> Hancock is a crank that thinks Atlantis existed in Antarctica.
Hancock claims to have been misrepresented about this by the BBC in an interview many years ago, he explains it here [0]. I think if you asked him today, he would say the most likely location for the ruins of Atlantis is somewhere off the coast between southwest Spain [1] and the Celtic Shelf [2]. While certainly outside the mainstream, that is not an unreasonable hypothesis. In my experience, when you start to really research ancient civilizations you often find the mainstream view a bit unsatisfactory. In searching for alternate explanations however, you quickly end up in the land of fringe theories. Hancock often presents these ideas in a more favorable light than what the evidence supports, but there’s also some good history mixed in and he doesn’t go off into ancient aliens territory like many of the people who write about these topics.
> Hancock is a crank that thinks Atlantis existed in Antarctica.
To be fair, it must be pointed out that the linked article, though hosted at the domain of the crank Hancock, was written by another author. That other author, however, is a legal translator by profession and only decided to dabble in Maltese archeology, so she is hardly any better.
He's not a crank, he's a journalist. Its his job as a journalist to generate interest in the subject - and in that regard, Hancock has done a lot to bring people into the subject who otherwise would've been ignoring it for the authorities ..
Just as fascinating are the seemingly endless list of real civilizations and cultures we seldom here about (often because they're in poorer parts of the world). Trypillian is one of my favorites ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_cul...) but a good starting point for others is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory#By_region