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What does HN think of Graham Hancock? The antediluvian period is definitely quite a mystery and almost certainly the traditional history we are taught is not as clear-cut as it is made to sound.

I think the ancient sky looked a lot different than it does today. And there were global cataclysms that shaped the mythology of these civilizations surviving through that event. Moving forward, the later generations adhered to the myths and propagated them but with minor details forgotten or changed. Fast forward centuries and people are telling stories told to them by their parents, without knowing what they are actually about or why, that are heavily modified over generation to generation and became more symbolic and less literal.

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Disclaimer: I worked professionally as an archaeologist, specifically in related fields.

He's pretty widely regarded as a crank. To some extent, we've done a terrible job of educating the public / undergrad population about what the current state of knowledge is and so it's almost to be expected that people flock to these sorts of crackpot theories.

I love sharing archaeology with people (it's our heritage!), but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes.

I'm intriged.

> the current state of knowledge is

Do you mean specifically to this site or to the profession in general?

In general people should have at the least vague "red flag limits" of what's reasonable in a field.

Let's use a hypothetical example: if I were to proclaim that I've found an overunity machine, most of the comments would (rightly) criticize and/or lecture me on how that's not possible without rewriting most of physics. The silurian hypothesis doesn't evoke nearly the same reaction, even accounting for the evidentiary strength difference between archaeology and physics.

We can discuss why that is and so on, but most people just aren't equipped to differentiate crackpots from legitimate sources.

So, why don't archaeologists write more books as interesting and engaging as Graham Hancock's then that also offer refutations of his claims? I see many personal attacks such as stating he's a crank...prove it.

For one thing, someone has to do actual archaeology. Debunking crank claims is not the primary job of researchers, there's simply too many of them - a lot of this is up to diligent consumers and that diligence involves a bit more work than demanding someone prove the crankery of every crank.

It's way less interesting to write a book titled "We don't really know very much" than "I know the key! This is it!"

Or:

People are interested in possible hypotheses and explanations of phenomena and would love if the somebody could either provide more evidence or refute them.

Definitely more interesting than the mainstream "We don't really know very much" together with " and we don't care, we are too busy doing real archeology".

There are lots of books, papers, blogs, etc out there that offer refutations of people like Hancock. The SAA Archaeological Record dedicated an entire section to one of his books (http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p...). Jared Diamond's books have prompted more than one seminar and rebuttal book, e.g. Questioning Collapse.

Unfortunately, people are busy, have real research to do, and don't have time to deal with every crank out there. Some are even state sponsored, which opens up a whole world of problems. It's not fair to expect people to do extensive rebuttals of every crank out there. It's the academic version of Brandolini's law.

> It's not fair to expect people to do extensive rebuttals of every crank out there.

Yeah but this isn’t just any “crank” out there, in this case it happens to be someone who is more famous and well known for their ideas than the vast majority of academics. We are talking about stopping to engage the crazy homeless person on the street.

This also happens to be what the egyptologists say about Robert Schoch and John Anthony West With respect to the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. They can literally take time to hold press events to personally attack the people And state there is no evidence for these crazy ideas but refuse to address the Actual water erosion hypothesis.

The post you're responding to literally links an SAA magazine section wholly devoted to rebutting just one of Hancock's books.

You also mention that academics refuse to address schoch. Here are a few academics responding directly to Schoch:

https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.3340100203

http://www.hallofmaat.com/sphinx/comments-on-the-geological-...

I'd like to point out that the conversation in this thread has covered topics from Gobekli Tepe to the silurian hypothesis to early agriculture to climatology to early mesoamerican architecture and now to pharaonic monuments. That's an incredibly broad range of topics and no single person is an expert in all of them. Cranks like Hancock BS about an astonishing range of stuff.

> The post you're responding to literally links an SAA magazine section wholly devoted to rebutting just one of Hancock's books.

I didn’t say there weren’t rebuttals. I didn’t even say he wasn’t a crank, only you can’t exactly apply the “we are to busy forwarding our field to stop and address every idea from every crank” argument to someone whose ideas (for better or worse) are gaining notoriety as potentially true and correct.

