These "cranks" provide an explanation. How do "non-crank" tradition archeologist explain this?
Just because somebody exaggerates means that he is a crank? In a world of ignorants perhaps the only option to be heard is to develop a fan base and exaggerate. That doesn't invalidate the few hypotheses presented by "cranks" which seem closer to be believable than mainstream explanations.
I'm not really speaking about this guy, I'm not at all qualified to say, but I think it's good we have people thinking differently from the crowd.
Also, and far more often, every crank starts out as a crank.
Ed: if you care, I mean. I'm the last person to deny the right to just not take a position on a non-actionable topic.
"...aaaand that's where we part company..."
This, I believe! Although it's probably a true statement for virtually any scientific profession.
That said: I don't know the first thing about Graham Hancock, and I'm quite comfortable dismissing Velikovsky and his ilk as cranks. Just because one can construct an absurd theory to explain things one doesn't understand, doesn't mean one should.
And yet... I was reading about the Norte Chico civilisation the other day, and thinking that it was really quite weird that they started building ziggurats at pretty close to the same time as the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese also started building ziggurats.
Really, the global flourishing of that exact form at that exact time -- in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them -- is honestly quite weird, right?
When I've mentioned these kind of thoughts to archaeologically-trained friends, I've often encountered a curious lack of curiosity -- "yes, obviously just a crazy coincidence, can't be anything besides that, let's talk about something else now" -- or asserting theories, as facts, about how ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue).
Both of these reactions are troubling to me. Dismissing these sort of things as "not a mystery" is doing them a disservice. Imagine how many great discoveries would have passed us by if every piece of initially-baffling evidence were dismissed as "just a coincidence". And while it's clearly irresponsible to to go on yammering about aliens or Atlantis or whatever -- at least in the absence of much more extraordinary evidence -- I don't think that it's much more responsible to concoct theories which are prosaic but obviously false.
Anyhow, minor rant there, sorry. I have absolutely no working theory as to why ziggurats started popping up all over the place 5,000 years ago. I just want to hear a non-crackpot archaeologist admit that yes, that's a legitimate mystery, and that if it's just a coincidence, it's a very weird one.
There is a [paraphrased] saying that might explain your friend's reactions though: the most exciting thing in archaeology is your data, the most boring is someone else's data.
We have to compartmentalize a lot because there's an overwhelming amount of stuff out there.
Maybe I don't know the problem well enough, but the relatively simultaneous nature of domestication seems like less of a mystery to me. More recent domestications (eg. in the Americas) seem to indicate that a hunter-gatherer population needs to be getting comfortable with a particular bioregion for at least a thousand years or so before an accumulation of of local knowledge can lead to the development of decent local cultivars. If this is a general and defensible rule, then I think our climate history can provide the rest of the evidence.
The ice age wasn't just cold, it was also chaotic, with temperatures pinging all over the place from year to year:
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
In that context, any population would have had difficulty staying in one place for a thousand years -- I don't mean living a settled life, I just mean hanging out in generally the same bioregion. Bioregional adaptation would be detrimental in such an unstable environment: your tribe needs to stay mobile and highly adaptable, or it'll die. No chance to develop agriculture under those circumstances.
Eventually we enter a nice calm interglacial period, and settle down to do some fishing -- then spend the next thousand years being chased around by rapidly rising sea levels and mega-floods from bursting glacial dams.
Finally, about 11k-10k BPE, all that settles down -- although not without us acquiring some nice flood myths along the way -- and we have time settle down and start getting to know some bioregions on a long-term basis. A thousand years or so later, we've got agriculture popping up all over the place.
Seems like a reasonable story? Or am I missing something?
1) We know sedentary hunter-gatherers existed throughout the upper paleolithic. This is a bit of an under-researched area for various reasons, but we know they definitely weren't all mobile.
2) Humans had been continuously inhabiting areas in east Africa since even before they could be called anatomically modern. Yet, agriculture there emerged at roughly the same time as elsewhere.
3) The earliest agriculturists were semi-sedentary anyway, not predominantly sedentary and fixed in place. How mobile they were depends on where and when we're specifically talking about, as it varied over time.
4) Climatic variability in New Guinea (another early center of agriculture) actually increased during/after the younger dryas.
This one's a bit unfair, as it's outside the scope of what I originally said. Nonetheless, it'd be nice if we could also use our explanation to say things about independent domestications long after the start of the holocene, like the eastern agricultural complex.
1.) Interesting about sedentary hunter-gatherers during the upper paleolithic -- I'd like to know more about that! But my argument would be that even if the the people were settled, the climate wasn't -- and that the severe climatic fluctuations which were happening would have been enough to deter the incremental steps towards agriculture.
2.) I presume Africa would have experienced the same climatic fluctuations as everywhere else. This begs the question of why they didn't develop agriculture 120k BPE, during the last interglacial? I'd argue it's because we still had some evolution to do to become behaviorally modern, around 80k BPE. So this interglacial is really our first time at-bat with a stable climate.
