[pensive music playing]
[Graham] These enormous structures in the Amazon
speak to a monumental human endeavor.
[dramatic sting]
But how many of them are there?
[pensive music continues]
Tell us what you found.
-[Fabio] You see the trees? -[Graham] Yeah.
-[Fabio] And now the terrain. -[Pärssinen] Now we take it down.
Wow.
-Wow. -Incredible.
[pensive music continues]
[Graham] Professor Pärssinen and the team have found nine new geoglyphs
that were hidden beneath the jungle canopy.
[electronic warble]
Here we have round octagonal.
This octagon, it's about 100 meters.
-Yeah. -100 meters in diameter.
Diameter.
Incredible. And nobody knew it was there until you got up there with your LiDAR.
Nobody knew about this.
Yeah. It's incredible what this technology can reveal.
Let's move up and look at this interesting feature.
[electronic warble]
[Graham] These two nearly overlap
and appear to be connected, perhaps to other sites.
This is road with embankments on both sides.
-An ancient road? -Ancient road, yes.
Leading to the large embankment square.
-Yes. -Stunning.
[Graham] If these geoglyphs were built at the same time as others nearby,
the roads suggest an organized civilization thrived here
at least 2,500 years ago.
And there's evidence they might've been around
for very much longer.
We found that many of these sites have been established
already 10,000 years ago.
[Graham] We can't be sure whether we're looking at
reconstructions of much older geoglyphs.
But what we do know is that human beings were present in that area.
And that evidence goes back more than 10,000 years, uh, into the past
and brings us very close to the end of the last Ice Age.
However old they may be,
the scale of the enterprise is truly astonishing.
So this raises the question,
how many people would it take to do something like this?
We speak, uh, about hundreds of thousands.
Yes. Literally hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
Amazing.
[Graham] Professor Pärsinnen isn't suggesting
all of those people physically built the geoglyphs.
But a population that size must have existed here long-term
to both provide for and support the necessary workforce.
[birds chirping]
Within a few hundred meters of known geoglyphs,
our LiDAR team were finding more geoglyphs that nobody even knew about.
So what on earth can we expect to discover
if we go hundreds of miles into that dense rainforest?
[triumphant music playing]
This has changed totally our understanding of Amazonia.
We're dealing with a huge phenomenon here,
which has to change the history of the Americas
and changing the history of the world.
[Pärssinen chuckles]
[triumphant music ends]
[theme song playing]
[theme song ends]
-[thunder rumbling] -[electronic warble]
[suspenseful music playing]
We can't possibly begin to tell the story of the Americas
until we have much more complete knowledge of what was going on in the Amazon…
not 1,000 years ago, but 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago.
We need to keep going back.
We need not to close our minds to these possibilities.
[tense music continues]
And there's tantalizing evidence of that deeper history
1,000 miles northeast of Acre.
I've come to the Monte Alegre National Park
on the north bank of the Amazon.
Although much of the Amazon basin is flat and cloaked in trees,
here, distinctive rocky outcrops tower over the canopy.
Archaeologist and anthropologist Dr. Christopher Davis
has spent years investigating a potentially history-changing discovery
high on one of these ridges.
[menacing music playing]
This is Serra do Paituna…
hill of the Blackwater Lake…
a towering rocky crag adorned with
an array of seemingly ancient painted images.
[menacing music continues]
Thank you for leading the way.
[music ends]
[Graham] We're obviously surrounded by just this amazing art here.
What led you to this investigation and this exploration?
I started doing archeology, um, as a graduate student.
And I had no idea that there was rock art in the Americas.
And so I was blown away by that.
[mysterious music playing]
[Graham] The images are known as pictographs.
Some are very simple.
Maybe a serpent slithering across the rock.
Others depict more complex geometric patterns.
The big question is when were these images painted?
[music intensifies]
The art itself can't be dated.
So Dr. Davis and his team looked for other evidence.
What's your dating of this site based on at the moment?
It's from the excavation that we did back behind here.
There were fragments of carbonated wood, mostly palm wood, some carbonated seeds.
