> That theory is espoused by the same people who think it was built by aliens.
I think this is a common misunderstanding.
Yes, there are some who think aliens built the pyramids.
But there is an equally large group of people who think that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today. And when the ice age happened 12,000 years ago - that knowledge was lost.
When you then look at build sites around the world from this perceptive, structures like the Sphinx and others (like Göbekli Tepe), begin to appear much older than convention teachings might imply.
EDIT: for those interested more in this topic, there is a Netflix series on it (called "Ancient Apocalypse"). I can't attest to the validity of the statements made in the series, but the arguments are compelling (and not alien related).
> In his book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Hancock (2006) explored the cultural importance of shamanism and psychedelics and the idea that nonhuman entities from other realms kickstarted human culture. Hancock draws parallels between shamanic spirit journeys, narratives of fairies, and modern alien abduction accounts. Shamanism is "nonsensical to 'rational' Western minds" as it is based on "the notion that the human condition requires interaction with powerful nonphysical beings" (Hancock 2019:220). He has also discussed this idea in public presentations. In America Before, Hancock (2019) again emphasizes access to the Otherworld of souls and nonhuman entities through psychedelic "plant allies."
That is a very common thing with ancient and even modern shamans.
So, how does saying so in a book about ancient shamans equate to an endorsement that aliens built the pyramids?
People love attacking this guy but the attacks always seem to be remarkably poor strawmen. What's so hard about believing we were smarter than acknowledged 10,000 years ago?
> the idea that nonhuman entities from other realms kickstarted human culture
I'm not attacking him I'm just posting some quotes. In addition to his ideas about lost prehistoric societies influencing ancient Egyptians, he in turn believes that those prehistoric societies were influenced by aliens. I don't think this is an attack and I don't think he would disagree with this summary of his beliefs.
I spent less than one minute googling, and came up with this [0] on my first try:
> I am quite clear, however, having spent more than quarter of a century walking the walk across many of the most intriguing ancient archaeological sites on earth, and digging into ancient texts and traditions from all around the world, that NO ancient archaeological site and NO ancient text or tradition that I have yet come across provides persuasive evidence for the “ancient astronaut hypothesis”.
> ... My own view is that all of the anomalies of history and prehistory pointed to by advocates of the ancient astronaut hypothesis are far better and more elegantly explained as emanating from a lost, advanced HUMAN civilization of prehistoric antiquity than from high-tech alien visitors from another planet.
So, you just made that up, even though he expressly says the opposite on his own website. Why would you do that?
I don't know what to tell you, there are direct quotes from his books in my first comment. Here's another one:
> Shamanism is not confined to specific socio-economic settings or stages of development. It is fundamentally the ability that all of us share, some with and some without the help of hallucinogens, to enter altered states of consciousness and to travel out of body in non-physical realms - there to encounter supernatural entities and gain useful knowledge and healing powers from them.
- Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind
I do think it's different than the "ancient astronauts" theory, but anything living that isn't from Earth is an alien, so entities from other realms clearly qualify.
Edit: Sorry, rereading the thread I see the misunderstanding, you are right that he doesn't think aliens were involved in building the pyramids specifically and I didn't mean to imply that. I'm just saying that he thinks aliens were involved in the general development of the human species.
> he thinks aliens were involved in the general development of the human species.
That's still a gross mischaracterization of his stance, I think.
It sounds like you've never had a psychedelic experience yourself? If you had, I think you'd find it much easier to believe there's something to the 'stoned ape' theory. Especially when you realize that basically every culture ever - I know of no exceptions - has developed some way of leaving their normal state of reality.
No one has ever left the normal state of reality. Only perception. Certainly humans have been hallucinating and imagining things forever. Also, lying about your knowledge is a pretty universal human trait. Graham Hancock is proof of that.
No. But it didn't unfold itself to anyone else either. Shamans have never produced a single falsifiable hypothesis. Reality is exposed but by bit through observation and experimentation. Preferably while sober.
The combination of plants that creates ayahuasca appeared in a dream. Shamans have identified cancers and illnesses in people. If science can’t cope with these realities, that’s a science problem.
That's it. Shamans appear in disparate cultures over millenia upon millenia, helping people in astounding and near-inexplicable ways... And modern academia is just like, 'well, they believe in spirits and take drugs so they must be dumb - now off I go to work to pay my $400,000 mortgage, because that's sensible'.
We owe these traditions an astonishing unacknowledged debt, and the people telling us so are ferociously attacked.
There’s quite a bit of evidence for the existing timeline. People quibble about radiocarbon dating, but there’s multiple methods. For example by comparing rings on enough wooden objects you can get a firm this can’t be older than X date.
That's simultaneously true, and misleading to the point of being wrong. The earliest parts of the layers date that far back, yes. The features of Gobekli Tepe that people who aren't archaeologists actually care about like the obelisks date much later around the second phase of the neolithic (PPNB).
Also note that Gobekli Tepe is neither the oldest site we know of nor unique in having monumental architecture. Even within the Tepler culture, Karahan Tepe dates earlier and I'm sure you heard of the older site of Jericho.
