99% of the time you'll be correct labeling people as conspiracy theorists with the blanket rule - any time they are not mainstream approved. You'll end up being horribly wrong on that 1% that actually matters.
I think about the story of he discovery of H. pylori as contributing to peptic ulcer disease. The theory was widely rejected but ultimately proven. The mitigating factor in accepting the theory was that the researcher did not have a reputation of peddling quack theories.
Past behaviour predicts future behaviour.
Given the highly falsifiable nature of his claims it should easy enough to disprove them. That nobody chooses to do so is quite curious. I can watch a hundred spirited debates and proofs on both sides of flat-earth, fake moon landing, essential oils curing cancer, and evolution vs young-earth creationism. What is so special about archaeology that it needn't mount a similar, vigorous defense?
I'm not sure how a fever dream about something that happened 12,000 years ago is falsifiable.
What evidence would you propose falsifies his theories?
If you believe you can watch a hundred proofs on both sides of flat-earth, you may want to reconsider your understanding of the word "proof".
Proof is the burden of the claimant.
If he had presented a plausible proof, there would probably be a spirited debate.
It is curious that ignoring someone is considered "suppression" by those ignored.
Because it isn't worth anyone's precious time and effort in academia to respond to such obvious bunkum?
I liked this one[1] better. He makes some good points, particularly that there is no genetic trace of Hancock's advanced civilization in our DNA. And that if a global seafaring civilization existed around the last ice age, then we would've seen a mixing of agriculture well before Columbus. Worth a watch.
Hancock isn't a scientist, and has never claimed to be. He presents himself as an investigative journalist. What he explores in his work are a series of "what if" questions that science either can't disprove, or hasn't been actively researching, for whatever reason.
The show is beautifully shot and produced, and provokes some interesting thought experiments. Besides "free thinkers" making an appearance, there are also "mainstream" scientists from renowned institutions around the world, who seem to side with Hancock in many ways.
If the show does nothing but raise more public awareness about these topics, it might lead to funding actual scientific research in some of these sites, which would be a good thing.
So far from being a "dangerous show", it's actually an interesting and well-shot documentary. People who see it as proof of anything factual are likely already conspiracy theorists, and are a lost cause for logical thinking anyway.
It could mean some other promising research doesn't get funded
This is clearly not the case, as you’ve just laid out about Hancock, not to mention there’s plenty of misinformation on the NYT as well.
Most often the reason is lack of evidence in proportion to the claims.
This is unlike other "proper" conspiracy theories that claim to know the facts, and present made-up evidence to back up their claims, while ignoring any actual scientific proof that works against them.
Critics can ridicule his claim that an advanced ice-age civilization existed all they want (and there are good counter arguments that do just that[1]), but it's certainly curious that advanced structures were built by what modern history tells us should've been hunter-gatherer groups, millennia before the birth of the oldest civilizations we know about. This is worth thinking about, but more importantly, scientifically researching, so that we can have a better understanding of our past and ancestors.
The more Hancock is ignored, ridiculed and labeled as a crackpot, the more it feels like the scientific community doesn't want to research this for whatever reason, thus proving some of his points.
Why should they, though? He seems to be staking much of his credibility on vague accusations that someone is not doing the work. Mostly the case seems to be that his propositions are not being ignored, they simply lack substance.
The thing is, the less evidence you have, the easier it is to come up with any number of stories that "fit" the data points. Historians therefore need to be extremely conscious about only drawing conclusions that have an undisputed record supporting them. That is the whole basis of the scientific methodology; if you can't get the evidence, you have no argument.
The period Hancock has chosen to focus on is commonly called "prehistory" for a good reason, as without any written records, there's not much of a basis to build any kind of narrative that stands up to scrutiny. Especially if you only cherry-pick data points that fit your assumptions, and wilfully ignore a gigantic void in the rest of the known record.
Surely that is a problem with the credibility of the claims themselves, and not the rest of the world.
Because of what I mentioned in my previous comment. Because we don't have a scientific answer to how a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers would be able to construct some of these complex monolithic structures, millennia before the dawn of modern civilizations. The timelines we're talking about here certainly make it difficult to gather any conclusive evidence, but the fact that these structures are understudied points to deficiencies in modern archaeology.
Hancock never claims to have the definitive answer to these questions, and from my exposure to his work, he always phrases his claims as a "what if ...?" scenario. He weaves some loosely related myths into a somewhat coherent narrative, but it's clear that as a journalist, he has no scientific qualifications, nor has he done scientific research to present any definitive conclusions.