Probably because made up stories about a cataclysm on a strict 12,000 year cycle sells a lot more books. The truth can be fascinating. But a lot of times, fiction is even more interesting. Especially if you try to pass it off as the truth.

i dont think Hancock states he is saying the truth, he just offers an explanation of his own to some unaswered questions.

Mystery stories are easy to sell. The problem with history is that if you're intentionally shaping a narrative, you're perverting your own discipline.

> So, why don't archaeologists write more books as interesting and engaging as Graham Hancock's then that also offer refutations of his claims? I see many personal attacks such as stating he's a crank...prove it.

They do. There's more books written on history than you could read in several lifetimes. Just the kind of people who follow Hancock don't really give a sh*t and if you try to educate them you get accused of being in some vast conspiracy, and they'd much rather believe in 'ancient aliens' and total crackpots.

Here's the people working on Göbekli Tepe calling out Hancock https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2017/06/21/what-y...

That site is worth reading because it's written by the people working there. Just follow and read actual professionals, even email and talk with them on Twitter, they're regular people and they'd love hearing from you if you're genuinely opening to learn.

> but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes.

This, I believe! Although it's probably a true statement for virtually any scientific profession.

That said: I don't know the first thing about Graham Hancock, and I'm quite comfortable dismissing Velikovsky and his ilk as cranks. Just because one can construct an absurd theory to explain things one doesn't understand, doesn't mean one should.

And yet... I was reading about the Norte Chico civilisation the other day, and thinking that it was really quite weird that they started building ziggurats at pretty close to the same time as the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese also started building ziggurats.

Really, the global flourishing of that exact form at that exact time -- in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them -- is honestly quite weird, right?

When I've mentioned these kind of thoughts to archaeologically-trained friends, I've often encountered a curious lack of curiosity -- "yes, obviously just a crazy coincidence, can't be anything besides that, let's talk about something else now" -- or asserting theories, as facts, about how ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue).

Both of these reactions are troubling to me. Dismissing these sort of things as "not a mystery" is doing them a disservice. Imagine how many great discoveries would have passed us by if every piece of initially-baffling evidence were dismissed as "just a coincidence". And while it's clearly irresponsible to to go on yammering about aliens or Atlantis or whatever -- at least in the absence of much more extraordinary evidence -- I don't think that it's much more responsible to concoct theories which are prosaic but obviously false.

Anyhow, minor rant there, sorry. I have absolutely no working theory as to why ziggurats started popping up all over the place 5,000 years ago. I just want to hear a non-crackpot archaeologist admit that yes, that's a legitimate mystery, and that if it's just a coincidence, it's a very weird one.

> in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them

Human walking speed is about 3.1mph. Walking 8 hours a day, it takes 40 days to cross a thousand miles. Communication's slow, but not that slow – especially if you've got horses. My working theory is that people walked.

Across the ocean? The walking theory breaks down when you look at the development of the Americas. That actually almost certainly kills any theory that communication is required. At least in the Americas, the timing was surely a coincidence?

From what I've heard, transatlantic boats can be fairly small and rudimentary.

Not really. The Vikings pulled it off, but it was hardly a walk in the park and required a network of bases in Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere to support venturing further.

I was thinking of the leather coracles used in another voyage. I read this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088116.The_Brendan_Voya...

There is evidence that some Pacific Islanders made it to the coast of South America in very small craft.

There are absolutely some huge unknowns out there. Here's one that fascinates me: The earliest evidence for crop domestication around the world all happen within roughly 1-2k years of each other. Hundreds of thousands of years of foraging, and all of a sudden agriculture evolves independently half a dozen times in that tiny span. We've spilled libraries worth of ink on the subject, but pretty much the only firm conclusion we have is that there wasn't a singular cause.

There is a [paraphrased] saying that might explain your friend's reactions though: the most exciting thing in archaeology is your data, the most boring is someone else's data.

We have to compartmentalize a lot because there's an overwhelming amount of stuff out there.

Climate. We know from ice cores that the climate prior to the current interglacial period wasn’t very conducive to crops. It was dryer and had less CO2. 180ppm be 260ppm pre-industrial area.