Humans have been humans for at least 200K years. And those primitive humans had the same capabilities we do today. But the kind concerted effort and organization required for monumental construction still took hundreds of generations to develop. Megaliths older than the Sphinx certainly exist, but the Sphinx is orders of magnitude more complex. Not just in terms of engineering and tools (the Sphinx was carved with metal tools) but the size of the well-governed population required to do the labor. It is inconceivable that a society could spring out of the marshlands to build the Sphinx and leave no other trace for thousands of years. And then for a new civilization to show up with all the technology and culture they had, falsify a load of records to say they built it along with the Pyramids.
> And those primitive humans had the same capabilities we do today.
Evolution has been ongoing on humans the whole time we've been a species. Drinking milk in adults has only been a capability we've had for ~6000 years. I'd be hard pressed to claim that there haven't been other capabilities that have evolved over that time that led to our ability to have more social organization.
Lactose tolerance AFAIK is a single enzyme. That taking 6000 years to develop I think is evidence against what you are saying. Specifically, that is a tiny adaptation compared to the organization of the human brain. Is 30x more time than lactose tolerance enough for significant brain changes? I find it implausible, I would guess the major adaptations of the brain are on the order of millions of years, not a couple hundred thousand.
The adaptations for social organization seemingly have been with us for a long time. AFAIK humans have been in large groups for a very long time, as long as they have been homo sapiens (Large being over 50 members, and take that with a grain of salt, that is only my possibly incorrect understanding).
I do find it very plausible that people 1k, 10k, 50k and maybe even 200k years ago were all smart (Plato probably is far smarter than most alive today). Though, smart and education are different, while smart- the body of knowledge was limited.
> Lactose tolerance AFAIK is a single enzyme. That taking 6000 years to develop I think is evidence against what you are saying.
Also relevant: lactose tolerance is something we start out with, babies need it. So lactose tolerance, or more properly lactase persistence, was not the development of a brand new trait out of nowhere, it was maintaining a capability past the age where it would previously degrade out of functionality.
TL;DR: (1) brain shape has not changed for about 160k years. (2) The framing/facts of the discussion is bad. Mutations are happening all the time, it is 'natural selection' that seemingly made lactose tolerance more prevalent in the last 20k years.
-----------------------
Long answer:
## Natural Selection / Lactose Tolerance (as an example of a very recent adaptation) / Why the discussion is so far incorrect
In my first reply, I notice now a big flaw. Having an adaptation be present in a population for 6000 years does not mean it took that time to evolve it. (According to [3], the adaptation has become prevalent in 20k years rather 6k)
To frame what we are discussing, I hope we can all agree:
mutations are happening all the time and in aggregate we each individually carry a vast quantity of genetic differences/mutations apart from every other individual.
For lactose tolerance, really what we are talking about is more natural selection. At least I think we are. As an example, a population can change very quickly via natural selection if an event kills off everyone that is missing a mutation. That perhaps 1% mutation suddenly becomes the surviving population. (For completeness, I'll mention that this process can happen more slowly as well over time, but it can depend on single mutations, aggregates of mutations, and environment and random luck [eg: asteriod] are all factors). This is to say, there could have been plenty of lactose tolerant people well before. This NPR piece on the history of lactose tolerance states it well [3] "But now that doesn't happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years — the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute — but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure."
What's more though too, nothing is to say that natural selection always works to favorably select genes. EG: The village idiot might be the only one immune to the plague. It's way complex of course since there's so much variation between every individual, but I just wanted to underscore that natural selection is a function of individual, time & place. Sometimes some mutations are useful, other times they are not and are dumb luck of what is left over from some time before.
--------------------
## Brain Size & Human Cognition
With the issue of natural selection out of the way, what I do wonder is how long it took for the brain to get the way it is today. According to this resource, The Smithsonian [1], the answer is approx 7M years, with most of that happening in the last 2M years until 200k years ago. That is in terms of 'size' (does not account for wrinkles).
According to 'newscientist' [2], the shape (now talking wrinkles here) of the human brain today is very similar to what it was 160k years ago, and has not really changed since. The resource mentions that the biggest changes since then have been in how our faces look rather than how our brains are shaped. Those changes are specifically smaller jaws: "Faces in modern humans are far smaller, with subtler indentation, than those of their ancestors. Studies show that this change accelerated when hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists around 12,000 years ago and ate softer foods, probably due to less loading on the skull from chewing."
Summing up, given that brain shape has been about the same for the last 160k years; it's plausible that is how far it goes back for people that felt & thought about exactly the same way we do today. If anyone knows about more research around the rise of human cognition on this topic, I'd certainly like to learn more.
Graham himself debated an actual archeologist on the Rogan podcast not too long ago. I think he makes it pretty clear that he's mostly advocating that there is a nonzero amount of evidence for a pre ice age civilization that was significantly more advanced than immediate post ice age civilizations.
Im not convinced he's correct, but that doesn't make his stuff invalid. He's basically just presenting an alternative interpretation of the data and academic archeology is vilifying him for it, which they've done to several people before who ended up being right.
Of course in his shows he presents everything as fact, just like every other science does.
> Of course in his shows he presents everything as fact, just like every other science does
That is problematic though, because genuine science is never/should never be presented as fact unless it's irrefutable. I'm fairly sure that's one big reason why he comes in for so much criticism, aside from any questions about the veracity of his ideas.
