Original subtitles

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] We need to re-examine the pre-history of Easter Island.

We shouldn't just accept what we're told.

[tense music playing]

{an8}Rapa Nui resident and archaeologist Dr. Sonia Haoa Cardinali

{an8}has spent nearly five decades recovering the island's lost history,

not by studying the Moai or ancient settlements,

but through a close investigation of its plants.

So, Sonia, I understand that you have a special interest in botany,

but you're also an archaeologist.

[Sonia] Yes. The most important for me

is to understand the people.

- Yeah. - Is to understand how people arrive,

is to understand how people adapted to this island

because as a human, we cannot do anything without plants.

[dramatic music playing]

[Graham] In the bowl of one of Rapa Nui's extinct volcanoes,

Dr. Cardinali and her colleagues have been searching for

the earliest evidence of non-indigenous plants or crops

that must have been brought here by humans.

What do plants say about when people lived on this island?

[Sonia] In the study of the different food we have, the result came...

Yes.

...with the banana.

They found the banana on the island 3,000 years ago.

So bananas have been on Rapa Nui for at least 3,000 years?

Yes. Yes.

[dramatic music continues]

[Graham] And they didn't get here by themselves.

[Sonia] It's not coming by the birds.

It's not by the sea.

The banana had to be planted by another human being.

So that's the reason it's telling you

that in Rapa Nui, there is a different period of people arrived.

[Graham] Yeah.

[Sonia] And it's a huge surprise for everybody.

It's changed, a little bit, the history.

- Well, it changes a lot the history. - [Sonia laughs]

[Sonia] The soil is not lying.

No, the soil tells the truth.

We didn't think that the banana was so important.

[music intensifies]

[Graham] Dr. Cardinali's dates were derived

from microscopic remnants of banana plants

and pushed the arrival of people on Rapa Nui back by around 2,000 years.

[majestic music playing]

So the plants are helping us to push the timeline back.

Yes.

And it's possible it may be older than 3,000 years.

We don't know. But that's the reason we should continue to study.

Absolutely.

[tense music playing]

[Graham] In light of this new evidence,

Rapa Nui's prehistory has to be reconsidered.

Dr. Cardinali's findings suggest that Polynesian settlers reached this island

long before the accepted timeline.

But based on Rapa Nui's oral traditions, there is another possibility.

[music continues]

Perhaps Hotu Matu'a and his seven scouts arrived here

many thousands of years earlier than anyone ever dreamed possible.

Might there not be a forgotten episode in the story of this island?

An earlier chapter written by survivors of the global cataclysm

that occurred around 12,000 years ago?

[music intensifies]

[music ends]

[theme song playing]

[theme song ends]

{an8}- [thunder rumbling] - [electronic warble]

[suspenseful music playing]

[Graham] If humans arrived on Rapa Nui many thousands of years ago,

where did they live?

Where are the archaeological traces we'd expect to find?

Remember that at the peak of the last Ice Age,

sea levels were more than 400 feet lower than they are today.

Rapa Nui would have been a much larger island.

All that land could have supported a much larger population...

[music intensifies]

...which could help explain how the huge Moai carving project

was pulled off.

Might their builders have chosen to live near the ancient coastline,

now lost underwater

and only used the higher ground we see today

for their great statue-building project?

It's not often realized how much land was lost to sea level rise

at the end of the Ice Age,

and the figure is roughly 10 million square miles,

the best land in the world at that time.

And when the sea levels suddenly rise,

and those coastlines get submerged beneath the sea,

anything built on those submerged areas gets smashed to pieces and destroyed.

And goodness knows what was lost to the rising sea levels.

[music intensifies, ends]

[waves crashing]

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] What we do know is that the earliest people living here

developed more than just extraordinary stone-carving skills.

[intriguing music intensifies]

Rapa Nui lore holds that their great founder, King Hotu Matu'a,

brought something special with him from that far-off land of Hiva,

a written language.

Its remnants were preserved on wooden tablets known as rongorongo,

most likely copies of copies created down the ages,

as the originals were lost to history.

Fewer than 30 rongorongo survive,

now preserved in museums around the world.

