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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 scie

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• screye 4y ago
  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.
  • stolenmerch 4y ago
    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.
    • Ar-Curunir 4y ago
      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
      • AlotOfReading 4y ago
        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.
        • moloch-hai 4y ago
          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.
    • screye 4y ago
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  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 I think this is the issue people have.
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  • stoneglyph 4y ago
• kcplate 4y ago
  > 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.
  • photochemsyn 4y ago
    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.
    • annadiru 4y ago
      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. (for what it's worth my mom's an archeologist)
• jcranmer 4y ago
  > 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."
• JackFr 4y ago
  Joe Rogan popping up in the documentary seems to seems to set a lot of people off.
• epgui 4y ago
  Academics worry about the public being confused, they don’t care about things no reasonable person would believe.
• fyrepuffs 4y ago
• cryptonector 4y ago
  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.
  • Shorel 4y ago
    It's not farfetched. But at the same time, it puts a lot of pressure in the immutability of oral traditions. Back then, distances were simply bigger, both in actual distance and in time. For a single culture to have been the origin, their message and mythos needed to be reproduced with precision through countless generations. I am not saying this is impossible, and in fact it is plausible, just that this is a factor to take into account.
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      > 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.
    • cryptonector 4y ago
• PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  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.