> Yes, there are some who think aliens built the pyramids.
> But there is an equally large group of people who think that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today.
Not GP, but to me, these two theories are both wildly implausible, so "think it was built by aliens" is a handy shorthand for "believes an implausible theory about the origins of the pyramids." There's zero reason not to believe the "orthodox" theory about the pyramids. There is even an actual contemporaneous written papyrus record referring to the Giza construction project [0].
Agh, this is so close to being a really interesting perspective.
"Advanced" can mean a couple of different things. I think your comment and Graham Hancock's stuff is using it in the sense of "technologically advanced", i.e., access to earth-moving equipment or something.
But there's also "advanced" in the sense of "ability to reason", and that's much more interesting to think about!
I think there's a tendency in the modern perspective to equate technological advancement with intelligence, and so we (laypeople and dilletantes especially) tend to think of these long-ago cultures as being sort of comprised of primitive people because they built primitive things, by modern standards. Writing systems, technology, politics & governance, math, chemistry, mechanical systems, metallurgy and materials science, medicine -- minor periodic and localized variations aside, all of these were pretty darn primitive, near as we can tell, and so the people must have been, too.
But maybe advanced people do primitive things because the process of developing technology takes a long time. Think about everything that's required to reliably produce steel; maybe a prerequisite for steel is 10,000 years of agriculture.
The "Primitive Technology" channel on YouTube is a great case study. We have an individual who has access to modern knowledge and technology, but re-producing it is extraordinarily laborious and he's still in the mud hut phase of development -- and he can escape that time period at any time to get access to modern medicine and a rich, nutrient-dense diet.
I think this might be a strong argument against ancient technologically advanced civilizations (and alien claptrap). It's unlikely that things really developed that much out-of-order because it just takes too dang long to develop all the steps between basic agriculture and powered machinery. It's kind of like that counter-argument against the "moon landing was a hoax" nutters: in 1969, we didn't yet have the film technology required to fake a moon landing. It was easier to get on a rocket to the dang thing! We knew it could be possible to fake it, but we didn't have the tools to do it, yet.
So, it's fun to think of past cultures and neolithic humans as being basically us, in terms of intelligence and reasoning and capability, but without any of the modern affordances we have now.
Strongly agree that this one is both very fun to think about and rings true. I sometimes imagine imagine it as parallel to the advancement of the world of computers, which has sort of been like watching the development an entire civilization in miniature. Early computer pioneers were, we know, incredible minds whose talent was the very thing that put us on the hard road to progress. Sure, nowadays, random people are able to casually accomplish much more in absolute terms, but it's because they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
All that said, I do tend to be sort of a Graham Hancock apologist. My take is that most people go too extreme with him. They either think he's a crackpot loony who must be taken at face value and debunked as a purveyor of pseudoscience OR they think he's a rebel truthteller: the only one who will look at the real facts, bravely pushing through the corrupt academic swamp.
It seems obvious to me that he's neither. He's just an author who stumbled on a compelling, mind-expanding idea. Roughly stated: what if we know less about the past than we think, and thus underestimate our ancestors? I think the interesting thing about Graham Hancock's spiel has nothing to do with any of his specific pieces of archaeological evidence that he digs up, which are very clearly marshaled to make a point he has already decided on making. (This is bad science, 100%.) Rather, the thing he brings to the table is more like a philosophical approach that is genuinely fresh and interesting. And I do think he will one day be vindicated in some way, because we act like we have way more precise knowledge about the past than we actually do. This is sort of an epistemology thing, so appealing directly to the evidence and the current anthropological understanding isn't really engaging with him in good faith. He's pointing out that the Troys of history prove that we consistently overestimate how completely we've understood history and what is and is not reasonable. Over time we tend to acclimate to that picture, and then the problem multiplies, because we tend to only accept things that seem to fit with the now-banal-seeming history we already know, leading to even more banal hypotheses gaining traction. Some of his best writings relate to the systematic bias against catastrophism that existed, and showing how these types of errors in epistemology lead to actual errors of science down the line.
If they were as advanced as we are now, we would have seen that the atmospheric CO2 levels had been higher back then, no? This paper draws the conclusions that such a civilization would be visible in the geological record.
In 1800, there were 1B humans, 1950 is 2.5, 1990 is 5.0B, and we are now at 8.0B.
I think we forget how many more people there are now compared to just 100 years ago. At -5000, there is an estimated 5M people. There's more than 1000x more people now. Per capita carbon footprint would be quite wild to leave any kind of mark on the planet with a total human population that is smaller than a single modern day mid sized city.
Of course, there would also be other markers. Fertilizers is one.
Another is the plants and animals they used for food. Why are some plants and animals still indigenous to certain areas, assuming there was a small globe spanning civilization at some point in the last million or so years? Shouldn't this civilization have at least brought the crops and livestock to other areas of the globe they visited?
Keep in mind that the start of the industrial revolution predates the mass adoption of the steam engine, and charcoal (a renewable resource) based steel mills existed into the 20th century.
I can imagine a world where electricity and batteries were developed before the mass exploitation of fossil fuels as, afaik, there's no specific technological requirement on one for the other to exist.
