shot structure, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's very interesting because George highlights it in a
Speaker 1: way where that whole area was much greener, much more
Speaker 1: abundant in forestry and things like that. It's a whole
Speaker 1: different world. And I'm trying to think back to the
Speaker 1: actual period of time when it would be over. It's
Speaker 1: over twenty thousand years, right, I mean, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, through a climatic change, it turned into
Speaker 1: a desert. So what would be the inception for the
Speaker 1: Atlantis to have been started to develop into a culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this is one of the things the questions
Speaker 2: that I think is really open because you know, the evidence,
Speaker 2: the physical evidence that they were shot doesn't reflect a
Speaker 2: massive city of the type described in the myth. What
Speaker 2: physical evidence has been found, and again it's a huge
Speaker 2: area forty kilometers you know in circumference or in sorry diameter,
Speaker 2: So I don't even think the surface has been scratched there.
Speaker 2: But there have been archaeologists who've done work out there,
Speaker 2: and they have found a tremendous amount of stone tools
Speaker 2: dating back to actually even before the Holy Scene era,
Speaker 2: so you know, pre ten thousand BC, pre ninety six
Speaker 2: hundred BC. So we know that ancient people have been visiting, hunting,
Speaker 2: living in this place over long periods of time. And
Speaker 2: but you have to put on your sort of long
Speaker 2: view binoculars to think back these twenty thousand year cycles. Right,
Speaker 2: So today we're kind of at the apex of the
Speaker 2: dry period, right, But if you were to go back
Speaker 2: ten thousand years to you know, eight thousand BC, you'd
Speaker 2: be at the peak wet period. So at that time
Speaker 2: there was shot had these circular lakes essentially like this
Speaker 2: concentric Ring Ring lakes, and we know that ancient people
Speaker 2: would have probably they're fresh water fossils there, right, So
Speaker 2: we know that there was marine life, and we know
Speaker 2: that ancient people have a long standing relationship with aquatic areas,
Speaker 2: so we know people would have been hunting, in fishing
Speaker 2: and spending time there, and there's stone tools that illustrate that.
Speaker 2: What we don't know is anything beyond that. To be
Speaker 2: frank and honestly, anybody who says otherwise, the work just
Speaker 2: hasn't been done. So as to what type of well
Speaker 2: why people would have would have lived there, I think
Speaker 2: is because of these shallow lakes and the fishing opportunities
Speaker 2: and the maybe defensive capabilities as well. That brings up
Speaker 2: questions about well, how these guys get out there? Did
Speaker 2: they swim? Did they have boats? And that leads us
Speaker 2: down the whole you know, the whole story that we
Speaker 2: cover in the in the film, and to a greater
Speaker 2: extent in the book about Hey, what what are the
Speaker 2: facts of this time period? And what are we starting
Speaker 2: to learn? What are the parts of the Atlanta story
Speaker 2: that could be true, and what are the parts that
Speaker 2: don't seem They seem like later editions or you know,
Speaker 2: functionalizations or or things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Plato describes atlant as being you know, devoured by
Speaker 1: the ocean. It's sunk.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: But you don't believe that's the case, obviously, and Georgie
Speaker 1: doesn't either. What would be the causation for its demise though?
Speaker 1: Was it a was it like Charles Hapgood who believes
Speaker 1: that the crustal displacement shifted Atlantis and it's now that
Speaker 1: he believes that the Antarctica is is Atlantis. And there's
Speaker 1: a number of other authors that we've had on the program,
Speaker 1: researchers who feel the same way. But obviously, if this uh,
Speaker 1: northern African area has just been decimated at some point
Speaker 1: it still exists. What was the cause? Was it a tsunami?
Speaker 1: Was it a horrific flood? What?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 1: What? What do you believe is the causation of its demise?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So I I this is there's two points to
Speaker 2: what you're talking about Cliff and one of them is
Speaker 2: again a sort of a mistranslation. The idea that and
Speaker 2: I won't go into the ancient Greek because it's a
Speaker 2: little abstruse, but the idea that a whole continent sank
Speaker 2: is a misreading of the ancient Greek. What it says,
Speaker 2: more likely, or more appropriately realistically, is that the the
Speaker 2: civilization or the city or whatever was was there, there
Speaker 2: was an earthquake, there was a there was a flood,
Speaker 2: and the city was was sort of covered over by water.
Speaker 2: Now that's a very different that's a very different translation
Speaker 2: than suddenly you're going from the realm of continents disappearing
Speaker 2: to oh, a city got flooded and there was an earthquake. Well, again,
Speaker 2: this is why George's work was so important. Was I
Speaker 2: think some of these older academics just took you know,
Speaker 2: they took their own knowledge. I mean, these guys weren't
Speaker 2: earthquake experts, so they didn't you know, they're sort of
Speaker 2: taking a bit of poetic license. So one of the
Speaker 2: things we did in the film, and I was grateful
Speaker 2: to be able to do, was talking with Oregon State
Speaker 2: University Engineering dean and earthquake expert doctor Scott Ashford, and
Speaker 2: I went to him. I said, look, Scott, I just
Speaker 2: want you to to break this down. Here's the idea.
Speaker 2: And he sort of corroborated. Look, a tsunami can't sink
Speaker 2: a continent, right, and and an earthquake doesn't sink a
Speaker 2: continent overnight.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This would take some time, and you'd have to have
Speaker 2: some massive cataclysmic event. Obviously, the land's still there, right,
Speaker 2: the city's still there, The west part of Africa hasn't disappeared,
Speaker 2: so it's still there. What could have taken place? And
Speaker 2: he really, to his credit, took some time. And he
Speaker 2: he was familiar with some Native American myths that they
Speaker 2: you know, people he knew had substained floodniss that everyone
Speaker 2: thought was you know, nonsense because it talks about you know,
Speaker 2: the great Spirit beating the drum and the waves.
Speaker 1: Of that stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, guess what, that's just a symbolic way of illustrating
Speaker 2: real events. And so they were able to find this
Speaker 2: is a sidebar, but they were able to go back.
Speaker 2: There was a They found that there was this massive
Speaker 2: tsunami that hit the northwest coast of the United States
Speaker 2: and Canada about three hundred and twenty five years ago,
Speaker 2: around seventeen hundred. And the way they figured this out
Speaker 2: was they went back to newspaper articles in Japan that
Speaker 2: spoke about a tsunami that had struck Japan at that time,
Speaker 2: where there was no earthquake associated with it. Well, what
Speaker 2: does that mean. That means the earthquake happened way out
Speaker 2: in the Pacific, which means it would have generated waves
Speaker 2: in the opposite direction as well, which which hit you know,
Speaker 2: north western United States and caused the local people to
Speaker 2: create this myth about this great flood that took place.