Lower CO2 levels meant that plants lost more moisture opening their pores and growth would be stunted.

Climate change is a big part of the puzzle, but for cases like the cucurbitaceae family in the Americas, it likely also reflects quaternary extinction events and social/behavioral changes in human populations, among other things. It's complicated and multifactorial.

Heh, that's a good reaction. :-)

Maybe I don't know the problem well enough, but the relatively simultaneous nature of domestication seems like less of a mystery to me. More recent domestications (eg. in the Americas) seem to indicate that a hunter-gatherer population needs to be getting comfortable with a particular bioregion for at least a thousand years or so before an accumulation of of local knowledge can lead to the development of decent local cultivars. If this is a general and defensible rule, then I think our climate history can provide the rest of the evidence.

The ice age wasn't just cold, it was also chaotic, with temperatures pinging all over the place from year to year:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...

In that context, any population would have had difficulty staying in one place for a thousand years -- I don't mean living a settled life, I just mean hanging out in generally the same bioregion. Bioregional adaptation would be detrimental in such an unstable environment: your tribe needs to stay mobile and highly adaptable, or it'll die. No chance to develop agriculture under those circumstances.

Eventually we enter a nice calm interglacial period, and settle down to do some fishing -- then spend the next thousand years being chased around by rapidly rising sea levels and mega-floods from bursting glacial dams.

Finally, about 11k-10k BPE, all that settles down -- although not without us acquiring some nice flood myths along the way -- and we have time settle down and start getting to know some bioregions on a long-term basis. A thousand years or so later, we've got agriculture popping up all over the place.

Seems like a reasonable story? Or am I missing something?

It's not bad as a first idea, but there are a couple difficulties with it.

1) We know sedentary hunter-gatherers existed throughout the upper paleolithic. This is a bit of an under-researched area for various reasons, but we know they definitely weren't all mobile.

2) Humans had been continuously inhabiting areas in east Africa since even before they could be called anatomically modern. Yet, agriculture there emerged at roughly the same time as elsewhere.

3) The earliest agriculturists were semi-sedentary anyway, not predominantly sedentary and fixed in place. How mobile they were depends on where and when we're specifically talking about, as it varied over time.

4) Climatic variability in New Guinea (another early center of agriculture) actually increased during/after the younger dryas.

This one's a bit unfair, as it's outside the scope of what I originally said. Nonetheless, it'd be nice if we could also use our explanation to say things about independent domestications long after the start of the holocene, like the eastern agricultural complex.

I'm defending a thesis I haven't thought about too much, but just to play devil's advocate, I'd say:

1.) Interesting about sedentary hunter-gatherers during the upper paleolithic -- I'd like to know more about that! But my argument would be that even if the the people were settled, the climate wasn't -- and that the severe climatic fluctuations which were happening would have been enough to deter the incremental steps towards agriculture.

2.) I presume Africa would have experienced the same climatic fluctuations as everywhere else. This begs the question of why they didn't develop agriculture 120k BPE, during the last interglacial? I'd argue it's because we still had some evolution to do to become behaviorally modern, around 80k BPE. So this interglacial is really our first time at-bat with a stable climate.

3.) True, but if they passed through the same bioregion/climate at the same time every year, then that's enough of a fixed point to begin experimenting with agriculture. My theory is as much about the mobility of the bioregions/climate as the people.

4.) Could be a counter-argument indeed. I know too little about New Guinea, which is a crazy fascinating place. I know that there was very early cultivation there, which was also abandoned some thousands of years ago. Don't know how that relates to its history of climate stability. Do say more?

> ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue).

Are you sure? I'm not strongly in one camp or another, but it seems relatively intuitive that if you are stone age people and want to build something tall, a square-based step-pyramid is the most stable form that can rise relatively fast wrt to the amount of material used and work needed

Of course this only pushes back the question of _why_ did all these people want to build tall things roughly at the same time, but still

i dont know i think your thinking implies years of growing with the same theories, like getting to a point of building with square like objects i dont think its a given

Defensibility. Hill forts have been around as long as settlements. Don’t have a hill? Build one.

doesn't look like anything to me

He may be a crank, but his theories are actually entertaining. There's a reason why The X-Files was super popular.

