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What does HN think of Graham Hancock? The antediluvian period is definitely quite a mystery and almost certainly the traditional history we are taught is not as

What does HN think of Graham Hancock? The antediluvian period is definitely quite a mystery and almost certainly the traditional history we are taught is not as clear-cut as it is made to sound. I think the ancient sky looked a lot different than it does today. And there were global cataclysms that shaped the mythology of these civilizations surviving through that event. Moving forward, the later generations adhered to the myths and propagated them but with minor details forgotten or changed. Fast forward centuries and people are telling stories told to them by their parents, without knowing what they are actually about or why, that are heavily modified over generation to generation and became more symbolic and less literal.

danaugrs 6y ago
I've read Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization from Hancock and really liked it. Lots of interesting thoughts in there.
stupidcar 6y ago
I became aware of Hancock by listening to the Our Fake History podcast series about him and his claims: https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-4/episode-78-who-are-the-magicians-of-the-gods-part-i/#more-791 https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-4/episode-78-who... The impression I got is... not good, to to say the least.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  In general you're usually better off actually listening to someone and seeing what they have to say in order to make an informed judgement about them before listening to a characterization of them by a 3rd party with their own agenda.
- reedwolf 6y ago
  This is a great podcast. Loved the Atlantis episodes.
nafey 6y ago
He does make persuasive arguments about existence of human civilization during younger dryas period (Gobekli Tepe happens to be one of his major evidence for this) but he tends to emphasise or deemphasise their sophistication depending on the kind of audience he is talking to. This is where he loses me. He tries to make much more reasonable claims when he is on mainstream shows like JRE, but he tends to get a lot more hyperbolic when speaking to his core audience.
- ColanR 6y ago
  That sounds like the difference between saying what can be easily defended to a potentially critical audience, vs. saying what you're less sure of to a receptive audience.
- sebastialonso 6y ago
  To me, the alarms sound way before that. You can change the tune of your idea if you need to persuade people, while at the same time being honest about it. What I don't like about Hancock is that he uses Gobekli Tepe as a prop: we don't know the whole story/history about it, but he will gladfully use it to support his claims, without actually producing evidence that furthers our knowledge on what Gobekli was! I can surely entertain the idea of lost civilizations, but that doesn't imply I validate the dishonest handling of unknowns as "evidence". This is what pseudoscience and con men do to appear respectable.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    You can manipulate your knowledge as though it were an object, but you cannot manipulate your ignorance.
rbosinger 6y ago
Watch the Joe Rogan podcasts with him and Randall Carlson. I'm into it. Whether his ideas are correct or not, I personally believe the chance that his general inclinations that there was a lot more to earlier civilizations than we believe, are very likely true.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
Disclaimer: I worked professionally as an archaeologist, specifically in related fields. He's pretty widely regarded as a crank. To some extent, we've done a terrible job of educating the public / undergrad population about what the current state of knowledge is and so it's almost to be expected that people flock to these sorts of crackpot theories. I love sharing archaeology with people (it's our heritage!), but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes.
- sebastialonso 6y ago
  I'm intriged. > the current state of knowledge is Do you mean specifically to this site or to the profession in general?
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    In general people should have at the least vague "red flag limits" of what's reasonable in a field. Let's use a hypothetical example: if I were to proclaim that I've found an overunity machine, most of the comments would (rightly) criticize and/or lecture me on how that's not possible without rewriting most of physics. The silurian hypothesis doesn't evoke nearly the same reaction, even accounting for the evidentiary strength difference between archaeology and physics. We can discuss why that is and so on, but most people just aren't equipped to differentiate crackpots from legitimate sources.
- mootzville 6y ago
  So, why don't archaeologists write more books as interesting and engaging as Graham Hancock's then that also offer refutations of his claims? I see many personal attacks such as stating he's a crank...prove it.
  - pvg 6y ago
    For one thing, someone has to do actual archaeology. Debunking crank claims is not the primary job of researchers, there's simply too many of them - a lot of this is up to diligent consumers and that diligence involves a bit more work than demanding someone prove the crankery of every crank.
mootzville 6y ago
From what I've heard, and read of Graham Hancock he has a lot of good thoughts on the subject of ancient/lost civilizations. He presents facts -- such as similarities between artifacts found in Egypt and the Mississippi Valley -- and goes on to tell what he thinks about them. I'd say overall he's pretty good about separating the facts vs his own ideas about things. Ultimately, he's a journalist and makes no scientific claims beyond those from the scientific community who have published peer-reviewed papers. He caught a lot of flack for changing his ideas over time -- even within his books -- yet it makes no sense as we -- humans -- figure things out by putting ideas out there and reflecting on them collectively. My favorite talk I've heard of his is the one on the use of psychedelics in ancient civilizations. In my opinion, modern society would benefit a great deal if we removed the stigma of altered states of consciousness, and more people began having these experiences...unfortunately, it would cut into big pharmas profits as less people needed lifetime prescriptions of anti-depressants.