Original subtitles

A giant stone monument rising from the sands of Egypt...

a labyrinth of long-forgotten tunnels

beneath the German countryside

and the remains of an ancient pyramid

located in the heart of the United States.

Ancient ruins fascinate us

because they often reveal how much

or how little we know about our past.

The discovery of a lost city

or the unearthing of a giant stone monument

can suddenly challenge our understanding of human history.

But is it possible that,

by investigating ancient structures,

we can uncover their long-held secrets?

Or has the truth behind these mysterious ruins

simply been lost to time?

Well, that is what we’ll try and find out.

While conducting research high in the Andes Mountains,

archaeologist Dr. Ruth Shady notices

a number of mounds and hills in the landscape

that do not appear to have been made by Mother Nature.

Most people had assumed that these great mounds were natural.

But, nevertheless,

when Ruth Shady arrived at the site in 1994,

she realized that there was something here

that was more than just natural hills.

She had an instinct, really, a gut feeling, I think,

which many archaeologists acquire,

that this place was worth exploring.

And, boy, she explored it and hit the jackpot.

As they began excavating,

Dr. Shady and her team discovered

the ruins of a forgotten ancient city

that has become known as Caral.

Ruth Shady has spent

years, now, working in Caral.

Caral has, under her supervision,

become part of the World Heritage List now.

So that says this is one of those unique places

that tells a story about civilization in the New World.

According to experts, what is remarkable about Caral is that,

unlike other ancient ruins located in Peru

such as Machu Picchu,

Sacsayhuaman

and Ollantaytambo,

Caral was not built by the Incas.

It was built by a previously unknown civilization

that remains shrouded in mystery.

Caral is one of the most impressive

and so the most important sites

in South America.

Certainly in terms of its size.

Excavations revealed it covers a huge area

and was clearly a great metropolis

for prehistoric South America.

You’ve got this incredible complex

covering hundreds of acres,

with an amphitheater...

supplementary temples,

all kinds of artifacts,

suggesting a sophisticated civilization.

The Greater Pyramid in Caral,

this is the biggest structure there is.

It dominates the landscape.

It is the center of the city.

It is nearly 500 feet long,

nearly 400 feet wide,

60 feet tall.

And on one side of it,

it has this 30-foot-wide staircase

that descends from the very top

down to a sunken circular plaza.

The whole structure itself has a stepped profile,

which has a number of very large terraces built into the side.

There’s a network of ceremonial rooms, some large rooms,

some smaller rooms,

built with stone and mortar.

It’s a phenomenal structure.

This was a culture with no wheels, with no metal tools.

And so the building

took an awful lot of people carrying earth and stones

from wherever they got them from.

You needed architects of some kind, maybe engineers,

probably thousands and thousands of man-hours to erect that.

The other thing that shows up in the Greater Pyramid

that tells us something about the nature of...

of Caral as a civilization

are symbols of monkeys.

So, in this part of Peru,

there are no monkeys.

Those actually come from the Amazon basin.

Which means that the people of Caral had to

basically go over the Andes

and into another part of South America altogether.

So why is this significant?

It tells us that they are a central point

for a vast trading network.

And not just goods but ideas.

The discovery of Caral’s ruins challenged everything we knew

or thought we knew about the history of civilization

in Central and South America.

And not just because of its elaborate design

but also because of what experts learned

when they were able to begin carbon-dating its artifacts.

Towards the bottom of the great mound,

they found remains of what seemed to be

reed bags or baskets

in which the earth and stones

would have been carried to make the mound.

These are called "shicras."

Of course, you can date reeds by the radiocarbon method.

And so samples were sent off to various labs.

And to everyone’s surprise,

the answer was far earlier than anybody had expected.

The dates came back

to approximately 2600 BC and earlier.

The same age as the pyramids in Egypt,

much older than other civilizations

that were known at the time in the New World.

It’s very likely that Caral goes back

at least to that kind of period.

It is arguable that Caral

is the kind of mother culture

for what came later in South America,

like the Inca civilizations.

However, there are lower layers at Caral which have been dug.

They may well find samples that can be dated far earlier

than anybody expected,

possibly at a period even several centuries

before the pyramids of Giza,

which will alter our view of the past.

