Review of "Ancient Apocalypse: The Americas"

​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.

​In this review, I’ll discuss each of the series’ six forty-minute episodes, each labeled as a “chapter” rather than given a formal title. There might have been a time when I would have spread this out over six days of analysis, but that time has passed. Dozens of Hancock’s critics have already lined up for a point-by-point rebuttal, and the episodes are divided in an entirely arbitrary way—it’s basically a four-hour documentary randomly cut up for streaming.
 
Chapter I
As with the first series, the second is beautifully produced with dramatic cinematography, soaring music, and smooth graphics—all in service of claims that have never been fact-checked. The opening minutes, when Hancock discusses the Clovis-first hypothesis as a dogma that “had been held so firmly and for so long” that no archaeologist dare question it, are a case in point. Clovis-first lasted barely thirty years; it has been gone nearly that long, and yet Hancock, discussing what “we were taught” in “the 1990s” is deeply enmeshed in the intellectual climate of the twentieth century, as though the period from 1955 to 1995 is frozen in time and everyone else is trapped in it, too.
 
Anyhow, Chapter I explores the discovery of Ice Age human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, dating back 23,000 years, long before Clovis. This is not a secret—it’s on the White Sands National Park’s website. “We’re going to have to completely change the story of the peopling of the Americas in light of this new evidence,” Hancock said, though my archaeology textbook when I was in school in 2000 already included information about the likelihood of sea-born movements of people into the Americas thousands of years before Clovis. “Archaeologists are opening their eyes and their minds to the possibility of a much older human presence!” Hancock insists—but, again, this has been the case for at least twenty-five years and is completely standard information to anyone whose intellectual framework isn’t frozen in the late twentieth century.
 
Hancock is a little slippery in this episode, conflating the peopling of the Americas—by humans who hadn’t invented shoes—with his advanced world-mapping, monument-building Ice Age super-civilization, and hoping that rants against archaeologists and bombastic music will paper over the switch. His singular “civilization” subtly became “civilizations” (the original returns later, in diminished form, as guys on boats who like stars and rocks) and his ancient apocalypse of 10,500 BCE transformed into a general inquiry into “human history.”
 
Then Keanu Reeves appears for no discernable reason halfway through the episode to tell Hancock that he is “on a quest to teach and bring understanding” while Hancock repeats his standard lines about his greatness, his tenacity, and three decades of trying to recover lost wisdom. For Hancock, “the past is all about mystery,” Hancock says in the most honest moment of the show. It’s not about answers—it’s about the frisson of excitement—Reeves even says at one point that Hancock makes boring old history seem “exciting”—that comes from working on an insoluble puzzle.
 
In the back half of the episode, Hancock travels to the Amazon to view geoglyphs. Hundreds litter the Amazon, and they are believed to date back to around 1000 BCE to 1000 CE, and Brazilian researchers believe they were ritual sites for communicating with otherworldly beings. Once again, though, while Hancock presents this as shocking new proof that archaeologists were wrong about everything, archaeologists have been researching human habitation of the Amazon for decades, and the geoglyphs, along with agricultural sites, have been known and investigated since I was a child.
 
Since nothing in this episode has anything to do with Atlantis or comets, “Chapter 1,” is basically a PBS documentary spiced with some angry rants about the very archaeologists who provide the information used in the episode.
 
Chapter II
The second chapter returns to the question of how many geoglyphs and earthworks are in the Amazon, a question that, while interesting, has little to do with the supposed question of Atlantis and comets. Elsewhere in the Brazilian Amazon, Hancock visits a ridge called Serra do Paituna, which is covered in red and yellow rock art. Hancock speaks with Christophere Sean Davis, the author of a retracted paper on the site that falsely claimed they served as an Ice Age solar calendar, based on faulty measurements. Now, Davis is on Hancock’s show to tell him that the site dates back to around 11,000 BCE—fascinating in its own right, but nothing like the high civilization of Atlantis. Other rock art is said to date back 25,000 years, and Hancock notes that the end of the rock art era, around 10,500 BCE, seems to coincide with his comet strike date and with indigenous myths of a flood. (The myths bear a striking resemblance to Noah’s Flood, which likely contaminated them in the colonial era.) It becomes clear that Hancock’s thesis now isn’t about a lost high civilization but simply about how far back he can claim hunter-gatherers roamed the Americas. It’s not quite as compelling.
 