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Hancock does suggest a few cranky ideas, not all his own. But he is quite, and unusually, careful to distinguish facts from speculation. Reading Graham, you always know which is which. You can safely read Hancock and quote out facts from it, even where you disagree with his conclusions, with no danger of propagating falsehoods. There really are hundreds of miles of tunnels carved into the rock under eastern Turkish towns. The monuments really are 11,000 years old. The designs on them might represent constellations, and if they do, might be the ones he picked. (My guess is yes on one, no on two.) The evidence for when the Sphinx and Giza pyramids were built really is a lot shakier than your tour guide will say. All we have reliable evidence for is that they are at least that old. Surface luminescence testing, what little has been done, puts bits of them 5000 years old, but not precisely enough to rule out the current guess of 4500 years. We also don't have any idea when the Giza pyramids were started. It would be possible to test surface luminescence of an interior stone, but nobody has. Cheops expanding an existing monument is equally as plausible as his building it from scratch. The Irish were building huge, astronomically oriented monuments at around the time the Egyptians may have done theirs. The Irish actually interred people in theirs, where nobody has found any hint that the Egyptians ever put a mummy in their own. (But there could be mummies anywhere under all that rock.) The entire lack of wall decoration in the pyramids does point to the idea that dimensional clues were the point, considering how distinctive so many of such details turn out to be. Meanwhile, the ancestors of Mayans were mining ochre at industrial scale deep underground at the same time as the Turks built their monuments, right at the end of the Younger Dryas cold spell 11,000 years ago. 2000 years later they were harvesting teosinte, ancestor to maize (Americans say "corn"). It is really true that huge swaths of what was coastal lowlands are now deep underwater, and if there were any cities or proto-cities there, they are there still, waiting to be found. It is true that anybody who lived there was obliged to move and, having moved, would bring along what they had developed, and have plenty of stories that would naturally have become legends of being flooded out. It is really true that there is extensive stonework deep underwater off India, not far from the Harappan cities we know about, that fishermen snag their nets on. It is really true that there is a thin layer of soot at many places all across North America, deposited at about the end of the Younger Dryas cold spell, suggesting a cataclysm of at least continental proportions. You can guess what all these things mean, as Hancock does, but his guesses don't taint the facts. If you have better ideas, you are equally free to publish them, or not to.
throwaway_kufu 6y ago
Honestly between Graham Hancock and John Anthony West I no longer know what is what. At least with Egypt it seems to be this great divide between the Official Egyptian Archeologists historical timeline and these relatively new ideas of an earlier society/culture with more advanced stone working technology (maybe more advanced mining/metal working as well) that disappeared before the old kingdom appeared. Each side bizarrely makes the other side out to be batshit crazy and verging on conspiracy theories. I guess I’m just left to conclude that few People will ever have access to these treasures of human history, fewer Still will get to dig them up and examine them, and ultimately one person’s interpretation will become the story we all hear which we call truth, and ultimately we will call it his-story.
troughway 6y ago
I would like someone to professionally dispute and counter Graham Hancock's work. And I don't mean a random blog posts or some short clip of him having a godawful debate. I mean a thorough break down of "Graham says X, in reality it's Y." He has published a handful of books. It shouldn't be that difficult to find word-for-word factually incorrect statements he has made, that he still clings onto, that can be readily disproven. The Joe Rogan show that he did where he debated was nice, but again, it's more for entertainment. Near the end it turned into ad hominem attacks against him and had some libelous pieces too. He could have taken legal action against the person. So far all I have heard have been, to say the least, vague statements of how he is wrong, how he's causing archaeologists to have a bad rap, and whatnot. Okay then, show me the work. I haven't found much in the way of anyone refuting his biggest points, namely the ridiculously precise celestial knowledge of the temple builders, and how these temples came to be constructed so well, considering they are massive slabs of stone that remain to this day. He touches on things like water erosion patterns and whatnot in areas that have seen very little water. At least one of these should be easily disprovable.
- empath75 6y ago
  That’s not the way science works. Have him publish a peer reviewed paper staking out his claims. If he’s right, it shouldn’t be difficult to produce something publishable in a major journal.
telaelit 6y ago
I really like Hancock
wendyshu 6y ago
He makes his living by telling stories to a popular audience. He's optimizing for a good story rather than accuracy.
pjc50 6y ago
> I think the ancient sky looked a lot different than it does today. In what way, and why do you think that?
jdenning 6y ago
I think the problem with G. H. is that he gets way too specific. I think his core theory is plausible (civilization existed before our current evidence suggests, and that it was wiped out by some sort of cataclysm - he suggests a meteor event IIRC). This would explain a lot of weird coincidences in the development of disparate human cultures (see sibling comments for examples) My problem with him is that a lot of things he claims as hard evidence are pretty weak, but he talks like his theory is essentially proven. His ideas can spawn a lot of fun thought experiments in any case.
sawaruna 6y ago
People see Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan and think those are the extent of his beliefs. Watch his other talks where he ponders of ancient Egyptians used some kind of telekinesis to move stones and build pyramids.
cabite 6y ago
And what does HN think of Ben Davidson and its Suspicious0bservers YouTube channel ? He claims electric forces shape the universe at big scales, and that our sun, because it is travelling through certain structures in the galaxy, charges then violently discharges in what he wall a micro-nova event. Most stars in the universe according to him actually are recurrent novae. When such an event occurs, huge electric potentials are blasted from the sun towards the planets in its vicinity , causing electric and plasma arcs able to form craters or even carve canyons. https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers A plasma physicist event went as far as seeing in petroglyphs worldwide the records of such a high-intensity aurora in antiquity. https://www.apanarcheo.nl/aurora%20jadeiet/PerattZpinch%20plasmaexperimenten.pdf https://www.apanarcheo.nl/aurora%20jadeiet/PerattZpinch%20pl... Part 2: http://www.everythingselectric.com/wp-content/uploads/peratt-z-pinch-directionality.pdf http://www.everythingselectric.com/wp-content/uploads/peratt...