Is it possible that the ruins of Caral are actually older

than the Egyptian pyramids,

which were built almost 5,000 years ago?

It’s an extraordinary possibility,

and the discoveries at Caral are forcing archaeologists

to redefine the timeline of human history.

What was the old definition of civilization?

It was extracted from the site of Mesopotamia,

which is in Iraq, basically.

Mesopotamia starts at 3500 BC.

And then the idea was that all civilizations used Mesopotamia

as the model.

But, looking at Caral,

we expect that Caral is gonna reach back to 3200 BC,

which indicates an incredible possibility

that faces the world of archaeology.

So we have to start rethinking what we mean by "civilization."

It’s incredible to think that, before Caral was discovered,

we had no idea that such a massive civilization

existed in South America that far back in history.

And it also makes you wonder... Could there be other ruins

around the world that are older than we ever thought possible?

Perhaps the answer can be found by examining

the most recognizable ancient ruin in the world today,

the Sphinx.

Sitting atop a plateau just a few miles west of the Nile River

is the Giza Necropolis,

perhaps the most famous collection of ruins

in the entire world.

Believed to be constructed

during ancient Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty,

around 2550 BC,

these limestone monuments attract

thousands of tourists every day

who come to marvel at the immense pyramids,

forbidding tombs

and a mysterious stone sentinel known as...

the Sphinx.

I think you can argue that the Sphinx

is the most recognizable statue anywhere in the world.

Its scale is immense.

It’s one single piece of stone.

It is cut from the natural rock

of the Giza Plateau.

The Sphinx stands 240 feet long,

66 feet tall and 62 feet wide.

For thousands of years, this massive statue

has been an object of both fascination and wonder.

But even after centuries of study,

the Sphinx holds many secrets

that archaeologists are still trying to unravel.

The Sphinx that we know today,

the Sphinx from the Great Pyramids of Giza,

is the most famous of all sphinxes.

But there are sphinxes all over ancient Egypt.

There are smaller sphinxes.

There’s an avenue full of sphinxes between the temples.

But the Great Sphinx at Giza is something very different.

It’s a single sculpture.

It sits in a very particular place.

It doesn’t seem to have performed

the same function at all.

What was it for?

This is what we really want to know.

No one has understood exactly what it means.

Because, for literally thousands of years,

the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand.

So it’s only a head sticking out of the sand

for much of its history.

There is a very famous painting

of Emperor Napoleon standing in front of the Sphinx,

buried still, at this point, up to its shoulders.

You might think, what has Napoleon got to do

with Egypt and the Sphinx? Well, in fact,

Napoleon led an invasion of Egypt in 1798,

which had a big impact back in Europe

in raising awareness and interest in ancient Egypt sites.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that a team of archaeologists,

led by engineer Emile Baraize,

succeeded in unearthing the Sphinx from the desert sands.

They were able to expose it

and to... so to reveal for the first time in centuries

that this was not just a head, a disembodied head,

but a-a full sphinx sculpture.

And this is a watershed moment

for our understanding of the Sphinx.

Archaeologists and Egyptologists like myself

believe that the Sphinx was sculpted around 2500 BC

by King Khephren

as a part of his funerary complex.

But a lot of scholars disagree about the Sphinx,

and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding

when was the Sphinx actually sculpted.

One of the most important documents we have

to deal with the dating of the Sphinx is the Inventory Stela.

This is a commemorative stone that actually records details

of how the Pharaoh Khufu repaired the Sphinx

after it was struck by lightning.

The significance of this is that Khufu came before Khafre,

the pharaoh who is conventionally said

to have constructed the Sphinx.

The Inventory Stela has an inscription

that goes back to about 4,600 years ago.

And that inscription says

that the Sphinx is a much older structure

that the Egyptians adopted

and repaired and venerated.

Based on the inscriptions on the Inventory Stela,

there are some archaeologists who believe

that the Sphinx is so ancient

that it could predate any records in human history

that are known to exist.

And some researchers are convinced that physical evidence

of the Sphinx’s true age can be found on the structure itself.

The first time I visited the Sphinx

was in the summer of 1990.

My early studies of the Sphinx

looked at the erosional features on the body of the Sphinx

and comparing that to other erosional features

right on the Giza Plateau.