We get around the comet at one point, and Hancock half-heartedly tries to claim a wheel-shaped piece of rock art is a picture of the comet, but this doesn’t hold much interest anymore. Instead, he speaks about a “DNA signal” from across the Pacific, and rather than get into it all again, I’ll just quote what I said in reviewing his chapter on this in his book: “the scholarly literature indicates that the Amazonian DNA findings are not consistent with a relatively recent trans-Pacific migration but must have been present in the founding populations.” That is—early Americans descended from a population that originated in Southeast Asia or Melanesia. But Hancock has learned nothing over the years and instead visits Easter Island, which wasn’t settled until no earlier than 800 CE, and possibly as late as 1200 CE, and has nothing to do with ancient “Pacific” DNA in South America.
 
Hancock avoids the dates for Easter Island and instead calls all research on the island and its statues “speculation.” A long segment on the moai offers nothing much of substance beyond the island’s myth of a flood and repeats material from Heaven’s Mirror (1998) and its TV version, Quest for the Lost Civilization. But the collapse of Rapa Nui’s population and culture and centuries of colonialism and Christianization make it difficult to draw firm conclusions about exactly how much of flood story with its culture heroes is independent of the Noachian flood legend, and Hancock chooses not to deal with this question but to speculate instead that some unevidenced lost race secretly populated Easter Island long before the Polynesians. Hancock scoffs at the idea that primitive Polynesians could have carved statues themselves and says they merely repositioned older statues. The trouble with that is the moai are similar to other Polynesian statues across the Pacific. Even if we grant Hancock that Easter Islanders lacked carving skills, we needn’t imagine Atlantis doing it ten thousand years earlier (has he heard of erosion?) but only that more Polynesians made the trek to Easter Island from where they were already carving similar statues.
 
Hancock finishes the episode by claiming the moai heads poking up from the ground were buried by thousands of years of sedimentation.
 
Chapter III
The third chapter presents the claim that bananas were introduced to Easter Island 3,000 years ago. (Easter Island isn’t really part of the Americas, but it counts, I guess, because it belongs to Chile.) Recent research has discovered banana evidence in Vanuatu around that time, perhaps suggesting a brief period of exploration across the Pacific that did not take permanent hold on Easter Island. But even if we accept this unchallenged, bananas on Rapa Nui around 1200 BCE has no connection to a lost civilization in 10,500 BCE—though Graham Hancock says that there could be an Ice Age settlement that left no trace whatsoever. He returns to his argument from Underworld that his lost civilization vanished under the waves when the continental shelf was flooded at the end of the Ice Age, something none of the underwater archaeology done anywhere in the world has ever found any trace of.
 
Hancock also bashes the Easter Island people for having a writing system, calling it a “paradox” that they could have thought up something like that all on their own. Therefore, he speculates that the “actual language used by the lost civilization I’ve been searching for” is preserved on Easter Island’s rongorongo tablets. Repeating material from Heaven’s Mirror, he points to a basalt platform as too perfect to be the work of dim ol’ Eastern Islanders, so it had to be the work of a lost civilization, and then he suggests that any ancient place whose name refers to the navel is a lost civilization’s sacred outpost.
 
Hancock says that in the Ice Age, a chain of islands led from Rapa Nui to Paracas in Peru, directly to the spot where the geoglyph known as the Candelabra of the Andes now sits. It dates to 200 BCE, but Hancock lets that slip by so he can repeat Spanish accounts of the myths of Viracocha, the culture hero gave civilization to ancient South Americans. Hancock overemphasizes the idea that Viracocha arrived following a cataclysm that destroyed civilization—he was, in standard account, a creator god who created the heavens and the earth and then wandered it dispensing civilization. Thus, the comparison between Viracocha and the king who founded Rapa Nui isn’t as exact as Hancock pretends.
 
Keanu Reeves pops up again to agree that myths encode prehistoric global wisdom.
 
Hancock then returns to Sacsayhuaman in Peru to marvel at its megalithic architecture and express bafflement that such a thing could be built. Sacsayhuaman is usually attributed to the Inca, though some archaeologists attribute it to a pre-Inca culture dating back a century or two earlier. Hancock argues that the Inca weren’t able to build such monuments (citing a Spanish source writing that the Inca couldn’t move a large rock decades after the Conquest, after many elites had died and much knowledge lost) so it has to be from the Ice Age. But as you can see from the photo below, most cyclopean architecture isn’t made from humongous blocks, and if you conceded that the Inca and their predecessors could move and shape these smaller blocks perfectly, then it is no stretch to understand that they could shape bigger ones, too. Hancock calls it, instead, “an enigma we cannot explain.”