danaugrs 6y ago

I've read Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization from Hancock and really liked it. Lots of interesting thoughts in there.

stupidcar 6y ago

I became aware of Hancock by listening to the Our Fake History podcast series about him and his claims: https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-4/episode-78-who-are-the-magicians-of-the-gods-part-i/#more-791 https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-4/episode-78-who... The impression I got is... not good, to to say the least.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago
In general you're usually better off actually listening to someone and seeing what they have to say in order to make an informed judgement about them before listening to a characterization of them by a 3rd party with their own agenda.
reedwolf 6y ago
This is a great podcast. Loved the Atlantis episodes.

nafey 6y ago

He does make persuasive arguments about existence of human civilization during younger dryas period (Gobekli Tepe happens to be one of his major evidence for this) but he tends to emphasise or deemphasise their sophistication depending on the kind of audience he is talking to. This is where he loses me. He tries to make much more reasonable claims when he is on mainstream shows like JRE, but he tends to get a lot more hyperbolic when speaking to his core audience.

ColanR 6y ago
That sounds like the difference between saying what can be easily defended to a potentially critical audience, vs. saying what you're less sure of to a receptive audience.
sebastialonso 6y ago
To me, the alarms sound way before that. You can change the tune of your idea if you need to persuade people, while at the same time being honest about it. What I don't like about Hancock is that he uses Gobekli Tepe as a prop: we don't know the whole story/history about it, but he will gladfully use it to support his claims, without actually producing evidence that furthers our knowledge on what Gobekli was! I can surely entertain the idea of lost civilizations, but that doesn't imply I validate the dishonest handling of unknowns as "evidence". This is what pseudoscience and con men do to appear respectable.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  You can manipulate your knowledge as though it were an object, but you cannot manipulate your ignorance.

rbosinger 6y ago

Watch the Joe Rogan podcasts with him and Randall Carlson. I'm into it. Whether his ideas are correct or not, I personally believe the chance that his general inclinations that there was a lot more to earlier civilizations than we believe, are very likely true.