3.) True, but if they passed through the same bioregion/climate at the same time every year, then that's enough of a fixed point to begin experimenting with agriculture. My theory is as much about the mobility of the bioregions/climate as the people.
4.) Could be a counter-argument indeed. I know too little about New Guinea, which is a crazy fascinating place. I know that there was very early cultivation there, which was also abandoned some thousands of years ago. Don't know how that relates to its history of climate stability. Do say more?
Lower CO2 levels meant that plants lost more moisture opening their pores and growth would be stunted.
Are you sure? I'm not strongly in one camp or another, but it seems relatively intuitive that if you are stone age people and want to build something tall, a square-based step-pyramid is the most stable form that can rise relatively fast wrt to the amount of material used and work needed
Of course this only pushes back the question of _why_ did all these people want to build tall things roughly at the same time, but still
Human walking speed is about 3.1mph. Walking 8 hours a day, it takes 40 days to cross a thousand miles. Communication's slow, but not that slow – especially if you've got horses. My working theory is that people walked.
Unfortunately, people are busy, have real research to do, and don't have time to deal with every crank out there. Some are even state sponsored, which opens up a whole world of problems. It's not fair to expect people to do extensive rebuttals of every crank out there. It's the academic version of Brandolini's law.
Yeah but this isn’t just any “crank” out there, in this case it happens to be someone who is more famous and well known for their ideas than the vast majority of academics. We are talking about stopping to engage the crazy homeless person on the street.
This also happens to be what the egyptologists say about Robert Schoch and John Anthony West With respect to the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. They can literally take time to hold press events to personally attack the people And state there is no evidence for these crazy ideas but refuse to address the Actual water erosion hypothesis.
You also mention that academics refuse to address schoch. Here are a few academics responding directly to Schoch:
https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.3340100203
http://www.hallofmaat.com/sphinx/comments-on-the-geological-...
I'd like to point out that the conversation in this thread has covered topics from Gobekli Tepe to the silurian hypothesis to early agriculture to climatology to early mesoamerican architecture and now to pharaonic monuments. That's an incredibly broad range of topics and no single person is an expert in all of them. Cranks like Hancock BS about an astonishing range of stuff.
I didn’t say there weren’t rebuttals. I didn’t even say he wasn’t a crank, only you can’t exactly apply the “we are to busy forwarding our field to stop and address every idea from every crank” argument to someone whose ideas (for better or worse) are gaining notoriety as potentially true and correct.
They do. There's more books written on history than you could read in several lifetimes. Just the kind of people who follow Hancock don't really give a sh*t and if you try to educate them you get accused of being in some vast conspiracy, and they'd much rather believe in 'ancient aliens' and total crackpots.
Here's the people working on Göbekli Tepe calling out Hancock https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2017/06/21/what-y...
That site is worth reading because it's written by the people working there. Just follow and read actual professionals, even email and talk with them on Twitter, they're regular people and they'd love hearing from you if you're genuinely opening to learn.
People are interested in possible hypotheses and explanations of phenomena and would love if the somebody could either provide more evidence or refute them.
Definitely more interesting than the mainstream "We don't really know very much" together with " and we don't care, we are too busy doing real archeology".
So did the devil bury all the evidence of a meteor impact in order to trick us?
Like a guy explaining why the earth is hollow is entertaining only if the guy is believing it. Don't ban the crazies, let them make their 8 hour monetized youtube videos on why elvis is still alive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=Graham%20Han...
This is completely unrelated to whether Graham Hancock is actually a fraud or not. The problem is with your comment, no matter who you are talking about. Anonymous authority on the internet is worthless, as is name calling. As a supposed academic, you should be providing sources and examples, the absence of which makes your statement about being an authority on the matter suspect.
I take issue with this because this sort of mechanism is currently used on social media to wreck great havoc on society, especially in the US where people's lives are destroyed and horrible politicians get into office due to supposed authorities calling people names on the internet. It's a far worse issue than you are acknowledging. The whole point of social media is to spread ideas. You are not an island.
For someone railing against unsupported assertions, that's a whopper. We can stipulate horrible people have gotten into office and that people are calling other people names on the internet, but the arrow of causation is not at all clear.
Addressing your point more directly: I don't think the problem is people making insufficiently footnoted comments so much as readers accepting things that align with their predjudices uncritically. As such, I don't see what is gained by attacking someone for commenting in a casual style.
Is this not common knowledge? Do you not use the internet at all? Graham Hancock isn't even known by most people let alone the quality of his research.
Your comments about what internet forums are for is completely unrelated and also incorrect. Internet forums are for whatever someone is willing and allowed to discuss.
> the current state of knowledge is
Do you mean specifically to this site or to the profession in general?
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.
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.