For Rapa Nui residents

like Indigenous documentarian Leo Pakarati,

these tablets hold a special place in history.

It's an incredible achievement because normally a written script

is associated with a big, highly-organized culture.

{an8}- Here we're finding it on a small island. - [Leo] Mm-hmm.

The rongorongo are very interesting and very important in our culture.

- And I think it's unique in Polynesia. - Yeah.

Yeah, it's unique. There's no rongorongo on other islands.

[Graham] With the slave raids in the 19th century

and the complete destruction of the wisdom tradition of Easter Island,

the ability to read the rongorongo tablets was lost,

and they remain one of the great mysteries of the ancient world.

Linguists have determined that there are too many different symbols

for the rongorongo script to be an alphabet.

[intriguing music playing]

It's likely a hieroglyphic or a pictographic script,

similar to those developed by the ancient Egyptians

and the Indus Valley civilization,

one that must have taken hundreds if not thousands of years to mature.

[Leo] The rongorongo system is very complex.

You need many elements, you know, peace, water, food, society, you know.

This is a very intellectual, complex process.

[Graham] For centuries, up until the Europeans arrived,

the written language was celebrated through song.

But the connection between sounds and symbols has long been forgotten.

The people don't learn to read.

- They learn only the song. - Mm-hmm.

And for a long time, the song continued.

What sort of things do these songs speak of?

Agricultural system.

- Yeah. - And the rules for navigation.

[Graham] Mm-hmm.

The inventory to the different genealogical lines.

[Graham] Mm-hmm.

The territory owners, things like this.

Yeah.

[Leo] For me, the rongorongo,

maybe it's the most important thing made by our Tupuna, our ancestors.

[intriguing music continues]

The presence of a fully evolved, complex script on Easter Island

is a paradox and a mystery, which has not yet been explained.

[suspenseful music playing]

I think the possibility has to be considered

that that script was first brought to Easter Island in remote prehistory

by those first settlers who are remembered in oral tradition

as having come from a much larger land of the Pacific called Hiva

that was inundated in an enormous flood and submerged beneath the waves.

I realize this is speculation on my part,

but could we be looking at the actual language

used by the lost civilization I've been searching for?

[tense music playing]

A people from faraway Hiva

whose origin story and script were preserved by the voyaging Polynesians,

who today call themselves Rapa Nui.

[tense music ends]

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] I believe that the Moai could also be a product

of this same earlier civilization.

There's even evidence that the ahus supporting the Moai

might have been based on an older design, created by someone else.

Like this one.

[intriguing music continues]

This is Ahu Vinapu.

It's unique in two respects.

First, it's constructed entirely from hard basalt,

not from soft volcanic tuff, like most of the others.

Secondly, and quite unmissable,

its megalithic blocks are intricately fitted together in a way

that's far superior to any other ahu on the island.

Indeed, it was so precisely made by the original builders

that no contemporaneous organic materials

were trapped in the hairline joints,

rendering its origins undatable.

It seems so out of place here

that one might almost imagine it to be the work of a different culture.

[intriguing music ends]

And there's another reason I suspect that this different culture might be

the lost civilization of the Ice Age I've been searching for.

The original name of the entire island is Te Pito o Te Henua,

which means "the navel of the Earth."

This designation of sacred ancient places as navels

is something that comes up again and again

across many ancient cultures and languages around the world.

{an8}Göbekli Tepe literally means "the hill of the navel."

{an8}Delphi in Greece was a navel of the Earth.

{an8}Angkor in Cambodia was another.

[tense music playing]

[car engine revving]

[Graham] Is it possible some single globe-navigating culture of prehistory

used this umbilical reference to name their most sacred sites,

including Rapa Nui?

If so, how could they have navigated here?

Well, there's one intriguing possibility.

[tense music intensifies]

[tense music ends]

[pensive music playing]

[Graham] Rapa Nui sits on the west end of a ridge of undersea mountains.

During the Ice Age, when sea levels were 400 feet lower

and the ocean floor perhaps higher because of a phenomenon known as isostasy,

the peaks of some mountains may have broken the surface,

creating a chain of tiny islands

linking Rapa Nui to the coastline of modern-day Peru.