We found evidence of a fire back there as well.
[Graham] The results were truly unexpected.
[Dr. Davis] From the radiocarbon dating,
the oldest dates that we got were about 13,200 before present.
Fascinating.
Dating back more than 13,000 years,
we're looking at some of the oldest artwork
found anywhere in the Americas.
Artwork created during the last Ice Age.
By people, we're told, who just suddenly appeared here
deep in the Amazon wilderness.
[triumphant music playing]
You can imagine, you know, thousands of years ago,
this would've been much brighter, much more vibrant.
[camera shutter clicks]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The images were painted using red and yellow ocher
and seemingly treated to make them last.
[tense music ends]
I've done experiments here where you just take the ocher
and draw it on the rock, and it washes away.
Right. So there has to be a binder.
There has to be a binder and a very good one.
-We suspect they mixed it with tree resin… -Uh-huh.
…and the resin forms into almost like amber but it's kind of clear.
[Graham] So that suggests those who created these paintings had,
first of all, experience in how to do paintings like this,
and they developed some knowledge of how to make the paint last.
Absolutely. Um, and in addition to that, it shows preparation and time.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] Most compelling to me are the many handprints…
that intimate human contact expressed by the handprints in the rock art.
It's almost as though they were touching the wall,
and through the wall, touching us,
sending a message to the future.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
[tense music playing]
[Graham] More Paleolithic art has been found in the Western Amazon.
Like this intricate mural in the jungles of Colombia,
where 12,600-year-old images depict humans
alongside what appear to be creatures of the Ice Age.
[tense music intensifies]
We are seeing an eyewitness account of the coexistence of human beings
with now long-extinct Ice Age megafauna.
And to the east of the Amazon, these paintings push the date back further
to more than 25,000 years ago.
[tense music continues]
Which means 2,000 years before those hunter-gatherers were walking
the White Sands of New Mexico,
there were other people already living in the forests of South America
creating art like this.
And in great numbers.
[tense music crescendos, subsides]
This should open up exploration
of what those human beings might have been doing in the Americas
over these tens of thousands of years
that archaeologists previously didn't think
there were any human beings there at all.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] At Serra do Paituna, Dr. Davis is sure of one thing.
Whoever they were and whatever they were doing,
the rock painters here suddenly stopped.
[Dr. Davis] So the first people who were at this region, they were here,
they were doing the art, and then about 12,700 years ago,
they were gone.
So was the area abandoned at that time?
[Dr. Davis] It appears to be so.
For quite some time. For thousands of years.
[Graham] To me, 12,700 years ago is a highly significant date.
There's always margins of error in dates.
But that's very close to the beginning of the Younger Dryas climate anomaly.
So I can't help wondering if there's a connection.
[music intensifies]
[Graham] Back then, temperatures suddenly plunged,
while unexpectedly, fires raged across the planet.
[fire crackling]
And sea levels rose.
[music ends]
[birds chirping]
We can hear echoes of this catastrophic epoch…
[pensive music playing]
…in the oral traditions of Amazonia.
[birds chirping]
There are countless myths and legends about an ancient cataclysm
that are still told all across the Amazon.
And there's one that I find particularly intriguing.
[dramatic music playing]
[Graham] According to the Indigenous Tiriyó people,
long ago, the sky spirits told a shaman
that a terrible flood would soon be unleashed,
a punishment for the people's wickedness.
Some heeded his warning and fled to safety atop Mount Kantani.
[people screaming]
But most perished in the deluge.
Eventually, the flood receded, leaving the survivors to start over.
[music ends]
It is a worldwide tradition. There was a golden age.
There was a time when humans lived in harmony with one another.
But that it somehow fell from its high standards,
and it was punished with a great flood, with a global destruction,
which wiped it from the face of the Earth.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] The global distribution of this shared myth can't be a coincidence.
I believe these ancient stories may be our last surviving memories
of very real events that occurred all over the world
around the end of the Ice Age,
during a period of cataclysms
that we've been calling the Ancient Apocalypse.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music ends]
[thunder rumbling]
[menacing music playing]
The evidence is mounting more and more
that the Earth crossed the path of cometary debris.