And what I found was the body of the Sphinx

and the walls of the Sphinx enclosure

are weathered differently

than everything else on the Giza Plateau.

The rest of the plateau shows classic wind erosion.

But what is on the Sphinx is water weathering.

It’s rainfall, precipitation,

and this makes no sense

when the Sphinx is sitting on the edge of the Sahara Desert

that has been a bone-dry desert

for literally thousands of years.

So what I concluded is that the body of the Sphinx,

and therefore the original statue,

had to go back to pre-Sahara times,

when there was a much more temperate climate,

much more moisture, much more rainfall.

And it has to go back not just a little bit into that period

but quite far back, given that we have incredible amount

of weathering and erosion on the Sphinx.

I now think that it goes back

to the end of the last ice age,

circa 10,000 BC.

I am convinced that it is a ruin from predynastic Egypt.

Is it possible that the Sphinx was constructed

more than 12,000 years ago,

centuries before the ancient Egyptian civilization

even existed?

If so, who carved it? And for what purpose?

Some researchers believe the answers to these questions

will be found in a secret room hidden beneath the Sphinx.

Something that there’s been a lot of speculation about

regarding the Sphinx is that there is

some kind of chamber hidden underneath it.

A psychic named Edgar Cayce,

in the first half of the 20th century,

asserted that there would be such a chamber

and that this was the legendary Hall of Records,

which would reveal very great secrets

relating to an ancient civilization

responsible for creating the Sphinx

and all these great wonders.

He also suggested that this would be discovered

by the end of the 20th century.

It was only confirmed relatively recently

that excavations discovered a passageway in the Sphinx.

There is a tunnel

that was found under the paw of the Sphinx,

a tunnel that people believe connects to another structure.

We have not discovered

what happens at the end of that tunnel.

Where does this tunnel lead to?

Someday in the future, we might find a room

that we’ve never heard of.

So, the more we dig, the more we find

about the secrets of ancient Egypt.

Was the Sphinx built by a civilization

that existed long before the ancient Egyptians?

It seems hard to believe, but the truth is that archaeologists

dig up unbelievable things all the time.

For example, consider the discovery

of a 100-foot-tall pyramid mound

constructed more than a thousand years ago

that is located in the heartland

of the United States.

In the heart of the downtown district

stands the Wainwright Building.

Built in 1891,

this office building

is one of the world’s first modern skyscrapers.

But, as it turns out,

there is a similarly sized structure in this region

that is much, much older.

Just ten miles east of the city

stand the ruins of an ancient man-made pyramid mound

that was built centuries ago

and is as tall as a ten-story building.

This is the largest prehistoric earthwork

in the Western Hemisphere,

the largest totally earthen mound built

by ancient people in North or South America.

Its base actually is bigger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt,

and it stands 100 feet high.

And it was built with about 22 million cubic feet of dirt

that had to be carried in baskets on people’s backs

and deposited.

The fact that the ruins of a man-made pyramid

sit in the middle of the United States

might come as a surprise for some.

And yet this monumental earthen mound

is merely one of more than a hundred similar structures

that have been discovered in this area.

They’re all part of a sprawling ancient city named Cahokia.

Cahokia is arguably the most important

of the ancient cities of North America.

Constructed approximately between 700 and 1350 AD,

it was an incredible metropolis.

We have this idea of the first peoples

as being hunter-gatherers

and riding around on horses all the time,

and that’s simply the wrong impression.

They were an incredibly

technologically sophisticated society.

We don’t know what this place was called

or what... the language that people spoke here.

The name Cahokia comes from a later group

of American Indians that moved into this area in the 1600s

from further north, around the Great Lakes.

They were here, but they did not build the mounds.

They just later used it as part of their settlement.

We often use the term "city" when we talk about Cahokia

because of its magnitude.

It covered nearly six square miles or about 4,000 acres.

During its peak, between 1050 and 1150 AD,

there were probably, you know,

40,000, 50,000 people living within this region.

It would be larger than London was at that time.

And yet, 200 years later,

by 1350 AD,

the whole place had been abandoned.

And, indeed, there is a mystery

of exactly what took place there.

