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If you like video essays, I enjoyed this movie-length debunking of Ancient Apocalypse. tl;dr: The evidence is simply not there, and real archeology is much, m

If you like video essays, I enjoyed this movie-length debunking of Ancient Apocalypse. tl;dr: The evidence is simply not there, and real archeology is much, much more interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A

masklinn 2y ago
Milo also visited Göbekli Tepe, as well as Karahan Tepe (a site which likely predates Göbekli and is believed to be related as there are lots of shared features), and a few other more recent sites of southern turkey: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bNsVeMHjFjF003GU1Stt8WF https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bNsVeMHjFjF...
cavillis 2y ago
thank you for posting this! I loved Ancient Apocalypse, very entertaining. It has been frustrating trying to find refutations of some of the theories/questions posed by it. When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
- roywiggins 2y ago
  It doesn't help that Graham Hancock levels his own ad hominem attacks, claiming that archeologists don't take his ideas seriously to protect their own egos and jobs.
  - colibri727 2y ago
    archeologist do that to themselves, it's not a monolithic block https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w&t=33m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w&t=33m20s Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established. This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book) >At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago. >[...] >the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička >[...] >throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis >[...] >The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified. >[...] >Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points >[...] >Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years. >[...] >a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper >[...] >because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets >[...] >Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago. >[...] >Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas. >[...] >Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Can recommend this channel as well run by an American professor, just did a video on the techniques Graham uses to fool people but has a lot of other debunking and visiting the pyramids etc. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU Graham and a real historian recently did a debate on Joe Rogan where Graham did not come off well.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn Because you're trying to 'learn' from an unreliable source spouting fiction. It's like someone learning homeopathy being frustrated that doctors dismiss it with passion.
tiffanyh 2y ago
I just started watched the YouTube. It’s hard to take this debunking serious when the very 1st point he makes about Graham is incorrect. He states that Graham claims to be a researcher. https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?t=139 https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?t=139 In the Netflix series, Graham doesn’t not. He makes it clear he’s not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly states he’s an investigative journalist. https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=youtu... —- And then the YouTube host roots his show on the scientific method with the question “How do you prove there was an ancient civilians”. This is the wrong root question. The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. Or said differently, “how did civilians not use more advance technology than we believe they had” (Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the wheel)
- roywiggins 2y ago
  > He states that Graham claims to be a researcher. No, he doesn't state that at all. This is what Milo says, verbatim: "He is a person that some may call a researcher. I am one of those people. More predominantly than that, Graham Hancock is a writer." > The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. That's an interesting question, but it's essentially an endless one: we will never, ever know how ancient civilizations created everything they created, because their secrets have been lost to time. Human history is so deep and the evidence so porous that we simply will never run out of questions to ask about how they did what they did. Furthermore, even when we come up with ways they might have created things, we may never, ever know whether that's really what they did, because the evidence is not there anymore. There are medieval and later items which we don't really know how were created, but we do know, for sure, that they didn't have power tools. For instance, what was Greek fire, exactly? There are lots of good ideas, Wikipedia suggests "it may have been made by combining pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, sulfur, or niter." Will we ever know which? Maybe, but probably not.
  - tiffanyh 2y ago
    His whole premise is that civilizations didn’t exist that long ago (which is his scientific method question). Yet no one disputes that archeologist have found remains of people from 200,000 years ago. That right there debunks his “debunk” show. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determine-age-of-some-of-the-oldest-human-bones#:~:text=Transcript-,Some%20of%20the%20oldest%20human%20remains%20ever%20unearthed%20are%20the,re%20around%20233%2C000%20years%20old https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determi....
johncessna 2y ago
As someone who doesn't know much about archeology, I watched the netflix show and thought it was interesting and had a lot of questions. Knowing that it's one perspective and that there has been information has likely been left out and/or there were either answers, or at least commonly accepted explanations, I started looking around for what those were and what the academics had to say. I found this channel and couldn't get more than 30 minutes. He starts off well saying that he didn't want to dismiss it all as nonsense but that doesn't last long. So yeah, If you want to watch someone ridicule an alternative theory that has been presented, or present commonly accepted theories as matter of fact, then sure, great channel.
- dbspin 2y ago
  Your criticism of this channel may be on point - I haven't watched it. But please don't make the mistake of equivocating scientific hypotheses, theories well supported by evidence and crank pseudoscience created for a mass audience. Hancock hasn't been excluded from the 'mainstream' archeological debate. He never participated in it in the first place. He's a writer of retrofuturological science fantasy in the same vein (and citing much the same evidence) as his predecessor Erich von Däniken. This stuff can be hugely entertaining (I'm a science fiction fan and grew up on 'face on mars', 'chariots of the Gods etc'). But its epistemic are based on just so stories and shifting goal posts, not triangulating the dating of sites, engaging in archeological digs or weighing in on scientific arguments about methodology.
  - unclad5968 2y ago
    That may be true but the scientific hypotheses and theories well supported by evidence in archeology have been wrong enough times that it isn't inappropriate to question them
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      That's how science works but new hypotheses must necessarily be able to explain all the existing evidence rather than just cherry-picking.

