I'm a big fan of Hancock but also work with professional archeologists (though I am not one myself). I regularly read "kooky" topics as well as established science papers and monographs. To my eye, none of this should be this confounding -- yet it's festering into a culture war battle. Let's all chill out, not take ourselves too seriously, and just fine-tune the epistemic status of entertainment-level Netflix shows like this. Yes, Hancock is highly speculative and isn't doing archeology. He's also not a white supremacist either as many academics claim (the "canceling" part of his gripe). But let's not pretend that there is evidence for Atlantis either. For some reason this particular show is aggravating academics in a way the million Ancient Aliens and UFO shows didn't.
Note that a lot of professional-archeologist or professional-historian beliefs are also turning out to be false over the decades. Population-genomics is dispelling many commonly held beliefs of the field.
Professionals hate people like him, because he uses the exact same techniques as these professionals to extrapolate towards obviously false conclusions. It puts the professionals in an awkward space, as they have to start with accepting that their own field is based on a lot of conjecture, and that it facilitates this kind of fictionalizing.
This kind of fictionalizing was particularly true with non-western history of ancient civilizations where accounts were less dense, worse translated, had worse cultural context and dated back a few millennia. A lot of professional historians and archeologists have taken great liberty in interpreting the history of these regions, and the liberty taken by folks like Graham Hancock exposes some of these historians for the obvious 'fiction' that they stake their own careers on.
In that sense, ancient History & Archeology is going through a similar moment as cooking did a while back. Popular FACTS such as 'Marination leads to flavor penetration' or 'searing traps the juices' have now been thoroughly debunked. Food Science exposed the 'old wives tale' aspect of cooking, and now Population Genomics is spearheading a similar disruption within academic history and archeology.
The response to such an existential threat to the field is gatekeeping and defensiveness. And when a piece of work holds a mirror up to your field so brazenly, it receives the sharpest response.
> In that sense, ancient History & Archeology is going through a similar moment as cooking did a while back.
Not really. Anthropology and archaeology had its great "everything we thought we knew is wrong" moment about 50 years ago. There already has been major reassessments of the interpretation of archaeological finds, say reassessment of the Mayan civilization after their writing was discovered, or the reorganization of "mainstream" Mesoamerican history after Aztec tales about the Toltecs turned out to be not as truthful as initially believed. A more recent debate has been whether or not the Roman Empire actually fell, which isn't really conclusively settled until perhaps 15-20 years ago.
But you wouldn't know that from pop archaeology, which is still stuck a hundred years in the past. And people like Hancock aren't helping--he's not introducing any challenges to mainstream archaeology, just retreading 140-year old theories (in other words, from the worst era in terms of archaeology being inherently and vehemently racist) that have already been debunked.
The whole, "did Rome fall, or did it just morph into the modern European states?" thing has sort of been overblown. Even the Medievalists (my old camp) have always recognized that the traditional story European states told themselves about their origins weren't entirely accurate.
But those stories weren't created out of thin air. Evidence of continuity abounds. Interwar scholars like Henri Pirenne overstated their case, leaning into economics at the expense of politics.
Most historians and archeologists today are firmly in the "fall" camp. I'm generally with them. A couple of recent books:
Bryan Ward-Perkins. _The Fall of Rome_. Oxford, 2006.
Peter Heather. _The Fall of the Roman Empire_. Oxford, 2007.
There are two good studies that could be read as leaning towards cultural and economic transformation while still acknowledging that there were political breaks:
Peter Brown._The World of Late Antiquity_. Norton, 1989.
Peter Brown. _The Rise of Western Christendom_. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Brown is the giant of 20th century Late Roman scholarship (he practically invented the idea of "Late Antiquity" in the 1971 first edition of that book, which I eagerly consumed as an undergrad in 1975). The main strength of Late Antique studies is in a worldview that acknowledges the continuities of Roman civilization in the East _during and after_ 476 (for me, the really critical period was in the 6th and 7th centuries when Constantinople failed to support its colonists on the frontier, and the consequent abandonment of settlements which were by then behind barbarian lines -- aptly described in the contemporaneous "Life of Saint Severian").
On Hancock: He's undoubtedly a grifter at this point. Anyone who has studied Plato seriously (as all good students of history and archeology from the Golden Age into at least the Renaissance have) will know the legion of arguments supporting the modern consensus that Atlantis was no more real than Numenor (which it inspired).
Vast swaths of paleontology and archeology can be summed up by the word "oviraptor". Instead of saying "We don't know" they feel compelled to make up a _plausible_ story which sometimes the field puts forth a likely sequence of events and the public then take it to mean fact. It's likely most people in the field(s) themselves understand it to be conjecture with some interpretable signposts --but introductory courses generally introduce lots of the field as fact based presupposing students understand that it's composed of lots of conjecture.
> Instead of saying "We don't know" they feel compelled to make up a _plausible_ story which sometimes the field puts forth a likely sequence of events and the public then take it to mean fact.
Happens all the time in science. Science is about making our best current generalized explanation that fits the observed data. That's what gets us luminiferous ether, phlogiston, the plum pudding model of the atom, or the miasma theory of disease. Future generations will certainly look at us in horror for what our best current generalized explanations are, just as we look at previous generations.
That doesn't mean science is wrong or not worth pursuing. It just means we have to have healthy skepticism, which should be a virtue of science.
There is an enormous difference between a fact - that has been observed and confirmed by various observers - and a plausible theory. There are many theories in physics, for example, some with many elements confirmed in numerous experiments, but still called theories.
When I read history books, authors often mix these two. As a reader, I don't know whether a given statement is a fact (an artifact was found, several contemporary authors described an event in a uniform way), or just an interpretation that seemed plausible in a given situation
To me there is a difference when you have fresh data vs very old data which may or may not be a result of the thing that you're proposing was a plausible cause of something. With hundreds and thousands of years, things move, they weather, other things interact, floods, fire, get exposed buried, re-exposed buried...
There is an vast amount of literature on exactly these sorts of things, which we call 'formation processes'. I don't recommend you read any of it because most is stupifyingly boring, but please consider that academics have spent at least a few hours over the past couple centuries thinking about archaeological epistemology.
In that sense, I have found "The Dawn of Everything", by David Graeber fantastically good at debunking so many previous preconceptions and clarifying with cross-checking historical records some things we were taught that are arguably wrong and biased towards the western-european culture.
I correct myself, I have found all books by him just as good in that respect.
So, new eyes are great, new perspectives are awesome. If Graham Hancock were just a bit as through with his fact checking as David Graeber was, it would have been even better.
Graham Hancock is a crank whose pseudowork would be labelled as bad SF if we lived in a more rationale society.
Yes scientist may be somewhat a little conservative with their acceptance of new theory, but it's actually a sane attitude that this kind of people justify totally
Nobody is being asked to accept Hancock's speculations as theory. They are asked to engage the evidence, and they evidently prefer to attack the messenger.
Aside from his speculations, many of his interpretations ("handbags", zodiac carvings, Anunnaki/Apkallu confusion) are void, but those not citing unaccounted evidence may be ignored.
That is fascinating. Can you suggest readings in "population genomics" that have challenged the established historical record? I'm tolerant of divergent opinions yet like to stay grounded in somewhat rigorous methods.
I believe the techniques being referred to generally fall under the "ancient DNA" camp, and from what I believe they haven't "shaken" up the field. Don't get me wrong, the results have been absolutely amazing, providing concrete genetic evidence for conjectures stemming from linguistic, anthropological, and archaeological evidence, but haven't, to my knowledge, changed our broad-strokes understanding of (pre-)history
There's a reason it's called the aDNA revolution. Archaeogenetics has transformed our understanding of the past on every level and opened up entirely new types of research.
The kinds of stuff Hancock advocates like globespanning ancient civilizations obviously don't show up in the genetic record, but some ideas that used to be pretty far out like "widespread admixture between AMH and neanderthals" are widely accepted today on the strength of the genetic evidence and other research that was done to back them up.
Hancock does not posit globespanning civilizations, but rather far-flung refugees. Any actual globe-spanning civilization would have left plentiful traces where they could still be seen, so that seems ruled out.
Washing up in Iraq, India, Mexico, and Peru would be more consistent with a single origin in southeast Asia than in the Atlantic, but a global cataclysm ought to produce refugees from multiple places.
Any genetic signal of scattered refugees would be faint.
I mostly follow Razib Khan's reporting on this work. It is really dense and uses domain lingo, so it can be rather hard to parse. But, here are some narratives that are changing:
1. Genetic findings among South-East Asians indicate that the maritime powers of India (and mostly south India) were of greater significance at their peak than the Delhi sultanate or the Delhi centric view held by most historians. [1][2]
2. We are expecting huge changes to our understanding of ancient humans in Africa [3]
3. The most famous co-evolution fact of milk-and-lactose-tolerance might not be true [4][5]
4. The so-called-indo-aryans might not have brought the caste system or "Indian culture" with them. The Dravidians are almost just as "indo-aryan" as their non-Dravidian counter parts and the Aryan-Invasion-Theory, might not have had an invasion to speak of at all. [6][7]
These are extreme simplifications of the interesting stuff I found that was relevant to my country. I'm sure there is just as much about every other culture and it's just as spicy. Also, emphasis on 'might' & 'probably'. These fields are mid-disruption, and facts on the ground are changing as we speak.
The anti-institution sentiment is a result of them having clearly decided to move from attempting being apolitical to actively being political.
I don't see any anti-science sentiment here. If anything, conjecture is the first step to the process of science and the suppression of it within the institutions of science is very much anti-science. This is especially true when non-scientific institutions (liberal arts & soft sciences) pose as if their fields are grounded in axiomatic first principles like the hard sciences.
Now, I do agree that there is a rise in the loudness of conspiracies, but the previous century had a majority population that believed in creationism. So, I'm not sure if it is that much worse. Just that everyone has a megaphone now.
I mean if one of your parties resorts to constant lying, undermines the basic principles of democracy like the equal treatment of all, fights against the separation of church and state and caters to a (surprisingly large) populace of people who think Earth was created 4000 years ago, maybe one should be political.
As far as conjectures go - it's always appreciated to make a hypothesis as long as you approach it in a healthy way. Science requires that you yourself try to disprove the hypothesis as much as possible before posting it to the world. Otherwise you end up with so many "takes" that people stop believing there is a valid answer and become apolitical and jaded. In time of internet and open access to scientific papers the tolerance for constant wild speculation should be very low.
There is a process with which we question things and questioning should be welcome. Just throwing out wild conjectures and not addressing criticism isn't science. Especially in the time of the internet, publish a paper publicly and let's see it, you can get around the old farts
All science and research is difficult. In order to do it correctly with our imperfect tools, you're going to need a large field of expert peers who are able to relentlessly challenge your findings. This process doesn't always lead to better understanding quickly, but it works better than any other system in the long run. The problem with people like Hancock is they may superficially use the same tools as real scholars, but they don't have (or respond to) the same scientific correction processes. Hence: Atlantis is real.
"Atlantis" is just a recognizable name attached to a posited phenomenon. Getting attached to the name will just confuse you.
A better accounting for the evidence than a fallen civilization is what you need to beat back the idea. Complaining about it filling the vacuum is not science.
> For some reason this particular show is aggravating academics in a way the million Ancient Aliens and UFO shows didn't.
Likely because this is essentially a low tech alternative theory, so it’s harder to attack using claims of “its just science fiction or supernatural mythology” to discount it.
It really isn’t that outlandish so it skirts the realm of the plausible. He is not making suggestions that a bunch of dudes with antigravity devices flew off to the the four corners of the globe and levitated a bunch of big stones around for some grunting troglodytes. What Hancock calls “advanced” is basically “some groups 12k+ years ago had more advanced stone working and astronomical understanding than other groups” and some folks with that knowledge survived this global catastrophe and disseminated that knowledge.
It’s aggravating mainstream archaeologists because they can’t really prove him wrong (just point to their own self established authority) and frankly any new civilization oriented discoveries that date older than the conventional wisdom just serves to make his theory appear more likely and since he is not as credentialed in the discipline as they are, it erodes their authority.
I think it's more that he doesn't have any actual archaeological evidence of note to support the theory of relatively advanced ice-age civilizations, and the claim that 'they all lived by the ocean so the evidence is all buried under 100 meters of water and sediment' isn't what any scientific professional would call a solid argument.
I suppose if he can get some billionaire to fund a series of global underwater archaeology expeditions, that's fine, and might even have some interesting results, but otherwise it all feels like another expedition in search of the resting place of the Biblical Ark.
Gobekli Tepi is a megalithic archeological site from (going on memory) 11,900 years ago. Are you aware of when the last ice age occurred?
The level of sophisticated engineering capability and large-scale coordination of populations makes it difficult to falsify the theory that it was produced by a civilization. I have no idea how else megastructures can come into existence. All surviving hunter-gatherer, simple hunter-agrarian, and pastoral groups demonstrate little capacity to produce such things.
