Update from the Writing Room: Peru's ancient coastal pyramids are rewriting world history transcript

Welcome to my writing room. The short video that follows, filmed by my wife Samantha on our recent research trip to Peru, is intended to give only a first quick glimpse of Peru's extraordinary coastal pyramid cities. Four of them are featured here, Bandura and Karal, both with drone footage, and Pine and Asparero. When Santa and I first visited Asparrow in 1993, it was still almost completely covered under the municipal rubbish dump of the nearby city of Sup.

Today, thanks to the work of brilliant Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solace and her team, Asparero has been largely cleared and excavations continue. Among the four sites featured in the video, Pineo is thought to be the youngest, dated to roughly 3,600 to 3,900 years ago. However, Bandura, Karal, and Asparrow are significantly older. Radioarbon dates place their earliest monumental constructions between approximately 5,700 and 4,600 years ago.

The step pyramids of Keral, Bandura, and Asparrow are thus as old or older than the officially accepted dates for the oldest of the Egyptian pyramids, as old or older than the oldest ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia, and roughly contemporaneous with the rise of early urbanism in the Indis Valley. What's being discovered in Peru is rewriting world history, which is precisely why these mysterious coastal cities alongside equally mysterious sites in Egypt, Iraq, India, and China will have an honored place [music] in the new book I've been researching and writing for the past year.

I'll be posting further [music] updates as the work continues. Heat [music] up [music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. [music] Heat. Hey. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> Woo! Heat. Heat. >> [music] [music]