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.
Not really. Anthropology and archaeology had its great "everything we thought we knew is wrong" moment about 50 years ago. There already has been major reassessments of the interpretation of archaeological finds, say reassessment of the Mayan civilization after their writing was discovered, or the reorganization of "mainstream" Mesoamerican history after Aztec tales about the Toltecs turned out to be not as truthful as initially believed. A more recent debate has been whether or not the Roman Empire actually fell, which isn't really conclusively settled until perhaps 15-20 years ago.
But you wouldn't know that from pop archaeology, which is still stuck a hundred years in the past. And people like Hancock aren't helping--he's not introducing any challenges to mainstream archaeology, just retreading 140-year old theories (in other words, from the worst era in terms of archaeology being inherently and vehemently racist) that have already been debunked.
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
TL;DR it depends on what you mean by “Rome Fell”
Most historians and archeologists today are firmly in the "fall" camp. I'm generally with them. A couple of recent books:
Bryan Ward-Perkins. _The Fall of Rome_. Oxford, 2006.
Peter Heather. _The Fall of the Roman Empire_. Oxford, 2007.
There are two good studies that could be read as leaning towards cultural and economic transformation while still acknowledging that there were political breaks:
Peter Brown._The World of Late Antiquity_. Norton, 1989.
Peter Brown. _The Rise of Western Christendom_. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Brown is the giant of 20th century Late Roman scholarship (he practically invented the idea of "Late Antiquity" in the 1971 first edition of that book, which I eagerly consumed as an undergrad in 1975). The main strength of Late Antique studies is in a worldview that acknowledges the continuities of Roman civilization in the East _during and after_ 476 (for me, the really critical period was in the 6th and 7th centuries when Constantinople failed to support its colonists on the frontier, and the consequent abandonment of settlements which were by then behind barbarian lines -- aptly described in the contemporaneous "Life of Saint Severian").
Happens all the time in science. Science is about making our best current generalized explanation that fits the observed data. That's what gets us luminiferous ether, phlogiston, the plum pudding model of the atom, or the miasma theory of disease. Future generations will certainly look at us in horror for what our best current generalized explanations are, just as we look at previous generations.
That doesn't mean science is wrong or not worth pursuing. It just means we have to have healthy skepticism, which should be a virtue of science.
When I read history books, authors often mix these two. As a reader, I don't know whether a given statement is a fact (an artifact was found, several contemporary authors described an event in a uniform way), or just an interpretation that seemed plausible in a given situation
1. Genetic findings among South-East Asians indicate that the maritime powers of India (and mostly south India) were of greater significance at their peak than the Delhi sultanate or the Delhi centric view held by most historians. [1][2]
2. We are expecting huge changes to our understanding of ancient humans in Africa [3]
3. The most famous co-evolution fact of milk-and-lactose-tolerance might not be true [4][5]
4. The so-called-indo-aryans might not have brought the caste system or "Indian culture" with them. The Dravidians are almost just as "indo-aryan" as their non-Dravidian counter parts and the Aryan-Invasion-Theory, might not have had an invasion to speak of at all. [6][7]
These are extreme simplifications of the interesting stuff I found that was relevant to my country. I'm sure there is just as much about every other culture and it's just as spicy. Also, emphasis on 'might' & 'probably'. These fields are mid-disruption, and facts on the ground are changing as we speak.
[1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/10/06/likely-male-mediat...
[2] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/09/20/indic-civilization...
[3] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/02/03/so-many-assumption...
[4] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/01/28/got-milk-long-befo...
[5] https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-were-drinking...
[6] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/09/12/the-aryan-integrat...
[7] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2022/08/15/indra-is-absolved-...
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.
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.
More kids will go into archaeology because of Graham Hancock than because of anything Zahi Hawass ever said.
The anti-institution sentiment is a result of them having clearly decided to move from attempting being apolitical to actively being political.
I don't see any anti-science sentiment here. If anything, conjecture is the first step to the process of science and the suppression of it within the institutions of science is very much anti-science. This is especially true when non-scientific institutions (liberal arts & soft sciences) pose as if their fields are grounded in axiomatic first principles like the hard sciences.
Now, I do agree that there is a rise in the loudness of conspiracies, but the previous century had a majority population that believed in creationism. So, I'm not sure if it is that much worse. Just that everyone has a megaphone now.