And the argument is that it was multiple impacts of fragments
of this cometary debris that set off the Younger Dryas climate emergency
12,800 years ago.
[menacing music continues]
[Graham] It's an idea we keep encountering
called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
In both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres,
scientists have found black matte layers like this one,
showing traces of nanodiamonds, platinum, and iridium,
suggesting a nearby cosmic impact or airburst.
But here, in the Amazon, other evidence might be present,
etched into these walls.
[menacing music ends]
We have several images of comets,
but one panel particularly,
there's a comet that is positioned facing upward.
The tail is going down. The head is going up.
[Graham] Yeah.
Above the comet image is a painting of the sun.
And this was baffling when I first saw it because normally you wouldn't see a comet
until after the sun sets.
[Graham] Most comets are easily distinguishable by their tails,
usually only visible above the setting sun streaming away from it.
Surely it would be impossible to see a comet below the sun in broad daylight.
So that gave me the idea, "When would you possibly see a comet head up
before the sun sets?"
-Maybe during an eclipse. -Mm-hmm.
And so I started looking in astronomy software,
and there was an eclipse that occurred facing that image about 13,027 years ago.
[Graham] Right.
[Dr. Davis] And a comet that was near the sun.
If there was an eclipse that darkened the sun,
you could possibly see suddenly this comet,
and it would be head up facing the sun.
-So-- -That's what we see in the art?
The art does seem to show that.
[Graham] Could this painting be a record of the comet
that many believe broke apart,
pummeling the Earth with debris and triggering the Younger Dryas?
I think the ancients were already getting warnings from the sky.
They were becoming aware that something had changed in the heavens,
and perhaps they were painting the first signs of the apocalypse
that was to come.
[tense music crescendos]
[tense music ends]
[Graham] The timing certainly fits with when humans abandoned this rocky outcrop.
I know archaeologists don't like to speculate
and I'm gonna ask you to speculate,
but do you think the Younger Dryas had anything to do with
that sudden cessation of activity?
You can't ignore it, certainly,
because it does come right at that period of time.
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music playing]
[thunder rumbling]
[tense music ends]
[somber music playing]
[Graham] At a personal level, what's your estimation
of the people who created this art?
How do you envisage them in your mind?
It's kind of hard to imagine how brave you would have to be
coming to a new environment.
I mean, they were pioneers.
[crickets chirping]
[Graham] But how did these pioneers get here in the first place?
[intriguing music playing]
In 2015, scientists investigating just that question dropped a bombshell.
They found that members of certain Indigenous Amazonian tribes
share a specific DNA marker
with people from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
[music intensifies]
The fact that we find it amongst remote tribes in the Amazon rainforest
and in Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, and Australia
suggests very strongly that there was a direct crossing
across the Pacific Ocean.
Even more surprising is where this DNA signal isn't.
This DNA signal is not found anywhere in North America.
If the Americas were peopled entirely by land,
we should find this DNA signal present in North America
as well as in South America.
What's more, the DNA signal is very old, dating back at least 10,000 years.
Nobody is supposed to have been able to cross the Pacific Ocean
from one side to the other 10 or 11,000 years ago.
For that to have happened just turns the whole story on its head.
If there's one place on Earth that might hold clues
as to who crossed the Pacific back then…
[music crescendos]
…it's here.
[tense music playing]
I've come to one of the world's most remote inhabited islands
2,300 miles west of South America
and 2,600 miles east of Tahiti.
On Easter Sunday, 1722, Dutch explorers stumbled across this small speck of land,
lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So they named it Easter Island.
But they were stunned to discover that it was inhabited
by a people who today call their home Rapa Nui.
[tense music ends]
[waves crashing]
[Graham] I mean, look at the basic geography.
It's just sitting there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
this tiny little dot of land.
And so the first extraordinary thing about it is,
how did people find it at all?
How did anybody ever end up settling on Easter Island
in this huge wilderness of the Pacific Ocean?