My point is that any reasonably well educated person who is not already prone to conspiracy theories shouldn't find his work to be conspiratorial or untrue, but mostly interesting and entertaining. Rather than dismiss his wild ideas as being "pseudoscientific" (which is ridiculous, considering he never claims to be a scientist), we should invest more in funding actual scientific research so that we can get some valid answers. Until then, I'll find shows like Ancient Apocalypse very entertaining.
The "random link" to the Guardian article is about the Hancock documentary and reasonably valid to mention, even if it is an opinion piece. The article does not conflate the Younger Dryas theory with Hancocks pseudoscience, in fact there's no mention of the theory. Also if you read the Guardian article to the end it has an interesting observation:
"If you don’t like Hancock’s story about the super-intelligent advanced civilisation being wiped off the face of the planet, here’s another that might explain how Netflix gave the greenlight to Ancient Apocalypse: the platform’s senior manager of unscripted originals happens to be Hancock’s son. Honestly, what are the chances?"
The problem is that we have a real problem: we teach kids things we don't know for sure.
I swear I am not 300 hundreds years old and they thaught me in school - science unequivocally says that - the Neanderthal men were the ancestors of the Sapiens, we have proof, we simply miss the link between Lucy and the Homo erectus and we're done, we explained everything!
Turns out there were 12, no wait 14, no wait 15, no wait 21 different species of hominids and many of them were contemporary to the sapiens.
Just like there were no baby dinosaurs because we thought the smaller ones were different species.
Archeologist and historians need to go out and say loud: we don't know anything about human history, but we have many good theories! please help!
According to mainstream, Göbekli Tepe should not exist.
I was thaught in school that there were no settlements at the time, absolutely impossible, scientific truth (tm)
Sorry you had shit school teachers that didn’t help you understand that. I can understand the feeling of being betrayed when something you thought was an irrefutable fact turned out to be wrong by advances in the same field.
Of course.
Now imagine me at 8 learning one thing "said to be taken for granted because <<science>>!" and me at 20 wondering how was it possible that everything was completely wrong and ancient history as we knew it wasn't much different from reading Nostradamus.
It all literally radically changed in 15 years, we got it completely backwards, it wasn't simply "a period of understanding", everything was simply wrong.
Everything, not just something.
One example among too many: we thought and we were taught and students at university were taught that the size of the brain mattered and was unequivocally linked to intelligence (we know now it's simply a correlation), so Sapiens obviously had the biggest brain among humans and hominids.
That was false too!
Neanderthal had bigger brains.
Does it mean they were more intelligent?
*we don't know!*
Another example: many dinosaurs had feathers, when we discovered it, I was already a young adult.
And not just some of them, but hypothesis (is) that many, if not all non-avian dinosaur species also possessed feathers in some shape or form.
Stonehenge and all the other cromlechs were believed to be built by the druids until the 60s of 20th century!
There are 3 thousands years difference between the construction of Stonehenge and the first records of the druids, still the knowledge of them being "magical places" is still the most common among people.
> Sorry you had shit school teachers that didn’t help you understand that
Don't be so dismissive, if you read papers from the 80s, when I was a kid (I-m actually from the 70s), you'll see it wasn't my teachers, it was scientifically accepted, you could read about that in every book you could lend your hands on.
No one contested that knowledge in public, it was "the truth".
The only ones contesting those theories were the religious people, my city hosts the Vatican, you can imagine they were quite vocal about it.
It wasn't so easy to shed some light on the topic even putting some effort into it.
We were simply sitting on bogus knowledge, everything prior to 6-7 thousand years ago is obscure and cloudy, everything could either be and not be, except maybe aliens.
We don't know, Hancock is obviously not a scientist and his theories are laughable, but could a civilization have existed before the ice age and have survived it?
We don't know!
We even miss a billion years of Earth geological history, it's almost a quarter of its entire existence.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02450-5
It's easy to understand why people can believe to crook theories about Atlantis and the saviour from the sea, it's actually interesting and if mainstream theories can be proven utterly wrong every 2 decades, who can say they are not true?
It's the reason why religion still goes so strong, we need to be upfront and say that we don't know anything and the things we know are probably mostly wrong or we risk that history in the future will be taught by the Hancocks.
Thank you for writing this.
The point also should also be made that the burden of proof should be on the claimant. It’s perfect reasonable to take crackpot theories and say “there is no evidence to support that this is true” rather than “we don’t know”. And again in my experience it’s crackpots like Hancock that try to dissemble about how much we actually know.
True, but they are now.
When Evans discovered (and named) the Minoans in Crete, he did not know that they probably made human sacrifices, so in his eyes they were all modern and elegant like "la parisien" *
I’m assuming you are referring to Graham Hancock? In which case, I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. He’s been hawking conspiracy theories for a long time. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/23/ancient...