​I will confess that when I learned Andrew Collins had recently published a new book on Karahan Tepe, an ancient site of enclosures and statues similar to and coeval with those of nearby Göbekli Tepe (collectively, the Taş Tepeler peoples, after the region where the sites are located), I was not particularly excited about reviewing it. Collins’s books are never wild enough to be fun to discuss, but they also fall just enough outside of the scholarly consensus to make it a slog to work through his reams of information, mostly accurate but outstripping the evidence. 

It isn't your imagination: Fewer people are talking about Ancient Apocalypse in its second season, nearly two years after the show's first season smashed viewership records for a streaming archaeology series. According to viewership statistics released by Netflix this week, viewership for the series is down more than two-thirds from the show's debut season. According to Netflix's Global Top Ten list for the week of October 14 to 20, just 2.2 million people watched the second season in its debut week. The 8.9 million hours viewed last week were about one-third of the 27.7 million hours viewed in the first season's first week in 2022. (Netflix did not estimate viewership in the figures it released in 2022, but using a similar conversion formula would estimate between 6 and 7 million viewers in 2022.) Similarly, with the media focused on the U.S. election and the Middle East, the number of news stories this past week discussing Ancient Apocalypse pales in comparison to 2022 stories about the first season.

This season's viewership collapse might be due to the timing of the release, in the heart of the busy season for new TV (Netflix viewers flocked to the streamer's Outer Banks instead of Ancient Apocalypse), or competition from world events ahead of the U.S. election. It may also be due to a lack of compelling narrative this season--there was nothing new, just a rehash of season one. (Of course, that never hurt Ancient Aliens.) But more likely, Netflix simply waited too long between seasons. Two years is an eternity when it comes to a flash in the pan, and the failure to capitalize on momentum led to viewers drifting away and forgetting why they cared. There were a lot of missed opportunities. I would have thought with all the time they had, Hancock, Netflix, and show producer ITN would have put together a tie-in book, for example, to build excitement. Instead, Hancock spent his promotional time on grievance tour complaining about Flint Dibble, and the whining likely did little to attract viewers to the show.

The Express reported today that Graham Hancock has denounced white supremacy as "a stupid cult" after a Neo-Nazi was seen on video explaining the value of Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse as a white nationalist recruitment tool. According to the Express, Neo-Nazi Harold Lloyd said that Hancock's work was "like listening to Third Reich archaeology, without the baggage" and could introduce viewers to the idea that indigenous people were unable to develop high culture absent outside help, without the explicit appeals to racism found in Nazism. "It's actually a good way of introducing people to white superiority.... It's a nice little intro to Racialism," Lloyd said.

​Two years after Ancient Apocalypse caused a media firestorm by putting on Netflix claims Graham Hancock had been making in print and online for decade, the show returned with a second season focused on the Americas. While the first season sparked outraged because elite media types were finally forced by the Netflix algorithm to see on a screen what they paid no attention to in print, the second season seems positioned to avoid some of the same backlash. Netflix released Hancock’s second foray into arguing that a comet destroyed a lost civilization in mid-October, after the first came out in late November 2022. This seems purposely chosen to drop while the mainstream media are focused on the upcoming election, limiting the time and attention they will devote to bashing Hancock’s show.
 
And, as we all know, the sequel is never as good as the original.

​Archaeologist Ed Barnhart appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast this week to spend more than three hours (!) discussing “lost civilizations” and ancient history. During the conversation, Barnhart called Graham Hancock a “great researcher,” agreed with the idea that the Amazon rainforest had been intentionally planted by a lost civilization, and dissembled when asked directly about the ancient astronaut theory. I suppose there isn’t much one can do to respond to questions about aliens when your entire claim to fame rests on your regular appearances as a cast member on Ancient Aliens, but asserting that Hancock is a great researcher is so silly—Hancock’s sources are often wildly outdated, he misrepresents material at will, and he is highly selective in his cherry-picking—that this can only be either an attempt to jump on the Ancient Apocalypse bandwagon or a preview of an appearance on that show later this month. And if you are wondering: Recent research found that parts of the Amazon were altered by ancient agriculture, resulting in a nutrient rich terra preta soil in and around ancient settlements, but this is a far cry from assuming the entire Amazon basin was artificially planned and planted by Atlantis. The best estimates are that terra preta covers less than 3% of the Amazon, and probably closer to 0.3%, though some put the figure as high as 10%.

​It’s been a busy week so far. At a rally in Eau Claire, Wisc., Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. J. D. Vance injected UFOs into the presidential campaign and inadvertently punctured the claim that Congress is deeply informed and concerned about extraterrestrial incursions. After incorrectly summarizing the past seven years of UFO interest as a “story from a couple years ago that, like, the Defense Department had declassified the UFO stuff,” Vance added, “I don’t talk about that because I don’t know what’s going on. […] So, to all the journalists there: If you do know anything about the UFO story, please tell us because we’re very, very fascinated by it.” Vance, a sitting senator, admits to knowing nothing and not even being informed enough to know what he doesn’t know, giving the lie to claims that UFO terror has gripped anything but a very small minority of legislators. 

​No wonder Graham Hancock has been testy. An article yesterday in The Guardian says that the U.S. filming on the new season of Ancient Apocalypse was scuttled after the production ran into difficulties with obtaining permission to film at some locations. Hancock’s program received permits to film at Chaco Canyon and the Grand Canyon for an episode on the peopling of the Americas. Several days of filming had already been completed at Chaco Canyon, but ITN, the company behind the series, pulled out of the U.S. and will scrap the episode in favor of a non-American location. The Guardian piece implies that the difficulty was with Native tribes, who spoke out against Hancock’s hijacking of their history and opposed efforts to film at ancestral sites. Grand Canyon National Park sought to deny Hancock a permit based on objections from Native groups, but federal officials in Washington overrode their objections to issue the permit—since the government can’t pick and choose permits by viewpoint. Tribal locations, though, can do what they like. Read the full story at the Guardian. 

​Months after debating archaeologist Flint Dibble on The Joe Rogan Experience, Gaham Hancock broke his silence about the encounter, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that he had been “conned” and endorsing a YouTube video alleging that Dibble lied five times over the multi-hour debate in order to humiliate Hancock with false information. Hancock did not explain how he failed to recognize the allegedly false information, which was directly relevant to the information he claimed to have researched for more than thirty years. The arguments used by YouTuber “DeDunker” were not terribly convincing, but even if taken at face value would hardly rise above slight misstatements or minor confusion when speaking extemporaneously for many hours. More concerning is that Hancck jumped on the “conned” bandwagon to save face after having no other response to Dibble dominating the debate for three months.

​In case you were keeping score, so-called "UFO whistleblower" David Grusch pulled out of the SALT conference following the flap over revelations he's been ducking invitations to testify to AARO and was replaced with another UFO speaker, Col. Karl E. Nell, who claims credit for influencing Congressional UFO legislation. Meanwhile, there are some dustups occurring as both archaeologists and fringe figures take aim at the popularity of YouTube ancient history videos, whose audiences have outstripped traditional cable TV documentaries and book publishing.