[suspenseful music playing]
That Pan-Pacific DNA signal convinces me
that this island could play a key role in my efforts to reconstruct the story
of a lost civilization of the Ice Age.
Why?
Because of these.
[dramatic music playing]
Vast megalithic statues that tower over the landscape…
for which Rapa Nui is famous today.
[music ends]
[Graham] Across the Pacific,
several islands are home to collections of remarkable megalithic structures.
However, the greatest concentration of such monuments is found here.
The islanders call them Moai.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] There are more than 1,000 of them…
on a remote rock that's smaller than Washington, DC.
Many stand together along the coastline, facing inland…
while others are found seemingly at random,
as if a massive project had been abandoned midway through.
[music crescendos, stops]
For me, Easter Island is just one of the most enchanted places on Earth.
The great Moai statues,
these human figures carved out of the soft volcanic rock.
It's confronting us with a mystery right there,
which needs to be explained.
[intriguing music continues]
Who were the sculptors of these giant statues?
What were they trying to achieve,
and why did they expend such mighty efforts to achieve it?
These are puzzles to which no definite solution,
only speculation, has ever been offered.
[music continues]
[birds chirping]
[mysterious music playing]
[Graham] This gap in our knowledge is mostly due to the devastation
wrought here by outsiders.
During the 19th century,
the Rapa Nui people were reduced to a tiny remnant
by slave raids and disease.
The few who clung on, did so,
by taking refuge in underground lava tubes like this.
[water dripping]
[Graham] I often say that we're a species with amnesia,
and that is particularly true of Easter Island
because of its tragic history.
Because from the moment
that Easter Island encountered Western culture,
uh, disaster set in.
[water dripping]
The elders who had preserved the memories were all taken away.
Some slaves were later repatriated,
but brought with them deadly diseases,
with the result that the remaining islanders
were all but wiped out.
[dramatic music playing]
Leo Pakarati is an Indigenous documentarian
whose family has carefully preserved the oral traditions of Rapa Nui
for generations.
He's painfully aware of what was lost
during those dark times of the slave raids.
The only memory that is preserved of the origins of Easter Island
is the memory that survived the 19th century.
In a historical moment, we are only 111 persons on the island.
-It's a big disaster. -For the culture.
It's a cultural disaster too
because you need many people to keep the knowledge.
Few people, few knowledge.
-Yeah. -And we lose a big part of our history.
[somber music playing]
[Graham] And yet, despite these overwhelming odds,
the Rapa Nui have retained memories
concerning this tiny island's most intriguing mystery.
Tell me what the old tradition says about the Moai.
The real name for the Moai is "te aringa ora o te Tupuna."
-Mm-hmm. -"The living face of our ancestors."
That is the name.
The idea is the Moai represent a real person.
Yeah.
And in life, this person is special, important.
[Graham] According to Rapa Nui lore,
these important ancestors were memorialized in the Moai
with distinctive features related to their rank.
-Some of the Moai have short ears. -Yeah.
Some have long ears. What's that about?
[Leo] This is because of our different social classes on the island.
-[Graham] Yeah. -Some people have time for long earrings.
They have long nails too.
-It's a social class act. -[Graham] Yes.
So those long fingers on the Moai, those are actually nails?
[splutters] They have long fingers,
and some Moai have very long nails and curves too.
[tense music playing]
[Graham] I find it impossible to avoid seeing
parallels with similar statues of great antiquity found elsewhere.
On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, we find 4,000-year-old megalithic figures
in a remarkably similar posture
and with similar hand positions.
Even on the other side of the world, in Turkey,
a statue known as Urfa Man that dates back to the Ice Age
strikes a similar pose, his hands clasped across his belly.
[tense music continues]
An equally intriguing parallel is found also in Turkey,
in the ten-ton megalithic pillars of Göbekli Tepe.
These pillars are 11,600 years old.
Could the similarities of these designs across time and space
be evidence of a single common ancestor culture,
leaving a legacy of ideas for later peoples to express?
[tense music crescendos, stops]
[pensive music playing]
No records exist that could explain the origins of such imagery.