> Keep in mind that the start of the industrial revolution predates the mass adoption of the steam engine
Well of course the start of it predated the mass adoption of steam engines, but as I understand it the start is generally considered to be when steam engines were first put to use pumping water out of coal mines, that water then being used to flood canals to transport the coal. That synergy was incredibly powerful, making cheap coal available in cities which allowed urban populations to rapidly grow, providing a workforce for the factories which would eventually (not initially) also be coal powered. That's the industrial revolution as I learned it.
So what you're saying is there was a massive technologically advanced civilisation which didn't build buildings, didn't carve stone, didn't mine or refine metals, didn't deforest, didn't farm, and didn't use oil?
> Terra preta soils are found mainly in the Brazilian Amazon, where Sombroek et al. estimate that they cover at least 0.1–0.3%, or 6,300 to 18,900 square kilometres (2,400 to 7,300 sq mi) of low forested Amazonia; but others estimate this surface at 10.0% or more (twice the area of Great Britain).
It could be that the technological civilization arose extremely quickly, and only in certain limited geographical areas before the population could grow to overwhelm the earth with industrial production. They might have had a completely different morality that led to this pattern. It was before the founding of all religions we have today.
Maybe, but I doubt that as technology seems needs a lot of specialists. You don't have time to focus on one small area in depth if you also need to farm/hunt/gather. We need generations for someone to come up with the idea of writing, make it better, educate kids in it... And of course before the printing press books took a lot of time and so even if you created something passing it to someone else is hard.
Primitive people were not stupid, they just needed a lot of time to figure out things that we now think are obvious.
I think you under emphasized the first part of your point. Living in a modern community is easy mode. Without that, mass time and effort are needed to subsist
>But there is an equally large group of people who think that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today. And when the ice age happened 12,000 years ago - that knowledge was lost.
Advanced as in late neolithic or even early bronze? Sure, I could find that tenuously plausible. Advanced as in space age, heavily dependent on petroleum products, etc... not even slightly plausible.
Graham Hancock is literally just making up stories and saying "wouldn't it be cool if this happened" with absolutely zero evidence. The guy can't understand why archeologist don't like his theories, but he doesn't have theories, he has fiction stories.
And archeologists limit their picture of the past to the evidences they have at a given point in time, although they know what they have is a very limited and degraded record of what actually happened.
See for instance the argument put forth by Hancock about network of ancient "highways" connecting cities in the amazon. Nonsense until lidar expose them:
"Hey archaeologists - here's a cool thing that doesn't fit with your timeline. Here are some ideas that could explain what's going on, but they're just ideas don't lynch me!"
The archaeological establishment: "Lynch this fucker!"
I would usually say, you first, since you made the outrageous claim he "provides no evidence at all".
But this might be fun... You do know the difference between evidence and proof though, right?
I'll go look at the most recent article on his website [0], and we'll see if there's evidence presented, or if he "provides no evidence at all"...
To avoid bias - and save time, because I'm doing your research for free - I asked ChatGPT to examine whether he provided evidence or not:
...
Evidence Provided by Graham Hancock
Cultural and Archaeological Evidence:
Hancock frequently references archaeological findings and scientific studies to support his theories. For example, he discusses the discovery of ancient human remains in California dating back 130,000 years, which challenges the conventional timeline of human migration into the Americas.
Comparative Analysis:
He often draws parallels between distant cultures to suggest the existence of a lost ancient civilization. For instance, he points out similarities between the spiritual beliefs of ancient Egyptians and Native American mound builders, arguing that these cannot be mere coincidences and suggesting a shared heritage from a forgotten civilization.
Scientific Studies:
Hancock cites recent studies and technologies, such as LIDAR, which have uncovered large, ancient geoglyphs and cities in the Amazon, suggesting advanced pre-Columbian civilizations that were previously unknown.
Historical Documentation:He references historical texts and accounts from early archaeologists and explorers, such as the work of Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray in Egypt, to support his claims about the existence of older and technologically advanced civilizations.
Analysis of the Evidence
Pros:
Innovative Perspective:
Hancock provides a fresh look at ancient history by challenging established narratives, which encourages further investigation and discussion.
Detailed References: His works are often well-documented with footnotes and references to scientific studies, which lend a certain level of credibility to his arguments.
Cons:
Interpretation of Evidence: Critics argue that Hancock often selectively interprets evidence to fit his theories, sometimes ignoring data that contradicts his views .
Speculative Nature: Some of his conclusions are speculative and not universally accepted by the academic community, relying heavily on what some consider circumstantial evidence.
Conclusion
While Graham Hancock does provide evidence to support his claims, the validity and interpretation of this evidence are often contested. His approach is not always balanced, as he openly admits to focusing on evidence that supports his alternative historical narratives. Readers must critically evaluate his claims and consider the broader academic consensus when interpreting his work.
...
Summarizing: At least 4 different types of evidence are regularly laid out. Benefits to his approach include encouraging fresh investigation and discussion, and the cons are acknowledged by Hancock himself.
I'm no Hancock fanboy - I've seen one show of his. But I've seen the way he gets attacked and it's so often so dumb. It reminds me of how people attack Assange and Snowden, or RMS, or Jared Diamond: surprisingly emotional, personal, venomous, and more often than not completely made up (as in this case).
I'm not a native English speaker so some nuances are lost. But I can concede that he does have something you could call evidence, for his conjectures.
