Graham Hancock Resurrects Old Claims in New Lecture

​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.

​Near the beginning of the lecture, Hancock offers a lengthy critique of the “Clovis-first” hypothesis, the academic conclusion popular from the 1950s to the 1980s which argued that the first people in the Americas were the Clovis culture, c. 11,500 BCE. Hancock uses this as an example of dogma that “ruined” careers and corrupted knowledge; however, “Clovis-first” was a reasonable conclusion for its era, when earlier occupations lacked conclusive evidence, and, more importantly, it has not been the dominant paradigm since I was a child—and I am now a middle-aged man. Hancock seems either unaware of this or seems to think that science works like “alternative archaeology,” where books from the 1960s like Chariots of the Gods and In Quest of the White God calcify into unchallenged fringe dogma.
 
Hancock repeats his (to an extent justified) criticism of the Society of American Archaeologists’ letter to Netflix last year complaining in somewhat overblown terms about his Ancient Apocalypse TV series before launching into  a rehash of the “evidence” he provided in Fingerprints of the Gods, recycled from older classics of the genre like Chariots of the Gods and Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, that old rocks were too big and heavy for mere humans to have worked together in large numbers to move. I was surprised to see that he resurrected Arthur Posnansky’s claim that Tiwanaku is 12,500 years old, a claim he supported in Fingerprints of the Gods but had largely abandoned after that, perhaps because we have pretty good evidence from various dating methods for the real age of the site.
 
The funniest part of the lecture follows. Hancock returns to an old favorite that he has pushed since Fingerprints of the Gods back in 1995: that Renaissance-era maps depicting a hypothetical southern continent represent Ice Age knowledge of Antarctica. This claim has been debunked many times over (the maps show a continent three times larger with a completely different coastline, for example), but in this lecture Hancock actually takes note of a criticism I made about his claims: Oronteus Finaeus, the cartographer behind the key map Hancock uses, actually wrote on the map itself that it was “never before seen” and contained features “unseen before now, known neither to Ptolemy, nor Eudoxus, nor Eratosthenes, or Macrobius, but which have lain in shadows up to the present day” (my trans.).
 
A plain reading of Finaeus’s text is that the map is new and not related to any ancient predecessor. Indeed, in a part of the map legend Hancock ignores, Finaeus literally says that the southern continent (which is actually a wildly exaggerated Tierra del Fuego) was “recently discovered and not yet completely known.” However, Hancock uses Finaeus’s words to claim the exact opposite—that the map is actually based on a “recently discovered” Ice Age map squirreled away in Constantinople and unknown to any ancient or medieval geographer until some unnamed merchant carried it out of the city ahead of the Ottoman invasion! The sheer audacity of claiming thousands of years of secrecy and inverting a mapmaker’s words to support the conspiracy is almost breathtaking.
 
The remainder of the lecture reviews material from America Before about a putative spiritual connection between the ancient cultures of the Old and New Worlds, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, and material from Fingerprints and Magicians rehashing Ignatius Donnelly’s arguments that Atlanteans settled the ancient world after the destruction of their homeland. As I’ve pointed out before, this material derives from a Late Antique reworking of apocryphal myths about the Watchers and the Flood (e.g., the story of Philemon and/or Hermes Trismegistus restarting civilization in post-Flood Egypt, preserved in medieval Arabic-language lore), and the Younger Dryas cataclysm claims that Hancock often makes are, at root, Bible fan fiction given a semi-scientific gloss.