Sure enough, it's precisely there that we find something remarkable,

carved into a hill facing the ocean...

[birds chirping]

[majestic music playing]

...a giant geoglyph, known today as the Candelabra of the Andes.

The sand has been scraped away, leaving the bare stone beneath

in the shape of an enormous trident.

[music continues]

As you approach the coast of Peru,

it seems almost like a beacon or a marker

that is calling people towards it,

that is saying, "Come here. There's something important here."

The geoglyph cannot be reliably dated,

though pottery found nearby has been attributed

to the local Paracas culture of around 200 BC,

who certainly recognized and respected it.

[suspenseful music playing]

But it's said to have been inspired by the legend of the ancient god Viracocha,

who was deified for creating many mysterious wonders

in this part of the world,

from the famed Nazca Lines

to the enigmatic megalithic complex of Tiwanaku in Bolivia,

high in the Andes, where his story begins.

[intriguing music playing]

[intriguing music intensifies]

[Graham] According to Incan lore,

this region was once struck by a great cataclysm,

a true ancient apocalypse.

- [thunder rumbling] - [rocks crumbling]

[intriguing music ends]

After it passed, a stranger appeared from the waters of Lake Titicaca.

[tense music playing]

They named him Viracocha...

[tense music intensifies]

...foam of the sea.

He and his band of followers taught the survivors the secrets of farming,

showed them advanced skills in stonework, and how to track the heavens.

[tense music ends]

[thunder rumbling]

Fundamentally, he is teaching the gifts of civilization

to demoralized and devastated survivors of a cataclysm.

[thunder rumbling]

These stories resonate with stories from all around the world

about beings, entities, deities, people, I think, who survived that cataclysm,

who attempted to restart civilization.

[uptempo intriguing music playing]

In Egypt, it was Osiris who taught his people

how to till the earth, reap crops, and make laws.

For the Aztecs in Mexico, it was Quetzalcoatl, the bearded wanderer,

who first brought them the gift of civilization.

[intriguing music continues]

And on Rapa Nui, King Hotu Matu'a and his chosen men echo this theme

of travelers from a far-off lost land arriving by sea to restart civilization.

[intriguing music intensifies, ends]

[suspenseful music playing]

Because the same traditions are found all around the world,

uh, we have to take them seriously.

Even today, storytelling is a powerful way

to pass down knowledge one generation to the next.

[Keanu] With these universal stories, do you feel like

{an8}what we're actually getting is a ripple out of that older knowledge?

{an8}[Graham] Yes. Yeah. I think we are.

And where did that come from?

There were so few survivors to pass on the knowledge,

but the knowledge was passed on in the form of myths,

- in the form of traditions. - [Keanu] Right.

The myths of humanity are the memory bank of our species

from a time when we have no written memories.

Right. We know that the oral tradition is very strong

- as a way of communicating history... - Absolutely.

...that kind of speak to me of some kind of historical events.

[Graham] Yeah, exactly.

It's this repetition of the same essential idea

from cultures that were not supposedly connected in historical times

that makes me think that what we're looking at

is a shared legacy, uh, from a much more ancient culture.

[splutters] And that's why I think myths need to be taken much more seriously.

Yeah, I think that too.

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] These great teachers from our myths like Viracocha,

could be amongst the few survivors of a civilization now lost to history.

[metal scraping]

[car engine revving]

And there may be more evidence of Viracocha's legacy.

Nearly 300 miles east from the Candelabra...

[intriguing music intensifies]

...on a mountaintop plateau near the city of Cusco,

more than 11,000 feet above sea level...

this is Sacsayhuaman.

[intriguing music ends]

[suspenseful music playing]

This is one of the world's most extraordinary ancient sites

and one of the most mysterious.

The vast hilltop site is filled with archaeological wonders

crafted from stone.

And at the edge of the hill, the greatest enigma of them all...

[music continues]

...three rows of mind-boggling stone ramparts

zigzagging across the mountain top.

[tense music intensifies, stops]

[mysterious music playing]

[Graham] I've been coming here for more than 30 years,

and it still never fails to confound me.