Speaker 2: It wiped out a lot of people, right, and you know,
Speaker 2: the story goes that those people only survived because their
Speaker 2: ancestors tied their canoes to the tops of trees. Now
Speaker 2: did that really happen? I don't necessarily think so, But
Speaker 2: there is evidence that a massive tsunami penetrated you know,
Speaker 2: ten miles inland, So you can only imagine those coastal
Speaker 2: communities would have been you know, or something like that,
Speaker 2: you know, would have been decimated. So Scott Asher took
Speaker 2: a look at the Atlantis story and I, you know,
Speaker 2: I talked to him about it and basically said, look
Speaker 2: all the processes that Plato's describing in this myth or
Speaker 2: this story, these are real.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Earthquakes are real. Tsunamis are real. Liquefaction is this thing
Speaker 2: where you have wet soil and when the earthquake hits it,
Speaker 2: it sort of creates this vibration. Well, everybody's experienced this.
Speaker 2: If you've gone to the beach, right, you stand there
Speaker 2: a dry sand and you're good. When the wave comes in.
Speaker 2: What happens your feet start to sink into it? Rightah,
Speaker 2: Just think about this on a bigger scale, And I
Speaker 2: mentioned this in the book where there have been some
Speaker 2: massive recent examples of this. For example, in New Zealand
Speaker 2: about fifteen years ago there were these two huge earthquakes
Speaker 2: and there was incredible amounts of liquefaction. You buildings sliding
Speaker 2: around and sinking. And these are modern buildings built to
Speaker 2: code to resist this. So you can only imagine Green
Speaker 2: Sahara period, large amounts of rain water from these mountains
Speaker 2: that kind of surround part of the rashot water coming down.
Speaker 2: You could imagine a landslide falling into these circular lakes
Speaker 2: and the sort of a giant wave or a series
Speaker 2: of waves striking whoever lived there. Again, I'm not saying
Speaker 2: who did or didn't live there, but any civilization, any
Speaker 2: any structures. You could imagine people living in this, you know,
Speaker 2: large community of adobe buildings or mud huts and things
Speaker 2: like that, just getting totally decimated by an event like that,
Speaker 2: And then you could imagine that story gives rise to
Speaker 2: a to a mythos right, that that gets graduated and grows.
Speaker 2: So I don't I wasn't there. I don't know exactly
Speaker 2: what happened, but what we do know is that that
Speaker 2: location at that time, with those climate conditions, with the
Speaker 2: water that was present, et cetera, that that's a realistic
Speaker 2: scenario based on George's reading of the story. So some
Speaker 2: piece of what has come down to us it could
Speaker 2: have happened.
Speaker 1: I was wondering your take on George's analysis on just
Speaker 1: how sophisticated the Atlantinians were. There's rumors, there's mythologies, there's
Speaker 1: My belief is that the Maya of the America's were descendants,
Speaker 1: some of them were descendants. To my feeling, the Maya
Speaker 1: were multi racial, multicultural from different parts of the world,
Speaker 1: and we see the predynastic Egyptians being fairly sophisticated in
Speaker 1: the number of areas, Do we have any sense at
Speaker 1: all the level of sophistication that the Atlantinians had it
Speaker 1: all in terms of mathematics, engineering, the sciences.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, I think this is one of those tricky
Speaker 2: I think this is one of those tricky questions, Cliff,
Speaker 2: because it's not clear that the people described in the
Speaker 2: Platonic myth maps up exactly to you know, what the
Speaker 2: archaeological evidence suggests. However, as we did in the film,
Speaker 2: and as I've done, you know, tried to do in
Speaker 2: this book, I've taken a hard look at are what
Speaker 2: are the all the different elements that are spelled out
Speaker 2: in the myth, what is implied by that? And then
Speaker 2: what does the evidence match up with that. So there's
Speaker 2: a few that I'll just tell you are probably not real,
Speaker 2: and then I'll go into the things maybe if you
Speaker 2: want to talk about that I think are real or
Speaker 2: surprising or shocking. So the things that do not appear
Speaker 2: to be real are some of the specifics of the
Speaker 2: descriptions of like the city and you know, the army.
Speaker 2: For example, they talk about these people fighting with chariots,
Speaker 2: and having you know, these huge navies of triremes and
Speaker 2: things like that, that is most likely untrue. How why
Speaker 2: do I say this before anyone gets mad at me? Well,
Speaker 2: talks about gymnasiums. As far as we know, the first
Speaker 2: gymnasium does not appear in the archaeological record until around
Speaker 2: seven hundred BC. So the idea that there was a gymnasium,
Speaker 2: you know, eleven thousand years ago, they disappear for the
Speaker 2: archaeological record for ten thousand years then they just reappear suddenly.
Speaker 2: It's like, that doesn't sound right. So, you know, things
Speaker 2: like that. The size you know again, the size of
Speaker 2: the populations, a lot of it. This is a disputed area.
Speaker 2: As I'm sure you're aware from your work in South
Speaker 2: America and Central America. You know, the populations described are
Speaker 2: too large for the time period based on our current estimates. However,
Speaker 2: as you're aware, recent work on ancient population estimates has
Speaker 2: totally changed. So for example, the Amazon Jungle, as I'm
Speaker 2: sure you're aware, you know, for most of our lives,
Speaker 2: everyone sort of said, well, no one ever really lived there,
Speaker 2: and no high cultures. Maybe one to two million people
Speaker 2: at most, kind of pre Columbus. Well, recently those papers
Speaker 2: have sort of they've first of all, they've found huge
Speaker 2: amounts of settlements that people had missed because they're sort
Speaker 2: of earth mounds and the architecture had been made out
Speaker 2: of wood, so that had all deteriorated, you, And they
Speaker 2: didn't until they started looking at it from satellite views
Speaker 2: or overhead views. They couldn't really see these shapes in
Speaker 2: these forms. And there's huge, huge settlements that used to
Speaker 2: exist in the Amazon, right, So overnight the population estimate
Speaker 2: of one to two million went to like ten to
Speaker 2: fifteen million like that. So what I mean to say
Speaker 2: by that is one of the frustrating things when you're
Speaker 2: trying to peer back into the ancient past is it's
Speaker 2: really hard to be accurate with your numbers. So Plato says, hey,
Speaker 2: there was an army of one point four million people
Speaker 2: in the navy of two hundred and forty thousand people.
Speaker 2: That's probably a number that is meant to be reflective
Speaker 2: of the Greek estimates of the Persian Empire that had
Speaker 2: invaded Greece like basically a couple generations before Plato. That
Speaker 2: was the largest army anybody had ever heard of in Greece.
Speaker 2: So I think Plato transplanted similar numbers onto the myth.
Speaker 1: When will you think.
Speaker 2: About what the population that's required to support an army
Speaker 2: of one point six million guys? You know you got
Speaker 2: to have probably twenty thirty million people, right, And the
Speaker 2: evidence or the current scientific consensus of what the population
Speaker 2: of the whole planet was in ten thousand BC is
Speaker 2: you know, one to ten million. My problem with that
Speaker 2: is is it one or.
Speaker 1: Is it ten?