Will you concede that he has no proof, only conjectures and that big archelogy are not out to get him? I'll leave this for your viewing pleasure, let me know what you think. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU
I don't need to, because I never claimed he had proof, and neither did he. He is always very upfront about that fact.
> and that big archelogy are not out to get him
But they are. Look at all the comments in this thread accusing him of things he isn't doing; putting words in his mouth; completely inventing beliefs that he doesn't actually hold - where did all that come from?
> I'll leave this for your viewing pleasure
... A 2 hour video nitpicking a Joe Rogan interview? I'll pass, sorry bud. Maybe if I get really bored later, but I hope to have better things to do.
I'll leave you with this: We have bone flutes that are 50,000 years old that use a pentatonic scale. Reconstructions of the Divje Baba flute can be seen played on YouTube (2 mins long, not 2 hours).
You can claim those perfectly circular, perfectly placed holes are animal bites, but there's other examples confirmed to be >30k years old, also using a perfect pentatonic scale. If you understand how music works, you know that's insane.
You could play modern pop songs on these flutes. Saying that there isn't any chance of an advanced civilization older than 10k years just doesn't seem credible to me, and the insistence from 'big archaeology' that it's impossible is not to their credit.
So no proof, only conjectures? Sounds like he shouldn't act like he is correct and everyone else is wrong.
I guess I am big archaeology then, somehow.
Having a very hard time understanding how a bone flute equates humans having forgotten advanced technology in the past. I don't think anyone here disagree that modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and have made artifacts like this in their spare time and created bespoke tools to create them that have been lost.
Conjecture, yes. Conjectures drive inquiry and investigation, especially when linked with evidence. They serve as starting points for scientific research and exploration.
Ignoring interesting conjectures despite the evidence is a foolish, and a mainstream historical pastime. If we let that be an end of it, we wouldn't understand evolution, germ theory, plate tectonics, or heliocentrism.
Someone always puts the idea out first, lays out their evidence, gets roundly mocked by people who feel threatened... And years later, building on their work, someone finds proof of the idea (or, tbf, sometimes disproves it in an interesting way).
> I guess I am big archaeology then, somehow
I really have no idea why you would say this. Are you feeling personally attacked here or something? Have you forgotten that you are the one that first brought up this term?
> Having a very hard time understanding how a bone flute equates humans having forgotten advanced technology in the past.
Then you don't understand music, technology, humans, or Hancock's argument. Creating such an instrument requires a massive degree of understanding. It suggests symbolic thought, cultural sophistication, planning, and multi-generational knowledge sharing. And it demonstrates that 'modern humans' were not the only game in town, because the Divje Babe flute likely wasn't made by homo sapiens, but by neanderthals.
> I don't think anyone here disagree that modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years
Lol... Now most people would agree, but not long ago you'd have been treated just as Hancock is for suggesting so.
And again, the flute was probably made by Neanderthals.
For centuries, the archaeological establishment, influenced by outdated notions such as phrenology, underestimated Neanderthal cognitive abilities and cultural sophistication. Suggesting they were smart enough to make a flute would get you ridiculed by 'big anthropology'.
... I read 20 minutes of the transcript of that YouTube transcript you suggested, and it's really bad. Woeful stuff.
It's an obvious smear job: Someone could make a 1 hour video detailing the rhetorical bs Professor Miano uses in that 20 minutes. It's all there - hypocrisy, projection, ad hominems, insinuations, gish galloping, straw-man arguments, appeals to authority. Honestly how do people fall for this stuff?
He spends the first 3 minutes attacking Hancock's character, then says "I'm sure he's a nice guy, I'm only attacking his rhetoric". He then says a bunch of stuff that Hancock supposedly does, without any reference to evidence whatsoever. He does everything that he accuses Hancock of doing, without a hint of self awareness.
It feels like an elaborate prank on his audience, and I'd believe it was; if only for the fact that I know people do this all the time when they feel their worldview/career is threatened.
For a final time, I hope - Hancock is clear and upfront that he is making conjecture (with evidence). He doesn't claim to have proof. He delineates between evidence and conjecture, and no one in this thread has provided a counter example - only put words in his mouth. Watch for that in your video: look at the first 20 minutes and make a note every time Miano tells us what Hancock thinks or does without any reference to actual fact. You might be surprised.
Opinions are like buttholes Hikikomori - everyone has one.
> Flat earth theories also have evidence
So you're not just confused about the difference between evidence and proof, but also the difference between evidence and disproved claims. How fun! Everything that doesn't have direct proof and mainstream consensus is now on the same level as the flat earth theory, amazing!
> psuedoarcheology grifters
Hancock disagrees with the archaeologocial community on like, one point. Maybe two.
His 'grift' is to write interesting books about a very intriguing idea - wow, what a huckster piece of shit.
Your criticism says more about you than about Hancock, Hikikomori. It's very uncool to attack people like this without bringing any actual evidence for your claims, English as a second language or no.
It's funny that you think you are different from flat earthers when most people would put you in the same category.
Neither has any proof. Both have flimsy evidence and only conjectures (Opinion or judgment based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork). Both are anti science and anti establishment and believe them to be hiding or stopping the truth from coming out to protect their sweet academic/science jobs. And both are pushed by people that make money from it, ie grifters.