Indiana Jones is just as ahistorical, but it's fine because no one thinks it's anything but fiction. The problem I have with Hancock isn't over whether it's entertaining, it's about the fact that he pretends his fictions aren't.

I think that Hancock is very entertaining and I enjoy reading or listening to him. I don't believe a word he says of course, but I was still annoyed that TED banned his talk for example. My point is, it seems that we need to protect people because they are stupid and will believe anything they read, but that deprives me of my entertainment!

Like a guy explaining why the earth is hollow is entertaining only if the guy is believing it. Don't ban the crazies, let them make their 8 hour monetized youtube videos on why elvis is still alive.

He builds a lot on top of Robert Schoch's Sphinx erosion controversy. Ie that the egyptian sphinx must be much older than currently estimated because of geological findings of erosion around it is water based, not wind based.

These "cranks" provide an explanation. How do "non-crank" tradition archeologist explain this?

Just because somebody exaggerates means that he is a crank? In a world of ignorants perhaps the only option to be heard is to develop a fan base and exaggerate. That doesn't invalidate the few hypotheses presented by "cranks" which seem closer to be believable than mainstream explanations.

https://www.robertschoch.com/sphinx.html

https://youtu.be/zSjnvlDWwrE

Every genius ahead of his time starts out as a crank.

I'm not really speaking about this guy, I'm not at all qualified to say, but I think it's good we have people thinking differently from the crowd.

Every genius ahead of his time starts out as a crank.

Also, and far more often, every crank starts out as a crank.

Yes, but the point is not that being a crank is a guarantee of truth. The point is that it's not a guarantee of being wrong either. You have to look at the evidence either way.

Ed: if you care, I mean. I'm the last person to deny the right to just not take a position on a non-actionable topic.

Also much more often every tenured professor starts as a conformist PhD student. Then some becomes cranks.

I remember watching a BBC (?) documentary with (I think) Schoch and Hancock, and Schoch being very reasonable and accommodating to Hancock with respect to the possibly scientific foundations of Hancock's theories about the extended age of the Sphinx until it got beyond that to the idea of coded messages etc:

"...aaaand that's where we part company..."

> He's pretty widely regarded as a crank.

So did the devil bury all the evidence of a meteor impact in order to trick us?

Disclaimer: The parent comment is by an anonymous person who has not provided credentials or identity and yet posits that they have authority to uniformly condemn someone without any reason, other than providing a label for this person, "crank". We are supposed to reel in horror at the terrible person he is, since he was labeled as such without a single source or specific example about how this person is wrong.

If you need credentialed sources to establish that archeologists are not warm to the theory that supernatural beings built the Egyptian Sphinxes, you can just consult any AskHistorians question about Hancock.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=Graham%20Han...

Flairs on AH aren't checked for credentials (though many are indeed in academia). My username is the same there and I occasionally pop in to answer questions.

You’re right, maybe historians really do take this person seriously.

That's fine - it's not hard to believe that there are credentialed people out there calling Hancock's work out as specious. That's a different topic though and doesn't imply that the word of an anonymous internet stranger should be taken at face value without any evidence, especially if you haven't yet encountered any of these credentialed people, and this call of "crank" is the first you've heard. It's a meaningless distillation of a complex reality - "crank" is just a label without any explanation. One of the characteristics of so-called "cranks" is that they make claims and broad generalizations without sources or evidence. It's hypocritical in the extreme by the original poster to commit the same fallacy as the one they are labeling someone with.

I think they're calling him a crank because, among other things, he seems to believe supernatural beings built the Egyptian Sphinxes. Do you think we should study more carefully the question of whether humans created the Sphinxes?

You are speaking about an entirely different topic. I've never once stating whether I believe anything he has said, or even am interested. I'm saying that you can't go around calling people names and expecting that to be taken as evidence against them, especially when done anonymously. Your post is different - you point to an actual fact as to why Hancock is called a crank. The original post did nothing of the sort.