Speaker 2: So I think there's the academia has we put a
Speaker 2: lot of respect to these because they're numbers coming from
Speaker 2: very respected, thoughtful, intelligent people. But Cliff, if I was
Speaker 2: to tell you that the population of Earth today is
Speaker 2: somewhere between eight and eighty billion, what would you say
Speaker 2: to me? You'd say, Jack, you've got to dial those
Speaker 2: numbers in. That's a pretty broad spectrum, and from a
Speaker 2: percentage basis, that's the same thing as one to ten million, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, so we have this false I think we
Speaker 2: have this false idea of the specificity of the past,
Speaker 2: or we did kind of until maybe the last couple decades,
Speaker 2: where as I'm sure you and your audience are where
Speaker 2: we've started to revisit a lot of these assumptions, and
Speaker 2: so I just want to point that out because I
Speaker 2: think it's an interesting thing to think about. What do
Speaker 2: we think we know and why do we think we
Speaker 2: know it? Because if you're saying, well, we're looking at
Speaker 2: birth rates and death rates and we're calculating back. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but what happens when you run into something like the
Speaker 2: Black Plague? That'll throw your numbers right off right, I
Speaker 2: mean before that and after that the population of Europe
Speaker 2: got cut in half, So you know, you have to
Speaker 2: account for some of that stuff. So I don't think
Speaker 2: he can just abstract backwards, but not to get into
Speaker 2: that too deeply. What are the parts of the Atlantis
Speaker 2: story that are shocking and surprising and have a real
Speaker 2: basis to them that's a little mind blowing. Well, things
Speaker 2: like transcontinental trade, This is this is, this is real,
Speaker 2: and anybody can go out if you doubt me, and
Speaker 2: read the primary sources on this.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a short commercial break to allow
Speaker 1: our sponsors to identify themselves, and we will return shortly
Speaker 1: with my guest today, writer producer Jack Kelly, discussing his
Speaker 1: new book just released, The Atlantis Puzzle. Will be right back.
Speaker 2: It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Speaker 1: Every way. To take a look on the five and
Speaker 1: ten listening once again with candy canes and silver lanes aglow,
Speaker 1: it's beginning to let a lot like Chrismas my guest
Speaker 1: today is Jack Kelly. He has written a new book
Speaker 1: based on his documentary, The Atlantis Puzzle. This is a
Speaker 1: detailed look at the actual geological land formations, more details
Speaker 1: on Plato's description of the Great Island Continent and other
Speaker 1: details that have come to light since the release of
Speaker 1: the documentary in April of this year. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about that right now. In fact, that's our next level.
Speaker 1: And regarding that, if we can show and apparently you've
Speaker 1: discovered some trade networks that are I guess from the
Speaker 1: Stone Age, how do we know that Atlanta has had
Speaker 1: anything to do with that? Or is the research just
Speaker 1: that we have discovered these trade routes in the Neolithic
Speaker 1: period that were significant.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So one of the challenges with this whole Atlantis
Speaker 2: story is is North Africa is a and the Sahara
Speaker 2: is a poorly studying place archaeologically right, and there's good
Speaker 2: reasons for that. It's a harsh climate. It takes a
Speaker 2: lot of money to get out there. It's it's hard
Speaker 2: to support logistically, and frankly, there's some extremist groups operating
Speaker 2: in large swaths of you know, North Africa. Don't want
Speaker 2: to you don't want to run into those.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the pirates and the other types.
Speaker 2: That are, you know, kind of extreme warlords. You mean
Speaker 2: it's warlords, you know groups and they're out Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 2: you know, I've I've talked to I've talked to archaeologists
Speaker 2: who have done work in areas like the Western Sahara,
Speaker 2: which is a contested era, a region adjacent to Mauritanian Morocco,
Speaker 2: and there's incredible structures out there. We show some of
Speaker 2: them in the film. There's pictures in the book, these
Speaker 2: stone structures, and a lot of those haven't been firmly dated.
Speaker 2: I mean, the supposition is that those are Neolithic. But
Speaker 2: you know, you need to take a team out there
Speaker 2: and do a heck of a lot of work. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he needs to be safe to be able to you know,
Speaker 2: to corroborate this. But be that as it may. If
Speaker 2: you look at these trade networks, one of the one
Speaker 2: of the things that I tried to do in the
Speaker 2: film was say, Okay, we might not have evidence from
Speaker 2: this immediate area, but let's look at what was going
Speaker 2: on at this time period in the sort of Mediterranean
Speaker 2: you know, Europe Mediterranean era and North Africa region, and
Speaker 2: let's see if we can extrapolate, because you know, just
Speaker 2: like Newton and Leibniz discovering calculus at the same time,
Speaker 2: technological breakthroughs, for whatever reason, it's not well understood. While
Speaker 2: they're not always lined up, often are approximate, you know,
Speaker 2: across similar areas.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So one of the things we looked at was like, well,
Speaker 2: were there even trade networks and long distance trade happening
Speaker 2: in the early Holo scene, right, which and again for
Speaker 2: people who don't know the holocenees like ninety six hundred
Speaker 2: BC to the present day, that's a sort of epoch
Speaker 2: of time. And the answer is yes, I mean there
Speaker 2: are there. A great discovery was off the coast of
Speaker 2: the UK. There were and we talked about this in
Speaker 2: the film. There was a site underwater where they they
Speaker 2: found had had previously of course been above water, had
Speaker 2: two types of grains that were not native to the UK,
Speaker 2: and they were dated to about eight thousand years ago
Speaker 2: and you say, well, how did this grain? How this
Speaker 2: grain get here? And what they figured out was this
Speaker 2: this grain came from the region of modern Turkey, so
Speaker 2: you know the area around what at that time, you know,
Speaker 2: go Beckley, Tepe and all that kind of stuff, so
Speaker 2: that that there was trade with this grain has no
Speaker 2: there's no ancestors of this, these types of grains in
Speaker 2: northern Europe, right, so it's not native. That's a trade
Speaker 2: network of two five hundred kilometers cliff and this.
Speaker 1: Is thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: So that's one example. Another great example from a you know,
Speaker 2: a more recent time is pearl millet, which is a
Speaker 2: type of grain which originates in Mauritania Mali in western Africa.
Speaker 2: The weird thing about this is this was a prevalent
Speaker 2: grain there and around twenty five hundred BC, so much
Speaker 2: more recent time period, right four thousand, five hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: But what's weird about that is that grain appears in
Speaker 2: India about within a couple hundred years. The thing is
Speaker 2: it's not really found in the Middle East, and it's
Speaker 2: not no evidence of it has been found at Saharan
Speaker 2: oases because you'd say, oh, they went over land. What
Speaker 2: that implies is that four th five hundred years ago
Speaker 2: there was a direct aquatic you know, seafaring trade route
Speaker 2: from western Africa to India. I mean, that's one of
Speaker 2: the only ways to explain the evidence at hand. So
Speaker 2: I think this type of thing starts to open you
Speaker 2: up and the deeper in time you look by the way,
Speaker 2: this is a trend that continues. Middle East. There's a
Speaker 2: place called Matsas City. I think it's around ten thousand BC.