Excuse my ignorance about the series and mr.hancock, as i havent bothered with the series or his books, but i'd like to reach an understanding: the claims of the space-debris collisions 12,000 years ago are false?
If not then these two facts aren't false, then it's important to note they coincide with myths of a global cataclysm, and do a lot to confirm graham's theory. Which seems from my 2-mile away viewpoint to have less to do with hand-wavy atlantians-this and more to do with the two points i mentioned above.
i think we can all agree thay academia (and especially anthropology) is one of the most anti-intellectual places on the planet. There's been tons of evidence over the past few years about how a lot of the "knowledge" and analysis that is produced is distorted at best and often outright incorrect. I'd say academia is just jealous and riding the wave of the absolutely fanatical censorship crusade that's been going on.
Gobekli Tepi is an interesting site, but doesn't really seem like 'advanced civilization' relative to later developments:
> "Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of modern times, pushing back the origins of monumentality beyond the emergence of agriculture. We are pleased to present a summary of work in progress by the excavators of this remarkable site and their latest thoughts about its role and meaning. At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops."
(2012) "The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey", Dietrich et al.
The Younger Dryas is a well-studied period in paleoclimate science and the evidence of an impact triggering it is pretty scant, see this from 2011:
> "In summary, none of the original YD impact signatures have been subsequently corroborated by independent tests. Of the 12 original lines of evidence, seven have so far proven to be non-reproducible. The remaining signatures instead seem to represent either (1) non-catastrophic mechanisms, and/or (2) terrestrial rather than extraterrestrial or impact-related sources. In all of these cases, sparse but ubiquitous materials seem to have been misreported and misinterpreted as singular peaks at the onset of the YD. Throughout the arc of this hypothesis, recognized and expected impact markers were not found, leading to proposed YD impactors and impact processes that were novel, self-contradictory, rapidly changing, and sometimes defying the laws of physics."
It does seem to sound a bit like 'the lost civilization of Atlantis was wiped out by a cosmic impact' fairy tale. Also the claims of a 'cover-up' are pretty silly.
> Gobekli Tepi is an interesting site, but doesn't really seem like 'advanced civilization' relative to later developments
Shouldn't we define “advanced” relative to the time of its construction? Seems unfair to compare it to sites that came later. You need to compare to sites from the same period…is it advanced compared to those? That’s an obvious yes.
That site would take a wide variety of skills to build. You need established leadership, an established religious or cultural belief enough to motivate the project. You need planning, you need stone cutting skills, you need artisans with stone carving ability, you need people with building skills, you need laborers, you need logistics, you need to essentially feed a large workforce which means your non-labors on the project have to provide hunting and gathering not just for themselves, but for others who are unable.
> I'd say academia is just jealous and riding the wave of the absolutely fanatical censorship crusade that's been going on.
People who grew up internalizing the ethos of cancel culture are graduating into faculty and other positions of authority. Plus, even as students through sheer aggressiveness they were quite effective at changing academic norms. Less a matter of jealously and more a reaping of what was permitted to be sown, I would think.
Cancel culture was always fundamentally based on moral certitude; not just in the abstract, but in concrete, detailed application to their own and others' activities. So there's obvious dissonance with the nature of the scientific process. The way this dissonance plays out as the cancel culture crowd becomes the scientific establishment is already turning out to be... interesting.
> I think it's more that he doesn't have any actual archaeological evidence of note to support the theory of relatively advanced ice-age civilizations
I guess for me it’s strange that what should be a passive dismissal of a fringe idea seems to have a much more active campaign of labeling it misinformation.
Are his ideas really that dangerous to warrant such concern? Pretty sure society is not going to change just because Graham Hancock convinced a hundred, thousand, or even a million people that maybe there was some groups that had astronomical and stone building capabilities prior to the ice age. I seriously doubt that manic mobs are going to raid the local archeologist’s houses, carry them out on a rail, and burn them at stake at the edge of town for daring to suggest that hunter gathers probably weren’t that advanced.
I don’t understand the resistance to his ideas honestly, or how it really impacts us as modern humans. Physiologically, humans 20,000 years ago were not any different than human beings 5,000 years ago. If they could figure out how to create structures in ancient Egypt, they could have very well figured how to create structures 15,000 years ago - the human brain was largely the same. Regardless, it does little to change how I view myself or my history as a human today.
I find the concept of a pre-ice age civilization with a degree of astronomical and stone working knowledge pretty fascinating and as I said above—plausible, perhaps even likely. But, I think Hancock gets a little more speculative and sure of himself than I think some of his evidence warrants. Some evidence seems plausible and compelling and some requires some big leaps of faith, but he for sure paints an interesting picture and I believe “what if..” is a powerful thing that shouldn’t be suppressed.
So are you saying you are surprised that actual archeologists are upset by this and they should calm down? I'm having a bit of trouble trying to understand what point you are trying to make.
> Yes, Hancock is highly speculative and isn't doing archeology
People tend to forget that Ilium (known to most as Troy) was regarded as entirely legendary until the late 19th century. There was no evidence for Troy until there was.
Even so, it is fun to think about such things. The more wild, the better. For example, save some areas earth's crust is largely turned over, which means evidence of civilization on certain land masses would have long been melted down by now.
The only hope for evidence would, in my view, be artifacts in space, assuming those past civilizations were space-faring. Its just fun to speculate, even if it borders on or exceeds the line between science and science fiction.
Antarctica is under thousands of feet of ice. Pulverized evidence of civilization might survive there, just like the petrified remains of 100MM year old trees. Who knows? That's the fun.
Hancock has been arguing for a long time that a variety of stone age monuments around the world stem from a common cultural background, from a priest caste that spread around the world to build those monuments, and that they must have come from a civilization we have not yet discovered that was destroyed by the end of the last glacial period.
It's been a while since I've watched any of his documentaries, so I'm not sure if my above characterization is accurate anymore (or ever was -- maybe I misremember). But while there isn't much (if any) evidence yet for his proposition, it's really not that farfetched. Sea levels went up a lot, and many possible sites of a small but relatively advanced civilization can have been buried relatively quickly and in ways that are hard to find now (e.g., in the black sea). Whatever the case, such a civilization(s) was not that advanced, and it must have been fairly small, else they'd have spread to areas that would not have been destroyed by the end of the glacial period. The biggest problem I have with his proposition is that it's really difficult to imagine a "priest" caste maintaining the necessary knowledge, ideology, secrecy (comsec and opsec), willpower, and cohesion across hundreds of (perhaps over 1,000) generations and tens of thousands of miles.
> Back then, distances were simply bigger, both in actual distance and in time.
I think it's been amply demonstrated that long-distance sea voyages were always feasible - which is how Oceania was populated in the first place. So the tales of ancient mariners bringing advanced knowledge to all sorts of peoples may well have some merit.
It's plausible, but keeping all that knowledge and opsec going across 1,000 generations (or more) is... very challenging -- so challenging that I doubt it actually happened.
> Yes, Hancock is highly speculative and isn't doing archeology. He's also not a white supremacist either as many academics claim (the "canceling" part of his gripe). But let's not pretend that there is evidence for Atlantis either.
There's a few things to unpack here.
First, the Atlantis theories are essentially racist. Fundamentally, what it does is take some impressive structure--Great Zimbabwe probably the most notorious example--and ask who built it. The natural first place to start looking is among the indigenous inhabitants (and in basically all cases, there is substantial evidence that this is indeed the case), but this theory is instead built by another group of people for whom there is really no evidence. In other words, the theory is going well out of its way to avoid the explanation that the indigenous inhabitants, to such a degree that you have to ask why. And the "why" is probably an inability to believe that the indigenous people could be capable of building such structures.
The second thing to point is the degree of lack of evidence. This isn't "oh, we haven't found any evidence;" no, it's "we have to posit something completely unlike every known explain to explain why we haven't found any hint of evidence." Yes, global sea levels were at lower doing the last glacial maximum--but note that every early civilization we have spread out substantially far from the coastline. Most of them weren't even centered on the coast.
Third, the framing of "just asking questions" and "I'm a journalist, not an archaeologist" is something that just pisses me off. Hancock has been pushing this narrative for several decades now (and the underlying theories are over a century old)--the questions he's asking have already been answered. He's clearly not interested in listening to the answers--and that makes him not even a journalist but a propagandist instead. If he's proven so unwilling to change, we shouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt and pretend that he's some kind of pop psychologist.
And the final, and most frustrating thing is, this sort of stuff sucks the air out of actual interesting archaeology. A great example of pop archaeology that covers "challenges to mainstream archaeology" [1] well is Charles Mann's 1491, which has the benefit of everything being supportable by actual evidence. And it still manages to bring up interesting questions like "what is a writing system?" (is the Andean quipu a writing system?) or "is agriculture a prerequisite for civilization?" (Norte Chico suggests perhaps not). But instead of stuff like that in documentaries, all we get is... Ancient Aliens^H^H^H^H^H^H Atlanteans. Again.
[1] One really unfortunate aspect of pop archaeology is that it's generally stuck in the early 20th century. This means that the current "consensus" in archaeology is actually surprisingly against what people think of "mainstream archaeology."
Ad hominem accusations of racism suck the air out of interesting discussions. There is nothing "essentially racist" about a hypothesis that there was an ancient civilization centered on a North Atlantic island with technology perhaps roughly equivalent to what we consider the Bronze Age, and that that civilization was destroyed circa 12K years ago by a series of meteorite impacts. That hypothesis is highly speculative and rests on a shaky foundation, but it's not outright impossible and there's no harm in doing some additional archaeological research to look for evidence one way or another. Population groups which existed that far back have little relevance to the modern social construct of races.
This isn't responsive to what the parent commenter wrote. They took on the burden of explaining why the Atlantis theories are intrinsically racist, and you didn't engage with that argument, but rather wrote a comment that pretends the argument wasn't made at all. You should try again (and you should read their follow-up comment, which expands that argument).
Howso? I thought he tackled it just fine. Heres a refutation for ya then :
1) the claim of racism is a claim about the intent of the alleged racist. What makes us think Hancock thinks X civilization wasnt capable of Y feat because of their race? Has he ever said anything remotely like that? He hasnt. Furthermore, whats to say that the civilization that he posits actually accomplishes feat Y is not the same race as cilivation X? Hes never said as much.
The racism bullshit is tiring as fuck. And by that I mean actual racism and flippant accusations of racism are old hat. Very tiresome.
> Furthermore, whats to say that the civilization that he posits actually accomplishes feat Y is not the same race as cilivation X? Hes never said as much.
In his first book on the topic, he did specifically make the point that the advanced culture was "white", although to his credit, he hasn't explicitly repeated that since.
How about this—the post did not contain any links to substantive support for claims that Atlantean theory is “inherently racist” much less than Hancock is racist other than a general association with what some unnamed people said about ancient stone forts in SE Africa, which my cursory search did not find linked to any theory of Atlantis.
Did Cassandra cry wolf? Some folks need to stick a finger in the undead to accept the least charitable interpretation.
It is baseless to claim that I “attempt to dismiss all arguments.” I only refer to one comment.
In that comment there was not an argument to which someone might engage. There was a string of free associated claims. The post did not contain any links to substantive support for the claims that Atlantean theory is “inherently racist.”
As a form of argument, it might be of the class “when did you stop beating your wife?” or the Democratic Party of the US are racist because senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK.
First, the Atlantis theories are essentially racist.
To make an argument the supporting sentences would address what is meant by “racist” and provide some evidence that “Atlantis theories” meet the criteria established definitionally or at least in common understanding.
Four supporting sentences:
Fundamentally, what it does is take some impressive structure--Great Zimbabwe probably the most notorious example--and ask who built it.
As far as I can tell there is no claim that a lost North Atlantic civilization built stone forts in SE Africa.
The natural first place to start looking is among the indigenous inhabitants (and in basically all cases, there is substantial evidence that this is indeed the case), but this theory is instead built by another group of people for whom there is really no evidence.
This does not establish that proponents of Atlantis theory make speculative claims due to a racist essence. The claim of “natural” isn’t a true claim. Given what is known about human mobility it would not make sense to link the builders of Cahokia with those of Chicago.
In other words, the theory is going well out of its way to avoid the explanation that the indigenous inhabitants, to such a degree that you have to ask why.
Again, doesn’t establish a link between Atlantis folks and the described behavior. In the case of Greater Zimbabwe there was a effort by the Rhodesian government to separate precolonial people from local architecture. Did the Rhodesians invoke Atlantis or is there some link between Atlantis theory people and Rhodesians other than they both engage in speculation? This is not established by the argument of the comment.
And the "why" is probably an inability to believe that the indigenous people could be capable of building such structures.
This is not related to the claim that Atlantis people are racist or not since the series of claims do not establish that Atlantis people do this. Additionally, this statement engages in hedged mind reading. It does not establish a likelihood of beliefs of Atlantis theory folks.
> this sort of stuff sucks the air out of actual interesting archaeology
Semi rhetorically: What makes fantasies, conspiracies, hoaxes, gossip so much more enticing than reality? What itch does having "sacred knowledge" scratch?
