10 Lost Civilizations That Existed Before Recorded History

The story of civilization has an official starting line: writing, around thirty-one hundred BCE. Everything before that is filed under prehistory — a polite way of saying we assume nothing important was happening. But the ground keeps disagreeing. Beneath hills, under floodplains, and off the bottom of the sea, archaeologists keep pulling up the remains of organized, ambitious, sophisticated societies that rose, built, and vanished thousands of years before the first word was ever carved into clay. From a temple raised before farming to an entire country swallowed by the North Sea, these ten lost civilizations push the beginning of the human story further back into the dark. Welcome back, fellow explorer. Subscribe for a new documentary every two days.