Speaker 2: They had found artifacts and you know, trade items that
Speaker 2: had come from distant areas in the Middle East. So
Speaker 2: that's twelve thousand years ago. And then one of the
Speaker 2: most shocking ones, Cliff is you go back three hundred
Speaker 2: thousand years to a time that we understand people to
Speaker 2: have been these small hundred gatherer groups and there's evidence
Speaker 2: in Africa that they were trading with groups dozens of
Speaker 2: miles away and that stone for their tools came from
Speaker 2: something times. You know, it could be hundreds of miles away.
Speaker 2: How did they know it was there? You know, who
Speaker 2: were they trading with what? So I think what this
Speaker 2: does is it doesn't outright prove anything, and I try
Speaker 2: to stay away from that, but it shows that maybe
Speaker 2: our understanding of the ancient past that I learned, certainly
Speaker 2: in high school or college growing up, is a little
Speaker 2: different than what we think it is.
Speaker 1: I think it needs to be more flexible. I think
Speaker 1: our historians are so rigid. For me, you have theories
Speaker 1: and hypotheses that are turned into facts because no one
Speaker 1: else is questioning this. And this is the problem that
Speaker 1: I have with Mesoamerica. These people had very sophisticated backgrounds mathematics, sciences, agriculture,
Speaker 1: and they're considered stone age, right, you know, so something
Speaker 1: is really really a skewed There address something that you
Speaker 1: just brought up that's featured in the book, which is
Speaker 1: a frustration of mine, which was not being able to
Speaker 1: find stone evidence buildings, temples, pyramids. And in the book
Speaker 1: you feature the work of doctor Nick Brooks, and he
Speaker 1: discovered in western Sahara step a step pyramid. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then he also found stone structures and I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: You have a photo of a dolmen. Yeah, talk about
Speaker 1: that that. I mean, that's remarkable. That's those are not
Speaker 1: simple structures.
Speaker 2: No, this is And Nick's a great guy, by the way,
Speaker 2: He was very generous to allow me to use some
Speaker 2: of those photographs and so forth in the film and whatnot.
Speaker 2: And yeah, you know, I've read Nick's book. It's it's
Speaker 2: worth reading if you have an interest in Western Saharan archaeology.
Speaker 2: But that's the group I was mentioning who had found
Speaker 2: all these different stone structures, and you know, they're I
Speaker 2: think making some risk to life and limb being out
Speaker 2: there because there was you know, I think a civil
Speaker 2: war being fought it around that time. So there's a
Speaker 2: lot more work that needs to be done out there.
Speaker 2: But you know, I'm sure your your audience is familiar
Speaker 2: with Knabduplaia, which is in the eastern Sahara, right, You
Speaker 2: know that site that's the sort of pre date stoneheads.
Speaker 2: It's probably seven to ten thousand BC something like that.
Speaker 2: That's one of the most fascinating and bizarre sites in
Speaker 2: the world, astrologically aligned, very high degree of sophistication. I
Speaker 2: think it was discovered by Fred Wendorf's team, who's a
Speaker 2: famous Southern Methodist University archaeologist.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 2: These some of these sites in the Western Sahara are
Speaker 2: very similar. And I don't think the analysis that Wendorf
Speaker 2: did and his team on the archaeo astronomy has been
Speaker 2: done on these sites, and but for boy, from a
Speaker 2: first glance, they look remarkably similar, right, an arrangement of
Speaker 2: vertical stone columns in a way that doesn't suggest a graveyard,
Speaker 2: It suggests, you know, more like a like a North
Speaker 2: European stone circle.
Speaker 1: Right, So let me stop you were you referring to
Speaker 1: archaeo astronomy when they actually have the foundation place in
Speaker 1: a certain way that is aligned with the North Pole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so like Nabtiplia is a tremendously sophisticated astronomical observatory,
Speaker 2: just like Stonehenge. Right, it just happens to be smaller,
Speaker 2: and it's in the middle of the eastern Sahara Desert,
Speaker 2: and it's from thousands of years before Stonehenge. Yeah, amazing,
Speaker 2: you know, And that's one of the things, like you
Speaker 2: bring up, Cliff, how are the people such sophisticated astronomers
Speaker 2: and mathematicians and builders, thinkers, you know, seafarers at such
Speaker 2: an early period of time, But we picture them as
Speaker 2: these sort of dirty, knuckle dragging half apes, right, I
Speaker 2: mean that's the common conception. But you know, here you
Speaker 2: have evidence in the western Sahara and again most of
Speaker 2: these the estimated dates are more Neolithic, maybe like three
Speaker 2: four maybe five thousand BC, but I don't think there's
Speaker 2: any conclusive dating that's been done. You also find these
Speaker 2: weird structures that look like giant walls that have collapsed,
Speaker 2: and now we're those walls that were defensive territorial. Was
Speaker 2: it to keep livestock? You know, nobody knows, right, You
Speaker 2: just find these long trains of stones that clearly there
Speaker 2: was there was something here. Yeah, so I think there's
Speaker 2: there's a mystery there about that. And and the other
Speaker 2: thing is there's these things called keyhole tombs, many of
Speaker 2: which have been found across the Middle East and North Africa.
Speaker 2: And these are they look like a keyhole because there's
Speaker 2: usually a burial, but then there's a sort of stone
Speaker 2: walls that go out and they are aligned to you know,
Speaker 2: solstices and all kinds of things, and these are you
Speaker 2: assume this is just some hunter gatherer people, and you
Speaker 2: know this is not we're not talking like dynastic Egypt
Speaker 2: level of sophistication. And yet here they are. They've they've
Speaker 2: aligned these things with precision. There was clearly a fascination
Speaker 2: with an understanding and a science awareness of the night
Speaker 2: sky and and and of the movements of the sun
Speaker 2: and the moon and so forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing. And one of the things that I was
Speaker 1: pleasantly surprised to read is the New Seafaring Discoveries, and
Speaker 1: you sent me an article and I believe is mentioned
Speaker 1: in the book, which is the migrations of people by
Speaker 1: water are over one hundred thousand years old. This is huge,
Speaker 1: And my biggest issue with Mesoamerican culture is that current mayanists,
Speaker 1: these are archaeologists who study specifics in Mayan culture, believe
Speaker 1: there has never been a migration, that these are just
Speaker 1: natural indigenous people. But the problem with this is that
Speaker 1: you look closely at their artifacts and there's African centric,
Speaker 1: Asian centric, Middle East and centric faces people and artifacts
Speaker 1: from these other locations. The only way they got to
Speaker 1: Mexico was by migrating by open water. So it makes
Speaker 1: the case for me. But I'd like to you to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about what is featured in the
Speaker 1: book and why this is an important discovery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, before we dive into that, I'll just
Speaker 2: tell you I took an interest in the seafaring and
Speaker 2: actually was working I still kind of developing a documentary
Speaker 2: about that as well, which is still in the early
Speaker 2: research stages. But the fact of the matter is they've found,
Speaker 2: you know, strains of DNA in you know, in South
Speaker 2: America and Central America that that that's appear to match
Speaker 2: up if I recall correctly with some of these more
Speaker 2: like Aboriginal peoples of you know, kind of Australia and
Speaker 2: some of those others around there. Well, how did those
Speaker 2: guys get there? I mean, that doesn't fit fit the
Speaker 2: traditional migration across you know, the Baringian land bridge story
Speaker 2: and suggests and certainly if you look at the spread
Speaker 2: of the Polynesians who completely colonized the Pacific Ocean in
Speaker 2: a matter of you know, a few thousand, you know,
Speaker 2: a couple thousand years, it shows you and their level
Speaker 2: of technology was not higher than the people who had
Speaker 2: immediately preceded them per se. So you know, this idea
Speaker 2: that people just kind of decided to walk across a
Speaker 2: massive glacier locked ice bridge to get over to North
Speaker 2: America I think has been soundly disproven by the fact that,
Speaker 2: you know, the first of all, you have these different
Speaker 2: strains of DNA, but second of all, that you have,
Speaker 2: Like in my home state of New Mexico, there's you know,
Speaker 2: that discovery of the footprints from twenty three thousand years ago,
Speaker 2: which overturned this scientific paradigm of the Clovis first, Like,
Speaker 2: Clovis people came here twelve thirteen thousand years ago. No
Speaker 2: one was here before that. That's how it is. If
Speaker 2: you suggest anything else, we will blackball you and you'll
Speaker 2: be laughed out of academia. That was the paradigm, Cliff
Speaker 2: and all those There was a few a few academics
Speaker 2: who had the courage to say, hey, like that guy
Speaker 2: in the Carolinas who's like, I've got a site here.
