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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

This site is one of the building blocs that Graham Hancock uses to paint an alternate prehistory, involving a forgotten antediluvian civilization that was supposedly responsible for transmitting esoteric seeds of civilization to such disparate places as North America, Mesopotamia, Central America, Polynesia, Indonesia and more. He builds on older, fantastical stories about Atlantis, the lost continent of MU and others and has quite a following.

He is most certainly wrong about most of it. But the notion that prehistory still holds a lot of amazing things waiting to be discovered, much of it buried deep in the oceans after the sea rise that occurred after the glaciers of the last ice age melted away just 10.000 years ago or so is most probably true.

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It'd not even be 'deep' in the oceans, more just a few tens of metres off-shore and down a bit.

I'm no fan of Hancock, but I've long thought about how much of our history we're simply blind to because it's not right in front of our eyes.

parent's comment seems to denigrate the site itself by associating it with someone named Hancock (who I have non idea who that it is). The article doesn't mention this individual at all. Two things can be true:

• something (an object, a site, a finding) can be amazing

• someone can have over-indexed on how amazing that thing is ahead of available evidence.

Language matterd because this type of guilt-by-association induces a backlash on studying existing evidence and investing in further evidence-gathering (whether supportive or falsifying) efforts. Scientists are all too sensitive to stigmatised or even potentially-stigmatised (watchword: 'controversial') topics b/c their career fundability prospects from grants are at stake.

True. Just because someone uses some else research to push a bad narrative doesn't mean the initial research is bad.

But in this case it fairly certainly is. Either by lack of scientific rigor, if not worse.

Doesn't make much sense from an archeological standpoint, and there are concerns from the geological standpoint too it seems:

Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/geology/comments/17t81dg/question_r...

It's not really a pyramid, just an ancient volcanic core where people deposited stones on top of it for long periods of time. There is no indication of architecture, engineering or organized work crews being involved in the construction. It may be the world's largest cairn/tumulus but definitely not the oldest pyramid.

Exactly. There might be some traces of human passage dating 10000 years ago. But basically what we have is: surface-ish level construction, then a bunch of stones they interpret as old masonry but that is more likely natural, with deeper possible human traces as organic material, such as even a hunter gatherer that made a fire here one night. They use that to conclude to a paleolithic construction site.

Kinda like going to a European church, finding a bunch of stones and gravel under for 30m. Finding one silex around the same depth ans thus concluding European paleolithic people 10-20000 years ago were building complex edifices.

I've always found the definition of "civilization" a bit self serving. In particular, the "hierarchical" part. I find it interesting that the rule of the few over the many is baked into a particularly important concept.

Well that feels more like it's the side-effect of the English word "civilized" being used to mean "genteel and proper", and also "pertaining to large-scale societies with monumental architecture, agriculture, etc." It doesn't seem to controversial that social hierarchies are associated with all of the world civilizations we know about - I suppose that could lead to arguments about them being intrinsically better, or just necessary to organize large groups of people?

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