As far as conjectures go - it's always appreciated to make a hypothesis as long as you approach it in a healthy way. Science requires that you yourself try to disprove the hypothesis as much as possible before posting it to the world. Otherwise you end up with so many "takes" that people stop believing there is a valid answer and become apolitical and jaded. In time of internet and open access to scientific papers the tolerance for constant wild speculation should be very low.
"Science is the disbelief in experts" -- Feynman
By anti-science I would imagine you mean anti-expert.
This insane epistemological certainty is what is creeping in and far more dangerous than some crank who thinks the pyramids are 30k years old.
"I already know the results of the experiment so why bother"
Yes scientist may be somewhat a little conservative with their acceptance of new theory, but it's actually a sane attitude that this kind of people justify totally
Aside from his speculations, many of his interpretations ("handbags", zodiac carvings, Anunnaki/Apkallu confusion) are void, but those not citing unaccounted evidence may be ignored.
I correct myself, I have found all books by him just as good in that respect.
So, new eyes are great, new perspectives are awesome. If Graham Hancock were just a bit as through with his fact checking as David Graeber was, it would have been even better.
A better accounting for the evidence than a fallen civilization is what you need to beat back the idea. Complaining about it filling the vacuum is not science.
> Yes, Hancock is highly speculative and isn't doing archeology
I think this is the issue people have.
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.
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.
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)
People who grew up internalizing the ethos of cancel culture are graduating into faculty and other positions of authority. Plus, even as students through sheer aggressiveness they were quite effective at changing academic norms. Less jealously and more reaping what was permitted to be sown.
Cancel culture was always fundamentally based on moral certitude; not just in the abstract, but in concrete, detailed application to their own and others' activities. So there's obvious dissonance with the nature of the scientific process. The way this dissonance plays out as the cancel culture crowd becomes the scientific establishment is already turning out to be... interesting.
> "Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of modern times, pushing back the origins of monumentality beyond the emergence of agriculture. We are pleased to present a summary of work in progress by the excavators of this remarkable site and their latest thoughts about its role and meaning. At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops."
(2012) "The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey", Dietrich et al.
The Younger Dryas is a well-studied period in paleoclimate science and the evidence of an impact triggering it is pretty scant, see this from 2011:
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.02.005
> "In summary, none of the original YD impact signatures have been subsequently corroborated by independent tests. Of the 12 original lines of evidence, seven have so far proven to be non-reproducible. The remaining signatures instead seem to represent either (1) non-catastrophic mechanisms, and/or (2) terrestrial rather than extraterrestrial or impact-related sources. In all of these cases, sparse but ubiquitous materials seem to have been misreported and misinterpreted as singular peaks at the onset of the YD. Throughout the arc of this hypothesis, recognized and expected impact markers were not found, leading to proposed YD impactors and impact processes that were novel, self-contradictory, rapidly changing, and sometimes defying the laws of physics."
It does seem to sound a bit like 'the lost civilization of Atlantis was wiped out by a cosmic impact' fairy tale. Also the claims of a 'cover-up' are pretty silly.
Shouldn't we define “advanced” relative to the time of its construction? Seems unfair to compare it to sites that came later. You need to compare to sites from the same period…is it advanced compared to those? That’s an obvious yes.
That site would take a wide variety of skills to build. You need established leadership, an established religious or cultural belief enough to motivate the project. You need planning, you need stone cutting skills, you need artisans with stone carving ability, you need people with building skills, you need laborers, you need logistics, you need to essentially feed a large workforce which means your non-labors on the project have to provide hunting and gathering not just for themselves, but for others who are unable.
I guess for me it’s strange that what should be a passive dismissal of a fringe idea seems to have a much more active campaign of labeling it misinformation.
Are his ideas really that dangerous to warrant such concern? Pretty sure society is not going to change just because Graham Hancock convinced a hundred, thousand, or even a million people that maybe there was some groups that had astronomical and stone building capabilities prior to the ice age. I seriously doubt that manic mobs are going to raid the local archeologist’s houses, carry them out on a rail, and burn them at stake at the edge of town for daring to suggest that hunter gathers probably weren’t that advanced.
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."
Second, racism is... old. After all, recall that Greeks were the ones who named their out-class of foreigners after the sounds sheep made ("bar-bar", hence modern "barbarian").
In Ancient Greece, the Greeks used the term not only towards those who did not speak Greek and follow classical Greek customs, but also towards Greek populations on the fringe of the Greek world with peculiar dialects.
Did Cassandra cry wolf? Some folks need to stick a finger in the undead to accept the least charitable interpretation.