> We know that the Earth has had at least five major ice ages. The first one happened about 2 billion years ago and lasted about 300 million years. The most recent one started about 2.6 million years ago, and in fact, we are still technically in it.
Ice age are properly defined as periods of "extensive ice sheets" at the poles, contrasted with "greenhouse periods" of no polar ice sheets (or glaciers).
Ice ages are comprised of glacial and interglacial periods. The Last Glacial Period is... a glacial period. We're currently in an interglacial. But still an ice age, since there's ice at the poles (for now anyway).
I spent my younger and teenage years obsessed with graham Hancock and his ideas.
I can confidently say after more than 16 years of listening to his talks, reading and re-reading his books and listening to the shifts of his emphasis, that he is full of shit in regard to his many hypothesis regarding some ancient culture pre-ice age that was the Ur-culture and is responsible for building lots of things in lots of places that we now falsely attribute to other civilisations.
When you get really into to him, the problem is he isn’t even internally consistent. In fingerprints of the gods he’s all into these things, then in heaven’s mirror he’s all going Gaga first on Ur-maps and then on fixed ratios/SI units and in the sign and the seal he’s pandering ultimately to the Masonic Lodge.
It is so convenient that these civilisations would have had, in his estimation, to have the sophistication and technology level of the 20th century, but left behind only artifacts that in many instances ended up getting ‘claimed’ by other civilisations. Give me a break.
There is the whole theory about the Sumerians coming from a civilisation at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. As the ice age came to an end the rising sea wiped it out making them move to higher ground.
Also theorized as the source of the great flood myths. As the Gulf flooded the shore line would be moving around a meter per day for centuries/millennia.
Milo also visited Göbekli Tepe, as well as Karahan Tepe (a site which likely predates Göbekli and is believed to be related as there are lots of shared features), and a few other more recent sites of southern turkey: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bNsVeMHjFjF...
As someone who doesn't know much about archeology, I watched the netflix show and thought it was interesting and had a lot of questions. Knowing that it's one perspective and that there has been information has likely been left out and/or there were either answers, or at least commonly accepted explanations, I started looking around for what those were and what the academics had to say.
I found this channel and couldn't get more than 30 minutes. He starts off well saying that he didn't want to dismiss it all as nonsense but that doesn't last long. So yeah, If you want to watch someone ridicule an alternative theory that has been presented, or present commonly accepted theories as matter of fact, then sure, great channel.
Your criticism of this channel may be on point - I haven't watched it. But please don't make the mistake of equivocating scientific hypotheses, theories well supported by evidence and crank pseudoscience created for a mass audience. Hancock hasn't been excluded from the 'mainstream' archeological debate. He never participated in it in the first place. He's a writer of retrofuturological science fantasy in the same vein (and citing much the same evidence) as his predecessor Erich von Däniken. This stuff can be hugely entertaining (I'm a science fiction fan and grew up on 'face on mars', 'chariots of the Gods etc'). But its epistemic are based on just so stories and shifting goal posts, not triangulating the dating of sites, engaging in archeological digs or weighing in on scientific arguments about methodology.
That may be true but the scientific hypotheses and theories well supported by evidence in archeology have been wrong enough times that it isn't inappropriate to question them
How is that relevant? Misinterpretation of evidence is a thing, certainly, but that has nothing to do with a crackpot making up stories without any evidence to support them. I can do that too, in an afternoon. Doesn't make it real.
thank you for posting this! I loved Ancient Apocalypse, very entertaining. It has been frustrating trying to find refutations of some of the theories/questions posed by it.
When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
Can recommend this channel as well run by an American professor, just did a video on the techniques Graham uses to fool people but has a lot of other debunking and visiting the pyramids etc. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU
Graham and a real historian recently did a debate on Joe Rogan where Graham did not come off well.
It doesn't help that Graham Hancock levels his own ad hominem attacks, claiming that archeologists don't take his ideas seriously to protect their own egos and jobs.
Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established.
This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book)
>At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago.
>[...]
>the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička
>[...]
>throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis
>[...]
>The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified.
>[...]
>Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points
>[...]
>Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years.
>[...]
>a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper
>[...]
>because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago.
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.
>[...]
>Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
> When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
Because you're trying to 'learn' from an unreliable source spouting fiction. It's like someone learning homeopathy being frustrated that doctors dismiss it with passion.
In the Netflix series, Graham doesn’t not. He makes it clear he’s not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly states he’s an investigative journalist.
And then the YouTube host roots his show on the scientific method with the question “How do you prove there was an ancient civilians”.
This is the wrong root question.
The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. Or said differently, “how did civilians not use more advance technology than we believe they had”
(Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the wheel)
> He states that Graham claims to be a researcher.
No, he doesn't state that at all. This is what Milo says, verbatim: "He is a person that some may call a researcher. I am one of those people. More predominantly than that, Graham Hancock is a writer."
> The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”.
That's an interesting question, but it's essentially an endless one: we will never, ever know how ancient civilizations created everything they created, because their secrets have been lost to time. Human history is so deep and the evidence so porous that we simply will never run out of questions to ask about how they did what they did. Furthermore, even when we come up with ways they might have created things, we may never, ever know whether that's really what they did, because the evidence is not there anymore. There are medieval and later items which we don't really know how were created, but we do know, for sure, that they didn't have power tools.