masklinn 2y ago

Milo also visited Göbekli Tepe, as well as Karahan Tepe (a site which likely predates Göbekli and is believed to be related as there are lots of shared features), and a few other more recent sites of southern turkey: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bNsVeMHjFjF003GU1Stt8WF https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bNsVeMHjFjF...

cavillis 2y ago

thank you for posting this! I loved Ancient Apocalypse, very entertaining. It has been frustrating trying to find refutations of some of the theories/questions posed by it. When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn

roywiggins 2y ago
It doesn't help that Graham Hancock levels his own ad hominem attacks, claiming that archeologists don't take his ideas seriously to protect their own egos and jobs.
- colibri727 2y ago
  archeologist do that to themselves, it's not a monolithic block https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w&t=33m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w&t=33m20s Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established. This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book) >At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago. >[...] >the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička >[...] >throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis >[...] >The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified. >[...] >Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points >[...] >Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years. >[...] >a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper >[...] >because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets >[...] >Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago. >[...] >Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas. >[...] >Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
Hikikomori 2y ago
Can recommend this channel as well run by an American professor, just did a video on the techniques Graham uses to fool people but has a lot of other debunking and visiting the pyramids etc. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU Graham and a real historian recently did a debate on Joe Rogan where Graham did not come off well.
DEADMINCE 2y ago
> When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn Because you're trying to 'learn' from an unreliable source spouting fiction. It's like someone learning homeopathy being frustrated that doctors dismiss it with passion.

tiffanyh 2y ago

I just started watched the YouTube. It’s hard to take this debunking serious when the very 1st point he makes about Graham is incorrect. He states that Graham claims to be a researcher. https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?t=139 https://youtu.be/-iCIZQX9i1A?t=139 In the Netflix series, Graham doesn’t not. He makes it clear he’s not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly states he’s an investigative journalist. https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=youtu... —- And then the YouTube host roots his show on the scientific method with the question “How do you prove there was an ancient civilians”. This is the wrong root question. The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. Or said differently, “how did civilians not use more advance technology than we believe they had” (Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the wheel)

roywiggins 2y ago
> He states that Graham claims to be a researcher. No, he doesn't state that at all. This is what Milo says, verbatim: "He is a person that some may call a researcher. I am one of those people. More predominantly than that, Graham Hancock is a writer." > The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. That's an interesting question, but it's essentially an endless one: we will never, ever know how ancient civilizations created everything they created, because their secrets have been lost to time. Human history is so deep and the evidence so porous that we simply will never run out of questions to ask about how they did what they did. Furthermore, even when we come up with ways they might have created things, we may never, ever know whether that's really what they did, because the evidence is not there anymore. There are medieval and later items which we don't really know how were created, but we do know, for sure, that they didn't have power tools. For instance, what was Greek fire, exactly? There are lots of good ideas, Wikipedia suggests "it may have been made by combining pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, sulfur, or niter." Will we ever know which? Maybe, but probably not.
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  His whole premise is that civilizations didn’t exist that long ago (which is his scientific method question). Yet no one disputes that archeologist have found remains of people from 200,000 years ago. That right there debunks his “debunk” show. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determine-age-of-some-of-the-oldest-human-bones#:~:text=Transcript-,Some%20of%20the%20oldest%20human%20remains%20ever%20unearthed%20are%20the,re%20around%20233%2C000%20years%20old https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determi....

johncessna 2y ago

As someone who doesn't know much about archeology, I watched the netflix show and thought it was interesting and had a lot of questions. Knowing that it's one perspective and that there has been information has likely been left out and/or there were either answers, or at least commonly accepted explanations, I started looking around for what those were and what the academics had to say. I found this channel and couldn't get more than 30 minutes. He starts off well saying that he didn't want to dismiss it all as nonsense but that doesn't last long. So yeah, If you want to watch someone ridicule an alternative theory that has been presented, or present commonly accepted theories as matter of fact, then sure, great channel.

dbspin 2y ago
Your criticism of this channel may be on point - I haven't watched it. But please don't make the mistake of equivocating scientific hypotheses, theories well supported by evidence and crank pseudoscience created for a mass audience. Hancock hasn't been excluded from the 'mainstream' archeological debate. He never participated in it in the first place. He's a writer of retrofuturological science fantasy in the same vein (and citing much the same evidence) as his predecessor Erich von Däniken. This stuff can be hugely entertaining (I'm a science fiction fan and grew up on 'face on mars', 'chariots of the Gods etc'). But its epistemic are based on just so stories and shifting goal posts, not triangulating the dating of sites, engaging in archeological digs or weighing in on scientific arguments about methodology.
- unclad5968 2y ago
  That may be true but the scientific hypotheses and theories well supported by evidence in archeology have been wrong enough times that it isn't inappropriate to question them
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    That's how science works but new hypotheses must necessarily be able to explain all the existing evidence rather than just cherry-picking.