Archaeology 'war' over claims Ancient Egypt's Sphinx is 8,000 years older than pyramids

An entire chapter of human history has been lost - and some of what we think we know about our ancient past is completely wrong.

This is the controversial claim made by the growing band of 'alternative researchers' inspired by the author Graham Hancock.

Hancock, who describes himself as a journalist investigating human prehistory, presents the TV series Ancient Apocalypse - which has been branded the "most dangerous" show on Netflix.

He has become the focal point of an increasingly bitter feud - the "archaeology wars" - between the academic establishment and autodidactic 'outsiders' who offer dissenting takes on our distant past.

Hancock and other history heretics, including a smattering of academics, are accused of spreading a distrust of science and scholarship. They believe elements of some enigmatic sites - such as the Great Sphinx at Giza in Egypt and the megalithic temples around it - could be at least 8,000 years older than conventional wisdom holds.

Seafaring shamans and psychedelic drugs

For more than 30 years, Hancock has been looking for the "fingerprints" of an Ice Age civilisation that he believes was all but destroyed by an ancient apocalypse.

He suggests this was a civilisation of seafaring shamans - archaic astronomers who used psychedelic drugs and other methods to expand consciousness and access hidden knowledge.

Hancock, 74, has partaken in ayahuasca ceremonies with shamans in the Amazon rainforest for more than 20 years. He believes this hallucinogenic DMT brew helps people gain valuable insights, enabling the first sophisticated human societies to rise and flourish.

In an exclusive interview, Hancock told The Daily Express: "In the Amazon, they call ayahuasca 'the teacher'... psychedelic fungi are also known as 'little teachers'. I think we're looking at an ancient culture - or ancient cultures - which regarded psychedelic plants and fungi as of fundamental importance."

Archaeologists broadly agree that humans have been using psychedelic drugs for thousands of years - and probably as far back as at least 14,000 BC. It is largely accepted that these drugs played important roles in rituals in some ancient cultures.

Ancient astronomers and a 26,000-year cycle

Hancock told Express.co.uk he believes 'his' lost civilisation had a complex understanding of astronomy, including the axial precession of the equinoxes, caused by the Earth's slow and cyclical wobble on its axis. Precession causes the Spring equinox to move, over a 26,000-year period, through all the constellations of the Zodiac - creating the 2,150-year Age of Pisces, which will be followed by the Age of Aquarius, from around 2150 AD.

Hancock said: "I'm talking about a hypothetical civilisation, during the ice age, that had a sophisticated and advanced knowledge of astronomy, that was capable of exploring the world and mapping the world - and of doing so relatively accurately."

Hancock said this "advanced knowledge" was "accumulated not through some mystical process, or by some high tech, but by close observation of the skies and record keeping and by passing down that information". He believes a "common ancestor culture" left behind a "legacy of ideas" that can be traced in sites "separated by time and space" around the globe.

Hancock says the Cathedral of Chartres in France exemplifies this principle from a different culture. While this Gothic cathedral was built in the 12th and 13th centuries, it contains ideas that go back to Abraham's time - some 3,000 years earlier, claimed Hancock.

He credits Hamlet's Mill - a 1969 essay by two acclaimed historians, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend - as the starting point for this hypothesis. Hamlet’s Mill suggests Neolithic megalith builders knew about precession at least 4,000 years ago and encoded this knowledge in myths.

However, other esteemed scholars have heavily criticised this seminal work. In one excoriating review, British anthropologist Edmund R Leach described his reaction to Hamlet's Mill as "hostile" - and dismissed its central ideas as "pure fantasy".

Historians generally attribute the discovery of precession in the West to Greek astronomer Hipparchus more than 2,000 years ago.

The archaeology wars

In the present day, Hancock has previously accused archaeologists of ignoring work that challenges 'academic dogma'. Archaeologists, meanwhile, insist there is no dogma in their academia and say that they are always open to new ideas.