Speaker 2: It looks like it's twenty five thousand years old.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Totter or tur or whatever his name is.
Speaker 2: Evel ridiculed the guy, right, Yeah, guess what, He's probably right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here we go.
Speaker 2: We have unequivocal evidence. So I think that just goes
Speaker 2: to your point about overturning scientific paradigms. But let's talk
Speaker 2: about the seafaring. This this blew my mind. When I
Speaker 2: was doing this research. I was certain that this would
Speaker 2: prove to be one of the things that was untrue. Well,
Speaker 2: I was wrong about that. So I think, you know,
Speaker 2: at least I don't know about you, but I learned
Speaker 2: in kind of high school or whatnot that the first
Speaker 2: seafaring people were probably the Egyptians or the you know,
Speaker 2: kind of the the mid you know, Middle Eastern, maybe
Speaker 2: like you know, Babylonians, Babylonians or you know, err or whatever,
Speaker 2: you know that kind of stuff. Maybe it was like
Speaker 2: three thousand BC. Yeah, sort of thing. Well, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the eye openers here is that's not true.
Speaker 2: And we know this isn't true because first of all,
Speaker 2: we actually have physical evidence of boats that are older
Speaker 2: than this, and we show this in the film. You know,
Speaker 2: there's in Africa the Dafuna canoe, and this speaks to
Speaker 2: the reality of the Green Sahara period, by the way,
Speaker 2: because the Dafuna canoe was found within about twenty five
Speaker 2: or fifty kilometers of the ancient shoreline of the Mega
Speaker 2: Lake Chad. Right, So people who were living in these
Speaker 2: river networks around the lake had these huge canoes and
Speaker 2: we only find one that happened to have been buried
Speaker 2: in clay. Well, you and I both know it's like
Speaker 2: if you have a car, I mean I have a car, right,
Speaker 2: everyone has a car. So if one guy had had
Speaker 2: a giant canoe or one tribe, you could be sure
Speaker 2: the other people around there had them too. Why don't
Speaker 2: we find them. Well, it's a tropical climate and wood
Speaker 2: deteriorates within a couple hundred years. So unless it's locked
Speaker 2: in this case, it was buried in this like clay sediment,
Speaker 2: you're never going to find it. So the Dafuna canoe
Speaker 2: demonstrates for a fact that in the middle of the
Speaker 2: Green Sahara people had large sophisticated canoes and were sailing
Speaker 2: and zipping around all over the place. That matches up
Speaker 2: more with what we think of in this Atlanta story
Speaker 2: of these people have a large fleet of boats, right
Speaker 2: and the war. Maybe it's more war canoes. Maybe they're
Speaker 2: not Greek try Rates, but maybe they look a little different. Well,
Speaker 2: you keep you keep seeing this, right, if you go
Speaker 2: back to the oldest the oldest physical boat we have
Speaker 2: is called the Pessa canoe, and I think it was
Speaker 2: found in amsterd I am accidentally by, you know, a
Speaker 2: highway construction crew that was digging up like a peat
Speaker 2: bog to lay a highway in and they found this like
Speaker 2: kind of boat looking thing, and you know there in
Speaker 2: this this caused controversy to Cliff, just to show you
Speaker 2: how back we are in terms of our thinking. People said, oh,
Speaker 2: this is a this is a couldn't possibly be a canoe,
Speaker 2: this is a trough for feeding animals. And I'm like,
Speaker 2: but more domesticating livestock at twelve thousand years ago that
Speaker 2: we know of, So why do they need a trough?
Speaker 2: So and then they tested, they made a copy and
Speaker 2: tested it, and sure enough it was. It paddled, it floated,
Speaker 2: it was a canoe. And today there's no doubt about that.
Speaker 2: But that was the supposition. So until very recently, like
Speaker 2: within the last hundred years, even the last fifty years,
Speaker 2: the supposition has been nobody had boats going back eight
Speaker 2: ten thousand BC. And that's flat out wrong. So the
Speaker 2: thing people have to remember is the wood will disintegrate.
Speaker 2: So we have to look at the indirect evidence. What
Speaker 2: do we often find stone anchors right back ring stones?
Speaker 2: You tend to find these all over the Mediterranean in
Speaker 2: other places. But more importantly, what about islands that were
Speaker 2: never connected to the mainland and are distant from other
Speaker 2: you know, require a journey of you know, some tens
Speaker 2: of kilometers to get there. Well, I don't think large
Speaker 2: groups of people were swimming out there. That seems out
Speaker 2: of question, right. I mean maybe there was like one
Speaker 2: dude who could have done it, but it just doesn't
Speaker 2: make sense right to go that far. In some cases
Speaker 2: you're talking hundreds of kilometers. So Crete is a great example.
Speaker 2: Crete's the largest island in Greece. It's right smack in
Speaker 2: the middle of the eastern Mediterranean. Crete has been a
Speaker 2: detached island for at least four to five million years, right,
Speaker 2: so it wasn't connected to the mainland, even during you know,
Speaker 2: kind of cold periods where the sea level might have
Speaker 2: dropped a little bit. It's quite remote from the mainland
Speaker 2: on Crete. I believe it was about two thousand and
Speaker 2: eight or nine there was a discovery made where they
Speaker 2: were looking for some stone tools from ten thousand years
Speaker 2: ago twelve thousand years ago, and what they found, cliff
Speaker 2: was layer after layer after layer in this gorge. When
Speaker 2: they started looking at the strata showing that there were
Speaker 2: stone tools there carved by people from yeah, nine to
Speaker 2: ten thousand years you know BC. But then they found
Speaker 2: them from twenty five thousand BC, forty thousand BC eighty
Speaker 2: thousand BC up to one hundred and thirty thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: So let's stop and think about what this means. Human
Speaker 2: beings have been sailing in some kind of oh to
Speaker 2: crete for at least one hundred and thirty thousand years.