But if Cahokia was such a thriving metropolis,

then it begs the question...

How did this civilization come to an end?

It’s a mystery that has driven archaeologists

to scour Cahokia’s ruins in search of an answer.

There are a number of hypotheses about the decline of Cahokia.

One involves evidence of a defensive wall

that was built around the center of Cahokia.

So that indicates that they had conflicts and warfare.

And there’s been suggestions that maybe,

with the crowded conditions here, perhaps there was

increases in-in disease.

Did the threat of warfare or poor living conditions

cause the inhabitants of Cahokia to abandon this thriving city?

It’s hard to say.

But in recent years

another theory has emerged,

one that suggests there may have been a more sinister reason

behind Cahokia’s demise.

So, one of the ideas that’s been put forward is

that something quite dark took place there

and this is why there’s little evidence in the oral tradition

or the folklore of this area.

And this could be ultimately why the site was abandoned.

Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s,

there was an excavation

at a small mound here on the site called Mound 72.

As we dug further into the mound,

there was a burial pit about five feet deep.

And at the bottom of that they found

53 mostly young women,

all buried at the same time,

laid out in two rows and piled in there two deep.

Next to them were four men

with their heads and their hands cut off,

apparently, in some ritual.

The burials that came out of Mound 72

quite clearly showed evidence of mass sacrifice.

We have to ask ourselves

whether this would have had any kind of impact

upon the society as a whole at Cahokia.

Did the vast majority

of Cahokia’s inhabitants abandon their city

because its leaders were engaging in the practice

of human sacrifice?

And if so, then where did they go?

Is this tragedy enough to explain

why there is no written record

that this civilization ever existed?

For now, experts remain collectively baffled

and worry that we may never know for sure.

We really must question, you know, what really happened,

because it could have been something much more mysterious

that we just don’t know about.

It’s remarkable to think that, centuries ago,

there was a massive civilization that built large structures

in what is now Southern Illinois.

But not all ancient ruins are hiding in plain sight.

Some were designed to remain secret and are hidden

right beneath our feet.

In this quiet rural town,

a Bavarian dairy farmer watches in horror

as one of her cows falls into what appears to be a sinkhole.

But after thankfully rescuing the animal,

the farmer discovers that her cow hadn’t stumbled

into a sinkhole

but rather a mysterious subterranean ruin

known as an erdstall.

Erdstall are human-carved tunnels

that extend into the ground.

You know, they’re-they’re chiseled out of stone.

They are like mini labyrinths,

mini underground cities,

and the erdstalls consisted of a series of chambers and tunnels

and stretched for about 125 feet

and was on different levels.

And archaeologists have investigated it

and have suggested that there was activity there

as much as a thousand years ago.

But this isn’t the only erdstall that’s been discovered.

In fact, similar man-made tunnels have been found hidden

all across southeastern Germany and Austria.

Many of them are found just in the middle of nowhere,

um, you know, out in somebody’s field or something like that.

Or within the cellar areas

or foundations of old houses, old structures.

Some of them may be very limited.

You go in and it’s just sort of

one little chamber, two little interconnected chambers.

And some of them extend hundreds of feet

in many different directions with,

you know, all sorts of different little,

sort of, side chambers and passages.

We don’t know who carved them.

We don’t know when they were carved.

We don’t know their original purpose.

Because of this,

the erdstall tunnels are incredibly mysterious.

One investigator driven to solve the mystery of the erdstalls

is Dieter Ahlborn.

He has been exploring these tunnels for more than 20 years.

Mm.

And, uh...

To date, more than 1,200 long-abandoned erdstalls

have been found beneath the German and Austrian soil.

But why would anyone go to such lengths to carve

these bizarre underground structures in the first place?

Normally, if you’ve got tunnels

or caves, you will find

bones or-or artifacts or something inside them.

There is nothing in these erdstalls,

and that has made it very, very difficult

to know what they were for.

They’re obviously completely dark,

and, interestingly, you don’t see areas

where there were, like, hearths or, um, fires.

You don’t have, you know, charcoal.

But there are also these tiny little areas

carved out for a place where, like, a lamp would be placed

so that people who are actually building would be able to see.

So it’s clearly... it was very well-planned

and designed and executed,

and yet we don’t know what they were built for.