You're surprisingly worked up about an informal post on a social forum. The reality is very simple: someone asked for opinions on Hancock, I responded with my views and a general disclaimer about where they come from. It seemed pertinent to mention I used work in "the establishment" when discussing someone that's anti-establishment.

The problem is that this forum, and social media in general, is viewed by a lot of people, certainly orders of more magnitude more people than actually comment. Comments such as yours misleadingly take advantage of human social traits, such as attributing more truth value to someone with authority, and avoiding people who have been negatively labeled because they must be outcasts. There are potentially thousands of people who's respect of Graham Hancock has been decreased to varying degree due to your statement. Using appeal to authority and ad hominem name calling are the most basic of logical fallacies and should be completely discarded.

This is completely unrelated to whether Graham Hancock is actually a fraud or not. The problem is with your comment, no matter who you are talking about. Anonymous authority on the internet is worthless, as is name calling. As a supposed academic, you should be providing sources and examples, the absence of which makes your statement about being an authority on the matter suspect.

I take issue with this because this sort of mechanism is currently used on social media to wreck great havoc on society, especially in the US where people's lives are destroyed and horrible politicians get into office due to supposed authorities calling people names on the internet. It's a far worse issue than you are acknowledging. The whole point of social media is to spread ideas. You are not an island.

Internet forums are typically for conversation not formal arguments constrained by some catechism of 'fallacies'. Domain expertise, consensus among domain experts, etc are perfectly sensible heuristics one can apply to claims.

How do you know this person is a "domain expert"? It's frankly outright foolish to give any weight to an anonymous "expert". Even then an anonymous comment could be valuable if there were links to sources demonstrating "consensus among domain experts", but nothing of the sort was provided.

Your comments about what internet forums are for is completely unrelated and also incorrect. Internet forums are for whatever someone is willing and allowed to discuss.

I don't know they're a domain expert! Hence the 'heuristic' part. I do know that in the course of normal conversation I'm not owed 'links to sources'. I can certainly ask for them if I can't figure out how someone arrives at their conclusions but it doesn't make reading comments without them (or without a list of the commenter's verifiable credentials) 'outright foolish'. What you are describing doesn't sound like a general purpose forum anyone would want to participate in. And the way you're describing it sounds outright scoldish.

"... especially in the US where people's lives are destroyed and horrible politicians get into office due to supposed authorities calling people names on the internet."

For someone railing against unsupported assertions, that's a whopper. We can stipulate horrible people have gotten into office and that people are calling other people names on the internet, but the arrow of causation is not at all clear.

Addressing your point more directly: I don't think the problem is people making insufficiently footnoted comments so much as readers accepting things that align with their predjudices uncritically. As such, I don't see what is gained by attacking someone for commenting in a casual style.

> "... especially in the US where people's lives are destroyed and horrible politicians get into office due to supposed authorities calling people names on the internet."

Is this not common knowledge? Do you not use the internet at all? Graham Hancock isn't even known by most people let alone the quality of his research.

From what I've heard, and read of Graham Hancock he has a lot of good thoughts on the subject of ancient/lost civilizations. He presents facts -- such as similarities between artifacts found in Egypt and the Mississippi Valley -- and goes on to tell what he thinks about them. I'd say overall he's pretty good about separating the facts vs his own ideas about things. Ultimately, he's a journalist and makes no scientific claims beyond those from the scientific community who have published peer-reviewed papers. He caught a lot of flack for changing his ideas over time -- even within his books -- yet it makes no sense as we -- humans -- figure things out by putting ideas out there and reflecting on them collectively.

My favorite talk I've heard of his is the one on the use of psychedelics in ancient civilizations. In my opinion, modern society would benefit a great deal if we removed the stigma of altered states of consciousness, and more people began having these experiences...unfortunately, it would cut into big pharmas profits as less people needed lifetime prescriptions of anti-depressants.

He does make persuasive arguments about existence of human civilization during younger dryas period (Gobekli Tepe happens to be one of his major evidence for this) but he tends to emphasise or deemphasise their sophistication depending on the kind of audience he is talking to. This is where he loses me. He tries to make much more reasonable claims when he is on mainstream shows like JRE, but he tends to get a lot more hyperbolic when speaking to his core audience.