For instance, what was Greek fire, exactly? There are lots of good ideas, Wikipedia suggests "it may have been made by combining pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, sulfur, or niter." Will we ever know which? Maybe, but probably not.
Of course there were people (or at least very-nearly-human people) 200,000 years ago, and of course there is a very, very long history of humans and not-quite-humans having material culture.
Graham Hancock asserts that there was a globe-spanning single culture with advanced technology ~12,000 years ago. That's a big, specific claim! Of course there were people around during the Younger Dryas, Hancock is making a bunch of claims about what people were doing at that time.
Milo is saying there wasn't a globe-spanning civilization with a shared culture and advanced technology existing during that period, not that there weren't people (are you perhaps confusing the words "civilian" and "civilization"?)
Seriously, keep watching for more than a couple minutes: does he at any point say "of course Ancient Apocalypse isn't real, humans didn't exist back then"? That would be a very short video.
Anyone who believes Hancock’s ideas should really watch the debate with Flint Dibble[0], in which Hancock eventually admits he has no evidence of his ancient civilisation, and Rogan, who is a long time friend and believer of Hancock, seems to end up siding more with Flint.
No. You misunderstood that quote, the emergence of writing is far more recent and at different locations. Thus “within 30km of” not at Göbekli Tepe.
“Current archeological evidence in the form of seals, reliefs, steles, lead strips, and wood panels, across almost one-hundred Anatolian sites, including some within 30 km of Göbekli Tepe, dates the emergence of the hieroglyphic script used to write in Luwian to the late 15th century B.C.E.,”
Göbekli Tepe was inhabited ~9500-8000 BCE, so ~6500 years before the writing examples given.
That's the idea - settlements are usually built in favourable areas (e.g. next to rivers) so the same site may be continuously inhabited or repeatedly reinhabited over very long periods of history.
My conclusion was the sites aren't excavated because they aren't really that interesting. They are all similar in nature and don't contain extensive written knowledge that can be preserved and studied. To put it comparatively Ötzi the iceman is highly studied because preserved bodies aren't found from his era and location that often. If we stumbled across a graveyard with 10000 people from the same era that was easily accessible, I doubt we'd spend much time studying all of them.
As another poster has pointed out, there may in fact be a writing system that we are just beginning to understand. So I'll have to see if there is anything I can try and learn there.
The sites are absolutely interesting, however unless pressed for time (usually because they're in the way of or uncovered by construction work) archaeological digs are slow going: the slower you are the more artifacts you can find, the better you can place them, and the better you can preserve them and the rest of the site.
Used to be people dynamited sites to get at stuff faster (also dynamite colleague's sites to undermine them). We stopped doing that, because it was stupid and wasteful.
Furthermore protecting and stabilising the site been a major focus of recent site coordinators, especially as the site has been opened up more for public visits.
If you want faster digs, fund archeological grants so there's more money to hire more people.
Nobody is conspiring to “keep this under wraps” so it can’t be a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires people who have some hidden knowledge and are keeping it secret?
Graham Hancock insists that his ideas aren't being taken seriously by the archeological community because they find them too threatening, rather than for the real reason: that they think he's plain wrong.
In this view, archaeologists "know" that he's really on to something, but refuse to look closer. He's claimed to have been "banned" from Egypt (which might even be true, I don't know). The whole vibe is this is the truth that THEY don't want you to know.
the shape shifting lizard people are the conspirators. only one of them would say it's not as to throw us all of the trail. we're on to you wincy, we are on to you...
Thanks for bringing these topics up, I find the raft of evidence quite compelling. I also find it quite interesting how much pushback on alternative hypotheses there is from the mainstream scientists. I even attempted to have a conversation with GPT4 about the possibility that ancient humans created the pyramids, and it told me I was being RACIST! Like, what?
The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind. There is no way I could be convinced that hand-driven bronze tooling was cutting diorite to a precision we would struggle to meet today, carving schists so thin you can see light pass through, absolutely perfect symmetry, and creation of granite stoneware with multivariate surface geometry that we'd be unable to do without a precision-destroying tool change.
I find the tool marks on the partially excavated obelisk in Aswan particularly compelling. It's like they had technology that could scoop granite like warm ice cream.
One person doing somewhat interesting research here and other ancient sites is Ben from Uncharted-X. He brings a lot of first-hand content and analysis of areas many can not access, though it is pretty light on conclusions (probably for the best).
> The thing that sells me, besides the erosion, is the absolutely astonishing artifacts that were left behind. There is no way I could be convinced that hand-driven bronze tooling was cutting diorite to a precision we would struggle to meet today, carving schists so thin you can see light pass through, absolutely perfect symmetry, and creation of granite stoneware with multivariate surface geometry that we'd be unable to do without a precision-destroying tool change.
The explanation is pretty simple: with sufficient effort and skill, it's possible to produce extraordinary works of precision. You cannot underestimate what people can do with sufficient patience and expertise.
However, each artifact is going to be different, because they're hand-made. If you found half a dozen objects that matched each other to extreme precision, you'd have a more serious case- that's the sort of thing you expect to need machine tools for.