[music continues]
But according to Rapa Nui oral tradition,
the Moai, in addition to being megalithic memorials,
channel a sacred spiritual power from their ancestors,
an energy known as mana.
Tell me more about mana.
Mana is very important.
Mana is the energy.
All the people have mana.
Any rock, any elements in the universe have mana.
So the Moai are invested with mana?
[Leo] Yeah. People, when they die,
the family send to make a Moai with the intention,
the soul, the mana, the spirit of this person entering the Moai.
[Graham] But interestingly, that mana only starts to flow
after the Moai are set in place and properly finished.
In the moment, the Moai is safe on the platform,
the tupuna, the ancestors, carve in the holes for the eyes first,
and later they put in coral for the white part
and sometimes obsidian or other rocks for the eyes.
-[Graham] Right. Yeah. -In this moment, it's no more Moai.
Now it's Aringa ora o te Tupuna. The living face of our ancestors.
-Once it has the eyes? -Once it has the eyes.
-Right. -And from the platform, from the Ahu,
the Moai look in direction to the town and protect the family.
That is the function of the Moai.
[music fades]
[Graham] Clearly, the Moai are deeply sacred to the Rapa Nui.
But does that mean they originally carved them?
Or could the Moai have already been here?
If so, we'd need to rethink the entire timeline
of the peopling of Rapa Nui.
Let's consider an alternative scenario
in which it was first explored by a small group
of highly sophisticated navigators,
much further back in prehistory than is presently accepted.
[tense music playing]
[man chanting]
[all chanting]
[Graham] Based on genetic testing,
we know that the Rapa Nui people…
[chanting]
…are descended from those great ancient navigators,
the Polynesians.
The Polynesians were fantastically advanced navigators and seafarers
and settled many parts of the Pacific Ocean
during the Polynesian expansion about 3,000 years ago.
Carbon dating of the oldest human settlements here
strongly suggests that Rapa Nui was one of the last islands they reached
around 1,100 years ago.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
A new study proposes
that the first people arrived even more recently,
just 800 years ago or less.
[singing in local language]
[Graham] And yet, fragments of a different earlier origin story
that seem to contradict the archaeological timeline
have been kept alive here.
I'm privileged to witness a celebration of it.
[singing in local language]
[singing continues]
The oral traditions speak of a primeval homeland called Hiva,
a large island destroyed by a global flood that forced their ancestors to flee.
[tense music playing]
In this account, the great king of Hiva, Hutu Matu'a,
was warned that his island nation would suffer a terrible deluge
and be submerged forever.
[tense music continues]
Guided by a vision,
he sent seven chosen men out in seafaring canoes,
heading towards the rising sun in search of a new home.
[people screaming]
[Graham] After weeks at sea,
they landed safely on the island of Rapa Nui,
where they were later joined by Hutu Matu'a and hundreds of his people
to reestablish their civilization.
[wind howling]
[waves crashing]
So we have a tradition of a great flood and an exploration,
and we have to ask ourselves, "Did such an event happen?"
You really have to go back to the end of the last Ice Age
to get the kind of flood that would submerge an entire land.
[tense music playing]
The name of that sunken island, Hiva,
in Rapa Nui language means far-off land,
suggesting it wasn't a land the Polynesians were familiar with.
But the arrival of a band of seven by sea after a time of great cataclysm
is a tradition encountered all over the ancient world
from the Apkallu of Mesopotamia
to Egypt's seven sages
and India's seven rishis.
[tense music continues]
Such traditions often speak of a small band of flood survivors
arriving in a distant land in a time of chaos
with a mission to restart civilization.
[Indigenous people singing]
Coincidence? Could these origin stories be memories of real events
experienced by many ancient cultures around the world?
[singing in local language]
[Graham] Crucially, the legend of Hotu Matu'a and Hiva
doesn't include a date.
[singing continues]
[Graham] This causes me to raise questions in my mind
about when Easter Island was first settled.
[singing continues]
[Graham] I'm not disputing the Polynesian expansion.
I'm not disputing that the population of Easter Island today
is a Polynesian population.