AlotOfReading 6y ago

Disclaimer: I worked professionally as an archaeologist, specifically in related fields. He's pretty widely regarded as a crank. To some extent, we've done a terrible job of educating the public / undergrad population about what the current state of knowledge is and so it's almost to be expected that people flock to these sorts of crackpot theories. I love sharing archaeology with people (it's our heritage!), but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes.

sebastialonso 6y ago
I'm intriged. > the current state of knowledge is Do you mean specifically to this site or to the profession in general?
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  In general people should have at the least vague "red flag limits" of what's reasonable in a field. Let's use a hypothetical example: if I were to proclaim that I've found an overunity machine, most of the comments would (rightly) criticize and/or lecture me on how that's not possible without rewriting most of physics. The silurian hypothesis doesn't evoke nearly the same reaction, even accounting for the evidentiary strength difference between archaeology and physics. We can discuss why that is and so on, but most people just aren't equipped to differentiate crackpots from legitimate sources.
mootzville 6y ago
So, why don't archaeologists write more books as interesting and engaging as Graham Hancock's then that also offer refutations of his claims? I see many personal attacks such as stating he's a crank...prove it.
- pvg 6y ago
  For one thing, someone has to do actual archaeology. Debunking crank claims is not the primary job of researchers, there's simply too many of them - a lot of this is up to diligent consumers and that diligence involves a bit more work than demanding someone prove the crankery of every crank.

mootzville 6y ago

From what I've heard, and read of Graham Hancock he has a lot of good thoughts on the subject of ancient/lost civilizations. He presents facts -- such as similarities between artifacts found in Egypt and the Mississippi Valley -- and goes on to tell what he thinks about them. I'd say overall he's pretty good about separating the facts vs his own ideas about things. Ultimately, he's a journalist and makes no scientific claims beyond those from the scientific community who have published peer-reviewed papers. He caught a lot of flack for changing his ideas over time -- even within his books -- yet it makes no sense as we -- humans -- figure things out by putting ideas out there and reflecting on them collectively. My favorite talk I've heard of his is the one on the use of psychedelics in ancient civilizations. In my opinion, modern society would benefit a great deal if we removed the stigma of altered states of consciousness, and more people began having these experiences...unfortunately, it would cut into big pharmas profits as less people needed lifetime prescriptions of anti-depressants.

ncmncm 6y ago
Hancock does suggest a few cranky ideas, not all his own. But he is quite, and unusually, careful to distinguish facts from speculation. Reading Graham, you always know which is which. You can safely read Hancock and quote out facts from it, even where you disagree with his conclusions, with no danger of propagating falsehoods. There really are hundreds of miles of tunnels carved into the rock under eastern Turkish towns. The monuments really are 11,000 years old. The designs on them might represent constellations, and if they do, might be the ones he picked. (My guess is yes on one, no on two.) The evidence for when the Sphinx and Giza pyramids were built really is a lot shakier than your tour guide will say. All we have reliable evidence for is that they are at least that old. Surface luminescence testing, what little has been done, puts bits of them 5000 years old, but not precisely enough to rule out the current guess of 4500 years. We also don't have any idea when the Giza pyramids were started. It would be possible to test surface luminescence of an interior stone, but nobody has. Cheops expanding an existing monument is equally as plausible as his building it from scratch. The Irish were building huge, astronomically oriented monuments at around the time the Egyptians may have done theirs. The Irish actually interred people in theirs, where nobody has found any hint that the Egyptians ever put a mummy in their own. (But there could be mummies anywhere under all that rock.) The entire lack of wall decoration in the pyramids does point to the idea that dimensional clues were the point, considering how distinctive so many of such details turn out to be. Meanwhile, the ancestors of Mayans were mining ochre at industrial scale deep underground at the same time as the Turks built their monuments, right at the end of the Younger Dryas cold spell 11,000 years ago. 2000 years later they were harvesting teosinte, ancestor to maize (Americans say "corn"). It is really true that huge swaths of what was coastal lowlands are now deep underwater, and if there were any cities or proto-cities there, they are there still, waiting to be found. It is true that anybody who lived there was obliged to move and, having moved, would bring along what they had developed, and have plenty of stories that would naturally have become legends of being flooded out. It is really true that there is extensive stonework deep underwater off India, not far from the Harappan cities we know about, that fishermen snag their nets on. It is really true that there is a thin layer of soot at many places all across North America, deposited at about the end of the Younger Dryas cold spell, suggesting a cataclysm of at least continental proportions. You can guess what all these things mean, as Hancock does, but his guesses don't taint the facts. If you have better ideas, you are equally free to publish them, or not to.