Speaker 1: That's mind blowing. That's I love it. I love hearing that.
Speaker 2: And this is this is not you know, Joe, ancient
Speaker 2: aliens doing this. This is this is academic archaeologists have
Speaker 2: confirmed this, and.
Speaker 1: This is all recently. This is all recent stuff.
Speaker 2: Though, this is all within the last decade, yeah, that
Speaker 2: these papers have come out. And the other cliff, I'll
Speaker 2: take it two steps further, so that shows you that, look,
Speaker 2: if people have been sailing for one hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: thousand years, the idea that someone you know, an Atlantean
Speaker 2: type culture or or you know, grew a culture from
Speaker 2: ten to twelve thousand years ago, was sailing as small beans,
Speaker 2: right like this is this is not that that shouldn't
Speaker 2: stagger us, right, It only staggers us because most people
Speaker 2: don't know this context. If you go, I'll take you
Speaker 2: one further. There's another island in Greece. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 2: forgetting the specific island. It might have been Melos, but
Speaker 2: I can't remember where. There are many different time periods
Speaker 2: where stone tools were dug up. But this is an
Speaker 2: island in the middle of the Aegean. Again, I'm blanking
Speaker 2: on which one it is. But of course there's tools
Speaker 2: going back long periods of time that were used by
Speaker 2: Homo sapiens. But they've found tools there that match up
Speaker 2: with Neanderthal tools. And again, this is a detached island
Speaker 2: in the middle of the Aegean. You had to get
Speaker 2: there by boat, and this is from two hundred thousand
Speaker 2: years ago. So now you got it's not just Homo
Speaker 2: sapiens sailing around in boats, it's Neanderthals sailing around in boats.
Speaker 1: No. I had to wonder for a second here, Jack,
Speaker 1: if the academia just can't conceive of early man having
Speaker 1: the sophistication to travel by boat, they just are locked
Speaker 1: into like these people are just too stupid, yeah, to
Speaker 1: put together a raft or a canoe or even some
Speaker 1: kind of a ship and travel great distances to new locations.
Speaker 1: It's it's like an impediment, like a speech impediment. It's
Speaker 1: a brain impediment that blocks they're thinking because I'm just
Speaker 1: perplexed at it. We're going to take a short commercial
Speaker 1: break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves, and we
Speaker 1: will return shortly with my guest today producer Jack Kelly
Speaker 1: discussing his newly released book, The Atlantis Puzzle, will be
Speaker 1: right back.
Speaker 3: Boom, Santa Baby, just slipper sable under the tree for me.
Speaker 3: Then an awful good girl, Santa Baby, So hurry down
Speaker 3: the chimney to night.
Speaker 1: My guest today, Jack Kelly has produced a well received
Speaker 1: documentary that first ran on Netflix and is now available
Speaker 1: on YouTube. By punching in The Atlantis Puzzle, you can
Speaker 1: see it for free in his entirety. The new book,
Speaker 1: which is just released, has fifty percent more content and
Speaker 1: details on the geological discoveries and archaeological finds that have
Speaker 1: been made so far in the western Sahara area of
Speaker 1: North Africa. Listen, as we come to the conclusion of
Speaker 1: our time together, I did want to expand on that
Speaker 1: navigation and ask you, and this is in the book,
Speaker 1: these trade networks, and you give us some nice examples
Speaker 1: of various grains that were found. Is there evidence of
Speaker 1: a region of fruits, vegetables or even other kinds of
Speaker 1: artifacts that have been found in unusual areas that only
Speaker 1: could have been taken there through trade waterways of some kind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is one of the most interesting areas.
Speaker 2: And I think the mill example, like the pearl mill,
Speaker 2: is a really strong one. I haven't personally found any
Speaker 2: yet from the time period we're talking about, but this
Speaker 2: is an example from the same geographic area, still from
Speaker 2: four thousand, five hundred years ago, right, So, you know,
Speaker 2: I think one of the surprising things we touched on
Speaker 2: Knob Duplia is a discovery of semi domesticated grains there,
Speaker 2: and so this sort of upended this idea of well,
Speaker 2: you know, Africans never domesticate anything outside of the Nile
Speaker 2: River Valley. I mean, you know, I want to just
Speaker 2: sort of go just touch back on the seafaring thing.
Speaker 2: If people are have been seafaring across the Mediterranean for
Speaker 2: at least one hundred and thirty thousand years, there's also
Speaker 2: evidence in various you know, caves and tidal pools and
Speaker 2: things that people have understood astronomy for one hundred to
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty thousand years, right, like understanding the
Speaker 2: tides and when you could collect shellfish and things like that.
Speaker 2: It's more sophisticated than people understand. And it's not just like, hey,
Speaker 2: it's Tuesday, it's time to collect my shellfish. You really
Speaker 2: have to understand and the cycles of the moon and
Speaker 2: the tides and things like that with a degree of
Speaker 2: sophistication to figure that out. The seafaring thing. I just
Speaker 2: want to mention one more thing that blew my mind,
Speaker 2: which is in Southeast Asia, there's two islands that were
Speaker 2: never connected to the mainland. One of them's in the Philippines,
Speaker 2: one of them's in Indonesia. Those two islands have evidence
Speaker 2: of human occupation that via butchered like you know, rhino
Speaker 2: bones or something going back eight hundred thousand to a
Speaker 2: million years ago. What's that mean, Cliff, These are not
Speaker 2: Homo sapiens. They're not Neanderthals as far as we understand.
Speaker 2: That's Homo erectus, who we perceive as a hairy, naked
Speaker 2: proto man with a barely can command fire. But yet
Speaker 2: these people were here and they crossed distances of you know,
Speaker 2: twenty thirty miles by some type of craft to get there.
Speaker 2: So what I want to leave people with is a
Speaker 2: sense of kind of wonderment about the ancient cultures going
Speaker 2: back not just thousands, but tens or hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of years that we have lost. And we know that
Speaker 2: human civilization doesn't just go like this, right, there's these
Speaker 2: waves of rising and falling, of advancement and then kind
Speaker 2: of dark ages. Right, we have that in our own history,
Speaker 2: right with the rise and the decline and fall of
Speaker 2: the Roman Empire and the dark ages and all that.
Speaker 2: Egypt has at least three known they call them intermediate periods,
Speaker 2: which were you know, you have these kind of these
Speaker 2: apex periods right with the Old Kingdom, and then there's
Speaker 2: there's a dark age for could be five, six hundred
Speaker 2: or more years, and then there's a rise again. So
Speaker 2: if there's one thing we can say, it's that human
Speaker 2: civilization follows this curve of rising and falling as far
Speaker 2: as we know throughout our observed history. No reason to
Speaker 2: assume that doesn't also continue far into the distant past,
Speaker 2: where there could be periods of a high culture which
Speaker 2: then is destroyed by natural disasters climate change, war, famine, disease,
Speaker 2: you name it, you know, fill in the blank, the
Speaker 2: four horsemen of the apocalypse, and then Basically people go
Speaker 2: into these periods of subsistence and struggle. Right. So one
Speaker 2: of the things I know you have an interest in
Speaker 2: is the concept of ancient or advanced civilizations. I don't
Speaker 2: believe that the Atlantis myth speaks of like a high
Speaker 2: technology people. I think it speaks of a more archaic
Speaker 2: Bronze Age or even classical Greek can really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that was my question to you, is if
Speaker 1: you were to put your finger on the highest level
Speaker 1: of Atlantinian culture, perhaps you know, during this most productive period.