​Indeed, at one point, Hancock stands next to these very stones, many barely two feet high, marveling that they are “humongous” and listens to a Jesus Gamarra, a “vitrification” advocate and son of Alfredo Gamarra, who believed ancient sites were built when Earth had a different orbit around the sun and different gravity (!), tell him they were poured from a liquid. Uh-huh. Makes the quarries rather redundant.
 
Hancock cites global cyclopean architecture to argue it is a “technology” from a lost past. The reason for the polygonal cyclopean construction, however, is twofold: (a) it’s easier to bang rocks into shapes similar to what you are starting from than it is to cut perfectly straight lines and 90-degree angles, and (b) the irregular pattern is more stable and will stand up to shifting earth and earthquakes better than regular blocks. We only use highly regular blocks because they are easier to package, transport by ship or cart, and move with machines—issues that didn’t apply at Sacsayhuaman.
 
Chapter IV
Jesus Gamarra keeps blathering about vitrified rocks, and Hancock seems to be all-in on the idea of stone being superheated, shaped, and then cooled into temples and walls. But if you could do that, why bother shaping blocks at all? Like Erich von Däniken in Gold of the Gods, Hancock goes on a tour of South American sites supposedly made by vitrifying stone, though even Hancock notes that there are other explanations for narrow tunnels with a polished surface, such as centuries of polishing from people, animals, and goods moving through them. Hancock calls South American stonework “impossible.”
 
Hancock then repeats the Viracocha claims again, adding that the Spanish recorded a legend that Viracocha used a heat source to make stone blocks “light as a feather” so they could be floated into walls. This is a badly mangled version of a fable Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa recorded in chapter 9 of his History of the Incas:

​[Viracocha], falling on his knees on some plain ground, with his hands clasped, fire from above came down upon those on the hill, and covered all the place, burning up the earth and stones like straw. Those bad men were terrified at the fearful fire. They came down from the hill, and sought pardon from Viracocha for their sin. Viracocha was moved by compassion. He went to the flames and put them out with his staff. But the hill remained quite parched up, the stones being rendered so light by the burning that a very large stone which could not have been carried on a cart, could be raised easily by one man. (trans. Clements Markham)

​Not the story Hancock gives in the show.
 
Somehow or another—I admit I am not following the leaps back and forth between sites—we are back at the Amazon earthworks, where Hancock discusses new research into the cities and settlements of the Amazon a second time. This time we’re talking about terra preta, the soil resulting from ancient slash-and-burn agriculture. The people who lived in the Amazon managed their world, but Hancock goes father than the evidence allows and suggests that the majority of the Amazon was intentionally planted, not that the selection of trees favored by humans is the result of repeated slash-and-burn cycles and selecting among plants that grew atop fallow or abandoned fields. Either way, it’s not really relevant to the lost Ice Age civilization since even Hancock admits that this process occurred nearly 10,000 years later.
 
The episode ends with Hancock discussing ayahuasca and suggesting that ancient knowledge came from a supernatural realm accessible through altered states of consciousness.
 
Chapter V
The fifth episode continues Hancock’s advocacy for ayahuasca and his belief that geometric-patterned art worldwide is inspired by psychedelics. Hancock covered this in his book Supernatural (2005), and there is nothing terribly controversial about the idea that ancient people used psychedelic and hallucinogenic substances. Hancock concludes that Amazonian earthworks, being geometric, must have been inspired by psychedelic visions, which is a bit of a stretch. Shapes happen to be one of the most important ways humans connect lines together, and circles and squares are the most logical enclosures.
 
Hancock angrily insists that North American mounds must be connected to South American earthworks, despite being separated by time, distance, and culture, because they also use squares and circles. Coincidence, he says, cannot explain the astonishing occurrence of squares and circles being deployed in two locations. Hancock says that these earthworks all encode astronomical alignments, which he also believes cannot be a coincidence since only a “lost civilization of the Ice Age” would have thought to look up at the sky.
 
He visits the Ancestral Pueblo (a.k.a. Anasazi) site of Pueblo Bonito, with its tall buildings and circular kivas, and again insists that it is unfathomable why indigenous people would go to “such lengths” to build a big building. Even he, however, can’t deny that the trees used in its construction prove that it was built starting around 850 CE, so it can’t be an Ice Age great house. “Why did they build all these structures?” Hancock asks. He also asks why they bothered to align buildings to the 18.6-year lunar cycle. Recognizing them as spiritual structures, he then speculates that all circular ancient structures, like Göbekli Tepe, are connected to a lost Ice Age spiritual system related underground shelters used to hide from the air burst caused by a fragmented comet, and he argues that Chaco Canyon great houses were a ritual lunar calendar spread across the desert. (This is not really controversial; even PBS did a documentary on Chaco Canyon’s many solar and lunar alignments—and they didn’t need a lost civilization to explain how Native people could look at the sky.) He concludes that there was a “worldwide project” to align buildings to the sun and the moon, which, I guess, wouldn’t have been important or noticeable to anyone without Atlantis insisting on it.
 
