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Graham Hancock is a fraud. We certainly underestimate the ingenuity of past peoples, but the way that Hancock frames this discourse is full of shit. Bad Archae

Graham Hancock is a fraud. We certainly underestimate the ingenuity of past peoples, but the way that Hancock frames this discourse is full of shit. Bad Archaeology is a great resource that explains why a wide array of pseudoarchaeological notions and tropes, including those peddled by Hancock, are wrong. Check it out. http://www.badarchaeology.com/ http://www.badarchaeology.com/

ncmncm 6y ago
Graham Hancock is always careful to separate his speculations from the facts, and carefully label each. And, he has turned out to be right (about things that are not completely wacky) remarkably often. Most recently, the Younger Dryas Boundary comet strike, that drove 30+ American genera to extinction and wiped out the Clovis culture, has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists. (Neanderthal gatekeepers on Wikipedia have not caught up yet, and probably won't for five or ten more years, and then will insist they were right to stall.) Furthermore, we now are certain that a large civilization farmed the whole Amazon basin for at least 1500 years before it was wiped out by Spanish-delivered smallpox.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > Most recently, the Younger Dryas Boundary comet strike, that drove 30+ American genera to extinction and wiped out the Clovis culture, has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists. This statement surprised me because, while I haven't kept any sort of close eye on Younger Dryas research, I had literally never heard of this hypothesis before. A quick search of scholar.google.com for "Younger Dryas impact" focusing on recent papers seems to indicate to me that there is at least an active, ongoing academic dispute between at least two groups over the matter, and I haven't looked at the author lists to figure out if there's only one group on a specific side. At the very least, I'd be very hesitant to say that it "has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists." Edit: I should also mention that I did find an r/AskHistorians post on this topic (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/du40jl/the_younger_dryas_event/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/du40jl/the_y...) where the archaeologist is clearly not a believer in the hypothesis, linking some articles [including those I found in my aforementioned search] that are critical of the theory. While not gospel truth, it again suggests that "has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists" is not an accurate description of the current status of the hypothesis in the relevant community.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Yes, not everyone has caught up yet. The watershed event was publication of Powell's "Deadly Voyager" this year. Powell is a respected, mainstream geologist. Hancock's most vocal mainstream critics have issued public mea culpas. The book is available on Kindle, free for Prime members, and is a quick and enlightening read. The opposition for the past 13 years turns out to be a real black eye for geology. One group's failure to discover corroborating evidence was treated as a demonstration of falsehood and possible fraud, rather than what turned out to be a failure to sample the correct stratum. The negative evidence, interpreted correctly, reinforces the Impact Hypothesis by showing that the particles reported occur only in the cited layer, and not in samples straddling the layer. The most compelling evidence is widespread, very sharp platinum enrichment at the layer, at dozens of sites, and particles that exhibit melting of materials that melt only well over 2000 degrees C, which does not occur in forest fires or volcanic eruptions.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - bildung 6y ago
      I few trivial searches disqualify your "watershed event": The "particles" you mention are most probably Highly siderophile elements (HSE) - which indeed only form upwards of 2000°C. That doesn't mean they have to come from outer space, though, as they are also present in earth's upper mantle[0]. Surface HSE presence can therefore also be explained by volcanic activity. And indeed, a July 2020 publication has shown that the present evidence and thus the Younger Drias Event can also be explained by a series of volcanic eruptions[1]. [0] = https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemer.2008.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemer.2008.10.001 [1] = https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        > The "particles" you mention are most probably Highly siderophile elements (HSE) From what I saw of some of the articles I was reading, it was nanodiamonds and magnetic microspherules. I'm getting this mostly from [1], which is definitely a strong critical take on the evidence, suggesting that the methodology for identifying these particles is sufficiently subjective that researchers knowing where the samples are to have occurred is biasing their interpretation of the results to find a sharp distinction around the Younger Dryas threshold that isn't corroborated if that context is removed. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155470 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

ncmncm 6y ago

Graham Hancock is always careful to separate his speculations from the facts, and carefully label each. And, he has turned out to be right (about things that are not completely wacky) remarkably often. Most recently, the Younger Dryas Boundary comet strike, that drove 30+ American genera to extinction and wiped out the Clovis culture, has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists. (Neanderthal gatekeepers on Wikipedia have not caught up yet, and probably won't for five or ten more years, and then will insist they were right to stall.) Furthermore, we now are certain that a large civilization farmed the whole Amazon basin for at least 1500 years before it was wiped out by Spanish-delivered smallpox.

jcranmer 6y ago
> Most recently, the Younger Dryas Boundary comet strike, that drove 30+ American genera to extinction and wiped out the Clovis culture, has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists. This statement surprised me because, while I haven't kept any sort of close eye on Younger Dryas research, I had literally never heard of this hypothesis before. A quick search of scholar.google.com for "Younger Dryas impact" focusing on recent papers seems to indicate to me that there is at least an active, ongoing academic dispute between at least two groups over the matter, and I haven't looked at the author lists to figure out if there's only one group on a specific side. At the very least, I'd be very hesitant to say that it "has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists." Edit: I should also mention that I did find an r/AskHistorians post on this topic (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/du40jl/the_younger_dryas_event/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/du40jl/the_y...) where the archaeologist is clearly not a believer in the hypothesis, linking some articles [including those I found in my aforementioned search] that are critical of the theory. While not gospel truth, it again suggests that "has finally been accepted by mainstream geologists" is not an accurate description of the current status of the hypothesis in the relevant community.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Yes, not everyone has caught up yet. The watershed event was publication of Powell's "Deadly Voyager" this year. Powell is a respected, mainstream geologist. Hancock's most vocal mainstream critics have issued public mea culpas. The book is available on Kindle, free for Prime members, and is a quick and enlightening read. The opposition for the past 13 years turns out to be a real black eye for geology. One group's failure to discover corroborating evidence was treated as a demonstration of falsehood and possible fraud, rather than what turned out to be a failure to sample the correct stratum. The negative evidence, interpreted correctly, reinforces the Impact Hypothesis by showing that the particles reported occur only in the cited layer, and not in samples straddling the layer. The most compelling evidence is widespread, very sharp platinum enrichment at the layer, at dozens of sites, and particles that exhibit melting of materials that melt only well over 2000 degrees C, which does not occur in forest fires or volcanic eruptions.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bildung 6y ago
    I few trivial searches disqualify your "watershed event": The "particles" you mention are most probably Highly siderophile elements (HSE) - which indeed only form upwards of 2000°C. That doesn't mean they have to come from outer space, though, as they are also present in earth's upper mantle[0]. Surface HSE presence can therefore also be explained by volcanic activity. And indeed, a July 2020 publication has shown that the present evidence and thus the Younger Drias Event can also be explained by a series of volcanic eruptions[1]. [0] = https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemer.2008.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemer.2008.10.001 [1] = https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > The "particles" you mention are most probably Highly siderophile elements (HSE) From what I saw of some of the articles I was reading, it was nanodiamonds and magnetic microspherules. I'm getting this mostly from [1], which is definitely a strong critical take on the evidence, suggesting that the methodology for identifying these particles is sufficiently subjective that researchers knowing where the samples are to have occurred is biasing their interpretation of the results to find a sharp distinction around the Younger Dryas threshold that isn't corroborated if that context is removed. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155470 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...