He’s swung pretty hard for the fences on some big claims and that was far from one of the controversial ones

I can't tell if you're serious? I'll take your comment at face-value: Graham Hancock is not a trustworthy source. His "inspiration" is based on thoroughly discredited, white supremacist garbage. The fundamental thesis of his work is that: (1) white people have had civilization for (tens?) of thousands of years; and, (2) nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.

Do you have a source for this? Because it sounds like you’re absolutely full of shit.

That's a pretty poor tone for HN. We don't do that sort of thing here.

Yeah, I apologize. I see this "fact" being brought up all the time and it frustrates me because it seems so disingenuous.

Graham Hancock's tone bothers me. it's far too much of "these traitorous archaeologists don't want you to know". but I've never seen any hint of white supremacy, or even remotely white-focused ideology. he seems to look for older civilisations pretty indiscriminately around the world. I'd say, if anything, he just likes a nice holiday

Why is it that he dismisses the ability of each of the native cultures (Mesoamerica, Egypt, China, ...) to have developed their own technology? His fundamental thesis is that they couldn't. That thesis comes from pseudoscientific 19th c. babble; that 19th c. work is for sure rooted in European exceptionalism.

for your logic to hold up, the proposed earlier civilisations would have to be white, otherwise what would be the point? a non-white civilisation inspired by a non-white civilisation is still non-white. if he was going around proposing that some real historical figure corresponding to Zeus or Odin had founded civilisation, then I'd agree with you, but he's not. last I remember, he was suggesting they were some kind of survivor(s) of a lost civilisation in the Americas somewhere

do you think it's possible that you're seeing things through an overly racial lens?

Nope. The actual archeological community has called him out over the years. I’m assuming he’s in it for the money.

    https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2022/12/ancient-apocalypse-summary-of-the-series-from-a-professional-pov/

Here’s Feagans about page:

    https://ahotcupofjoe.net/about-2/

I heard about Hancock pandering the show from Ed Barnhart’s podcast:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Barnhart

The first link cites Fingerprints of the Gods, chapter 14 as racist, but doesn't give any quotations. I haven't read any of Hancock's books, and I have far better things to do with my time (apparently, among them, browsing HN).

If he's really making clearly racist statements, it would be good to see the quotes. If one needs to read the whole chapter to see the racism in some holistic interpretation, then perhaps there's a lot of ambiguity there.

I've seen video clips of Hancock here and there, and he strikes me as a smart guy who gets a kick of fooling average people. However, none of the clips I've seen seems racist.

Don't get me wrong. He strikes me as a bright guy who gets a kick out of (and if he profits, so much the better) fooling average people.

But, has he actually suggested or implied that European society was more advanced back then? Has he actually suggested or implied that this ancient advanced civilization was racially European?

The reason it took so long from anatomically advanced humans to create advanced civilizations, is that the progress of ideas is the slow painful task of churning and refining horseshit into slightly less shitty ideas.

Others have theorized that a European advanced society pre-existed the most advanced ancient civilizations, and that comes from racist European exceptionalism. However, that doesn't mean that all theories positing an undiscovered advanced ancient civilization are racist. Even if he draws (I have no idea here... I don't follow him) some of his ideas from those earlier racist theories, that doesn't make his theories racist unless he assumes or implies this undiscovered civilization was of European ancestry. If you follow any idea back far enough back in time, you eventually hit horseshit. Maybe the first horseshit you hit in this case is racism. It's possible that he refined the racism out of the previous horeshit and came up with a less shitty advanced ancient civilization theory.

Lots of modern medicine was full of racist horseshit more recently than the 19th century. That doesn't make modern medicine racist.

Again, I think he's wrong, and likely knows he's wrong. I just haven't seen anything to justify painting him as racist. (Though, I also haven't paid him much attention.)

Hancock is clever in that he works around a core idea that’s effectively impossible to disprove, and more importantly genuinely plausible

this is the idea that civilisation goes back [a lot] further than our current understanding suggests

he then wraps this up in dramatic language with an us-vs-the-establishment demeanour, adds a few extremely tenuous pieces of evidence, and sells it to the public

lots of this “evidence” is just a clever way to get people to pay for his trips to exotic holiday destinations. the episode of his Netflix doc on the Bimini Road (in the Bahamas) being the perfect example. humongous pile of bollocks, but I bet it was a lovely holiday

it’s a clever con, with little to no real harm, and I applaud him for it. it’s even possible that it’s a net good for the world. he without doubt interests more people in history and archaeology than would be otherwise, and it’s not a bad thing to challenge scholarly consensus now and again

> ... nonwhites are too stupid to have discovered/developed anything.

Except that, e.g. the Dogon civilization is also many thousands of years old and had complex astronomical knowledge about extra-solar bodies which rivals that of modern times. There's nothing whatsoever about Graham Hancock's working hypotheses that's inherently exclusive to Europeans.

No they didn’t. The Dogon BS was debunked years ago:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people#Astronomical_beliefs

> Graham Hancock is proven correct once again.

Hancock is a fraud, and has never been proven correct over anything that I am aware of.

I would welcome corrections, by which I mean academic citations to falsify my statement.