But now that my search for a lost civilization

has zeroed in on the Americas,

I'm here to re-examine this ancient megalithic mystery.

[music intensifies]

I always feel like a miniature version of myself

standing next to these giant megaliths.

There are thousands of these colossal polygonal blocks

perfectly shaped and fitted into place.

No single block is the same size or shape as any other block.

And yet they're all fitted together with this incredible level of precision.

It almost looks as though they've been melted together.

Even using today's technology, where would you start?

How was this done?

[music subsides]

To understand Sacsayhuaman, we need to know more of its history,

which is intertwined with the city below.

[intriguing music playing]

Today, Cusco is a vibrant metropolis that's home to 500,000 people.

For millions of visitors a year, it's a popular tourist destination.

But for my search, it's so much more than that.

[intriguing music continues]

Cusco was the capital of the once mighty Inca Empire,

a truly remarkable, indeed, astounding civilization.

A civilization that flourished across the high Andes,

{an8}famous for its legacy of incredible sites in stone like Machu Picchu.

{an8}[intriguing music ends]

But as with the Moai of Rapa Nui, the true story is clouded by catastrophe.

[menacing music playing]

Here, in 1532,

the Spanish conquistadors brought chaos and destruction to the Inca.

Because of the suppression of Indigenous cultures

during and after the Spanish conquest,

what we know about the Incas remains fragmentary

and in many ways a black hole in history.

[intriguing music playing]

Why? Because history, of course, is written by the winners.

And very few of those conquistadors spent time learning

about the culture they were decimating.

[men yelling]

The Incas were a glorious civilization.

They recorded incredible achievements, but they were very short-lived.

Although rich and powerful,

the Incan Empire had existed for less than a century

before the conquistadors arrived.

Of course, the Spanish didn't know that

and assumed that everything they saw, including the incredible megalithic walls,

was the work of the Incas they'd just met.

[intriguing music ends]

[Graham] It's hard to imagine how this was achieved

with the supposed tools available to the Incas,

which were largely other stones

for pounding these huge megalithic stones with.

It doesn't make sense to me.

[tense music playing]

The Incas had no written language.

But the Spanish records, such as they are,

tell us that Sacsayhuaman was the brainchild of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui,

whose reign ushered in the Incan Empire more than 500 years ago.

[tense music continues]

{an8}I'm hoping to learn more from site expert Amadeo Valer Farfán.

In which century, roughly, at what date do you think

this incredible, majestic work of architecture was built?

Approximately started construction in 1440.

And finished after 90 years.

[Graham] Right.

[Amadeo] Exactly before conquistadors came.

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] Pachacuti instructed his workers to build Sacsayhuaman using local stone,

which was a relatively soft rock.

Although now 12,000 feet above sea level,

it once formed the floor of a primordial ocean.

Long time ago, this part of South America also was part of the sea.

In different parts of this valley,

it's possible to see bedrock of, uh, limestone.

- Limestone. Sedimentary rock. - [Amadeo] Limestone. Yes.

And for this reason,

this stone is softer to work with than different stones.

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] Archaeology tells us these huge limestone blocks

were likely cut at quarries up to nine miles away.

I understand that limestone is a soft stone and relatively easy to work,

but we're looking at some gigantic blocks of limestone.

What's the heaviest here?

The heaviest here weighed more than 100 tons.

Good Lord.

[intriguing music intensifies]

[music fades]

[Graham] What puzzles me is the movement of those huge blocks.

I just can't understand how it was done.

In my opinion, the secret was in the quantity.

Pedro Cieza de León was a Spanish soldier and chronicler,

and according to him,

every day more than 20,000 people were working here.

That's a huge organizational challenge.

To organize 20,000 people as a workforce

is a highly sophisticated task.

[somber music playing]

[Graham] The construction of New York City's Empire State Building

took around 3,400 people in the 20th century.

Even with six times as many workers,

shifting these stones with far less advanced technology

would have been a gargantuan challenge, which could swiftly go wrong.

The only record we have of the Incas attempting to move a huge megalith

was preserved by a Spanish chronicler a few decades after the conquest.