One very good way to debunk this stuff is to look at the best stuff that came out of the Renaissance: we know, for certain, that they weren't carving that stuff with power tools.
So your view is that these pieces are modern forgeries? It's _maybe_ possible we could create something like this with today's machinery, but if you're saying some ancient person with enough time could create these, it's just not the case. It's not just that I don't believe a determined human can do amazing things, but it's just impossible to create the precision these cuts show without measurement tools almost more precise than we have the capability to make today.
There were thousands of vases like this found beneath the bent pyramid.
I can't find the video, but I recall watching this on TV when I was younger. They found an ancient abandoned quarry site in Egypt (same one?) and brought in someone to test cutting and drilling granite with copper tools and it worked. The trick is using sand in between the copper and the granite.
The thing that made Ancient Egypt so special and so historically significant isn't that they had amazing technology. It's that they built a coherent culture, religion, language and government. The vast construction projects they undertook were achievable because they could field massive armies of laborers and keep them provisioned for years. They built these massive structures by dint of having lots of food and secure borders.
It actually didn't work. They were barely able to scar the surface with a jagged janky cut after many hard hours of hard work, and they weren't even attacking the hardest types of stone we see things created from. It's just not possible these tools were used to create the amazingly accurate pieces you find in Egypt, fashioned in some of the hardest materials we know.
He cuts it pretty sharp here. And then shows a technique for smoothing imperfections. Also a lot of the stones weren't actually cut perfectly. Only the ones that were on visible surfaces. The technique was probably slow and laborious, but the Egyptians had huge numbers of workers and they spent years or decades on projects.
I'm not sure what the counterargument even is. If the Sphinx was built using super ancient metal tools, where are they? And how did Egyptians make granite carvings all over their empire over the span of millenia? They obviously knew how. We know it's possible. We just don't know for sure how they specifically did it and maybe never will.
It was only a few years ago that we solved the mystery of Roman concrete.
Utterly spurious. The toolmarks don't match the experiment and therefore it was another civilization? Just stupid. They may have used a different type of grist for their drills. They may have had a technique for smoothing them after the hole was cut. They may have just been so practiced in their art that they were just better at it than anyone who tries to replicate it today by guessing. We have unequivocal evidence that cutting and drilling granite with available material was totally possible. We don't know and probably never will know for certain how exactly they worked. But it's 100% plausible they did it themselves with technology and resources available at the time that matches all the correlated evidence. There are carved granite and schist artifacts in Egypt spanning thousands of years during which they kept lots of written and artistic records and interacted with dozens of regional cultures all of whom are well-attested. Accusing the scientific mainstream of being to stuck in their orthodoxy to accept an alternate theory is rich coming from someone who believes a wildly implausible theory with nearly religious fervor and rejects all the physical evidence in front of his face in favor of blind faith. Bring some proof beyond pure conjecture and then maybe we'll be convinced. Go read about pre-Clovis people in the Americas. The orthodoxy that had stood for decades was upended pretty quickly when new evidence was uncovered.
> It's just not possible these tools were used to create the amazingly accurate pieces you find in Egypt, fashioned in some of the hardest materials we know.
The pyramids are almost entirely made of limestone. Limestone is around a 3.5 on the mohs hardness scale.
The scale goes up to 10 (diamond).
Granite (king's chamber, sarcophaguses, plugs) is around 6, 6.5.
Guess what's above that? Quartz. AKA your common desert sand.
Very impressive, but the Egyptians supposedly didn't have the ability to form steel; also the holes were not chiseled, they were drilled leaving spiral striations that witness an incredible feed-rate.
Yes, it's interesting isn't it, how everyone is debunking eachother, and that hasn't changed much from the days of Petrie. Doesn't seem like the "science", after all these decades, is solid and settled yet whatever timeline you believe.
I think we have to take into consideration the "entertainment" aspect of lots of these theories. Like UFO theories, such and such monster, bigfoot, etc., they are for entertainment. People make money off of these things. The more plausibility and uncertainty they add, the more money they make. Some suffer from delusion as well.
Archeology and Paleontology have evidence for things millions of years ago, yet do not have evidence for Ancient advanced civilizations.
> Like UFO theories, such and such monster, bigfoot, etc., they are for entertainment.
Many astronomers and physicists have engaged in speculations about extraterrestrial life. They also use some radio telescope time for SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) projects.
Extra-terrestrial life does not mean Alien Vehicles at super-light speed darting in and out of the atmosphere or nerosphere. It means looking for signs of life forms on other planets or planetary systems. We could have alien life on Mars, Io, extra-solar planets, etc. They search for that.
I think this is a common misunderstanding.
Yes, there are some who think aliens built the pyramids.
But there is an equally large group of people who think that humans pre-ice age were advanced like we are today. And when the ice age happened 12,000 years ago - that knowledge was lost.
When you then look at build sites around the world from this perceptive, structures like the Sphinx and others (like Göbekli Tepe), begin to appear much older than convention teachings might imply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
EDIT: for those interested more in this topic, there is a Netflix series on it (called "Ancient Apocalypse"). I can't attest to the validity of the statements made in the series, but the arguments are compelling (and not alien related).
https://grahamhancock.com/ancient-apocalypse/