On The Joe Rogan Experience, archaeologist Flint Dibble debated Graham Hancock for more than four hours about the existence of a lost civilization. You will forgive me that I did not have the time to watch the full podcast—it is simply too long—but you are of course welcome to watch below. I watched about half, from various segments of the podcast. I noticed in the parts I did see that Hancock seemed a bit underprepared to encounter the nuts and bolts of how archaeology is actually done, leaving him to complain that archaeologists have simply missed all of the evidence for a lost civilization, despite Dibble’s clear presentation of how archaeology actually works and the methodology of science and the signatures of large-scale settlements, such as evidence of agriculture, that should survive even the most thorough cataclysm.
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When the explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in 1925 searching for the mythical Lost City of Z, he was also hunting a fabulous city described in Manuscript 512 in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. The document, written in 1753, tells of a Portuguese expedition, which discovered a city reminiscent of Classical settlements like Rome and Athens deep in the Brazilian rainforest. It contained arches and domes, statues, and mysterious hieroglyphic engravings. Fawcett thought Z to be the capital of a vast civilization of which the Manuscript 512 city was a mere outpost.
In a lengthy recent interview, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter said he is releasing a censored copy of his new book with blacked-out maps and missing evidence until The Curse of Oak Island television series either pays him for the “millions of dollars in content” he says his book is worth, or the show is cancelled. Wolter said he tried contacting the History Channel’s top-rated series ahead of the mid-April publication of Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail: Secrets of "the Underground Project" Revealed in the hope of appearing on the show. He said that from a “financial perspective” using the show to promote his book would benefit him; however, Curse producers were not interested. As a result, Wolter decided to black out images of “evidence” in his book, including maps, and censor some of the content because he fears Curse will use his work without paying him for it.
After two months of miserable Ancient Aliens episodes on all but one Friday, I felt more than a little relief to receive a bit of time off from the grind. But that doesn’t mean that the outer edges of pseudoscience fell silent. After John Wiley & Sons retracted the infamous Gunung Padang paper claiming the Indonesian site was an Ice Age mega-pyramid, the author of the paper, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, published on Graham Hancock’s website what he says is the full text of his team’s communications with the team at Wiley over the retraction. Natawidjaja seems to think that doing so vindicates his claim that nefarious forces of Western orthodoxy ae suppressing his superior science, but reading through the correspondence makes plain that Natawdjaja and his team have no real evidence to support their claims, failed to consider alternative explanations, and relied almost entirely on drawing conclusions from a visual inspection of rocks—basically, “looks like, therefore is.” Natawidjaja seeks to reverse the burden of proof, demanding that critics prove that the natural-seeming formations he identifies as prehistoric constructions are not human-built, rather than offering any positive evidence of their artificiality.
When the journal Archaeological Prospection published an article claiming that the Indonesian site of Gunung Padang was a massive pyramid complex that dated back to the Ice Age, archaeologists sighed and fans of Atlantis-style lost civilizations cheered. The article’s lead author, Danny Natawidjaja, is a fan of Atlantis (and a beneficiary of publicity from Graham Hancock) who made wild claims about Indonesia being Plato’s intended lost continent. His methodology for dating Gunung Padang was so suspect even non-archaeologists like me recognized the problem immediately: Natawidjaja carbon dated random bits of organic material from within the volcanic hill but did not prove that it was associated with human activity, so the dates were worthless as proof that the hill was a human-made pyramid from the Ice Age.
I am currently knee-deep in revising and editing my manuscript for my publisher and on deadline for a forthcoming piece for a major media outlet, so I don't have the time to break down today's New York Times Magazine piece about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis point-for-point. I will just observe that it is another entry in the Times' ongoing fascination with all things Graham Hancock and Ancient Apocalypse a year and a half after the show aired. I am not sure why the Times is still rehashing Ancient Apocalypse speculation, or spending so many words to say that the show's claims have no value but they want to hope they could be true anyway. I do recommend that you read the full piece, but the conclusion is sadly quite correct: People want to believe things that are just a bit beyond true to experience the frisson of transgressive excitement, and when these claims are repeated often enough, they become a maker of group identity, frequently in opposition to a perceived oppressive mainstream that has ill-served them: In a recent paper, two psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Spencer Mermelstein and Tamsin German, have argued that pseudoscientific beliefs, which range from the relatively harmless (astrology, dowsing) to the deeply malignant (eugenics, Holocaust denial), tend to find cultural success when they hit a sweet spot of strangeness: too outlandish, and the epistemological immune system will reject it; too banal, and no one passes it on. [...] The [Younger Dryas Comet Impact] hypothesis has already penetrated deeply, and perhaps indelibly, into the public imagination, seemingly on its way to becoming less a matter of truth than a matter of personal and group identity. Nobody I spoke with seemed to think it would go away soon, if ever. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that after just three cobbled-together clip shows to start its new season, Ancient Aliens is already going on a break, substituting an even longer, multi-hour clip show under the Ancient Aliens Declassified brand. Anyhow, it turns out that I missed a bizarre appearance in which Tucker Carlson has some things to say about ancient history after descending further into the Ancient Aliens / Ancient Apocalypse rabbit hole.
Just hours after the New York Times published an uncritical column reporting on the astrological New Year’s predictions of a Chinese geomancer, the paper of record offered a “fair and balanced” review of the controversy over claims that an Indonesian hill is really a prehistoric pyramid complex by extensively quoting Graham Hancock, who, by his own admission, is not an expert in Indonesia, hills, prehistory, or pyramids.
Another year has passed us by, and it seems that each one is somehow a little bit darker than the one before. I’ll be honest: I had a hard time bringing myself to write this year-end wrap-up this year. It’s been a hard twelve months. At the beginning of the year, the release of generative A.I. completely destroyed my career, wiping out virtually the entire industry of business writing that was my bread and butter. It happened so quickly and so destructively that CBS’s 60 Minutes came out to Albany to interview me about losing my job to a machine, and then I experienced a double humiliation when the venerable newsmagazine called me a few hours before my interview was scheduled to air to tell me that they cut me from the story and replaced me with an interview with a generative A.I. chatbot.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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