For me, reality is so much more interesting. Looking up at the Milky Way, I'm just gobsmacked. Microscopic images of cells, proteins, and frikkin atoms just breaks my brain. Whole universes left to discover and understand. Woot!
The truth is so much more compelling than fiction.
If you had no other evidence to go on then yes, that would be exactly the FIRST assumption that you would work from. But then you might keep LOOKING for evidence and re-evaluate as necessary. Is Hancock doing this?
Terms like 'turkic' really only serve to confuse discussions like these. If you're asking whether population continuity with modern day populations in the area is a reasonable and common null hypothesis, the answer is yes. There are cases where continuity is extremely limited (e.g. pre-Columbian native Americans -> modern rural American populations), but those sorts of near-complete replacement events are historically rare. More commonly it's a broad mixture of the admixture, social recombination, and ethnogenesis that's constantly happening anyway.
This is all separate from saying that historical people would have identified as 'Turkic' or 'Russian' etc, or even understood anything resembling modern definitions for those terms.
One of the hallmarks of colonial archaeology was conflating these things and throwing in a touch of racism for good measure. They'd walk up to a Mayan site (ex.) and say "well these modern primitives couldn't have invented the techniques for this fine stone- and metalworking on their own, therefore a group of now-extinct people who suspiciously resemble Europeans must have either done it directly and been replaced or taught these barbarians how to do it". Thor Heyerdahl of kon-tiki fame is a prominent example that you may have heard of, but this was a thing that permeates a lot of old archaeology/anthropology. There are even terms for this like diffusionism and hyperdiffusionism. Being called a diffusionist is basically one step above being accused of plagiarism for modern archaeologists, which should give you an idea of how badly such theories are regarded today.
First off, the Atlantean theory being talked about bears rather little relation to Plato's description. It rather harkens back to the 1880s, when Atlantis shifted from being a tale of hubris to a world-spanning civilization responsible for most or all indigenous innovations.
Second, racism is... old. After all, recall that Greeks were the ones who named their out-class of foreigners after the sounds sheep made ("bar-bar", hence modern "barbarian").
Oikophilia, as opposed to xenophobia, is hardly racism. After all, many cultures do have a general term for other people. The passage of a word over the course of 2k+ years to its current bearers is hardly an indictment of those who first mint it.
In Ancient Greece, the Greeks used the term not only towards those who did not speak Greek and follow classical Greek customs, but also towards Greek populations on the fringe of the Greek world with peculiar dialects.
Graham Hancock is a journalist, not a scientist. He doesn't pretend to be otherwise. He's likely wrong about most of his theories. But he's challenging accepted ideas in a field where accepted ideas are frequently overturned. That's useful. He stimulates the imagination and tells stories expertly, making it a joy to listen to him talk. There's value in thinking "What If" and being unafraid to think outside the box of the consensus. While being careful to understand probabilities enough to know it's likely wrong. I think Archaeologists need to be a little less uptight and remember why they go into the field in the first place. It's because their imaginations were captured by stories, told and untold, of history. Let's also not forget that every new idea in any science was once against the "consensus" view.
I find it fascinating to think that civilization could have started earlier than we currently imagine. It doesn't seem that crazy to think that humans like to settle around river deltas and near the coast, and all the river deltas and coasts of 10,000 BCE are now under 400ft of ocean. What secrets lie buried under the ocean sediments? What will we discover? Graham may well be wrong about most of it, but I'd bet my life savings that there are fascinating discoveries yet to be made that will overturn what we currently think we know about human history.
> river deltas and coasts of 10,000 BCE are now under 400ft of ocean. What secrets lie buried under the ocean sediments? What will we discover?
With current technology isn’t there a way for us to scan all coastline to detect evidence of large settlements?
If someone truly believes (and moreover fashions their entire career around) in advanced earth civilization before 10,000 BCE, wouldn’t they be figuring out a way to scan all coastline?
This argument seems analogous to me to when someone tries to sell you an investment with unrealistic returns - why wouldn’t they just pocket the entire return instead of sharing?
I think you underestimate how hard it is to find evidence of human settlement under sediment in the sea floor in 400 ft of water. Anything organic likely is gone, but there might be stone evidence. Unless it's something like Gobleki Tepi, it would be very hard to identify. And sites like that would be very rare, if there are any. It's worse than finding a needle in a haystack.
As far as I know, little effort had been put into it.
You expect a journalist to field tech to scan continental shelves? His role is to call attention to unaddressed questions provoked by evidence. It is historian's and archaeologists' job to answer them.
Looking at the surface of the ocean and speculating what may or may not have been below it 10,000 years ago is not journalism. It's storytelling.
Do I expect the man to go swimming around the ocean's depths? I have no expectation one way or the other. My only expectation is that, having not done such work, he doesn't claim to have the result of the work he didn't do. I assume GP was thinking similarly.
I think the frustration comes from people who have already asked these questions and provided answers, which he is ignoring in favor of his own speculations.
Unfortunately not that easy. Take the Mesopotamian city ur. One theory is that there was earlier cities that were on what is now the gulf that got covered as the sea rose as the last ice age retreated. Unfortunately those cities if they exist were most likely build out of mud brick and thus dissolved.
I'll not address resolving coastline since that's an already known problem and currently has no solution.
For shallow sea discovery, radar is good enough to get a detailed map of terrain and medium to large scale objects. There is also a heuristic that can be applied in finding whether something is man made or occurs organically. Software applying this heuristic was used to debunk suggested "alien" structures on Mars. This same approach can be used to scan and find potential settlements underwater for excavation. At the very least some follow up core drilling.
The only sales pitch needed is one that gets the money to buy some equipment, pay a few people to sit a long time in a boat trolling, and maybe longer at a desk organizing and publishing the data. None of this is magical, requires magical thinking, or magical amounts of money. The issue is convincing enough people its worth at least trying to find new or more evidence.
There is no such technology. Ground penetrating radar can be used to find some large buried artifacts above the water line. For underwater artifacts the only options are side-scan sonar and lidar, but those don't work for anything deeply buried under sediment. A lot of sediment can accumulate in 12K years.
In order to find anything I think the most productive approach would be to make some educated guesses about where settlements might have been located, then excavate those sites. But any sort of underwater archaeology is extremely expensive. And the cost goes up exponentially for anything much deeper than 100 ft / 30 m because that's about the limit for human divers to do useful work with cheap and simple compressed air scuba gear.
I'm guessing that someone in that position has the choice of maintaining their money-making proposition with little further investment. Or investing a lot in something that might confirm what he already earns from, or uncover nothing useful for his journalism.
I think actual archaeology based on evidence, from digs supported by careful dating, is far more interesting than what are essentially just unsupported speculations. Anyone can make up a might-have-been story, after all.
For example, I recommend this DW documentary on the 9,000 year old village of Ba'Ja in Jordan, and the actual archaeological discoveries made there. It's perhaps not as exciting as claims about Lost Atlantis etc., but it does have the benefit of being a real site:
There does seem to be something going on with a lot of corners of academia where it’s not just about the science or evidence, which it should be, but also “playing the game” where you “pay your dues” by following roughly the same path as everyone else in the field and if you don’t, nothing you say or do will be taken seriously.
That doesn’t mean everyone outside the mainstream is right, of course, but it means that when I see academics so up in arms I suspect motivations that aren’t as purely about evidence as they claim.
Serious Academics are not much better in their use of conjecture and motivated reasoning.
Consider this article in the New York Times in which a Real Archaeologist dismisses the idea that there was any violence involved in a large group of men suddenly meeting their genetic end:
> But skeletal DNA from that period is striking and puzzling. Over all, Bronze Age Iberians traced 40 percent of their ancestry to the newcomers.
> DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.
> To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.
> “I cannot say what it is,” said Roberto Risch, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the new studies. But he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,” he said.
> Instead, Dr. Risch suspects “a political process” is the explanation. In their archaeological digs, Dr. Risch and his colleagues have found that Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.
If there were a lot of men dying in wars, wouldn't there be a lot of damaged skeletons which would lead to the conclusion that it was a violent time? You're offhandedly dismissing a statement that could have a lot behind it.
There might be such skeletons. But even bones decompose, especially on these time scales.
That any time in history was not a violent time is itself an extraordinary claim. Additionally, thousands of men, 100% of a genetic line, opting to not reproduce would also be an extraordinary event. We've seen men turned eunuch by cults before, but I don't think ever at such a scale.
We have many historical examples of genocide, as well as invaders killing the local men and taking the women as their wives.
There are a lot of possibilities, but this archaeologist is discounting a very likely possibility with flimsy reasoning. I'm reminded of how virologists seemed to unite behind the idea that COVID couldn't possibly be a lab escape, but they had no real evidence to dismiss the possibility. They weren't following the evidence, but rather following the popular narrative.
I live in Boulder, so I see more junk pseudoscience than usual, and I think it's out of control.
It's worth noting that noted nonsense profiteer Gaia TV is based here, and I've had conversations with employees who make no apologies for what they're knowingly doing (and one who was uneasy about it, FWIW).
If you thoroughly understand a subject, you can perceive subtle differences between close arguments. You can understand where knowledge is solid enough to be used in distinction, and where it is not, and therefore conjecture and opinion are appropriate.
If you don’t thoroughly understand a subject, then you don’t perceive these subtle differences, many arguments look equally valid, and the complaints of experts seem like pointless gate keeping to you.
This is totally misinformed. When research is funded by corporations, we get ideas that are informed from the lunatic fringe that are based on nothing.
To preface, I have absolutely no idea about archeology or academia. I watched the first episode and I've been aware of Graham Hancock since his first appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, but I had to stop watching this new show after the first episode. It felt like he was just purely on the defensive against 'big archeology' from the very get go, rather than presenting an interesting argument for why a civilisation like Atlantis might have existed. I may be misremembering, but I don't remember his style being so defensive when he first came into the public eye with these ideas.
I think I'll still keep a distant eye on what he's saying though. His message definitely tickles a curiosity bone in my body, but I'll take it all with a massive pinch of salt.
I watched it with my kids (we have 2 more episodes to go). He definitely has a chip on his shoulder about being called out by archeologists, but it's a fun series and I learned a lot. He builds a pretty decent case, but it's not rock solid, but it's fun to hear.
I tell my kids that the show is not proven facts, but that it's an alternate theory and the evidence he brings up sounds reasonable. But just keep it as another theory, and you consider strength of evidence as whether or not to believe it. So even if it's just a story, it's a fun story.
Stuff like Gobeki Tepe, however, is pretty interesting and seems to shatter our understanding of how human civilization started.
After watching the show, next year we intend to visit 2 of those sites he mentioned just for fun.
> Stuff like Gobeki Tepe, however, is pretty interesting and seems to shatter our understanding of how human civilization started.
Does it?
Back when I went to school in the 90s, the fashionable site was Çatalhöyük. It's ~2000 years younger than Göbekli Tepe, but it was a (proto-)city with thousands of people. I remember the teacher saying that Çatalhöyük was notable for its size, not for its age, and that there were plenty of older permanent settlements in the region.
The first time I heard of Göbekli Tepe was 10-15 years ago. It fit pretty well with the established timeline of the Neolithic Revolution. The site was more remarkable for having (what appears to be) ceremonial buildings than for its age. It was also interesting that Göbekli Tepe was buried deliberately rather than being destroyed or built over.
Current scholarship is that it was not deliberately buried, but just filled in over millennia. That happens when your structure is basically a pit to begin with.
I'm not going to pretend to know anything more than what I saw on the tv show or the scant amount of research I did on the internet out of interest. My understanding, which I will not defend because I have zero background, is that the megaliths, ie. huge stone constructions, are considered to be much more advanced than something at that stage in human history. In addition, I think there was suggestions that it was involved in astronomy which was also not expected for something that old.
>Stuff like Gobeki Tepe, however, is pretty interesting and seems to shatter our understanding of how human civilization started.
He stacks alot of speculative but interesting claims on top of each other so it's not an all or nothing theory. I think a flooding/impact event pushing humanity into a dark age during that period is a very compelling idea. The idea that all megalithic structures come from a single lost civilization not so compelling.
I think he does. Something like survivors of "Atlantis" spread through the world and taught local hunter gatherer groups in the ways of civilization and megalithic architecture.
>It felt like he was just purely on the defensive against 'big archeology' from the very get go,
This is specifically the play though, it's what triggers some kind of mind-blow response in people's minds - don't give any explanation but insinuate that "everything you know is false", because the entire structure that exists is some kind of front, and I'm the only one who will tell you. This is what Qanon and sabine hossenfelder play on
Valid question downvoted to oblivion (really people? vouched.).
Her content is well within the range of reason. [1][2] However, I feel like in her (honourable) effort to debunk questionable pop science stuff, she sometimes is a little too harsh: she’ll point out that an idea borders on untestable/religious (fair) and nearly ridicule it, failing to reframe it in a more constructive way. For example, things like string theory or multiverses may be untestable, but even as such they are extremely useful tools for thought. These ideas help us take a step back from our intuition and firsthand experiences, and can help us gain more perspective on ourselves. They can help exercise our imagination, and they can help spark curiosity in people. All within certain bounds of reason.