throwaway_kufu 6y ago

Honestly between Graham Hancock and John Anthony West I no longer know what is what. At least with Egypt it seems to be this great divide between the Official Egyptian Archeologists historical timeline and these relatively new ideas of an earlier society/culture with more advanced stone working technology (maybe more advanced mining/metal working as well) that disappeared before the old kingdom appeared. Each side bizarrely makes the other side out to be batshit crazy and verging on conspiracy theories. I guess I’m just left to conclude that few People will ever have access to these treasures of human history, fewer Still will get to dig them up and examine them, and ultimately one person’s interpretation will become the story we all hear which we call truth, and ultimately we will call it his-story.

troughway 6y ago

I would like someone to professionally dispute and counter Graham Hancock's work. And I don't mean a random blog posts or some short clip of him having a godawful debate. I mean a thorough break down of "Graham says X, in reality it's Y." He has published a handful of books. It shouldn't be that difficult to find word-for-word factually incorrect statements he has made, that he still clings onto, that can be readily disproven. The Joe Rogan show that he did where he debated was nice, but again, it's more for entertainment. Near the end it turned into ad hominem attacks against him and had some libelous pieces too. He could have taken legal action against the person. So far all I have heard have been, to say the least, vague statements of how he is wrong, how he's causing archaeologists to have a bad rap, and whatnot. Okay then, show me the work. I haven't found much in the way of anyone refuting his biggest points, namely the ridiculously precise celestial knowledge of the temple builders, and how these temples came to be constructed so well, considering they are massive slabs of stone that remain to this day. He touches on things like water erosion patterns and whatnot in areas that have seen very little water. At least one of these should be easily disprovable.

empath75 6y ago
That’s not the way science works. Have him publish a peer reviewed paper staking out his claims. If he’s right, it shouldn’t be difficult to produce something publishable in a major journal.

telaelit 6y ago

I really like Hancock

wendyshu 6y ago

He makes his living by telling stories to a popular audience. He's optimizing for a good story rather than accuracy.

pjc50 6y ago

> I think the ancient sky looked a lot different than it does today. In what way, and why do you think that?

jdenning 6y ago

I think the problem with G. H. is that he gets way too specific. I think his core theory is plausible (civilization existed before our current evidence suggests, and that it was wiped out by some sort of cataclysm - he suggests a meteor event IIRC). This would explain a lot of weird coincidences in the development of disparate human cultures (see sibling comments for examples) My problem with him is that a lot of things he claims as hard evidence are pretty weak, but he talks like his theory is essentially proven. His ideas can spawn a lot of fun thought experiments in any case.

sawaruna 6y ago

People see Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan and think those are the extent of his beliefs. Watch his other talks where he ponders of ancient Egyptians used some kind of telekinesis to move stones and build pyramids.

cabite 6y ago

And what does HN think of Ben Davidson and its Suspicious0bservers YouTube channel ? He claims electric forces shape the universe at big scales, and that our sun, because it is travelling through certain structures in the galaxy, charges then violently discharges in what he wall a micro-nova event. Most stars in the universe according to him actually are recurrent novae. When such an event occurs, huge electric potentials are blasted from the sun towards the planets in its vicinity , causing electric and plasma arcs able to form craters or even carve canyons. https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers A plasma physicist event went as far as seeing in petroglyphs worldwide the records of such a high-intensity aurora in antiquity. https://www.apanarcheo.nl/aurora%20jadeiet/PerattZpinch%20plasmaexperimenten.pdf https://www.apanarcheo.nl/aurora%20jadeiet/PerattZpinch%20pl... Part 2: http://www.everythingselectric.com/wp-content/uploads/peratt-z-pinch-directionality.pdf http://www.everythingselectric.com/wp-content/uploads/peratt...