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Review of "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little

9/10/2019

Denisovan Origins: Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America
Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little | 432 pages | Bear & Company | ISBN: 1591432634 | $21.60

Denisovan Origins is a team-up between Andrew Collins and Greg Little, two authors whose combined oeuvre includes wild and extreme claims about history ranging from Atlantis and space aliens to giants and Nephilim. Their new book carries an endorsement from no less than Graham Hancock, who claims that the book uncovers a “missing chapter” of American history that supplements “my own book, America Before.” Normally, a publisher will give me a copy of a book and I will write a detailed review that—and this should surprise no one—also serves the publisher’s purpose of promoting the book. I didn’t get an advance copy of Denisovan Origins, in large measure because Andrew Collins reportedly was upset that the publisher had sent out copies of his last book several months ahead of publication, and I am not terribly interested in giving too much space over to promoting a book that the author and publisher wanted to hide from me. But in the interest of the public good, I will look at it anyway, even though it contains very little new material that isn’t repeating claims from the authors’ earlier books

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Göbekli Tepe and the Ancient Infrasound Global Communication System

8/30/2019

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I need to spend today working on writing my new book on pyramid myths before I review Ancient Aliens tonight, so I am going to leave you with this recent YouTube video claiming that Göbekli Tepe and other ancient sites were connected through an “infrasound” network that somehow transcended not just barriers of distance but also of time, communicating between cultures that didn’t even exist at the same time as one another. Many of the claims are warmed over from Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis and Edgar Cayce’s version of Atlantis, but you can see more than a little of the “energy network” claims from Ancient Aliens, particularly when the narrator alleges that the ancient stones received messages from other dimensions or other planets.

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Review of Code of the Wild S01E05 "Aztecs in America"

8/29/2019

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This episode airs Sept. 3.

For more than two centuries, scientists, historians, and treasure hunters have sought proof that Mesoamerican peoples visited or even colonized the lands now part of the continental United States. In the nineteenth century, this line of speculation tended to focus on the Aztecs, who had a myth of coming to Mexico from Aztlán, a land to the north of Mexico. Baron von Humboldt infamously placed Aztlán in the Great Lakes region on the evidence of a painting of a palm tree (don’t ask) and what amounted to some guesswork about how fast they might have walked across the 416 years of their wanderings from Aztlán to Mexico. “It is almost certain,” Humboldt wrote in Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America (1810), “that we must look for the first country of the Mexican nations, Aztlan, Huehuetlapallan, and Amequemecan, at least North of the 42d degree of latitude” (trans. Helena Maria Williams). Humboldt’s claim was so persuasive that he succeeded in getting scholars to speak of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan as “Aztecs” from Aztlán instead of the Mexica of Mexico.

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"The Atlantic" Repeats Afrocentrist Claim about Pre-Columbian Africans in the Americas; Plus: "Epoch Times" Under Fire for Trump Links

8/21/2019

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This past week, conservatives across the country rose up to take on the most pressing issue of the day, the New York Times’ ongoing series reporting on the continuing legacy of slavery on modern American life to mark the 400th anniversary of slavery in the lands that eventually became the United States. Conservative leaders claimed that the paper was doing a disservice to America by sowing division through a discussion of historical facts and making America look bad by explaining the compromises and corruptions that slavery created at the heart of the American social, economic, and political systems. In the Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi of American University wrote in support of the Times’ project, but in doing so, he offered his own ahistorical claim.

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"Barnes Review" Claims "White Leadership" from Ancient Egypt Ruled the Maya

8/13/2019

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Originally, I planned to spend today’s blog post discussing Tom DeLonge’s recent interview in the British music magazine NME, in which he claimed to have secret knowledge that he has adjudged too dangerous for public consumption: “Believe it or not, we have very long conversations about what we’re going to talk about publicly, not because we don’t have the facts – but because people aren’t ready for the facts,” he said. This seems transparently false. If an aging rock star whose sum total of knowledge of UFOs, ancient history, and the occult is derived, by his own admission, from reading old paperback ufology books has experienced “the facts” and emerged unscathed, surely we mere mortals can hear whatever it is DeLonge thinks he knows (but probably doesn’t). I also thought it worth mentioning that Luis Elizondo, who two Pentagon spokespeople have denied served as the head of the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program, declined to provide evidence that he did head it when asked. “I don’t want to make anyone look foolish,” he said. Sure, that’s the reason.

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Martin Sweatman Claims Göbekli Tepe Was a "University" Teaching Civilization to Africa, Europe, and Asia

8/6/2019

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Look who’s back… again. Martin Sweatman wrote an academic journal article back in 2017 alleging that the ancient temple site of Göbekli Tepe contained carvings recording the impact of a comet at the end of the Younger Dryas and that its iconography is derived from the zodiac, a set of constellations first seen in the historical record 10,000 years later in Babylon. In December Sweatman expanded his claims into a full-length book, PreHistory Decoded, which he is promoting this month on Graham Hancock’s website. Despite the passing of the years, the quality of the evidence for Sweatman’s position has yet to grow more convincing since it remains founded on speculative (pseudo-)astronomy and the books of Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock, whom he praises by name as “closer to the truth” than actual scholars.

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Dave Truman Claims Teotihuacan Is an Energy Portal to Hidden Spiritual Dimensions

7/23/2019

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Ancient Aliens returned from a one-week hiatus on Friday only to see ratings remain firmly lodged at 1.06 million viewers, hovering around its weekly average. Its lead-out, the debut episode of William Shatner’s new In Search Of knock off The UnXplained, handily outdrew the finale of the show it replaced, Unidentified, and also Ancient Aliens itself with 1.11 million viewers. The oddly consistent ratings for almost literally anything that airs after Ancient Aliens suggests that there is ceiling on the audience for this type of program, and it hovers around 1.2 million people.

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Graham Hancock Doesn't Quite Square the Circle When Discussing Earthworks

4/27/2019

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It’s been a very long week for me, made longer by the three hours I spent listening to Graham Hancock basically read his new book to Joe Rogan while discoursing on his respect for psychedelic drugs. Because I have been a bit too busy this week to do much writing, today I’d like to turn over my blog post to a video that archaeologist Andy White made to explain why Graham Hancock is wrong when he misuses the term “squaring the circle” to describe circumscribing a circle with a square. It’s a small but important detail that demonstrates how Hancock’s fact-checking (and the fact checking of his paid research assistant and his British and American publishers) continuously misses easily correctable errors.

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Graham Hancock and Joe Rogan Discuss "America Before"

4/24/2019

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On Monday night, Graham Hancock appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience to discuss his new book, America Before. The interview lasted nearly three hours in length and in large measure consisted of Hancock delivering a series of monologues summarizing most of the major points of the book. Because so much of the interview is essentially identical to the book, I will refer you to my review of America Before for my take on the majority of Hancock’s claims. Instead, in this discussion of his Joe Rogan interview, I will look at some of the claims that are either not in the book or that Hancock and Rogan discuss in ways that go beyond what Hancock says in the book

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My Review of "America Before" by Graham Hancock

4/23/2019

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Today marks the U.S. publication of Graham Hancock’s new book America Before. Last night Hancock appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss the book, but I can’t say that I was going to turn over three hours of my evening to listening to it. I will review the recording and discuss it later this week. In the meantime, to mark the launch of the book, my review is now available. You can read it on Skeptic magazine’s website, in this week’s eSkeptic newsletter, or in the forthcoming edition of Skeptic magazine in print. By arrangement with Skeptic, it also appears here on my website.

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