[1] Disclaimer: I’m a scientist (biochem) with an interest in maths, but physics is not my area of expertise.
[2] In contrast, you'd have to have the IQ of a carrot to think QAnon makes sense. Completely insane comparison.
When I was young(er) I remember the trope of old people complaining about how everything is getting worse and rolling my eyes, but as I get older...
I distinctly remember growing up and watching educational dinosaur documentaries on the science channel and cool Roman history on the history channel.
Couple decades later I check out those channels one is a hundred variants of "ancient aliens" and the other is... well I have no clue about the Science channel actual but the history channel definitely took a hard turn towards non-science based paranormal.
I imagine the history channel was never a non-profit educational endeavor but it sure was at least somewhat educational back in the day?
For what it's worth, what happened is that it turns out people don't actually want to watch good, educational content. At least, not in the numbers required to sustain a cable tv channel.
On that note, I really wish YouTube would do more highlight its high quality channels. I'm sure I'm missing better examples, but creators like RealLifeLore, Tom Scott, and Weird History are finding success in making new informative video essays about historical subjects
People want to watch good educational content, but they don't want to pay for content. They may be willing to pay for convenience, but a cable channel no longer provides that.
People want to watch entertainment, when I was a kid watching the 100th documentary about egypt I wasn't thinking about getting educated, I was enjoying it because it was fun and interesting, and so was everyone else I knew. And if i'm honest they could be lying to me and I wouldn't have been able to tell, nor would I be bothered to go after archeology papers to fact check it.
I do lament the fall of the history channel because the documentaries were extremely fun, not really because I'm sad about missing the information on the mongols in the nth century. Hell the dragon: a fantasy made real doc in discovery channel was a blast, not really bothered it wasn't real, if anything it was a wake up call for people that believed everything they saw on there.
And that literally a whole generation lived through it, and you could find plentiful interviewees to fill time with. I loved watching my grandfather's generation tell stories, because it felt like watching grandpa tell stories.
I don't remember which channel it was specifically, but I happened to catch one of those style of documentaries (probably something about string theory because that's the only thing deep pop physics seems to want to cover). The basic style of the show was "commercials, recap of last segment, frame a question, have the expert talk about it for like 30 seconds, voiceover recap of that response, lofty question to leave you wanting to come back after the commercial break, commercial break" (rinse and repeat until hour timeslot is filled). And in one of those segments, the managed to have the leaving question ask the thing they just answered earlier that segment.
So don't hold your breath that the various science channels are doing much better.
Social media has taken the same slide from helping people communicate and find information to being skinner boxes that serve streams of addictive filler.
The pattern I keep seeing repeated is that things start out with positive intent but fine after a while discover that there is not only more money but more engagement and popularity to be had in making increasingly stupid and destructive material. We seem to consistently surprise ourselves with just how low our tastes actually are.
Like if you took me from the late 1990s (college years) and showed me todays TikTok or YouTube I’d have laughed and thought there’s no way anyone would want to spend much time watching that schlock. It’s so low effort, dumb, boring… but human beings really do seem to just want our minds numbed. Same thing drives the opioid epidemic I assume.
> there’s no way anyone would want to spend much time watching that schlock. It’s so low effort, dumb, boring… but human beings really do seem to just want our minds numbed.
We've been trained into that by desperation. Social connections and celebrity have become so vital to any chance of having a middle-class income that you can't blame zoomers slaving at a repetitive drone job for long hours and token pay for carefully poring over the output of people who have been successful at gathering attention and converting it to rent.
I distinctly recall seeing a documentary based on Chariots of the Gods on Discovery back in it's heyday. That was the great progenitor of all the phony archaeology industry.
History channel launched as a kicking-ass channel, with all kinds of good documentaries. Then it got a show about "what facts are around the UFO stuff", and suddenly it was all bullshit. It was an incredible trajectory. Everything changed in a single year.
But that doesn't mean that "everything is getting worse". It means that this one thing got worse. Plenty of other things appeared since then, some much better.
A bit meta, but after having to repeatedly fight their login mechanism and ads suddenly appearing on our ad-free stream and... I'm personally done with Discovery+
Streaming was a great improvement over cable for awhile, but it currently seems determined to close that gap.
He starts off the series discussing his lack of scientific credentials, journalist background, etc., and presents the whole thing as his theory. How can that possible be construed as a 'deceptive cloak of veracity'? Let the man have his theories- I thought some of it was pretty interesting, although his raging against academia was exhausting enough to make it unwatchable after a point.
That's why. Laypeople lack almost all the tools necessarily to evaluate research and slick presentation, even when couched with "I'm not an expert - make up your own mind" can be quite effective and completely misleading people.
I think there is a big problem with people not not having any understanding of how much work it actually takes to become an expert. The narrative of "outsider dabbles in some field and makes a big breakthrough" feels reasonable. How hard could it really be to break into one of these fields? This sets them up to be misled.
I really do hope you are ready to give up the right to theorize on any subject if you are not an expert. That includes: whether a job is bullshit or not, whether the calories you ate are good for you or not, and whether C++ is the right tool for the job or not. Sorry citizen, you are simply not a credential expert in these fields, enjoy your fine and labor camp.
My strategy in all fields where I am not an expert is to go talk to some experts and ask them to synthesize the expert consensus for me. For academic fields this is usually university faculty. For something like software design this would be a mentor with decades and decades of experience.
Yeah, I think this is the right way to do it. "I'm just explaining my weird theory" is not a good approach to fields that you know little about.
That's true, people are often wrong about evaluating expertise. This is why I seek out people at respected institutions who have a track record of respect from peers.
No system is perfect, but I'm way more likely to hold correct opinions using this approach than most other approaches.
Hancock has been publishing since 1990s. If someone was publishing made-up theories in my professional field for thirty years (and becoming a globally known celebrity, sort of), then I'd also be pretty cranky about that.
You should be more angry if people within your professional field still claim the pyramids were built as tombs by people wearing sandals and loincloths with bronze and copper tools.
We absolutely know they were tombs. We can read Ancient Egyptian you know. There are texts on the walls dealing with how the person entombed there will deal with being judged in the afterlife. The idea that that the pyramids were mysterious in purpose only made sense prior to the mid 19th century before we could read the hieroglyphs.
There are, in fact, no such inscriptions in any of the Giza pyramids, and no remnant of funerary apparatus was found in any of them, never mind a mummy. (Other looted Egyptian crypts were found full of trash; looters don't clean up after themselves.) The only writing found inside was not funerary.
There are funerary temples lousy with inscriptions outside, but anybody can build those anytime. Crypts elsewhere are scribbled throughout.
We still know very little about the pyramids, so cannot contradict speculation. The official story / timeline is just one such.
The Giza pyramids are far from the only Egyptian pyramids though -- the reason the earliest descriptions of the Egyptian religion are referred to as the "Pyramid texts" is that they are found in other pyramids, some of which like the Pyramid of Unas are nearly as old as the Great Pyramids in Giza (but better preserved as so more informative from an archeological perspective). The Giza pyramids are impressively large but seem to have been entered/looted at various times in antiquity.
They certainly would have been looted, if there were something to loot. But as noted, looters never cart out the trash. (Or, anyway, until recently, in order to feel more like legitimate archaeologists.)
Anybody can co-opt a spare pyramid and scribble it up. There is even an absurdly sparely applied term: usurpation. Usurping one of the Giza constructions would raise eyebrows, but the others could tempt, if in good shape.
Once one's immediate predecessor is securely dead, actually expending on a fancy interment is not strictly necessary, given nobody can see inside anyway. Lots of crypts were left comically incomplete, later. Even Menkaure's pyramid was not clad as specified.
Later they must have got the idea of having supporters demand to tour the crypt before it was sealed, to make sure things were actually done. You probably can determine which successions were ... unfriendly by how incomplete the funeral chores are.
All hypotheses are initially made up to an extent. Can you point out specific ways that Hancock's main hypotheses fail to match the available evidence? His claims are falsifiable, so people who care can go ahead and do the science to falsify them.
Whether Hancock is a celebrity is neither here nor there. Proper science is supposed to be above personal attacks.
That seems like a deflection. What specifically in Hancock's interpretation does not align with the known facts? I don't particularly care about him one way or another, but if you want to criticize him then please present some actual evidence.
I’ve watched enough of Hancock to know that he starts with an observation: xyz physical structure doesn’t align with our accepted view of history, and then tries to find a conclusion.
I understand why he's defensive, but I found the excessive discussion of it in the series to be petty and negative- detracting from the exciting, mystical vibe of the rest of it.
> his raging against academia was exhausting enough to make it unwatchable after a point.
For me, that point was somewhere in the first episode. Sorry, after watching Van Daniken (sp?) and the Ancient Aliens crew use misinformation and "asking the question" type fallacies to basically ruin widespread understanding of history all I can say is "fuck that guy in particular".
World of Antiquity[0] on YouTube does a good job filling in the context around claims like this. He did one on the Netflix series[1] and has others about Hancock's take on flood myths[2], Plato's account[3], other Atlantis claims, and many other alt-archaeology topics in his Myths of Ancient History[4] playlist.
He keeps it pretty civil, but he makes it clear when takes are bad or purposely misleading.
The word that comes to mind watching any of those is "disingenuous". He very carefully avoids mentioning anything that might call into question what he wants to assure us he knows all about.
Obviously Hancock is wrong. But he is right to be proposing answers that this smug seatwarmer is failing to even look for. His job is to present a strong case for something else, but he has none.
Does he ever mention the helical groove in the tube-drilled core at the British Museum? Does he ever mention that the very oldest stonework is the most dumfounding? Or that nobody is bothering to get surface luminescence readings on any of it, since the few samples in Egypt came out 500 years too old?
He picks the easiest topics, and never mentions that historians know vanishingly little of our 300,000-year past.
He's said (I'm paraphrasing) that he goes for popular myths, especially when there's a single video or series promoting them. I've never heard him mention the groove or the dating thing, but aren't those pretty specific? I've never heard of them at all. Maybe he'd reply if you left him a question.
He does address the stonework point in [1] at 6:36[^]—though he says it's not true. He also says at 3:43[*] that archaeologists can make mistakes and don't know everything.
Anyway, I'm not here shilling for the channel. I just found the background info relevant and useful.
Finding a place with a course of smaller blocks under the largest ones is not addressing the question, it is purely dodging. Similarly, repair work is almost all radically cruder than the original work, so finding a place where it measures up is another dodge.
Three and a half hours? Just the first half hour exceeded my tolerance for whiny disingenuity.
The stone boxes in the Serapeum suffice to show that the copper tooling presented is laughably inadequate. Pretending otherwise, apparently just to avoid admitting ignorance of the real method, is disingenuous.
We really don't have any clue how they could have done that work. Certainly nothing found has been up to the job. What would be so bad about admitting that? It would be much better than lying.
Some claim he's supporting racist conspiracy theories in their headlines. I'd say that's an attempt at canceling him. He's good at taking on the victim role though, I'll give you that.
First, I don't think that's a correct characterization of the criticism made against him. It's a sloppy or somewhat dishonest spin.
Second, IMO that's the weakest claim made against him, but in no way does that amount to canceling anyone or anything.
Third, a little bit of proportionality is also in order: the request is for Netflix to reclassify the production as fiction, not to remove it. Even if the claim that this amounted to cancellation had merit (and I don't see how it does) it would still be quite the exaggeration.
What's really happening here is that he's upset that adults are calling his work fiction. That's pretty much it.
Their argument is: 28 years ago, Graham wrote a book about this theory (Fingerprints of the Gods) where he used the language "ancient white civilization". Why precisely he used this language may require deeper research, but it was at-least in part because Quetzalcoatl was described in Aztec literature as being white (to my knowledge this is not controversial), and Graham believes that the Quetzalcoatl story isn't a myth or legend, but rather a spoken-word memory of a visitor from this more-ancient civilization.
Part of his theory (which is well explained in the show) is that there are a handful of ancient cultures like the Aztecs who have stories of an "enlightened visitor" like Quetzalcoatl, bringing the knowledge necessary to elevate their cultures into organized society. In other words: these ancient cultures, who are mostly non-white, were "saved" by an ancient white civilization.
Having followed him loosely since then: he does not use this language anymore; certainly not in Ancient Apocalypse.
If, upon reading that, your conclusion is "mainstream academia may actually be out to get him": you're beginning to understand why people like Dr. Hoopes [1] just need to shut up, go outside, and find more actual evidence to disprove him. Slinging insults like that only adds credence to his statement that mainstream academia is out to get him, which by proximity adds credence to the rest of his theories. But, what he would say is: mainstream archaeology is a lot better at insulting and talking than they are at digging; and independent of his theories, there's substantial evidence to conclude this to be true.
