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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

So apropos of this pop history author, my "oh shit, being compelling and interesting doesn't mean it's correct" anecdote comes courtesy of another book that was popular around the same time as Guns, Germs and Steel, 1421: The Year China Discovered The New World.

I read it, found it all very plausible and interesting.

I read Gavin Menzies next book, 1434, found it equally interesting and compelling.

Then I read his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and found it just as plausible as his first book.

Except the prior plausibility in my head of a Minoan civilization maintaining global trade was way, way lower, and so I didn't just accept it as uncritically as I had the first two books, and that made me realize how unskeptically I had been reading the first two books, and other books in the genre.

It was a more enjoyable life lesson than most, all things considered.

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When I was about 10 or so I read the Erich von Däniken book Chariots of the Gods and was absolutely fascinated - eventually (and I don't know how) I came to understand that just because something is written in what seems to be a non-fiction book doesn't mean it's remotely true. Nearly 40 years on I can still remember my rage on realising this.

Haha I fell into the same trap around 15-25 years ago!(but tbf, elementary school me was going through cryptozoology phase)

von Daniken really knew how to write in academic prose, which only sold it further.

I keep a dozen books by von Daniken and his contemporaries on my bookcase to this day. Not because I believe them, but to remind me that I once did. I like to blame the X-Files, but the 90s was a funny time and I don't even remember buying all these books, but I sure believed them for a while.

I personally think Ancient Aliens ought to be required watching in english classes. The way they smoothly slip down that slope from non-controversial statements of the form "X." towards statements of the form "Ancient Astronaut Theorists believe X; could it be true?" usually beats even political discourse.

I used to watch Ancient Aliens as entertainment, and was usually not convinced by their claims. But it did reveal the cultural and historical ignorance that we have of other nations.

You can basically say anything about a culture that the audience is not familiar with, and they will think it is plausible.

For me, AA jumped the shark when they claimed that Vikings came from "nowhere" and "suddenly" had sea faring technology. Obviously the Aliens had given them the technology through the god Odin, who was also an alien... what other explanation could there logically be?

There was so much wrong with those claims, that I just turned off the TV. I decided to be more careful about looking at shows about aliens and conspiracies, because I am afraid that it will slowly change my ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

In reality, the ships were based on a long history of ship making with incremental improvements and did not suddenly appear. Anyone could find this easily, which indicates to me that they don't care to make even a slight effort to moderate their claims.

That got me thinking of all the other programs I watch that are not necessarily as "inventive" as AA. What other false statements are said about other cultures that I am not aware of?

From a sibling comment, the Graham Hancock/"progenitor civilization" idea is likewise just so obviously wrong to me.

Basically, they think that multiple agricultural civilizations arising independently at the end of the last glacial maximum is implausible, and that there must have been a global progenitor civilization that discovered it all and spread it after its own fall.

Except ... all of the crops of those early agricultural civilizations were distinct, based on the plants native to that region. Why would ancient farmers have traveled the world to teach people how to farm, but not have brought seeds with them?

You make a good point. I have watched several Hancock shows, including the one on Netflix, and while some of his points seem plausible, he tries to link everything into a common source that does not seem plausible to me.

There are some things that are plausible that I think would be interesting to see actual academics researchers spend time on, such as the Sphinx and a few other claims.

- The Sphinx:

To me it seems plausible that the Sphinx may have been constructed before the Egyption civilization, based on geological analysis that indicates a wetter climate and that the head seems to be carved much later than the rest (even proportions are wrong).

The findings in Göbleki Tepe proves that you don't need a massive agricultural civilization to create impressive stone works. People can get together and make amazing things without having to invent an Atlantian civilization that travels the world.

Unfortunately I think that Hancocks involvement may prevent serious research into this, as they don't want to be associated with him.

> The findings in Göbleki Tepe proves that you don't need a massive agricultural civilization to create impressive stone works.

Is this definitive? Couldn’t it be evidence that the people that built it might have had massive agriculture that we haven’t found yet?

They haven't found anything that would require an agricultural society to support it. Also, the time and location matches the origin of the oldest known strains of farmed grain. And the remains of people from agricultural societies differs dramatically from non-agricultural, again not far away in time and space from Gobleki Tepe. And the amount and type of animal remains suggests non-agricultural diet, with animals hunted and slaughtered elsewhere and carried in (the site wasn't used year round). So dawn of agriculture. A popular theory is this sort of society grew big enough (due to abundance of animals in the region at that time) that they needed to start farming for non-essentials, such as grain for alcohol, kicking off what would become agricultural societies.

It also doesn't really answer the interesting question -- if one presupposes a "progenitor civilization" that gave rise to later civilizations, how did the first civilization start? It's not unlike the arguments for "panspermia" -- the claim that the origin of life came from outside Earth in a meteor. That just moves the interesting question of life's origin farther back in time and space.

I rated 1421's credibility pretty low from the introduction onwards - he talked about matching Chinese maps to how he'd seen things from seaports, which sounds like a very easy way to see whatever you want to see, and some stuff about the same kind of chickens which felt like extremely thin evidence to hang extraordinary claims off of.

I haven't got to GGS yet, but given that the top reddit "debunking" is pretty open that its main argument is "his conclusions are racist, therefore he mush be wrong", I'm feeling a little more hopeful.