It's not like the argument is irrefutable. But you have to at least engage with it to do that.
In that comment there was not an argument to which someone might engage. There was a string of free associated claims. The post did not contain any links to substantive support for the claims that Atlantean theory is “inherently racist.”
As a form of argument, it was of the class “when did you stop beating your wife?”
This is the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860417
Claim:
First, the Atlantis theories are essentially racist.
To make an argument the supporting sentences would address what is meant by “racist” and provide some evidence that “Atlantis theories” meet the criteria established definitionally.
Four supporting sentences:
Fundamentally, what it does is take some impressive structure--Great Zimbabwe probably the most notorious example--and ask who built it.
Claim, not argument. Additionally, as far as I can tell there is no claim that a lost Atlantic civilization built stone forts in SE Africa.
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.
Claims not argument.
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.
Claim and query, not argument
Speculation, not argument.In that comment there was not an argument to which someone might engage. There was a string of free associated claims. The post did not contain any links to substantive support for the claims that Atlantean theory is “inherently racist.”
As a form of argument, it might be of the class “when did you stop beating your wife?” or the Democratic Party of the US are racist because senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK.
This is the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860417
Thesis:
First, the Atlantis theories are essentially racist.
To make an argument the supporting sentences would address what is meant by “racist” and provide some evidence that “Atlantis theories” meet the criteria established definitionally or at least in common understanding.
Four supporting sentences:
Fundamentally, what it does is take some impressive structure--Great Zimbabwe probably the most notorious example--and ask who built it.
As far as I can tell there is no claim that a lost North Atlantic civilization built stone forts in SE Africa.
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.
This does not establish that proponents of Atlantis theory make speculative claims due to a racist essence. The claim of “natural” isn’t a true claim. Given what is known about human mobility it would not make sense to link the builders of Cahokia with those of Chicago.
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.
Again, doesn’t establish a link between Atlantis folks and the described behavior. In the case of Greater Zimbabwe there was a effort by the Rhodesian government to separate precolonial people from local architecture. Did the Rhodesians invoke Atlantis or is there some link between Atlantis theory people and Rhodesians other than they both engage in speculation? This is not established by the argument of the comment.
And the "why" is probably an inability to believe that the indigenous people could be capable of building such structures.
This is not related to the claim that Atlantis people are racist or not since the series of claims do not establish that Atlantis people do this. Additionally, this statement engages in hedged mind reading. It does not establish a likelihood of beliefs of Atlantis theory folks.
1) the claim of racism is a claim about the intent of the alleged racist. What makes us think Hancock thinks X civilization wasnt capable of Y feat because of their race? Has he ever said anything remotely like that? He hasnt. Furthermore, whats to say that the civilization that he posits actually accomplishes feat Y is not the same race as cilivation X? Hes never said as much.
The racism bullshit is tiring as fuck. And by that I mean actual racism and flippant accusations of racism are old hat. Very tiresome.
In his first book on the topic, he did specifically make the point that the advanced culture was "white", although to his credit, he hasn't explicitly repeated that since.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/12/oreo-cookie-...
So Hagia Sophia was built by Turkics and the Königsberg Castle by ethnic Russians.
This is all separate from saying that historical people would have identified as 'Turkic' or 'Russian' etc, or even understood anything resembling modern definitions for those terms.
One of the hallmarks of colonial archaeology was conflating these things and throwing in a touch of racism for good measure. They'd walk up to a Mayan site (ex.) and say "well these modern primitives couldn't have invented the techniques for this fine stone- and metalworking on their own, therefore a group of now-extinct people who suspiciously resemble Europeans must have either done it directly and been replaced or taught these barbarians how to do it". Thor Heyerdahl of kon-tiki fame is a prominent example that you may have heard of, but this was a thing that permeates a lot of old archaeology/anthropology. There are even terms for this like diffusionism and hyperdiffusionism. Being called a diffusionist is basically one step above being accused of plagiarism for modern archaeologists, which should give you an idea of how badly such theories are regarded today.
Semi rhetorically: What makes fantasies, conspiracies, hoaxes, gossip so much more enticing than reality? What itch does having "sacred knowledge" scratch?
For me, reality is so much more interesting. Looking up at the Milky Way, I'm just gobsmacked. Microscopic images of cells, proteins, and frikkin atoms just breaks my brain. Whole universes left to discover and understand. Woot!
The truth is so much more compelling than fiction.
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.
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.
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.
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.