> Part of his theory (which is well explained in the show) ...
That's where scientific standards may differ.
I cannot drop in to gather a couple of references and find more than a tinfoilhat lady and two hobby blogs that were likely set up to promote the show, I have no use for it.
>... is that there are a handful of ancient cultures like the Aztecs who have stories of an "enlightened visitor" like Quetzalcoatl,
It's a 50:50 chance it's black or white and that's heavily skewed by the sun in favor of brightness.
> memories of an "enlightened visitor" like Quetzalcoatl, bringing the knowledge necessary to elevate their cultures into organized society.
Yes, thank velociraptor our lord and savior!
> In other words: these ancient cultures, who are mostly non-white, were "saved" by an ancient white civilization.
No, no. Proper racism says they were white and got bastardised. But Hancock doesn't say anyhting like that other than what may be warranted by years in currect affairs economics, I guess.
Christianity is based on the same stipulation but less technocratic, and it can be racist as hell, no doubt, but, well
Something about Atlanteans being white (I don't recall this ever being a point of Graham, and I don't think Plato mentioned it either) and bringing civilization to brown folk (who later brought it to white folk), implying that brown folk are lesser. Yeah, it's not their best work.
When you impose a decision on someone they do not like, they do not have to play the victim, they are the victim. We can discuss whether they are a victim that you sympathize with or whether you think that they deserve their treatment, but accusing them of "playing the victim" is about as profound and distracting as accusing people of "playing the race card."
edit: I need to add that it is also intellectually dishonest to dismiss arguments based on who you think the arguments have been designed to appeal to.
That seems a weird use of the word. By that notion, every convicted criminal is a victim, because the court imposed a sentence that they, presumably, do not like. This removes practically all meaning from the word "victim". In common parlance, well-understood consequences of one's own actions occurring does not make one a victim.
> This removes practically all meaning from the word "victim".
No, it removes the personal judgement from the word "victim," where we decide whether a particular victim deserves their punishment as a preliminary to discussing their situation.
-----
edit: i.e. where sympathetic people who are killed are victims, and unsympathetic people are killed are being portrayed as victims. It's an attempt to distract from the material facts of a situation with arguments about language.
edit 2: In the spirit of tripling down, I'm also giving this discussion more credit than it deserves. This is about someone saying that the word "cancel" implies the word "victim." So here's the implied argument afaict.
1) Using the word "cancel" to refer to an imposition on your work means that you're implying you're a "victim."
2) A "victim" is someone who is undeserving of what has happened to them.
3) This person is deserving of what has happened to them.
But your original reply didn't say "he didn't call himself a victim," it tried to argue why he was a victim. The gp to this reply was pointing out how absurd your definition of victim is. It's not making an argument about whether or not he called himself a victim, it makes an argument about what you yourself defined as a victim.
I've made that argument, and you can accept it or not. The larger point is that accusing people of playing victims is always a distraction from actual argument, and the entire thread is evidence of that. It started with irrelevance and ended nowhere.
If a court ignored the law and imposed a criminal sentence merely because it didn't like the defendant, then that would be an injustice and you would call the convicted person a victim.
Point of order: a non-domain-expert produced a thing he called a “documentary”, and then he was criticized for totally reasonable reasons by actual subject matter experts. Using the word “cancel” in this context is petty.
"But the whole theory is steeped in racism and white supremacy, so it's not just harmless entertainment."
"He will get to the edge of something, but he won't say it, because he knows that his followers already know it. He can say, 'I didn't say that,' and he didn't say it, but everyone knew what he said because it was already known, right?"
Graham is often reporting (presenting observations) of facts that are overlooked by the mainstream. He has spent a lot of time and money and travelled-widely gathering those observations. As with any hypothesis, people will disagree with the interpretation of the observations. That's how the game works, and how science advances one funeral at a time. (Plate tectonics for one fine old example. The YDIH for a much more recent other.)
Sometimes evidence is ignored because it can't be right. (For example, no skeletons 7 or more feet tall have been found in North America ... 'those newspaper stories, all hokum'. Or, anyone who radio-dates bones at human sites in NA that are 24k or 130k or 200k years old has simply made a mistake. 'Incompetent. Take away their funding.' Or, it's our consensual opinion that it's most likely that the natives killed all the megafauna for food.)
Graham (for one) has a real knack for looking at a lot of ignored evidence, pulling those pieces together and presenting hypotheses that often pass the Occam test. I've learned a lot reading of his discoveries. As to the 'truth' of it all, time will tell (or the coverups go on). Funny seeing the insiders getting all riled.
Can you tell me - if he was a hack pushing nonsense theories, rather than an outsider being suppressed by the orthodoxy, how would you expect things to look different?
It’s never sat well with me that anatomically modern humans are supposedly at least 300,000 years old but nobody got much past banging rocks together until around ten thousand years ago. I’m not an archeologist and I’m not claiming there were relatively advanced prehistoric civilizations, but I find the blanket claim that there can’t possibly have been ridiculous. With a glaciation or two along with various other weathering it sounds plausible to me that virtually all physical traces of, to give an example, the ancient civilizations the Vedas mention, could have been obliterated.
Not just weathering, but also sea level rise. Settlements built on the coastline when sea levels were lower than today would leave little or no trace after millennia underwater. I'm not necessarily claiming that such settlements had any technology more advanced than stone tools, but it's difficult to conclusively prove that they didn't.
Another possibility to consider is that while human skeletons might not have changed much in 300K years, it's also possible that some more recent mutations gave us the mental capacity to advance technology and build civilizations. Maybe our ancient ancestors just weren't very smart?
> If these societies were that advanced, would they not have figured out a fraction of the things that we have in modern times?
The interesting question from Graham Hancock’s books is along the lines of: “If these societies were that advanced, how would we know?”
Until Gobekli Tepi was discovered, there was no evidence that humans did anything other than bang rocks together till the end of the last ice age.
We can not use radio carbon dating on inorganic material. We can’t look at a stone monument and determine it’s age purely by looking at the stones. For big monuments, the best we do is “the oldest thing we found here that shouldn’t be here unless someone put it here is xxxx years old. Therefore this is at least xxxx years old”
Graham Hancock and others pointed out that several monuments were aligned astronomically if you assume they were built at the end of the ice age. We didn’t believe anyone could have built the monuments that early because we hadn’t discovered Gobekli Tepi yet.
Basically the current problem isn’t absence of evidence that people were advanced back in the ice age. The problem is determining what is evidence and what is coincidence - and a lot of things that should have been evidence were brushed aside as coincidence because that determination was done pre gobekli tepi.
> The fact of the matter is that for a long time we simply did not have the population density to scale up to modern civilization standards
That's true and I agree. But how would we know what the population density was of a conjectured civilization that would have been virtually totally destroyed over a hundred thousand years ago by catastrophic climate change?[1] I'm not positing some super society with flying cars and crystal skyscrapers or anything, but something more like the ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian kingdoms that we do know about.
There is a difference in kind and not degree between stating that it's absolutely impossible for any complex human civilization to have existed before 12,000 years ago and it's possible but we have little to no evidence for it. In the former world view any evidence to the contrary is immediately ignored as being impossible, whereas in the latter lines of inquiry remain open, despite being admittedly rather barren.
The problem with Graham Hancock is that he pretends to be scientific while disparaging the actual scientists. If he wants to write science fiction, great; is entertaining.
But pretending to pass fantasy as science in the way he does is not Ok because some people cannot tell the difference. Is the opposite of education, with the aggravation that he is making money out of it.
It is not appropriate to classify this as fiction for the simple reason that Graham Hancock believes what he is saying. He may be faulting, but he is not feigning.
There are likely already some documentaries which present Dr Dibble's conclusions. Netflix can and should show them.
Because what happens instead is that you repeat your interlocutor's claims, you validate the existence of a discourse at all -- and discourses necessarily have two sides.
Consider the following imagined conversation:
--
Alice: The Earth is hollow.
Bob: The Earth isn't hollow; here are some facts about the Earth that speak against this claim.
Carol: [to David, attempting neutrality] Disagreements about the hollowness of the planet continue
David [to Bob]: Experts disagree on whether or not the Earth is hollow; why are you not taking Alice's concerns seriously?
--
Generalizing, it's impossible to debunk an obviously false claim without subtly reinforcing the feeling that there must be some valid point being made. After all, would anyone be talking if there weren't facts on both sides?
Because engaging with a batshit idea effectively helps promote it, the best thing to do with such an idea is to hustle the 'bat' out of the conversation as quickly as possible, before you find that the conversation is now entertaining angels, square circles, and multiple Atlantii.
Yes, the need to downregulate dangerously absurd voices is in tension with free speech. Yes, it is still a necessary practice.
Yet, ultimately, one must also make peace with entropy. Over the long term, no conversation can withstand batshit. Sooner or later, the convo will turn. Sooner or later, Alice will be celebrated.
> Yes, the need to downregulate dangerously absurd voices is in tension with free speech. Yes, it is still a necessary practice.
What is dangerous about his theories? Every culture I've heard of has their own origin myths, what is so dangerous about this man creating one of his own? I don't see astronomers raging against flat-earthers. People having different beliefs might be cumbersome or annoying, but it's rarely dangerous.
What is dangerous is not that a harmless old man is tenuously attached to reality, but rather that a corporation with global reach has discovered how lucrative falsehood can be when slickly produced & released at scale.
That is dangerous, because not only is it harmful in the immediate term, but because it strongly implies that they will do so again. Whatever checks-and-balances used to exist at Netflix on what they disingenously call "creative freedom" are simply no match for a contracting market.
> because not only is it harmful in the immediate term
How is it harmful? I'd never heard of most of the megalithic sites he visited. He just goes around to these sites and points out things he finds amazing, and presents some of his theories on their origins. Whether a viewer chooses to believe his theories or not, really all he's doing is stimulating the viewer's imagination. Nothing he discusses will have any immediate physical effect on anyone's lives.
> discovered how lucrative falsehood
They are in the entertainment business, not the education business. They sell stories and fantasies. You're holding TV to a standard that might make sense for government sources.
It's harmful because it means that it presents things which are known with near-certainty to be falsehoods as truths or potential truths.
This is being done by Netflix for profit, which ought to be bad enough to end the conversation right there.
But the deeper context is even worse: it's being done in an era where reality is routinely contested by quasi-LARP-like political actions that depend on keeping their userbase afraid, absurd, and feeling unheard.
Giving them yet another reason to feel epistemically isolated in order to boost ratings is like taking the water out of a nuclear reactor to heat your home -- it makes a great deal of sense to today's bottom line, but none at all for tomorrow's.
Our civ is not sustainable without a steady, heartfelt, and broadly-distributed grasp on truth.
> it presents things which are known with near-certainty to be falsehoods as truths or potential truths
I didn't get that from the show at all. There aren't many fundamental 'truth's in this realm, afaict, and I don't recall him debating things like carbon dating. Instead, there are theories with varying amounts of archaeological evidence to support them. Does he display every bit of evidence people have discovered? Obviously not, but over time, everyone's theories on ancient civilization will change.
There shouldn't be anything negative/isolating for people if they choose to entertain different theories about the past, and it's sad that people would ostracize someone for that. The world is a richer place because of it imho- this is largely a realm of fantasy, imagining life in the past, trying to infer the ancient's motivations/capabilities from scraps of long-lost cultures.
I'll counter with a bit of dangerous drama of my own: Its very easy to believe that the 14th century papal state said the same thing to Galileo. "Our civilization is not sustainable without a steady, broadly-distributed grasp on truth; and that truth is Christianity, with the earth in the center of the universe."
Of course, our scientific truths today are far, far more steady than those of the past. We know a lot more; we don't know everything. We only evolved beyond that state by questioning the accepted truth and testing it.
In the line of that questioning; we're going to land on ten times more wrong answers than right ones. Graham's work is, probably, a wrong answer; that doesn't make it any less important that its asked.
We shouldn't aim for a world with one steady, heartfelt, and broadly-distributed grasp on truth. We should encourage skepticism. The Accepted Truth should exist; people should be taught it, and taught to be skeptical of it. They should seek out alternate viewpoints, and be skeptical of those too. They should do their own research, whether that's new fundamental research or seeking the research of others; integrate what they find into their worldview; and draw new conclusions from it.
I in no way claim that we all need the same grasp on truth.
I do however claim that there are ideas which can be described as 'absurd.' A large number of these ideas later turn out to have been misclassified, for example, Galileo's ideas.
Yet there are still some other ideas in the 'absurd' category which are there *because they are absurd*, and because *absurd ideas deserve to be ignored.*
The possibility of making a mistake does not obviate the need to try.
I guess I'm not sure what you're demonstrating with this link. I watched Behind the Curve, and it generally treated flat-earth proponents as nice, well-meaning people who've just gotten themselves stuck in a rut where no evidence will convince them. That seems like the right attitude towards this kind of theory to me. Perhaps some of the scientists in the movie were exasperated by how obviously false flat earth is, but I can't imagine any of them writing a letter like the one in the source article, saying that flat earth theory is harmful and you're racist if you believe in it.