And, um...

If the erdstalls weren’t made for any practical purpose,

then why were they built?

Well, some people believe that they weren’t created

to be used by the living

but, rather, they were designed to be a resting place

for the souls of the dead.

A very unique theory, uh, about erdstalls

was that there was a lot of Christian ideas

as to their function.

And they would have been used to collect the souls of the dead,

where they would remain until the Day of Judgment

and then they would rise to go to heaven.

Is it possible that the erdstalls were constructed

by Christians throughout Central Europe

to be holding chambers for people’s souls

as they waited to get into heaven?

Perhaps.

But, on the other hand,

there are some archaeologists who believe

that explanation isn’t quite good enough.

And one reason is that, as it turns out,

erdstalls aren’t only being found in Germany and Austria.

People are discovering them all over Europe.

There are similar tunnels in many parts of Europe.

Even Israel has some, but it’s very, very difficult

to see any kind of linking, uh, phenomenon between them.

Perhaps there was some widespread belief

that we know nothing about,

because they were clearly of great importance.

Humans have been able to-to chisel

into stone for thousands of years.

There’s probably countless structures

throughout the ancient world that are in places

where we just don’t know that they exist.

The discovery of ancient underground tunnels

beneath buildings and even people’s homes all over Europe

is proof that ruins can be found in unexpected places.

In fact, there are those who believe

that there are ancient structures

located in areas that you might never imagine,

including the least hospitable place on Earth: Antarctica.

On the bottom of our planet

lies the frigid land of Antarctica,

the coldest and most inhospitable continent

in the world.

Stretching over five million square miles,

Antarctica is covered in ice sheets

that reach more than a mile deep.

The average daily temperature is -49 degrees Fahrenheit,

and wind speeds can reach over 100 miles per hour.

Today, the only inhabitants of this barren landscape

are scientists who work in research stations

scattered across the continent.

Mainstream geologists have long believed that ancient humans

never settled on Antarctica because of its hostile climate.

But incredibly, in 2016,

satellite images revealed a curious formation

emerging from the ice

that some researchers believe could be

a man-made pyramid.

Recently, there have been a number of reports

of pyramids, huge, great pyramids, in Antarctica.

They jut out of the ice and snow,

and they look perfect, just like those in Egypt.

But they dwarf those in Egypt, like the Great Pyramid.

One has a perfectly square base

that is two kilometers square in each direction.

Is it possible, therefore, that our ancestors

did actually reach the Antarctic continent

and perhaps even settle there?

A man-made pyramid beneath the Antarctic ice?

If such an incredible notion is true,

then it naturally begs some questions.

How was such a massive structure built on Antarctica?

When was it done? And by whom?

Antarctica, we have been told from the geologists,

has been under ice for many millions of years.

However, there is evidence that it could have been

free of ice, certainly in certain areas,

until, perhaps, 4000 BC.

There are a large number of stories from Polynesia

of so-called "culture heroes,"

who reached the Antarctic continent.

A French academic by the name of Argod

put together all of these different stories

in a book titled Out of Antarctica.

The Polynesian peoples’ stories describe

this strange land, with these white rocks

that come out of the water, which are icebergs,

and other creatures, such as seals and penguins,

and seem to describe an area that we now know

as Antarctica.

The Polynesian peoples believed

this was the place of the ancestors.

And they said, this is where, uh, we came from originally.

Why did they believe this if this was untrue?

Is it really possible that the coldest place on Earth

was once warm enough to be inhabited by humans?

Well,

in 2017, German geologists collected core samples

from deep within the frozen Antarctic seafloor

in order to analyze what the continent’s climate

might have been like thousands of years ago.

What they discovered was astonishing.

In the case of that expedition in early 2017,

we used a very special seafloor drill rig

that, uh, hasn’t been used before in Antarctica.

So when we used this special drill rig

and the sediments came up, we saw immediately

more than 60 different taxa of plants.

Similar to something that you would find in a rain forest,

in a temperature regime that was similar

to what we today know from Northern Italy.

And finding that on the Antarctic continent...

That was the most exciting thing.

Because the climatic conditions

doesn’t today allow any vegetation

to survive under those conditions.

