07.31.19. The Enigma of Our Ancestry

It’s been a long time in the making… and we’re excited to finally make the big announcement: introducing The Micah Hanks Program, the new weekly podcast and official audio offering from Micah Hanks and The Gralien Report.

Although the name has changed, the newly rechristened podcast will continue to offer news and insight into the realms of space, science, ancient mysteries, and the unexplained, along with articles, videos, and other content provided by The Gralien Report, the official website of our long-running enterprise.

And to help break in the new and improved podcast, we kick things off with a journey back in time, as Micah takes us to the mysterious “Cradle of Humanity” in Eastern Africa, where millions of years ago our earliest human ancestors first appeared. Over the course of the next several hundreds of thousands of years, these mysterious early humans spread across the globe, eventually making their way to every continent. But just how early did humans set foot in the Americas, and were anatomically modern humans even the first to do so?

To answer these questions, we look at some of the most controversial archaeological sites in the world, which are also alleged to be the oldest in North America. Disputed by most scholars today, these sites—if confirmed—would dramatically shift our understanding of ancient human migrations. They may also cause us to have to rethink the mobility of ancient early human groups like the Neanderthals, as well as the mysterious Denisovans, each of which is believed to have disappeared nearly 40,000 years ago. But what if these hominid groups, or perhaps even unknown varieties similar to them, existed far more recently? What would this mean in terms of the broader human story… and even claims of sightings of primitive, bipedal primates that persist in modern times?