Yes, the flat-earthers are indeed shown as relatable, flawed, silly human beings, but the show is still driven by scientists.
Imagine how _Behind the Curve_ would have played if it had instead shown those astronomers as being part of a secretive conspiracy to conceal the real geometry of the world. That's what Netflix is playing now.
I expect it would have played a lot like What the Health, a similarly buzzy documentary from 2017 making ridiculous false claims about the health benefits of a vegan diet. It got a lot of attention, and people talked passionately in major outlets about how wrong it was, but as far as I can recall (and as far as I can tell from a Google search) the idea that Netflix had some responsibility to downrank it or attach a "fiction" tag was never part of the conversation.
I've never heard of this documentary, but if it makes false claims, then, yes, it should be labelled fiction, and possibly downranked.
This seems so morally obvious to me, and the converse so plainly wicked, that I'm going to assume I've hit one of those issues where there is some deep-seated worldview-differences that say as much about me as they do about my interlocutor.
If I'd hazard a guess, it would be that I believe that there is some sort of fact of the matter, and that people -- even large groups of people -- can be actually very wrong, in fact, and this wrongness counts again listening to them in the future, or valuing their opinions the same as those which are not wrong. This is a belief I hold and I know it is unpopular ;)
The alternative, often expressed on the right as a 'marketplace of ideas' and on the left as 'values-alignment', is that there are multiple competing ways of assessing the worth of an idea, and an idea's wrongness might (say) be counterbalanced by its congeniality, its convenience, or its usefulness, and therefore that it's mean or base of me or anyone else to complain about someone pumping falsehood into the ears and eyes of the planet.
But at the risk of being melodramatic, I say: this is a hill I'm ready to die on. Or not; but definitely not both at once.
I really don’t understand what’s so batshit about the claim that anatomically modern human with similar brains as modern humans could have built up civilizations and structures a few thousand years before the currently accepted dates.
Because it essentially requires everything known about the recent past to be wrong. Human societies and civilizations are incredibly complex and don't just pop out of nowhere and then disappear without a trace. We have an overwhelming amount of evidence on the human development from genetics to radio-carbon dating, to deciphered languages to the spread of technological innovations.
It is as nonsensical as claiming that the latest Ryzen is really from the 1990s.
Of course, this guys 'theory' is not based on actual evidence; so there is no reason to even take it seriously.
> Human societies and civilizations are incredibly complex and don't just pop out of nowhere and then disappear without a trace.
But they absolutely do. "Traces" of ancient societies are incredibly sparse, very little other than stone can survive for thousands of years. And what we call "civilization" rests on resource availability; when people only have enough resources for bare subsistence, social collapse is inevitable.
The disappear without a trace part is entirely possible if you assume they were largely centered around areas that are now underwater or covered under earth.
> “Why is there no evidence for this Ice Age civilization when we have plentiful evidence for hunter-gatherers all over the world at this time?” Dibble asked. “The truth is in the trash.” Every living being leaves something behind, but no refuse at all has turned up from Atlantis. “You’re going to clean up all your trash and vaporize it?”
OK, well, attacking the fringiest speculations doesn't do the establishment any favors. The nut of the whole thing seems to be that humans were doing sophisticated things about 8000 years earlier than academia were telling us even 10 years ago.
Speculating on what was happening doesn't seem like something beyond the pale of reasonable discourse.
And here, I think, we landed on a core piece of the matter. That there are some "ineffable truths" reserved and locked away in the High Tower of Academia. Oh, you're not An Academic? Ha, moron. We know the truth, how dare you question it?
Guess What? Graham also isn't in academia. Yet, he's been talking about this for 30 years, gained a following, and now has a Netflix special.
The ball is in your court. If you want to talk about failures, let's not focus on Graham. Let's focus on this High Tower of Academia. Why the hell doesn't the accepted side of the theory have a Netflix Special? What happened to PBS? Our public schools are a disaster. Published research seems to be more of a contest to see who can use the most complex, flowery, unintelligible language in the Race for Academic Recognition.
THIS is why Academia lost this one. We're on HackerNews, so here it is: You're an engineer with a brilliant idea; but you can't market it. What's the point of the idea? Ideas are nothing without marketing. Its the same fucking thing. If there's Truth out there, scientific truth, it doesn't mean shit unless its communicated intelligibly and repeatably. Academia has institutionally FAILED at this. But, hey, tenure must be nice.
My favorite part about Ancient Apocalypse isn't really anything about the Ancient Apocalypse. Its the fact that Graham spends minutes in every episode saying "mainstream academia hates this, they hate me" and if you have no context you might hear that and think "wow he's being dramatic"; but he's not! Every single reaction I've seen to this show has been one of absolute vitriolic derision. There's startlingly little attempt to educate, present accepted facts, criticize his presentation. Its just "he's racist, this is a crackpot show, fuck netflix for showing this." Its like we just assume, despite a failing educational system, that people should just know he's wrong; and you're dumb for thinking he's right. His theories are out there; YouTube is free; shoot him the fuck down. I want to see it.
I haven't said that. But how is a legitimate significant inquiry. How dare you (what's that even mean?)
How do you expect people change their mind after they said obv bs, tl;dr the first time they saw the original? I haven't.
> Its like we just assume, despite a failing educational system, that people should just know he's wrong;
Yeah, no they don't expect that, when they complain the first time, but they are hoping to give a hint. Hancock hasn't asked the right question (which can be worth more than a correct answer, according to saying).
Considering that it wasn't until the last 15 years or so when those in "Academia" finally started letting go of the long-since discredited "Clovis First" theory, people have have reason to be skeptical. As some other posts have pointed out, the fact is that much of our understanding of the distant past is speculation. We have fragments of history that archeologists are left to make their best guesses about. There are many different guesses and narratives about human pre-history that can be spun from the same set of these fragments that are all equally plausible. That isn't to say that Hancock doesn't make guesses and assertions that are unsupported (he does), but it is to say that the guesses and assertions made by academics are no more credibly or valid than guesses and assertions made by anyone who else who has a firm grasp of the available evidence and good reasoning skills.
Do academics feel like it's important to bring the normies up to speed on what they know or don't know?
It seems like a good opportunity for an enterprising establishment figure to step up and explain why the Hancock idea is wrong. Preferably with an argument that's better than "he's not an archaeologist plus he's probably racist because that's what I'm afraid of being called so that's what I'll call him."
Actually, yes they do, in large part. The problem is that the people who produce the documentaries don't want to make "let's talk about modern archaeology" documentaries--they think lay audiences won't lap it up, and so instead want to shift everything to "crusader against orthodox archaeology" (which usually means something akin to Hancock or Ancient Aliens) instead.
They have on many, many occasions. Here's an example: the Nov 2019 special edition of the SAA magazine [1] is dedicated almost entirely to debunking some of Hancock's claims in a recent book and explaining why they're so problematic in context.
The reason you're probably not aware of things like this is that public awareness of the discussion is very one-sided. People like Hancock are fantastic at getting their narrative into the public consciousness. Good academics (almost inherently) are not.
Except that much of what we theorize about hunter-gatherers comes from relatively modern foragers, who lived in very resource-poor environments and were thus unable to transition to more complex societal arrangements. Ancient "hunter-gatherers" may have been very different, and Gobekli Tepe is suggestive of that.
"Relatively modern foragers" did have and still have complex social arrangements and rich trading partnerships.
Göbekli Tepe is deeply interesting for being an apparent transition between fully nomadic living and the first permanent cities in Europe, however Graham Hancock is not some sole lone outsider commenting on this, there are many more qualified people providing a bedrock of thought on what may have occurred there with Hancock repackaging their work and adding a twist of magical thinking.
The fact that long-range trading arrangements among ancient foragers have only been posited very recently, and on the sheer weight of evidence, is quite significant and means Hancock has a point. Even then though, there's complex and then there's complex. Having more resources around means that people can devote time and effort to something other than bare survival--and that turns out to be one of the main factors behind complex societies. Any widespread disaster leading to lower resource availability would in turn have social collapse as its unavoidable consequence. Even mainstream historians and archaeologists readily accept that this happened, e.g. on Easter Island; Hancock is just generalizing that same kind of scenario.
The best of Hancock is unsourced and uncredited from the actual progenitors, the bulk of Hancock, that which remains, appears to be pop rubbish and discredited conjecture.
I couldn't be arsed banning the chap, but he's offered nothing original of value that I'm aware off.
>> I mean, the evidence has only been moving toward Hancock’s theories over the last 30 years, not away from it.
I'm sorry. What? More raw research has been conducted in the last 30 years than in the entire history of archeology up to that point. Absolutely none of it provides even the slimmest speck of confirmation for this guy's nonsense.
He predicted that monumental construction dating to the end of the younger Dryas would be found. It was.
He predicted that a comet strike at the onset of the Younger Dryas would be demonstrated. It was. 30+ genera suddenly vanished from North America, along with any hint of Clovis toolmaking.
He does better than anybody with his qualifications has any right to. His wacky speculations trace back to unaccounted evidence.
That's just load of anti-science nonsense. The whole premise of scientific progress is our ability to convince people, backing our arguments with facts.
Your attitude is of religious fundamentalist, where discussing truths about god can be done only by a carefully selected and prepared priest elite, and non-priest people are unworthy and can't be trusted with it, and would be best thrown into a lake for heresy if they have any opinions on their own.
I mean, kind of? Any speculation on what's up with a city thousands of years older than expected should be rooted in, you know, someone going and investigating the city in depth.
I listed to their appearance on the JRE podcast. I didn't know much about them before that. The first half of the show they present their case relatively well (the flooding in particular kinda makes sense). But when they started talking about quantum physics and the multiverse my bullshit-o-meter went through the roof.
Hancock is one of those people who sounds reasonable at first. Then as you keep going it gets worse and worse.
Someone told me he was going a little fash lately too. Don’t know if it’s true or not but it wouldn’t surprise me.
That’s not to say absolutely none of his claims could possibly have merit. It’s just that he mixes reasonable heterodox ideas with schlock. Loads of other people on the fringe have the same problem.
> Hancock is one of those people who sounds reasonable at first. Then as you keep going it gets worse and worse.
I'm reminded of someone describing Velikovsky, who wrote some pretty far-out books which conveyed radical views of archaeology and astronomy.
Paraphrased: "If you ask astronomers about the archaeology, they say it seems interesting enough, but the astronomy is bullshit. If you ask archaeologists, they'll tell you the astronomical theories are plausible but the archaeology is bunk."
People think he's a racist because they think he implies non-whites are stupid because they got their knowledge of civilization from survivors from Atlantis. They don't really touch upon the fact that literally all civilizations would have spawned out of them, including "white" ones.
I've never seen, read, or heard anything indicating that Graham is racist. Is there any substance to this, or it about as solid as his theories?
That is the implications because the Atlantis myth has become white supremacy through deeply racist works from Helena Blavatsky and Ignatius Donnelly. Spoiler: the Nazis were really into this stuff.
It boils down to that that all the non white peoples could not have done any of these things and needed help from a superior white race, robbing these peoples from their own ingenuity and heritage.
Just because he isn't an outright racist doesn't mean that his theories imply that. I've not read his books but from what I've seen he likes to quote works built on the authors above that are just as racist.
I don't know what the nazis thought (or think) about Atlantis, but who cares? If it ever existed, and Graham is 100% correct, how is that fact not infinitely more interesting than what race they were? I certainly don't think about my own ancestors, which were verifiably "uncivilized" up until the 13th century AD, as being lesser than anyone else.
He's clearly wrong, and it's easy to discredit him scientifically. Why not do that instead of playing the race card? Everything's a nail when you have a hammer I guess.
It certainly would be interesting, I would certainly enjoy reading about something like that. But as this is extremely unlikely as Platos own students believe he invented the myth as a vehicle to teach philosophy. And the specific Atlantis myth that Graham subscribes to is racist, as its derived from the works of the authors in my previous post, which previous generations of psuedo archeologists have been using since then, with more or less in your face racism.
His works may be a nice story, but is fiction that is rooted in racism. Why not call it out for what it is?
This kind of makes sense depending on how you view the purpose of the show.
He starts off, right off the bat, talking about how he is going against the establishment of “Big Archeology” and is subject to persecution by their shadowy machinations.
It’s a very sensational idea, and my personal impression of the show was more about him trying to prove his DaVinci Code style narrative that centers himself than him trying to actually prove that Atlantis exists. His “archaeology” is tangential to (though in support of) his persecution narrative in that his thesis is about a shadowy conspiracy to hide Atlantis.
For example, Behind The Curve was a _documentary_ about silly kooks that are trying to prove that the earth is flat. It was not an exploration as to whether or not the earth is flat. It would have been pure entertainment to take them at face value, like a Christopher Guest movie.
He's been churning out a never ending pile of bullshit in this vein since the 90s. At some point in 30 years one might expect he has gained some expertise perhaps reviewed some actual research. At some point he's not a journalist or an archeologist, he's just a crank.