According to the account he was given by local informants,

the attempt ended in disaster.

[menacing music playing]

He tells us of a great boulder that was hauled across the mountain

by more than 20,000 people,

until, at a certain point, it fell from their hands over a precipice...

[rocks crumbling]

...crushing more than 3,000 men.

If the Incas had that much trouble transporting one megalith,

how could they have brought thousands of them here?

[intriguing music playing]

[Graham] According to Spanish accounts, the Inca used a combination

of ropes, log rollers, and levers.

[intriguing music continues]

You could, with great effort and great care,

put two or three such blocks together,

but to put hundreds of them together, all of them precisely fitted,

it defies logic.

What if that Incan emperor was actually just supervising the building

of a fortress atop megalithic walls that were already there?

It's hard to imagine the spectacle that must have greeted the eye here

before the Spanish conquest.

But combining the latest scientific data

with eyewitness accounts left by the first conquistadors,

we can get a fairly good idea how Sacsayhuaman must have looked

at the height of the Inca Empire.

[intriguing music intensifies]

[suspenseful music playing]

[Graham] The Spanish tell us that the main complex

was being used as a military barracks, capable of holding thousands.

[suspenseful music continues]

They describe a three-layered circular tower

soaring 50 feet above the site,

surrounded by rectangular buildings and courtyards,

with their own freshwater system and storerooms for grain.

[suspenseful music intensifies]

The invaders believed Sacsayhuaman was first built as a fortress

because, after the fall of Cusco,

the Inca warriors made their last redoubt from behind these walls...

[suspenseful music intensifies, stops]

...which are all that remain today.

[suspenseful music resumes]

But is that why they were built?

What is the archaeological view of the origins of Sacsayhuaman,

and what was it for?

Many people think that it was military construction.

Only Spaniards or conquistadors told them it was a military fortress, but it wasn't.

It was a holy place, a temple, to celebrate the rituals and ceremonies.

- [intriguing music playing] - [drum beats]

[Graham] So the idea, which we often read in the history books,

that... that Sacsayhuaman was built as a military fortress, is a mistake?

It's a huge mistake.

[intriguing music intensifies]

[Graham] What's left of the structures atop the hill,

which were made from uniform rectangular blocks,

suggests they weren't built at the same time as the megalithic walls.

It would be fair to say that the Incas inherited some earlier works,

but those earlier works are quite hard to explain.

Yes.

[Graham] It also suggests they were constructed with a different,

as yet unknown, stone-working technique.

[uptempo intriguing music playing]

This could be considered, um, lost technology.

We are confronted by mystery, by an enigma that we cannot explain.

Could the smooth, massive, zigzag walls of Sacsayhuaman have been carved

not by the Inca, but by someone else?

[dramatic music plays]

[intriguing music playing]

What if much of the construction we see here that's attributed to the Incas

actually incorporates a legacy of far more ancient knowledge?

Could there be a legacy in stone,

a legacy from an older civilization, as yet unidentified by archaeology?

[intriguing music continues]

After all, no simpler versions of these smoothly fitted megalithic walls

have been found anywhere in Peru.

But we did see something like this back on Rapa Nui...

{an8}in the walls of Ahu Vinapu,

{an8}supposedly built long before Sacsayhuaman, more than 2,000 miles away.

[intriguing music intensifies, stops]

The individual blocks are made of solid basalt.

They are beautifully fitted together,

and they include polygonal elements, just like the walls of Sacsayhuaman.

{an8}Similar construction can be seen in ancient walls in Turkey and in Egypt.

{an8}There's a particular, a single small block

{an8}that is fitted in between larger blocks, which is identical.

{an8}You can find the identical image in Cusco.

{an8}Some suggest the builders were simply being efficient

{an8}with leftover waste material.

But just look at the precision.

So the feeling is that this is a technology from the past

that wasn't confined to or limited to Peru.

[intriguing music playing]

What if the Incas built some of the structures we see here

on top of far more ancient foundations?

[intriguing music builds]

Foundations that may go back

to the very roots of civilization in the Americas.

