This week, Graham Hancock posted to YouTube video of a ninety-minute lecture he gave at a rented hall at University College in London in which he repeated arguments from his previous books and offered his usual bevy of attacks on archaeologists and what he sees as a nefarious conspiracy to suppress his claims about a lost Ice Age civilization. Because the majority of the lecture is simply a rehash of his past books, there is little purpose in going through it point for point (see my reviews of Magicians of the Gods, America Before, and Ancient Apocalypse for more detailed breakdowns). However, I do want to highlight a few key points in the evolving arguments Hancock uses.
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A couple of weeks ago, the Wiley journal Archaeological Prospection raised eyebrows by publishing a paper by Daniel Natawidjaja, the geologist who wrote Plato Never Lied: Atlantis in Indonesia, and his team claiming that the volcanic hill of Gunung Padang was a 27,000-year-old pyramid. Natawidjaja did not provide any evidence that the radiocarbon dates he took from organic material within the hill were deposited by humans, or that there had been any human occupation beyond the relatively recent surface structures. Now the journal and its publisher have launched an ethics investigation into the flawed paper, according to a report in Nature:
A year ago, Netflix sent the media into a frenzy of consternation with the release of Graham Hancock’s series Ancient Apocalypse, one of the most-watched shows about ancient mysteries in a generation. Dozens upon dozens of articles decried Netflix for producing a one-sided argument for pseudoscience and Graham Hancock for attacking archaeologists and educators for an alleged conspiracy to suppress Hancock’s belief that Atlantis seeded ancient cultures. I was one of the writers who produced a think piece on the series, for the New Republic.
Two weeks ago, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja and his team in Indonesia published a paper online claiming to have radiocarbon evidence that Gunung Padang was an Ice Age pyramid complex and not, as geologists commonly believe, a natural volcanic formation that humans built atop around 1,500 years ago. The reaction from both archaeologists and geologists was swift, with calls for the journal in which the paper will soon appear, Archaeological Prospection, to retract it because of its deeply illogical reasoning. While Natawidjaja and his team performed real science that dated soil from within the hill of Gunung Padang, they neglected to complete an obvious step before claiming the dates as evidence of human activity—they did not provide any evidence that the soil was associated with human activity.
Note: This post also appears in my weekend newsletter.
This week, the new Speaker of the House, Christian conservative Mike Johnson, came under fire for his past comments on homosexuality, notably his claim that gay marriage is a cancer that would lead to the collapse of Western civilization. But more humorously, CNN unearthed a 2008 clip this week that revealed that Johnson believes that “rampant homosexuality” was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire: “Many historians, those who are objective, would look back and recognize and give some credit to the fall of Rome to, not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society.” The Roman Empire fell, of course, when it was officially Christian and had Christian laws. Meanwhile, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, the Indonesian government-affiliated geologist who claims Gunung Padang in Indonesia is a prehistoric pyramid complex that coincidentally makes Indonesia the oldest civilization on Earth, published a new paper repeating the claim, to the delight of Graham Hancock, who claims it is “vindication” of his speculations. However, Natawidjaja only provided radiocarbon dates for organic material buried within the hill of Gunung Padang without providing evidence of human occupation at the time or of human deposition of the organic material. Finally, the Daily Mail reported that Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s UFO office, will resign in the coming weeks following months of attacks from ufologists in the mainstream media and on social media that he is too closed to witnesses’ extraterrestrial claims, is hiding the “truth,” and is too willing to work with alleged conspirators hiding UFO evidence. He is rumored to be replaced with a candidate more open to space aliens. The History Channel has canceled the semi-annual Alien Con after nearly a decade. A representative told New York Post journalist Steven Greenstreet that the company would instead focus on its Ancient Aliens and Secret of Skinwalker Ranch touring live shows because they make more money. “We make money on the tours,” a spokesperson for History’s parent company, A+E Networks, said. And of course they do. The traveling shows feature a few guys sitting in chairs, and even orthopedic chairs cost less than all the overhead that goes into putting on a full convention with all the trimmings, especially as the shows’ ratings decline and the incentive to travel a thousand miles to a convention declines. It’s much easier to get casually interested audiences to go to a local show.
Last year, researchers associated with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis claimed that an exploding comet destroyed the Hopewell culture of ancient Ohio. At the time, I pointed out many of the reasons their claim did not pass the sniff test, notably because Hopewell culture persisted more than two centuries after the supposed impact. Now, a new paper in Nature confirms that the original claim is almost absurdly flawed: Tankersley et al. claim a cosmic airburst over modern-day Cincinnati, Ohio in the 3rd or fourth century CE catalyzed the decline of Hopewell culture. This claim is extraordinary in the face of hundreds of archaeological investigations in the Middle Ohio River Valley (MORV) that have heretofore provided no evidence of a widespread cataclysm or “social decline” in need of explanation. Tankersley et al. misrepresent primary sources, conflate discrete archaeological contexts, improperly use chronological analyses, insufficiently describe methods, and inaccurately characterize the source of supposed extraterrestrial materials to support an incorrect conclusion. While charcoal and burned soils are found on virtually all excavated Middle Woodland archaeological sites in the region, these have prosaic explanations. Many of the burned “habitation surfaces” mentioned are actually prepared surfaces for ceremonial fires, not the result of a synchronous regional catastrophe. Radiocarbon dated samples from one context are mistakenly attributed to distinct and unrelated contexts. The chronological analysis does not support the notion of a single event spanning 15,000 km2. The composition of their supposed extraterrestrial materials is inconsistent with an origin in comet or asteroid events. In sum, there is no evidence to support the conclusion that a comet exploded over modern-day Cincinnati in the third or fourth century CE. The whole paper is a great read and a decisive rebuke to the expansive but fantastical types of claims Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis researchers have proposed.
[Update: George Howard said the dispute revolved around contract negotiations and concerns about payments and the ownership of the rights to material presented at the conference.]
In a surprise move, Graham Hancock pulled out of June’s Cosmic Summit, a meeting of catastrophists in support of the theory that a comet hit the Earth at the end of the last Ice Age and destroyed a high-tech lost civilization. Atlantis speculator Jimmy Corsetti, who was also scheduled to speak, also said he would not be attending. Corsetti claimed he had been “removed” against his will from the list of speakers, leaving the conference in chaos. A new Netflix series called Ancient Apocalypse shot to the top of the streaming service's rankings the week it was released. It claims that an advanced civilization which thrived during the Ice Age was wiped out by comets and floods, but left humanity with science and technology. In the world of archaeology, such claims aren't new, and are referred to by experts as "pseudo-archaeology." This episode of IDEAS unearths the long history of pseudo-archaeology, how it's been deployed to advance political and cultural ideas, and where it crosses over from pseudo-science to religious myth-making.
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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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