Possibly they're just annoyed that someone is spreading wild ideas that haven't been checked for accuracy. Perhaps if it was labeled "speculation" they might calm down.
Shows like this could be a way to get real academic expedition funding though. Give up a bit of cred to let them tell their story, and you get a week on a research vessel paid for by television viewers to collect all the data you want.
Personally, I would be pitching their show my exploration and field research proposals. Hell, do a real science television show and just bring one of these guys along to make it entertaining enough for everyone to watch, and use it to fund real science going on in the background instead of junk science.
It's so hard to find decent documentaries to watch especially my favourite subject ancient history.
I tend to find that anything 15 to 20 years old seems mostly free of the stink of "ancient aliens". And I find that YouTube is the best place to find them since any current streaming services are infested with junk "documentaries". I can only speak of Canadian versions of streaming services which tend to carry slightly different libraries compared to US or international versions.
It is to Hancock's credit that he acknowledges everything was built by regular people constrained by regular physics. Accusations of racism are as reprehensible as they seem.
That he is not exactly clear on regular physics is a result of his background. (E.g. confusing axial precession with solar system dynamics.) What is clear, and that justifies his complaints, is that inconvenient evidence is very systematically ignored. Would-be debunkers uniformly avoid mention of any of the inconvenient evidence motivating the speculation, or admitting the problem it presents. The word for all of them (miniminuteman perhaps excepted) is "disingenuous".
Obviously journalist Graham Hancock is not going to discover the scientific truth the evidence points to. But his cohort are the only ones tackling the questions. He does have a talent for lighting on the right side of controversy, e.g. the now well-established Canada ice sheet comet strike 12,800 years ago. Which no one mentions anymore.
(NB: whether the comet strike had any role in kicking off the Younger Dryas cold spell is a separate issue, of no import here.)
That all of the most impressive megalithic stonework is also the oldest, and that no one knows how old it really is, should be occupying all archaeologists full-time. They could find out how old it all is, if they cared, via surface luminescence.
I have 2 more episodes to go and I've been watching it with my kids. I've truly enjoyed it, even though I don't quite believe it.
To those that are interested, basically Hancock visits sites around the world that seem to show that humans had the technology to build megaliths much earlier than previously thought. Currently accepted archeology believes that human civilizations start around 6000 years ago, but some structures like Gobeki Tepe suggest that this actually happened much, much earlier, closer to 12,000 years ago. Hancock goes to various sites around the world and tries to build the case that if the technology to build these megalithic structures existed earlier than previously thought, then how is that possible? He then links ancient myths of great floods, and then links that to the Dryer Younger Impact theory, which is that around 12,000 years ago the Earth passed through a comet trail that cause catalysmic events and basically ended the Ice Age. He suggests that the civilizations that lived pre-cataclysm were able to pass technology onto human civilizations afterwards and then they died off or disappeared.
I don't necessarily believe it, but it's a fun story to listen to, and after 3 years of COVID I'm desperate for stories that are intellectual, creative and new to my brain.
However the article above is pretty poorly written. As far as I've seen, he has not once declared things as "fact".
> Rather than presenting evidence of Atlantis from its existence, Hancock seeks to amend the legacies of existing ancient sites like the columns atop Gunung Padang in Indonesia, attributing them to advanced Atlanteans who survived their society’s purported destruction by comet.
I never once heard him mention that Atlanteans built Gunung Padang, but rather that civilizations earlier than believed had the technology to build large structures like pyramids.
> “Ancient Apocalypse,” however, crosses a line by claiming its hunches as fact.
This has never happened, as far as I can tell from watching. He is always suggesting, and building a case, but he never declares things as facts unless they have been agreed upon. For example, Gobeki Tepi was measured as 12,000 years old by German archeologists, not by himself.
I'm not an archeologist but everything he predicted the archeology community would do to him, they are trying to do. They are vilifying him for simply bringing up an alternative explanation. If they were better, they would just present their evidence but instead they attack him, try to ridicule his ideas, etc, and only make him look better. I don't understand why they have such a strong, predictable reaction to Hancock, but it definitely seems unwarranted. I would love to watch someone dispute the claims besides "This guy is stupid" or "Where is the evidence of this civilization?" I think he showed some pretty decent evidence to me, as an objective and open-minded viewer.
I watched a Youtube Q&A between Hancock and Hawass, and Hawass was so rude and arrogant, it wasn't even close. He just extremely rudely dismissed the question about Gobeki Tepe from an audience member. I haven't seen anything else useful but would love to see a real honest debate. My guess is no one is confident enough they can debate Hancock though, because he builds a pretty good case for his theory.
>> To those that are interested, basically Hancock visits sites around the world that seem to show that humans had the technology to build megaliths much earlier than previously thought. Currently accepted archeology believes that human civilizations start around 6000 years ago, but some structures like Gobeki Tepe suggest that this actually happened much, much earlier, closer to 12,000 years ago.
I'm confused here. The significance of Goblekli Tepe is as a ritual center that may not have been produced by a sedentary agricultural community. It is clearly a neolithic structure of the period. In fact, the controversy has less to do with the megalithic structures than the research that suggests it may not have had a settled population. None of that has anything to do with what Hancock suggests. No archeologist involved in the site agrees with Hancock. I can say that with 100% confidence.
Nor does the age of the site disprove anything about 'mainstream archeology.' The site is clearly neolithic. The suggestion that archeologists believe that megalithic structures are impossible before 4,000 bc is simply wrong.
True and non-fiction aren't the same thing. Conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas don't purport to be literary works. Nobody talks about papers about the luminiferous ether as works of fiction simply because they're wrong. Maybe a pendantic point, but if you're insisting on playing word games instead of boycotting purveyors of pseudoscience and crankery, then I'm going to point out that's not really what the word "fiction" means.
It's just basic entertainment. It's cool to think about but I've watched shows like this on History channel since like 2000. Do they even play stuff like this anymore? I love this stuff. I don't know why it's such an issue now?
Credentialists in all corners of society feel threatened because the legitimacy and worth of credentials is (rightfully) coming under attack. This is especially true in the field of ancient archeology, where much if it boils down to, "my guess is more legitimate than your guess because I have some letters in front of my name!"
I would say it's incredible how many people on here are actively supporting Hancock on this, or are at best pretending to not understand what the big deal is. But then I remembered that this site is full of the exact sort of people who lap this shit up.
Graham's arguments have strong merit - the presence of the myth of 'civilizing HERO coming from the water with a BOAT, teaching agriculture, infrastructure, civilization' in regions that are not known to have had any contact until modern age points to one of the below:
- There was a 'civilizing hero' or heroes that visited those totally disparate regions and this points to the presence of a localized, capable civilization that was able to travel the globe
- Or, the majority of the cultures of the age were much more capable than what we previously thought, being able to travel large distances and have exchanges in between them and therefore this myth was shared.
If the mythology was 'Divine being descending from the skies to teach things', that could be understandable. Because thats what many people could easily imagine, and what many cultures already had as a myth.
But the myth of a 'civilizing, normal, human hero that visits here and there and teaches agriculture, infrastructure in the same manner' is too uniform and ordinary that it would be legitimate. This is without the commonality of those heroes having the habit of carrying a small bag in most of those myths.
However, even more important is astroarchaeology or whatever they call it - in the absence of writing and lingua franca, sky is the only constant for all humans. And its normal for humans to try to record events and their dates using this only existing universal language - after all, there is no way that your wise men wouldnt know how to read the stars and their time-location analogies, right... Therefore if they recorded the date of a significant event using the position of the objects in the sky, surely not only your own tribe's wise men would know how to read it, but even the humans in the future. (they never thought we would invent something like writing and forget such traditions).
Based on that, indeed, a lot of the prehistoric monuments point to a certain date at the end of younger dryas, which these prehistoric cultures described as catastrophic, cataclysmic in their monuments in different parts of the world. Which also explains the differing flood mythologies that exist in totally isolated cultures.
Graham seems to be the pioneer here. And the conservatism of modern scientific establishment, which descends from its scholastic roots that shaped in the shadow of Christianity that always prefers to explain history in a linear, developing fashion, shows itself again.
Note that humanity losing its accumulated knowledge is not an extraordinary thing. It happened many times before regionally, even continentally. Even today, our knowledge takes a LOT of effort to keep in the form of scientists, educators working everywhere, every day to catalogue and maintain it - it is a globe-wide effort. Yet we could still lose a huge swath of that knowledge if we end up having a nuclear war or another global catastrophe that will kill vast amounts of people and destroy large amount of infrastructure, therefore disrupting this extensive system of keeping knowledge. In the earlier ages, it would be much easier. Just remember the Library of Alexandria. And that, when writing existed and records of some knowledge at Alexandria was already duplicated and kept elsewhere. Imagine an era in which there wasnt writing but the wise-men relayed knowledge from generation to generation or inside their group/clique by teaching it through oral means. Just a small plague, a war, a major famine would cripple such knowledge-keeping systems. So it is possible that humanity may have had more advanced cultures or even what we would call civilizations (minus writing, maybe even that) that were lost because they were too localized and one major catastrophe crippled them...
> Graham's arguments have strong merit - the presence of the myth of 'civilizing HERO coming from the water with a BOAT, teaching agriculture, infrastructure, civilization' in regions that are not known to have had any contact until modern age points to one of the below:
Here's a counterpoint: the main culture that's attached to is the Mexica, who immigrated into the Central Mexican Valley somewhere between about 1200 and 1300. This means that they were not involved with any of the flourishing developments of the Preclassical and Classical (or even much of Postclassical!) Mesoamerica--notably, not the achievements of Teotihuacan. Nevertheless, they did consciously adopt many elements of the existing cultures that they would come to rule, and the Aztecs themselves engaged in a fair amount of myth-building to tie themselves into the culture. What is to say that the idea of knowledge being specifically given to them by a foreign culture wasn't a conscious attempt to justify their overlordship of the prior inhabitants of the land?
> Based on that, indeed, a lot of the prehistoric monuments point to a certain date at the end of younger dryas, which these prehistoric cultures described as catastrophic, cataclysmic in their monuments in different parts of the world.
One of the problems with archaeoastronomy is that there are too many variables. If you want to memorialize the sun--do you choose an equinox or a solstice (which one)? Or, in certain latitudes, the day the sun passes directly overhead? The setting or rising position? Or maybe you want the moon, one of the visible planets, the milky way, an important star. Then you have procession of the equinoxes--if you don't narrow it down to within roughly a century, the alignment is off (a lot of dating is insufficient precision to give that tight a bound). You get extra slack for being only "slightly" off--ancient imprecision, amirite?--and besides, which features are you using to establish the alignment in the first place?
In short, you have so many parameters in archaeoastronomy that if you want to find an alignment, you probably can. So if a purported alignment is the only evidence you have of a theory... be very skeptical.
> Which also explains the differing flood mythologies that exist in totally isolated cultures.
I've never been impressed with the thesis that "flood myths = some cultural echo of sea level rise." The thing is that floods are a pretty common thing in... just about every climate (even deserts, which can be prone to flash floods), and so the concept of a flood that utterly destroys everything is going to be readily accessible to every culture. If you've got some cosmological need to have the world be utterly destroyed... a flood is probably the handiest option. (Props to, I think it was the Aztecs, who came up with a different way the world was destroyed after every cycle.)
> Graham seems to be the pioneer here. And the conservatism of modern scientific establishment, which descends from its scholastic roots that shaped in the shadow of Christianity that always prefers to explain history in a linear, developing fashion, shows itself again.
Arrrgh. If you ever take a class in anthropology, one of the first things you will likely learn about is the unilinear evolution model of civilization... followed very swiftly by how utterly wrong and out-of-date it is. It's not what the scientists believe, not for at least 70 years at this point. It is what popular anthropology believes, though, and people like Hancock are partially to blame for that.
History often follows a pattern of "thesis" -> "antithesis" -> "synthesis", where we tend to go from one extreme ("thesis") to another ("antithesis"), but then end up with a moderate "synthesis" that may be closer to the "antithesis", but incorporates elements from the "thesis".
One example is that we used to see written accounts as "facts" (thesis). We then rejected that view (antithesis) because it was too influenced by whoever wrote it. Now we have a more balanced view (antithesis), where we interpret written accounts differently, often by focusing more on the cultural aspects and cross checking with other evidence.
The reactions to Hancock indicates that we are in the antithesis state, as a natural reaction to the thesis (unilinear evolution). We may think we have reached the "synthesis" stage, but based on the reactions to Hancock I suspect we have not reached it yet.
The classic "unilinear" thesis may be wrong, but we could find that there have been a wider connection than we currently believe.
> What is to say that the idea of knowledge being specifically given to them by a foreign culture wasn't a conscious attempt to justify their overlordship of the prior inhabitants of the land?