So, based on that location and the environment we found,

I think that the Antarctic continent and the secrets

that still need to be recovered

will tell us a lot about planet Earth.

Was Antarctica once a tropical rain forest

where people lived?

It may sound impossible,

but some scientists have suggested a theory

that might offer an explanation.

They claim that it’s possible that the continent of Antarctica

wasn’t always at the South Pole,

but rather that it shifted there over time.

The idea of pole shifts was proposed

by Charles Hapgood in the 1950s.

Hapgood was a science teacher, a professor in New Hampshire,

and he published a book called the Earth’s Shifting Crust

in the 1950s.

And what Hapgood proposed

was that the geographic pole will change.

In Hapgood’s research,

he proposed that the poles shifted 18,000 years ago.

And the way it changes is that

the whole crust of the Earth changes.

It slips, sort of like an orange skin over an orange.

If Hapgood’s theory is correct,

Antarctica would have been not at the South Pole

but would have been shifted to a much more temperate climate,

like New Zealand or South Africa.

It’s possible that there could have been

an ancient civilization long ago when Antarctica

was in a more temperate, uh, climate and was habitable.

Is it possible

that such a pyramid could actually be in Antarctica?

We are now getting slim pieces of evidence that are telling us

that it was occupied in the past.

All of these are clues that will give us more information

about the people of the past,

and the greater antiquity of the human race.

If it was ever proven that there really is an ancient pyramid

on Antarctica, that could very well be

the most extraordinary structure ever found.

But there are other ruins

that, while they may seem more ordinary,

are no less baffling.

For instance, a seemingly unremarkable series

of stone buildings off the coast of Scotland

that left behind a mystery we may never be able to solve.

The Orkney Islands, Scotland.

This rocky archipelago

off the coast of Great Britain

is home to well-preserved Stone Age ruins

known as Skara Brae.

Skara Brae was discovered in 1850,

after a storm revealed these ancient ruins.

This storm moved a whole load of sand

away from a location,

revealing an entire Neolithic village

perfectly preserved,

as if this is how it was left 5,000 years ago.

It was like something out of The Flintstones,

with these rooms containing stone chairs,

stone beds, stone cupboards and mantelpieces.

Constructed around the year 3000 BC,

Skara Brae is believed to be older

than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

However, further excavations showed an astonishing connection

between Skara Brae and the mysterious ancient stone circles

that can be found throughout Great Britain and Ireland.

The culture responsible for Skara Brae

are known as the Grooved ware people,

due to a very specific type of pottery that they created.

And if you go to somewhere like Stonehenge,

they found examples of ceramics that are identical

to those that were found at Skara Brae.

And that in itself is significant,

because it’s very clear

that the people on Orkney were gradually spreading out

to cover the whole of Britain,

building stone circles all over the country.

Stonehenge, Avebury,

Anglesey, Newgrange in Ireland...

All of these were the product of the culture

that originally started with Skara Brae.

These huge stone circles

obviously had some sort

of special significance to the builders.

But they didn’t have any form of writing to tell us

why they were building stone circles.

And so, the only way that we can

reconstruct what these people were doing

and the thinking behind it is by what they left behind.

These big megalithic complexes that were built

to exactly the same formula, and it all began

on the Orkney Isles, and we don’t know why.

Will we ever learn what motivated the inhabitants

of Skara Brae to build such elaborate stone circles?

It’s questions like these

that keep archaeologists digging all over the world,

in order to learn more about our ancestors

and the mysterious structures they left behind.

There are vast areas of the world,

vast parts of Asia and Africa, for example,

that are barely touched by archaeology even now.

And there will certainly be all kinds of surprises,

and endless strange things coming out of these areas

which will completely change our view of that period of the past.

It does seem that

the deeper we dig into our past,

we are finding things that we can’t explain.

Sites and temples that shouldn’t have been around at that time.

And the further we explore, the mystery just gets

deeper and deeper.

Whether it’s lost pyramids or abandoned tunnels

or baffling stone artifacts,

ancient structures have the uncanny power

to capture our curiosity, and keep us wondering

what secrets they might reveal.

But no matter how much time or effort

we spend trying to find and study

and understand mysterious ruins,

like many things from our past, they remain...

unexplained.

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