That sounds like the difference between saying what can be easily defended to a potentially critical audience, vs. saying what you're less sure of to a receptive audience.

To me, the alarms sound way before that. You can change the tune of your idea if you need to persuade people, while at the same time being honest about it.

What I don't like about Hancock is that he uses Gobekli Tepe as a prop: we don't know the whole story/history about it, but he will gladfully use it to support his claims, without actually producing evidence that furthers our knowledge on what Gobekli was!

I can surely entertain the idea of lost civilizations, but that doesn't imply I validate the dishonest handling of unknowns as "evidence".

This is what pseudoscience and con men do to appear respectable.

You can manipulate your knowledge as though it were an object, but you cannot manipulate your ignorance.

I would like someone to professionally dispute and counter Graham Hancock's work. And I don't mean a random blog posts or some short clip of him having a godawful debate. I mean a thorough break down of "Graham says X, in reality it's Y." He has published a handful of books. It shouldn't be that difficult to find word-for-word factually incorrect statements he has made, that he still clings onto, that can be readily disproven.

The Joe Rogan show that he did where he debated was nice, but again, it's more for entertainment. Near the end it turned into ad hominem attacks against him and had some libelous pieces too. He could have taken legal action against the person.

So far all I have heard have been, to say the least, vague statements of how he is wrong, how he's causing archaeologists to have a bad rap, and whatnot. Okay then, show me the work.

I haven't found much in the way of anyone refuting his biggest points, namely the ridiculously precise celestial knowledge of the temple builders, and how these temples came to be constructed so well, considering they are massive slabs of stone that remain to this day. He touches on things like water erosion patterns and whatnot in areas that have seen very little water. At least one of these should be easily disprovable.

That’s not the way science works. Have him publish a peer reviewed paper staking out his claims. If he’s right, it shouldn’t be difficult to produce something publishable in a major journal.

Honestly between Graham Hancock and John Anthony West I no longer know what is what.

At least with Egypt it seems to be this great divide between the Official Egyptian Archeologists historical timeline and these relatively new ideas of an earlier society/culture with more advanced stone working technology (maybe more advanced mining/metal working as well) that disappeared before the old kingdom appeared.

Each side bizarrely makes the other side out to be batshit crazy and verging on conspiracy theories.

I guess I’m just left to conclude that few People will ever have access to these treasures of human history, fewer Still will get to dig them up and examine them, and ultimately one person’s interpretation will become the story we all hear which we call truth, and ultimately we will call it his-story.

Watch the Joe Rogan podcasts with him and Randall Carlson. I'm into it. Whether his ideas are correct or not, I personally believe the chance that his general inclinations that there was a lot more to earlier civilizations than we believe, are very likely true.

I became aware of Hancock by listening to the Our Fake History podcast series about him and his claims:

https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-4/episode-78-who...

The impression I got is... not good, to to say the least.

In general you're usually better off actually listening to someone and seeing what they have to say in order to make an informed judgement about them before listening to a characterization of them by a 3rd party with their own agenda.

This is a great podcast. Loved the Atlantis episodes.

I've read Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization from Hancock and really liked it. Lots of interesting thoughts in there.

> I think the ancient sky looked a lot different than it does today.

In what way, and why do you think that?

I think the problem with G. H. is that he gets way too specific.

I think his core theory is plausible (civilization existed before our current evidence suggests, and that it was wiped out by some sort of cataclysm - he suggests a meteor event IIRC).

This would explain a lot of weird coincidences in the development of disparate human cultures (see sibling comments for examples)

My problem with him is that a lot of things he claims as hard evidence are pretty weak, but he talks like his theory is essentially proven.

His ideas can spawn a lot of fun thought experiments in any case.

People see Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan and think those are the extent of his beliefs. Watch his other talks where he ponders of ancient Egyptians used some kind of telekinesis to move stones and build pyramids.

I really like Hancock

He makes his living by telling stories to a popular audience. He's optimizing for a good story rather than accuracy.

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