> In that sense, ancient History & Archeology is going through a similar moment as cooking did a while back.

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.

Didn't know that about the Roman Empire, fascinating. Where can I read more about the debate that it possibly never fell?

A good place to start might be Bret Devereaux, who regularly appears on the front page here

https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

TL;DR it depends on what you mean by “Rome Fell”

The whole, "did Rome fall, or did it just morph into the modern European states?" thing has sort of been overblown. Even the Medievalists (my old camp) have always recognized that the traditional story European states told themselves about their origins weren't entirely accurate. But those stories weren't created out of thin air. Evidence of continuity abounds. Interwar scholars like Henri Pirenne overstated their case, leaning into economics at the expense of politics.

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").

Vast swaths of paleontology and archeology can be summed up by the word "oviraptor". Instead of saying "We don't know" they feel compelled to make up a _plausible_ story which sometimes the field puts forth a likely sequence of events and the public then take it to mean fact. It's likely most people in the field(s) themselves understand it to be conjecture with some interpretable signposts --but introductory courses generally introduce lots of the field as fact based presupposing students understand that it's composed of lots of conjecture.

> Instead of saying "We don't know" they feel compelled to make up a _plausible_ story which sometimes the field puts forth a likely sequence of events and the public then take it to mean fact.

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.

To me there is a difference when you have fresh data vs very old data which may or may not be a result of the thing that you're proposing was a plausible cause of something. With hundreds and thousands of years, things move, they weather, other things interact, floods, fire, get exposed buried, re-exposed buried...

There is an vast amount of literature on exactly these sorts of things, which we call 'formation processes'. I don't recommend you read any of it because most is stupifyingly boring, but please consider that academics have spent at least a few hours over the past couple centuries thinking about archaeological epistemology.

There is an enormous difference between a fact - that has been observed and confirmed by various observers - and a plausible theory. There are many theories in physics, for example, some with many elements confirmed in numerous experiments, but still called theories.

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

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.

I mostly follow Razib Khan's reporting on this work. It is really dense and uses domain lingo, so it can be rather hard to parse. But, here are some narratives that are changing:

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-...

4 and 5 make so much sense. We would not have these genes without the selective pressure to keep them in the population.

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

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.

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.

search academia.edu for paleogenetics

They don't like him because he is a scam artist that is good enough at it that even smart people like HN readers are taken for a ride.

Or because he's popularized their area of expertise in ways none of them could ever do themselves.

More kids will go into archaeology because of Graham Hancock than because of anything Zahi Hawass ever said.

Maude you're over estimating the readership of HN

I really dislike this anti science and anti institution sentiment that’s creeping in everywhere

Isn't it well justified though ?

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.

I mean if one of your parties resorts to constant lying, undermines the basic principles of democracy like the equal treatment of all, fights against the separation of church and state and caters to a (surprisingly large) populace of people who think Earth was created 4000 years ago, maybe one should be political.

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.

I think Hancock is a total fraud but the irony is that you probably have the more anti-science world view.

"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"

There is a process with which we question things and questioning should be welcome. Just throwing out wild conjectures and not addressing criticism isn't science. Especially in the time of the internet, publish a paper publicly and let's see it, you can get around the old farts

Graham Hancock is a crank whose pseudowork would be labelled as bad SF if we lived in a more rationale society.

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

Nobody is being asked to accept Hancock's speculations as theory. They are asked to engage the evidence, and they evidently prefer to attack the messenger.

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.

In that sense, I have found "The Dawn of Everything", by David Graeber fantastically good at debunking so many previous preconceptions and clarifying with cross-checking historical records some things we were taught that are arguably wrong and biased towards the western-european culture.

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.

All science and research is difficult. In order to do it correctly with our imperfect tools, you're going to need a large field of expert peers who are able to relentlessly challenge your findings. This process doesn't always lead to better understanding quickly, but it works better than any other system in the long run. The problem with people like Hancock is they may superficially use the same tools as real scholars, but they don't have (or respond to) the same scientific correction processes. Hence: Atlantis is real.

"Atlantis" is just a recognizable name attached to a posited phenomenon. Getting attached to the name will just confuse you.

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.