Just finished watching "Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix. They go over this kind of discovery
It's quite speculative, but also really fascinating. Even if what they claim is not completely right, it definitely shows how the current accepted understanding of the history of the Americas needs an overhaul and a lot more research
PS: if you like this stuff, also check out the movie "The Lost City of Z"
The show seemed very convincing, not in the speculative theories about an ancient precursor civilization necessarily, but definitely in some of the findings they show
Do you have any resources you could share that debunk the specific things they show? Like the rock paintings they dated to 10k years ago, or some of the other digs that were dated as 20-25k years old?
Are you saying it is all made up? Or just some of it?
This is precisely what I'm looking for too. All critiques of Hancock I can find with my feeble googling skills seem to be focused on unimportant stuff such as encouraging uses of psychedelics and accusations of racism.
But what's far, far more important, is debunking evidences like rock painting dating, geoglyphs dating. That thing on Rapa Nui about statues being more-than-half buried seemed really intriguing. The speculation he makes about why that might be so (spoiler alert: that famous lost civilization being there first) seemed interesting to me. Is there a specific debunking of that somewhere?
I'd also be interested in specific debunking of his theory that incas didn't have the capabilities to do some of the rock walls they've made. You know, with heated rocks and all. That seemed interesting too.
The moai are half buried because that's just what tends to happen in erosive environments. Sediment buries things.
As for specifically debunking his LGM speculation, there isn't much because no one with public credentials wants to spend time and effort on it in the current academic environment. You can find debunkings in popular media (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A) and a few scattered "popular" academic publications like the SAA's special edition on Hancock's pseudoarchaeology (http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=634462&p=10&view...), but most of the information is buried in papers and books that don't discuss him at all.
There's just flat out no actual evidence for (virtually?) all of his speculation and you can't prove a negative. Hancock's MO is to take 1-2 anomalous results and spin out media around "these dates don't line up, so let's speculate about something entirely unrelated". The rapa nui episodes in Ancient Apocalypse S2 talk to one actual archaeologist, who doesn't even support the dates discussed in the episodes. They were just anomalous banana phytoliths that were present from sediment intrusions. Dating is hard and this stuff happens regularly, especially in areas without much active research like Rapa Nui. The standard understanding is post-1200, as documented in papers like https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105094 and https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03902-8
On a tangent, isn't that a signal of inaccuracy? Accurate people - i.e., committed to be truthful and correct - are very careful and nuanced about what they claim, make weaknesses as clear as strengths, and are careful to not be too convincing, because that can distort their reader's critical thinking.
At least, that's the ideal. But why be especially convincing - why be more convincing than your empirical evidence?
That book is really an incredible eye-opening read, I strongly recommend it.
Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything spends quite a bit of time with complex societies in the Americas as well, and is certainly worth a read as well.
Hancock is great at showing civilizations that I would have never heard of if it wasn't for his "journalism" (that's he's self-appointed title). He's a good communicator and I feel like I learn at lot from his Netflix shows.
However the whole "forgotten civilization" AKA lost city of Atlantis, just seems too far fetched and forced into the various episodes. That part of it makes for good entertainment at least.
In general, I'm a supporter of his work and look forward to further episodes.
Basically Hancock show lots of interesting and fascinating archaeological sites which is great especially since a lot of these are things that most viewers didn't know about before. But sadly he chooses to use these site only to present his theory for which he's doesn't have any actual evidence.
Thank you for that video. Unfortunately the guy spends the first part of it just hating on Hancock, which I don’t think is a good way to debunk stuff
I was also hoping the guy would find whatever papers or publications were made by the scientists Hancock interviews throughout the series, but he’s mainly just rebutting the concept of an ancient advanced civilization (which yes, is very speculative, and even Hancock says that himself in the series)
Clearly the guy has a lot of detractors, his grand theories are speculative and they certainly have many holes
But it also seems like even mainstream archaeology is also, to some degree, speculative (we can’t really know exactly what happened in the past). And that some of the research that Hancock is supporting his theories on, might actually be right
Anyway, thank you again. I will take Hancock’s most grandiose claims with a grain of salt, but I’m also going to keep an open mind about alternative theories of how the Americas might have been first populated by humans (especially the Amazon)
One the one hand, experts pile up pretty hard on this series and on M. Hancock. Maybe deservedly, I don't know.
But I'm still sour about COVID where experts piled up pretty hard on the lab leak theory. When early on, experts were telling us that science said that masks were ineffective. They were adamant.
Here, the very insistence of those experts, the aggressive tone of the wikipedia page give me an air of deja vu.
You mean by the history we are told in the Ancient Apocalypse series? No, probably not.
But that's the point! New information such as these discoveries in the Amazon show that the stories told by "mainstream archeology" can't explain the reality of the modern world either!
Where does that leave us? I don't know, but curiosity should be encouraged.
? How do you figure? The idea of "fully explaining" the modern world seems a ridiculous concept but it's not like we have alternatives to the concept of looking to the past in a methodical manner.
The slow movingness of Science with its method and peer reviewing definitely fights against new ideas becoming accepted overnight, but we do get there, and glomming onto personalities with unaccepted ideas will hurt your 'correctness' more than help it.
I watched some of the first season and was actually already open to all the alt archaeology stuff with the precision arguments people make, but the more I looked the more clear it was just BS.
I think the biggest thing about the old world people miss (and thus makes alt archeology so attractive) is the mass use of slaves and general lack of caring about human suffering.
All these people that think big archaeology is wrong because of gobekli Teppe and they now have a couple seasons of the Netflix show referenced in this thread
It's quite speculative, but also really fascinating. Even if what they claim is not completely right, it definitely shows how the current accepted understanding of the history of the Americas needs an overhaul and a lot more research
PS: if you like this stuff, also check out the movie "The Lost City of Z"