Speaker 1: I was waiting for you to say, well, yeah, these
Speaker 1: are out of context because they were able to develop
Speaker 1: the telescopes, they had certain form of propulsion, and you're
Speaker 1: kind of going back to the basic You're just I mean, describe.
Speaker 1: I want you to keep going. I want you to
Speaker 1: give me the description of what you think their level
Speaker 1: of scientific advancement was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what Plato says in your writes in his
Speaker 2: dialogues is sounds an awful lot like, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of a Bronze Age civilization. They have chariots, they have
Speaker 2: you know, warships they have, but they fight with horse chariots, right,
Speaker 2: They're not fighting with hovercraft and atomic.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, or propeller planes of some kind.
Speaker 2: Oh no. And people who are of saying, oh, you
Speaker 2: know they had this and they had that. Well, if
Speaker 2: all we're basing it on is the Platonic record, you know,
Speaker 2: his writing, it's not what it says, right. It sounds
Speaker 2: like an ancient Greek Bronze Age city state.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So a number of people have tried to say, take
Speaker 2: that story and say, well, this was inspired by a
Speaker 2: later story. I don't think that's true, Cliff. I think
Speaker 2: that's Plato putting the spin of his own era on
Speaker 2: a pre existing myth. So unfortunately, I don't think we
Speaker 2: know what the level of specific technology was. But I
Speaker 2: think what we can say for certain is that transcontinental
Speaker 2: trade networks were legitimate thing in the early hol.
Speaker 1: Scene, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2: We can stay that sailing across the Mediterranean was a
Speaker 2: real thing during the early hol Of scene. We can
Speaker 2: say that you know, astronomy, and you know, possibly even
Speaker 2: early farming and irrigation things like that could have been
Speaker 2: in existence. But until a lot more archaeological research is done,
Speaker 2: I don't think we will know. And you know, one
Speaker 2: of one of my favorite things to think about is
Speaker 2: Are you familiar with the Eocene layers of mysterious origin? Yeah,
Speaker 2: fifty five million years ago. There's these in the in
Speaker 2: the sort of fossil record, there's a period of time
Speaker 2: which is commensurate with what we would consider the climate
Speaker 2: effects of an industrial civilization. So there's a great paper
Speaker 2: oute there written by a couple guys called the Solurian hypothesis.
Speaker 2: These are academics, and they said, look, we're not saying
Speaker 2: that there was some sort of you know, dinosaur or
Speaker 2: descendant advanced industrial people living here. Probably it's from volcanoes
Speaker 2: and natural climate change. But the the signature of this
Speaker 2: is probably what someone will be able to see of
Speaker 2: our own culture in fifty million years. So we are
Speaker 2: not able actually to distinguish. And I think this is
Speaker 2: one of the things I like to leave people with
Speaker 2: is thinking about, look, what's going to be left in
Speaker 2: ten thousand years from our civilization? What are you gonna find?
Speaker 2: Are you going to find maybe like a watch in
Speaker 2: a cave somewhere. Are you going to find? Is the
Speaker 2: Hoover dam who was built to last ten thousand years.
Speaker 2: But what happens when you get to ten thousand and
Speaker 2: one and it dam breaks, and all that stuff gets
Speaker 2: pushed down river by the Colorado River. At Bury right,
Speaker 2: maybe you find some scraps of metal or I don't know,
Speaker 2: some congrege you like, and that stuff's going to deteriorate too. Really,
Speaker 2: all that will be left, even plastical deteriorate. All that
Speaker 2: might be left is some sites of nuclear radiation. And
Speaker 2: even then the contents, the drums or whatever, that'll all
Speaker 2: be gone too. So that's something I like to leave
Speaker 2: people to think about, is what if we have such
Speaker 2: a hard time, you know, quote unquote proving what things
Speaker 2: were like in the distant past, what do we think
Speaker 2: people are going to think of us? And how will
Speaker 2: how will the future? How will they actually be able
Speaker 2: to understand us If there's not a continued continuity of
Speaker 2: our culture, if we're not taking steps to avoid war,
Speaker 2: and if we're not ensuring that people have an understanding
Speaker 2: of the past, what are we going to be left with.
Speaker 2: Our descendants are going to be scratching their heads just
Speaker 2: like we are today, and what people are going to
Speaker 2: be hypothesizing as to whether we had airplanes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's funny. Uh, why don't we have more
Speaker 1: documents on Atlantis? If this was a huge place, and
Speaker 1: there were perhaps tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of people that were born on this so far mythological
Speaker 1: place known as Atlantis. What do you think there'd be
Speaker 1: more references out there of this place? I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: asking you because this has been your your go to
Speaker 1: for the last several years. And if you ran across
Speaker 1: the document that was kind of odd or ambiguous but
Speaker 1: had some of the key features of Atlanta's it's an
Speaker 1: island and has sophisticated here or there, I mean, why
Speaker 1: don't we find more documents?
Speaker 2: And I think it's it's pretty simple, Cliff. I don't
Speaker 2: think any written records as far as I'm aware of
Speaker 2: the oldest written scripts that actually have been found in
Speaker 2: Greece from about five thousand BC, So I don't think
Speaker 2: any written records ever survived from call it before, you know,
Speaker 2: anytime before that. I think, you know, stuff just is
Speaker 2: whatever was around is gone like.
Speaker 1: Five thousand years ago, and then then that's it, because
Speaker 1: what fragments we have yet left or just melting away.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, And I mean if you even just think
Speaker 2: about the scraps of ancient Egyptian or Greek documents we
Speaker 2: have ago, they're all deteriorated, and you know, and you
Speaker 2: know you have stuff carved in stone. But my thought
Speaker 2: is that Plato, I believe, took a pre existing story
Speaker 2: or a myth he had heard, and then I think
Speaker 2: he manipulated it for his own purposes. So I think
Speaker 2: people have to keep that in mind. The story we're getting.