Scholars say the evidence they have studied simply does not support Hancock's claims - and they dismiss them as "pseudoscientific". They accuse Hancock of 'cherry-picking' evidence and misrepresenting data to support a hypothesis they say has already been proven wrong.

However, Hancock and his supporters - including podcast giant Joe Rogan - have levelled similar accusations at archaeologists who say they have 'debunked' his work. This has led to heated exchanges - and name-calling from both sides - in posts on X and in YouTube videos.

Redating the Sphinx 

Hancock told the Express: "I've tried to take on board the reaction of archaeologists to me. I realised that by taking a rather attacking mode in season 1 [of Ancient Apocalypse]... I was kind of ruling out the possibility of cooperation.

"I would like to find a synthesis in the future where the great work being done by archaeologists - without which I could not do any of my work - can exist side-by-side with people like myself.

"People like Professor Robert Schoch at Boston University, the late great John Anthony West, Robert Bauval, Randall Carlson and others.

"People who are looking at history in an alternative way. People who are maybe looking at things that archaeologists don't study and are coming to different conclusions."

Professor Schoch, an associate professor of Natural Sciences, and the others Hancock namechecks all support the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. This idea posits that the Great Sphinx of Giza and its enclosing walls were eroded by ancient floods or rainfall more than 11,500 years ago.

This is more than 8,000 years before the reign of Pharaoh Khafre, who Egyptologists maintain built the Sphinx and the middle of the three Pyramids of Giza. However, conventional archaeologists and some professors of Natural Sciences dismiss the hypothesis as "pseudoscientific."

Heterodox Hancock v orthodoxy

Nonetheless, Hancock insists he has been mispresented by academia. He told the Express: "They claim that I say they [a hypothetical lost civilisation] built all the pyramids, that I say they built the mounds in America. I don't say that - I have never said that.

"I've been very clear, right back to Fingerprints of the Gods [first published in 1995], that I do not divorce the ancient Egyptians from the three great pyramids at Giza. I think they were intimately involved with them. "

But he also told The Express he believes the Sphinx and the megalithic temples around this enigmatic monument are much older and are "examples of stuff that was built 12,000 years ago". Most Egyptologists do not share this view.

Hancock also says some Egyptian ideas - such as the belief that the human soul must navigate the Milky Way in the afterlife - are shared by indigenous cultures in the Americas despite being separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles.

However, some scholars challenge the assertion that any myths from ancient Egypt and the Americas are the same - or even similar - in meaningful ways. They also suggest that non-indigenous authors have altered these legends.

Others point out that all ancient cultures looked up at the night sky and made up stories about what they saw.

Regardless, if the Sphinx and its associated temples - and parts of other sites worldwide, such as the megalithic masonry found in Peru - weren't constructed by the civilisations archaeologists attribute them to, who does Hancock believe built them?

The Great Flood 'myth' 

Hancock suggests they were built by his psychedelic civilisation of seafaring shamans, which has been lost and forgotten. He claims nearly all traces of this civilisation were washed away by a cataclysmic flood at the end of the Younger Dryas ice age.

He thinks this deluge inspired the stories of a great global flood, such as the tales of Noah, Gilgamesh, and Atlantis. Similar myths can also be found in ancient cultures worldwide, including those in the Americas.

However, most scientists say no such flood can be found in the geological record. Many archaeologists believe the flood myths were inspired by separate, localised flooding events or introduced by Christian conquerors and missionaries.

They say solid proof of Hancock's civilisation would have been found because evidence of the ephemeral activities of hunter-gatherers from this period has been found. Despite this, Hancock and others maintain that the scientific consensus is wrong.

He told The Express: "I wish archaeology, as an institution, would stop just insulting us [people with alternative views about the past] and sneering at us and making it impossible to have any kind of dialogue.

"I wish there could be some kind of dialogue so we can go deeper into these ideas, rather than just the knee-jerk reaction that anyone who suggests there was a lost civilization is some kind of grifter.

"That is not a productive way to have any kind of working relationship - and I think there could be a positive working relationship between archaeologists and those of us who have an alternative view on the past."