As far as I know, the civilizing hero myth exists in other parts of the Americas. Even if it didn't, the the civilizing HERO - not heroeS - coming with BOAT, teaching agriculture, infrastructure and civilization is way too specific to be something like that - simply because we see other things being used than such stuff when an invading people need to justify their overlordship. They mostly invoke divine beings, heavens or other holy things - not a random singular person that did good deeds.
Also, even if a singular person would be used, the tendency would be to make it into a god so that the overlordship could be justified that way. Not make it a regular person that came in quite humble circumstances, like in a boat from the sea.
Moreover, the good deeds are way too specific and mundane - teaching agriculture, infrastructure and civilization. Not divine things that could make the locals say 'Ok, since obviously the heavens gave this right to these people and their ancestors descended from the heavens, they must be justified'.
This is without the exact similarity of the myth in different regions - Osiris is another civilizing hero that came from the sea in Egypt. Apkallu also is. But most interestingly, Osiris leaves Egypt after teaching them agriculture and stuff and sails somewhere else, explicitly saying that he is going away to teach other people agriculture.
> One of the problems with archaeoastronomy is that there are too many variables
But time and dates are constant. And seen from the perspective of the architects of those monuments, you can easily see the logic that they had while building them: Since the locations of the stellar objects and their movements are invariable, there is no way anyone, anywhere, at any point in time, would not be able to know the dates which the monuments represented. Moreover, anyone would of course know or remember what major event that the monument referred to at that given point in time - like the floods during the younger dryas - because it affected everyone and it was a global event, so surely it would be remembered and transmitted from generation to generation through oral means or other traditions, right...
So, with the cultural, actually civilizational paradigm that existed then, those monuments have inviolable logic.
But of course, this also means that the info that we can reach through those monuments is limited - because we can definitely know the date of construction of those monuments, and we definitely can match those dates to a known major event like the younger dryas, and therefore concluded that these monuments across the globe referred to that event, but not much more than that. Because the rest of the information was supposed to be handed from generation to generation, wise men to wise men. We could only gleam bits of that information in the myths, legends and maybe in the local religions.
> and besides, which features are you using to establish the alignment in the first place?
If you study the matter, you will find that the placement of the features are unmistakable. Yes, there could have been a 100 years difference in estimating the exact time point. However, as far as we know, the younger dryas was a process, not a biblical cataclysm - it had a pre-cataclysm phase in which a lot of climate effects were observed, then it itself happened over a duration of time, and then it had an aftermath which took some time to settle. ~100 years would not make any difference - for the people of the time, that event would be one singular, long, ongoing catastrophe to which they would refer as 'the' catastrophe.
> I've never been impressed with the thesis that "flood myths = some cultural echo of sea level rise." The thing is that floods are a pretty common thing in... just about every climate (even deserts, which can be prone to flash floods),
Floods happen all the time everywhere. But they never happen at the same time, everywhere. For the people of the period, every known major culture, every known major population center getting destroyed by the sea would be an unparaleled thing. With no place to run to, nobody spared from the onslaught. It would be an unparaleled thing if it happened even today if you think about it.
> Arrrgh. If you ever take a class in anthropology, one of the first things you will likely learn about is the unilinear evolution model of civilization... followed very swiftly by how utterly wrong and out-of-date it is. It's not what the scientists believe
And yet, it is not what is being kept as the public paradigm. What we have is a linear progression of history modeled mainly from Christianity and its beliefs. Things happen in a linear fashion even if there were some mishaps on the way, and the civilization just progresses forward without losing everything at any point in time. There are catastrophes and setbacks, but there is no case of entire civilization going down the drain. The more advanced knowledge that is nascent in the teaching of the sciences does not seem to have propagated itself to how science is applied at the largest scale, less, how the science explains things to the public.
As said, this is just scientific conservatism that exists due to the scholastic roots of modern scientific establishment.
> There are catastrophes and setbacks, but there is no case of entire civilization going down the drain.
Indus Valley and Minoan cultures are but only the most well-known ones. Teotihuacan is an interesting "maybe"--the dynamics at the end of Mesoamerican Classical period are less well-known than the Bronze Age collapse (which itself is pretty enigmatic).
> The more advanced knowledge that is nascent in the teaching of the sciences does not seem to have propagated itself to how science is applied at the largest scale, less, how the science explains things to the public.
The problem isn't the scientists. Popular anthropology and history, as fielded to the public, makes the goal of telling people the truth subordinate to a particular narrative. The cultural elite of today are the ones that are pushing this narrative, and shamefully, the things in the history books in primary and secondary education are part of this (witness the extreme political backlash today towards the teaching of the idea that our ancestors once did bad things). Scientists have been pushing back against this for literal decades--longer than you or I have been alive, most likely.
People like Hancock aren't helping. Instead, they seem to prefer things like, well this statement:
> As said, this is just scientific conservatism that exists due to the scholastic roots of modern scientific establishment.
I've explained multiple times already how it's not the scientists who believe this, and you're still coming back telling me that this is the rot in the field of science that needs to be exterminated. One gets the feeling that it's not about trying to uncover the truth, but participating in a crusade against "the establishment."
(I'd respond to the other points, but quite frankly, I don't see the point. It's clear that you're invested in the narrative, given that you're completely ignoring the points I'm making that there are alternative explanations which explain the same fact, so providing more facts seems unlikely to do anything.)
> I've explained multiple times already how it's not the scientists who believe this
Scientists might acknowlege isolated facts, but they're very bad at trying to reach the most parsimonious explanation by putting two and two together. The enduring conservatism mostly shows up wrt. what explanations are considered out-of-the-ordinary and not acceptable without overwhelming evidence, which by definition is hard to come by in the best of cases. For some reason, complex societies in the very far past are considered too outlandish even though they're a natural consequence of (1) human behavioral modernity, and (2) some places having enough resources to generate large surpluses and sustain activities other than bare survival.
> Indus Valley and Minoan cultures are but only the most well-known ones. Teotihuacan is an interesting "maybe"--the dynamics at the end of Mesoamerican Classical period are less well-known than the Bronze Age collapse (which itself is pretty enigmatic).
I didnt say 'an entire civilization'. I said 'entire civilization'. Those are all localized catastrophes, affecting at most multiple localized civilizations. While Indus, Minoan collapses totally local. Whereas Bronze Age collapse is larger, it still affected multiple civilizations while leaving a lot of others intact. Egypt for one. Mesopotamians. Chinese civilizations, Indian civilizations. None of them are cases of entire civilization or 80-90% of all civilization going down the drain.
Younger dryas event would be the collapse of entire human civilization as it existed then.
> The problem isn't the scientists. Popular anthropology and history, as fielded to the public, makes the goal of telling people the truth subordinate to a particular narrative. The cultural elite of today are the ones that are pushing this narrative
Not at all. What is known as public knowledge, what is taught at schools, and what is 'acceptable' in mainstream are all defined by the authority and advocacy of prominent scientists of the time. Today's science is no less conservative than the time of Champollion when he dechiphered the Rosetta Stone and entire scientific establishment lashed out against him because he contradicted the established 'knowledge'. If the prominent scientists change their approach and advocacy, entire society eventually changes. Just like it happened after the Rosetta Stone, but only gradually.
> People like Hancock aren't helping. Instead, they seem to prefer things like, well this statement:
> As said, this is just scientific conservatism that exists due to the scholastic roots of modern scientific establishment.
It wasn't different with Champollion. The scientific conservatism hampers science greatly. And its not only social sciences. It even plagues more objective sciences.
> I've explained multiple times already how it's not the scientists who believe this, and you're still coming back telling me that this is the rot in the field of science that needs to be exterminated....
Say all of that after you read the above reference.
> Say all of that after you read the above reference.
I'm more than willing to do so. That's not a very good reference, because if you're going to do any in-depth study of how and why barriers to new ideas crop up repeatedly in the history of science, you need to spend more than a paragraph explaining stuff. (Also, where in hell is Lavoisier? The debunking of phlogiston makes such a wonderful addition to these kinds of lists!) And when you study in depth, "they were persecuted for being right" turns out to actually be at strong odds with the historical data. But hey, where have we heard narrative being more important than facts before...
Take the most recent example: Schechtman and quasicrystals. It turns out, if you're not familiar with the field, that there's a mathematical theorem that proves that quasicrystals can't exist. And also it's a field that is notorious for being finicky in experimentation--you need good crystals, which are hard to get. So it's only natural that saying "here's this thing that we know can't exist" is going to get him pilloried for saying so... but that's not really what happened. A lot of people had seen similar things before, so the initial reaction was, while controversial, still had a lot of "hmm, that's funny" reaction rather than outright rejection (note that the paper was accepted without much fuss). Around the same time, Penrose tilings were discovered, which provided clues as to why the mathematical theorem was in fact wrong (it had an assumption that crystals could only be periodic, whereas quasicrystals are aperiodic), and the main organization of crystallographers explicitly changes its mandate to include quasicrystals within 7 years of the original publication--extraordinarily rapid. Sure, Linus Pauling was a very loud and vocal opponent of quasicrystals, and spent the rest of his life trying to prove Schechtman wrong. But the field moved on despite this opposition.
There is another point that is often made here: if someone is resorting to citing "Galileo was persecuted for being right!" as a defense for their new scientific theory, they are almost certainly a crank. (See, e.g., https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html).
Its a definitive reference. It shows that how scientific conservatism makes the larger science community reject propositions that can be verified by 'hard' sciences and its practices until the 'old guard' dies or enough of the young crop start adopting those ideas. In social sciences, the conservative is more sticky.
As you read the comments here, please remember the limitations of ChatGPT and try to be kind.
EDIT: I've just had it pointed out to me that some comments here might have been created by human beings without use of a chat bot. If that's the case ... well, I'm mystified, but I apologize.
I got one of his books as entertainment, it's a guilty pleasure, I like "kooky" fringe stuff. So I was actually pretty stoked to see the series appear on Netflix, but then I watched the preview... It is presented as if it's not "Harry Potter"-grade silly nonsense, as if it's not fiction. Hancock might believe his own fiction, but that makes him a nutter, not a scientist nor a journalist.
The problem is that this series, and say, the mushroom series about Stamets et. al., and Tyson's Cosmos are presented as if they are the same epistemologically, when they are clearly not the same.
Cosmos is science.
Paul Stamets is basically scientific with a gloss of pop and promotion.
Graham Hancock is a kook.
Normally I'm not one for the "won't somebody think of the idiots!?" folks, but I really find the presentation of the Netflix series problematical. But then the "History Channel" is full of ancient astronauts gunk, so what do I know? Tabloid trash sells.
(At best he's a kook, if he believes his own fiction he's merely a kook. He might just be trolling for the money. If so, he's a pernicious conman. But I think he's earnest. As I mentioned I'm a fan of his.)
I've been reading fringe material since before the Internet was a thing, I've forgotten more weird theories than most people know exist. You can tell a kook from a journalist or a scientist w/o reference to the content, it's the form that their communication takes that gives it away.
That's why this series is problematic: it conflates the three things: journalism, science, and kooky fringe "theories".
(Whenever they say "ancient astronaut theorists" on those History Channel I giggle because what they really mean are "kooks". But it's fucking pathetic that that channel calls itself the "History" channel, eh? It's like a cooking channel that only showed programs about sewage treatment.)
The hallmark of a kook is promoting a story in conflict with the facts. Flat-earthers are kooks.
Hancock speculates out ahead of the facts, a different activity. He can turn out to be wrong as new facts come in, or even right, as he was about the North American comet strike 12,800 years ago. Kooks start out wrong and stay wrong.
A million square miles of what was southeast Asia 20kya is under water, enough room for several Mesopotamian-scale civilizations. People had lived there for tens of millennia, ice-free.
Kooks are useless. Speculators generate interest in big questions.
The problem isn't that he is "speculating out ahead of the facts", the problem is that this series paints him in exactly the same light as, say, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
NGT has done actual work. But the main difference today is that he hews close to the favored mainstream speculation.
But probably Brian Greene is a better comparison. He has not done any actual physics (i.e., connected at any remove to actual experiment) in decades, if ever.
Like I said, normally I'm not a "think of the children" type, but IMO you've got to give the kids (et. al.) a fighting chance, I really did watch the trailer for the series and think "WTF? This makes GH look way more legit than he is." and I count myself as a fan of GH, okay?
Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my reaction and my considered opinion. Take it for what it's worth. (Or not. It's just the internet, eh?)
I am much more in agreement with you than not. But I see Hancock, presented with evidence indicating a better alternative than his own, cheerfully accepting it. Most likely he would come up with another speculation consistent with the new facts. He certainly harbors lots of deeply kooky ideas, but doesn't seem as attached to them as my favorite kooks are.
I don't know if anybody has tried taking him aside to explain how Earth's rotational precession is wholly divorced from solar system orbital dynamics, or if he could understand it if they did. His notion of Gobekli Tepe built as a red warning to us about the scheduled upcoming comet strike is easily his kookiest, and has been a serious distraction from his main interest.
On a different tangent, I only just found out about megaliths in Montana. If those are all erratics, some glacier was being awfully artful about it.