Speaker 2: I don't think anyone should assume is all real or
Speaker 2: all false. I think we should assume that a very
Speaker 2: wise and intelligent guy used used in it maybe a
Speaker 2: pre existing myth, and put his own spin on it
Speaker 2: for his own audience and for his purposes.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So, think about how many times Dracula has been retold, right,
Speaker 2: I think about and they range from Goofy Car to
Speaker 2: Nunes to really scary horror movies. Right. I think this
Speaker 2: is something where when we look back at the research,
Speaker 2: there are two groups of people who existed and in
Speaker 2: early Holy scene North Africa, one of which originated in
Speaker 2: the region of modern Mauritania. They were known as the
Speaker 2: land people, and they spread eastward across the north across
Speaker 2: North Africa. Right in the early Holt scene expanded across
Speaker 2: all of North Africa. If that doesn't sound like the
Speaker 2: seeds of the Atlantis myth of a people moving from
Speaker 2: west to east across North Africa and conquering. I don't
Speaker 2: know what does, right, So that might be the real
Speaker 2: root of the story, was this expansion of these of
Speaker 2: these niger congos speaking hunting people. And then I think
Speaker 2: what probably happened is Plato put a spinof this, because
Speaker 2: there are other Platonic dialogues where Plato references the idea
Speaker 2: in the Greek mind that ancient Egypt, Egyptian culture had
Speaker 2: been going on for at least ten thousand years, right. Well,
Speaker 2: you have to ask yourself, Cliff, how did they know
Speaker 2: that they didn't have archaeological science, this, that, and the other.
Speaker 2: They knew Egypt was damn old and that these things
Speaker 2: were thousands of years old, but they didn't know exactly
Speaker 2: how old, right, And we know today that Egypt, the
Speaker 2: Nile River valley has probably been inhabited for seven hundred
Speaker 2: thousand years by different types of humans and people, and
Speaker 2: even some of the earliest structures there are fifty to
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand years old, like very simple stone things
Speaker 2: and so forth. So I think there was an idea
Speaker 2: in the Greek mind. Egypt is the oldest place we
Speaker 2: know of that has written records, and so I think
Speaker 2: Plato's setting the story with the Egyptians communicating to the Greeks, Hey,
Speaker 2: you guys don't know your own history. We know it
Speaker 2: because we've got it written down. Let me tell you
Speaker 2: a story that shows just how ignorant you are, and
Speaker 2: just how well read you know, or how aware we
Speaker 2: are right right, And I think that that is one
Speaker 2: of the purposes of the Atlantis story. And I talk
Speaker 2: about this a lot in the third part of the book.
Speaker 2: Some people might not find this interesting, but I went
Speaker 2: really deep into the philosophy and the references that Plato
Speaker 2: might have been making to the Odyssey, or to the Iliad,
Speaker 2: or to other ancient Greek myths or ideas. Why is
Speaker 2: he referencing these stories? And as you know in the film,
Speaker 2: you know this idea that Plato leaves off the end
Speaker 2: of Critias and it kind of directs you back to
Speaker 2: the beginning of the Odyssey. Well, what's he trying to say, Hey,
Speaker 2: go read the Odyssey. No, I think he's trying to say, Hey,
Speaker 2: civilization can rise, and I'm giving you an example of
Speaker 2: a culture that you can't prove existed or didn't exist.
Speaker 2: Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. And I'm trying to
Speaker 2: explain to you that if you don't take care of
Speaker 2: your current civilization, you're going to wind up on this long,
Speaker 2: circuitous odyssey, like you're going to go through dark ages
Speaker 2: and you're going to have a hard time getting even
Speaker 2: back to the point, you know where you are now.
Speaker 2: So again, people kind of tend to forget about the
Speaker 2: philosophic side of this story, But I think Plato was
Speaker 2: taking an ancient myth shaping it to his own needs,
Speaker 2: you know, filling in details he couldn't possibly have known.
Speaker 2: I mean, how did he know how many two horse
Speaker 2: chariots the army had? I mean, think about it. You
Speaker 2: couldn't have known that. So he's inventing. And then I
Speaker 2: think he's taking that story and making a point which
Speaker 2: you and I have talked about at length, which is,
Speaker 2: how do we know about the past if we don't
Speaker 2: have evidence, What do we need to know to be
Speaker 2: able to prove of things? Why does civilizations rise and fall?
Speaker 2: And what what what happens?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 2: What what's really behind those processes? And is there anything
Speaker 2: we can do to stop it maybe a scarier question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. The books called The Atlantis Puzzle. My guest
Speaker 1: today has been Jack Kelly. This book came out just
Speaker 1: a couple of months ago in October, and I just
Speaker 1: saw it on Atlantis. It's well worth your time to
Speaker 1: pick it up. Lots of I think you must have
Speaker 1: self published it because there's a ton of colored photographs
Speaker 1: in here, which is very rare for a book of
Speaker 1: this size to to have. And uh, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a nice update and it's a nice addition to the documentary.
Speaker 1: So how can people learn more about your work? Jack?
Speaker 1: Give us your website.
Speaker 2: Sure, you can go to Atlantis Puzzle dot com and
Speaker 2: just you know, take a look at what we've got
Speaker 2: on there. You can and find The Atlantis Puzzle Book
Speaker 2: internationally in about a dozen countries on Amazon, and just
Speaker 2: so Jeff Bezos doesn't get all the money, it's also
Speaker 2: on Barnes and Noble.
Speaker 1: Oh good, good for you. Fantastic All right, Hey, real
Speaker 1: pleasure having you on the program, and I'm looking forward
Speaker 1: to really deep diving into this book a little more. So,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining me.
Speaker 2: Fantastic, Cliff, Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to
Speaker 2: talk with you.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we touched upon in this
Speaker 1: interview was the obvious nature of mass migrations through ocean travel,
Speaker 1: and this is becoming much more clear to a lot
Speaker 1: of people other than the archaeological community, who are still
Speaker 1: very firm in their belief that there were no ancient migrations.
Speaker 1: These articles and I'm going to post a couple of
Speaker 1: them on the Facebook page. There's one specific article that
Speaker 1: reveals that ancient man over one hundred thousand years ago
Speaker 1: was migrating by ocean in the Pacific from China to Australia.
Speaker 1: In fact, next year we're going to have Evan Young,
Speaker 1: who is in Sydney, presents some new data that reveals
Speaker 1: the Chinese were in Australia, but not just Australia, people
Speaker 1: coming to the Americas, North America and South America. So
Speaker 1: this is something that has to be taken more seriously
Speaker 1: because there's been evidence forever over one hundred and fifty years,
Speaker 1: and this is the problem. For over one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years, the archaeological community has refused to believe that
Speaker 1: there was any mass migrations. And I'm presenting this right
Speaker 1: now in my book. Is the multi racial types of
Speaker 1: people who lived thousands of years ago in present day Mexico,
Speaker 1: African centric, Asian centric, Middle Eastern, Caucasian, and a number
Speaker 1: of species of human that are gone not with us anymore,
Speaker 1: long heads, wide heads, very unusual cranial structures and bodies,
Speaker 1: and they probably were survivors of the Great Cataclysm. So
Speaker 1: so we need to look at this migration possibility with
Speaker 1: a little more clarity and not immediately say that it's
Speaker 1: not possible, because it is possible. And now it's probable
Speaker 1: that our ancestors traveled quite frequently and migrated from Africa, Europe,
Speaker 1: Asia to North America. And I want to mention that
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Speaker 1: this is it for this program. I want to think
Speaker 1: my guest today, Jack Kelly and his new book, The
Speaker 1: Atlantic's Puzzle. As always the team of guiltour Mark Foster
Speaker 1: in Faia in Pakistan. You guys rock, Happy Thanksgiving and
Speaker 1: we'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 2: The Compani