But the question is, could it have been settled earlier than that?
[cheering]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] Alas, the Moai themselves can't help us answer this question.
The characteristic Moai are cut from
a relatively soft type of rock called tuff,
a form of volcanic ash turned to stone.
They can't be dated in and of themselves.
In the absence of direct evidence
for when these megalithic statues were carved,
archaeologists relied on dating the organic matter
embedded in the Ahu platforms, on which many of the Moai stand.
For example,
Ahu Nau Nau has been dated to between 400 and 900 years old.
[music ends]
[dramatic music playing]
So that's when historians believe the islanders began to carve the Moai.
But if that were true,
it means that after a few centuries,
living simply with no traces of building the necessary skills,
the Rapa Nui people suddenly embarked on this mammoth project,
which continued until just a few decades before the Europeans arrived.
Many of the platforms are really quite rough
and ready by comparison with the statues.
And we have to ask ourselves the question,
"Are the platforms actually the same age as the statues that stand on top of them?"
Or is it possible that the statues were re-erected
by latecomers to Easter Island,
giving us a totally false idea of how old the statues are
based on the platforms alone?
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] After all, throughout history,
many objects of great cultural value have later been moved and displayed
in a newer setting.
-[music intensifies] -[bells tolling]
In Venice, the four tetrarchs of St. Mark's Basilica
were actually carved in Constantinople 900 years before they were installed here.
And the Renaissance fountain in front of Rome's Pantheon isn't nearly as old
as the ancient Egyptian obelisk it supports.
Many of these huge statues were moved around, relocated,
placed in different positions.
And I think we have to remain open to the possibility
that the statues may already have been there
when the first Polynesians arrived.
And that they were kind of adopted by those new settlers
and taken in to their culture.
Supporting this idea is Ahu Nau Nau,
which uses another Moai head, deeply weathered,
as one of its foundation stones, recycled for this purpose.
[music crescendos, subsides]
Another hint that the Moai could be much older than previously thought
can be found at the extinct volcano,
where nearly all of the megaliths were first quarried and shaped.
[suspenseful music playing]
Here, in the southeastern corner of the island, is an extinct volcano
called Rano Raraku.
It's a dramatic feature on the landscape.
[suspenseful music ends]
And on its slopes are the remains of hundreds of partially completed Moai.
It truly is one of the world's most mysterious places.
[triumphant music playing]
[Graham] Nearly 400 Moai are scattered about the volcano…
in various stages of completion.
[triumphant music crescendos, subsides]
[pensive music playing]
Many only peek above ground level,
their squat torsos embedded in deep sediment.
This sedimentation could result from landslides,
mudflows, or even tsunamis.
But although they might lean, most of the statues remain upright,
not randomly tumbled over,
as you would expect if such an event were the cause.
So what really happened here?
For centuries, the sediment concealed the evidence.
Until 1914, when archaeologists began excavations.
As this photograph shows,
some Moai are much more than just head and shoulders
and include the whole torso lodged deep in the hillside…
a finding that was only fully revealed to the world in the 1950s
by the famous ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl.
[tense music crescendos, stops]
Thor Heyerdahl was a remarkable human being.
I was lucky to meet him more than once.
He was willing to challenge convention.
He was convinced that there were some missing pieces
in the story of our past.
And he tried to show us that deep in prehistory,
uh, ancient humans were capable of achievements
that we have tended to allocate to much later periods.
[triumphant music playing]
[Graham] Like this mysterious Moai building project.
Archaeologists tell us
that the last of the Moai were sculpted around 400 years ago.
But it seems implausible, on such a small island,
that such a massive amount of sedimentation could have accumulated
around them in such a short time.
None of these Moai show evidence of intentional burial.
So is there another explanation?
[triumphant music intensifies]
Could it be that what we're looking at is the end result
of a process of sedimentation
that would have taken not hundreds of years, but thousands?
The problem with that theory?
There's no evidence of human habitation dating so far back.
[dramatic music playing]
Or is there?
[music ends]
[closing theme playing]
[closing theme ends]