The episode ends in Palenque where Hancock pretends to be surprised that Maya structures were aligned to equinoxes and solstices. “But why would they go to so much trouble?” Hancock asks, apparently believing indigenous people to be naturally lazy. It’s not really that much trouble; it just takes planning, which is fairly standard for sacred and religious sites.
 
Chapter VI
Finally, we come to the last episode. By this point, I am somewhere between bored with the general lack of engaging content and angry at the borderline racist questioning of indigenous intelligence and capability. We resume in Palenque, with Hancock visiting at the spring equinox to observe solar alignments. We hear about the legend of the feathered serpent god Kukulkan (Quetzalcoatl to the Aztec) and his astronomical connections, including the famous spring equinox snake illusion at Chichén Itza’s El Castillo. Hancock reverts back to his Fingerprints of the Gods days by claiming Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, Oannes (from Babylon), and Osiris were all the same figure, a traveling emissary from the lost civilization—though their stories bear no great similarity beyond being culture heroes. None of them survived the destruction of a lost civilization, despite Hancock’s claims that all are said to be cataclysm survivors. (That idea is a legacy of medieval Arabic-language pyramid lore, adapting Noachian flood myths.) Ed Barnhardt, who praised Hancock on Lex Fridman’s podcast recently, shows up to talk about the Maya here, and now we know why he praised Hancock’s research so effusively.
 
Hancock discusses the Maya calendar’s cycles at great length, including the idea of cyclical destruction of the Earth. He discusses with Barnhardt the Maya obsession with time and his claim that the Maya calendar is a legacy from a lost civilization that “needed” large numbers. (So how does he explain that it is built upon earlier calendars with shorter counts?) Barnhardt then, quite shockingly for an archaeologist but not for his other job as an Ancient Aliens talking head, claims all of archaeology is built on speculation and that there are “few facts” in the field of archaeology, apparently declining to identify evidence such as artifacts, their position, and their dating as facts and confusing them with interpretation, which emerges from theory.
 
This leads to Hancock engaging in some revisionist history, now saying it was “never correct” that the Maya saw 2012 as the end of the world; however, in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) Hancock wrote explicitly that the Maya “believed that the cycle will come to an end, amid global destruction, on 4 Ahu 3 Kankin; 23 December 2012 in our calendar. […] So, at any rate, thought the Maya.” Now, Hancock revises the Maya apocalypse to refer to “the eighty-year period between 2000 and 2080,” letting him serve as a prophet of doom again predicting that we live in an age of collapse. “That is our experience of the world today,” Hancock said, claiming that the Maya accurately foresaw a “world-changing apocalypse.”
 
Hancock talks about the widespread notion of the Milky Way as a river of souls to the afterlife, and Keanu Reeves pops in once more to nod in agreement. (While the Milky Way as a celestial river is widespread in mythology worldwide, it’s hard to draw universal conclusions, even in the Americas, as there are hundreds of different myths and legends in addition to this one.) We hear some more about calendrical lore from Davis, who implies a “deep” lore about the sun, and then Hancock gives his peroration about a “common source” standing behind similar shapes, colors, stories, and interests worldwide, that source being something like Atlantis rather than the common creativity, genius, and curiosity of the human mind.
 
We end with Keanu Reeves giggling giddily about Hancock “taking on every childhood misconception about the world” and Hancock asking what will “come to light” next.
 
That’s about right: an actor incoherently rambling about imagined lies he half understands with an angry old man who proudly takes credit for work real archaeologists are doing, all while swirling camerawork and bombastic music take the place of evidence--Ancient Apocalypse in a nutshell. Look, if you want to argue that Stone Age people had myths and legends and made observations of the sun and moon and stars and some of this knowledge passed down to descendant people, that is justifiable, if not fully provable. It is not the same as claiming vast cities of stone vanished without a trace while survivors paddled their boats to the far corners of the Earth over a period of thousands of years to seed science and star-lore among benighted people. All told, this was a duller trip than the first; the newness wore off with the first season, and even if you are inclined to a lost civilization, Hancock struggled to make his claims resonate as deeply the second time.