[dramatic music plays]

[suspenseful music playing]

[Graham] This possibility is leading me down

to the city over which Sacsayhuaman towers,

a place whose very name might hold a vital clue.

In the original Quechua language of the Inca,

Cusco means "navel of the Earth,"

{an8}just like all those other sacred ancient navels,

{an8}including Rapa Nui.

[music continues]

This notion of navels being found all around the world

should not be dismissed, in my view, as coincidence.

Could the remarkably shaped stonework we see throughout this navel of the Earth

be another surviving remnant of that far older, advanced civilization

I've been looking for?

Everywhere you look in this city,

there are layers upon layers of beautiful and intricately-shaped stone walls,

some incorporating giant megaliths.

The mystery is that in any wall,

you can often see several different styles of architecture.

Some extremely fine, some comparatively crude.

[suspenseful music continues]

That mystery has led me to Cusco's Calle Loreto

and archaeological researcher Jesus Gamarra, a descendant of the Inca,

{an8}who's spent decades studying the unique stonework of ancient Peru.

Tell me about your work in the area of Cusco and the Sacred Valley.

[in Spanish] My passion lies in antiquities of human origin.

And this is reflected in the stone

which is the oldest witness that exists in history.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Graham in English] Just as we saw at Sacsayhuaman,

the street's megalithic walls fit seamlessly together,

the stones' curved edges flowing one into the other.

I mean, it boggles the mind.

I'm just stunned looking at this, and I can't figure out

how anybody could have made walls

with these enormous stones so perfectly fitted together.

What the archaeologists teach us is that this was done by the Incas

and that they used simple pounding stones to make all of this incredible work.

[in Spanish] It is not possible to make this marvel with chisel technology

and a builder's kit

or to calculate the perfect precision

that exists in this type of expression.

[Graham in English] Nowhere is this precision more clear than here

with the geometric feat known as the 12-angled stone...

with its multiple faces fitting seamlessly

with 11 other unique blocks.

[intriguing music playing]

And yet something else is jarring about these so-called Incan walls.

I see many different styles of architecture here.

Some amazing stonework like this

and then some much poorer quality stonework side by side.

Help me to understand that mystery.

[in Spanish] This architecture does not correspond to the Incas.

The Incas did not use this polygonal, cushioned architecture.

The Incas have another type of architecture,

which is characterized by right angles.

[intriguing music continues]

[Graham in English] The upper sections feature blocks that clearly show

marks consistent with the basic tools the Inca used.

Their construction poses no mystery, unlike the lower tiers.

So in your view, the Incas did not make this?

No. No, no, no. No.

[Graham] Jesus believes the Incas built above

and around more ancient walls that were already here when they arrived.

[in Spanish] The history of Cusco does not only go back to the Incas,

but much further back.

[in English] Jesus Gamarra, he's convinced that we're looking not at one,

but at least at three different styles of architecture,

the work of at least three cultures.

[intriguing music playing]

The most recent rough block work, Jesus attributes to the Inca.

But he believes the pre-Inca smoothly-shaped stones

both here and at Sacsayhuaman

have their roots in a far more ancient technique,

one the Incas revered but could not emulate.

[intriguing music ends]

[in Spanish] There are things that are impossible

for more modern civilizations.

These are more ancient

and prove that moldable stone was used.

[Graham in English] Jesus Gamarra calls this style Hanan Pacha.

And to get a first-hand glimpse of it,

he suggests I visit an intriguing site

on the side of the hill topped by Sacsayhuaman.

[intriguing music playing]

A truly mystical location

with a secretive entrance all but hidden from view.

One that again shows a curious mix of building styles.

It's known as the Temple of the Moon.

[intriguing music continues]

This is a strange, complicated place with an air of mystery about it.

The low stone walls here are typical Inca masonry.

But hidden inside this shaped rocky outcrop

is something altogether different.

You're drawn in through a narrow passageway,

surrounded by silence.

[adventurous music playing]

It's almost like entering into a labyrinth.

It looks like some unknown technology that we don't fully understand,

created for reasons that don't make sense to us.

[music builds, ends]

[closing theme playing]

[closing theme ends]