Ancient Apocalypse reviewed

Apparently this is the most dangerous thing on netflix. I of course don’t watch netflix, but I did watch this. I am familiar with Hancock from watching Joe Rogan shows while lifting weights. I also read one of his books (I think the Atlantis one) as a sort of amusing piece of science fiction with some bits of facts thrown in. That said, guys like Graham Hancock and John Anthony West (who inspired many of his ideas) often turn out to be right about certain things. Gubekli Tepe is a lot older than the mainstream archeologists said for years; just like these guys and other younger dryas types said. Ayahuasca wake and bake Graham Hancock was right, and normie archaeologists were wrong. They might also be right about stuff like the sphinx water erosion hypothesis; I have no real way of adjudicating this, other than noting that people have been saying it for a while and it might very well be true.

 

Archaeology is a wonderful subject, but it has an ideology, and it is presently mostly the kind of thing made to appeal to “Head Girl” IFLS types who memorized all the “correct” answers. Those sorts of people are always a squalid clerisy, and they almost never figure anything new out. It wasn’t always true; it used to be a field for adventurers, treasure hunters, freebooters, nationalists and religious believers. It used, for example, to be orthodoxy that the Great Flood was a real thing. Every Mediterranean culture from the Hebrews to the Greeks had the exact same legend with an Ark and the animals and everything. I found it flabbergasting being reminded of this by reading Lucian a few months ago.  Modern archaeologists haven’t read the ancient Greeks and probably think that people who read the bible are primitive, barely sentient barbarians. Yet the flood story is not only in Ancient Greek stories, Hebrew stories, Sumerian stories, it is rather annoyingly persistent in Hindu mythology, Zoroastrian mythology,  there are even American Indian flood myths. I assume archaeologists wave their hands and say fluffy bullshit about early farming communities being close to rivers which flood blah blah “I fucking love science” blah. But at one point in time people thought it was very reasonable to take old legends at face value and go looking for the stuff people wrote about. That’s certainly an ideological choice: we must recognize that we’re making one today by not looking for stuff the ancients wrote about. It is at least interesting this cultural commonality; a reasonable man could assume at least for the Mediterranean cultures perhaps it came from a knowable event.

In this series of videos, generally speaking, Mr. Hancock is either hamming it up for the rubes, or is an extremely credulous person. Hancock also doesn’t seem to think much of the ancients; his intuition is that anything old and impressive looking must have come from some other more advanced civilization. My own view is that people are pretty smart, and in the absence of distractions like ipotatoes and television, they get up to all kinds of interesting engineering shennanegins. I don’t think it is at all surprising people build things which have precise astronomical alignments (and in fact the birthday paradox makes them inevitable even when they’re not doing them on purpose), nor do I think it is weird that people cut and moved around giant stones before the bronze age. I could do it if I was really bored or had a large supply of slaves or enthusiastic followers. In fact when I was a teenager smoking weed and getting drunk in the woods, me and my friends did minor league megalithic architecture. In presence of an actual ideology or religion (or even sober engineers, riggers or a vague sense of purpose) we would have done a hell of a lot more.

That said it is obvious there are lost civilizations. It is obvious people can forget stuff that happened before: we know that humans have forgotten fairly important things that happened before. The Romans were arguably more civilized than we are in many ways, and some of their technologies are still mysterious to us. There are civilizations in South America which are unknown to official archaeological science. Even I know of one not discovered by archaeologists yet: this despite my having never even visited South America.

Episode1: Gunung Padang -classic example of where weirdo amateurs were right and mainstream dudes were wrong for a long time. There are these stone log things in Indonesia which happen naturally, so westerners thought it was just some weird formation of them. Well, it turns out people took the logs from a fair distance and made stuff with them. I have no way of evaluating the age of these things; everyone’s pretty sure it’s at least 7000 years old; maybe (according to a local expert) 23,000 years old, which would be really bonkers. It’s pretty cool; I only knew of it in vague hand wavey ways. I don’t think it means there was lost Atlantis whatever though: I just think people 7000 years ago were bored and built something cool to go with their local religion, which for all I know involved getting drunk and smoking weed in the woods.

Episode2: big messican pyramid. yes, it’s there. Yes there seems to be an older structure inside it. We of course have no fucking clue about the culture which did it, but it’s kind of hard for me to attribute it to some pre-ice age cultures since we know more or less when they built it: not too long ago. He hams it up with honkey trumpet sounds as if “pre Aztec” means post-Atlantis or something. I have an acquaintance who used to give guided tours of an actual lost civilization’s abandoned city in the jungle in South America. There’s probably dozens of such things, and every now and then people are reminded of it when some mainstream archeologist discovers them. It’s not clear that they are particularly old: most pre-Columbian architecture is pretty recent compared to, say, Roman ruins. Hancock also mentions the legend of Quetzalcoatl, which is one of those weird things that mainstream Archeologists prefer to ignore or wave away, despite the fact that it gave Cortés a huge leg up in the conquest of Mexico (Bernal Diaz de Castillo’s book is literally one of the most glorious things ever written: heroic men of the west destroying a filthy stone-age slaver empire of human-sacrifice pagan cannibals -and yes, my description is precisely correct). Hancock says of course this story is evidence of ancient civilizations, but he doesn’t talk about what’s weird about Quetzalcoatl: he was a white dude who showed up in a place where people rarely have white dude features such as beards and pale skin. Anyway some dudes he talk to say “maybe its really super old and you’re right Graham.” BFD. Cool pyramid though.

Episode3:  Ggantija and megaliths of Malta. This one I knew about, as a friend of mine visited recently, but holy cow I never realized how cool and gianormous it was. Hancock’s argument here is “ancient Atlantis” and “it must be much older because the ancient Maltese were hunter-gatherer NPCs.” This is as I say above more or less nonsense. If Maltese people qualified for affirmative action, this would be considered a deeply racist argument (not that there is anything wrong with that). Seriously, people get bored and make weird giant things all the time. Sometimes these things even turn into a racket. Imagine yourself as a neolithic barbarian whose family built some cool stone thing after eating the wrong mushrooms or drinking too much fermented barley water. People would come, sacrifice animals there because it is a cool thing, and you’d get to eat them and otherwise dispose of the sacrifices of delicious protons. You put people to work making bigger and more awesome religious edifices. Just because the native people were lame for a while in the history of Malta doesn’t mean they were always lame: look at Easter Island. The crazy Tiki-head edifeces there were constructed pretty recently by stone age Polynesians, and more or less we saw how it went bad. People developed a religion involving building these big stone heads. Then they had a civilizational collapse, because building stone heads isn’t adaptive behavior during periods of drought or whatever, and the level of civilization was much lower by the time Europeans showed up and enslaved the survivors. Hancock goes on to make wild assertions that he thinks it is part of some kind of Atlantis thing during the last Ice Age for basically no reason other than he wants it to be true. In furtherance of this he interviews a Maltese pediatrician who writes Atlantis books and agrees with him, while making it seem like he is a doctor of Archaeology, which is …. deceptive at the very least. Also some quack who talks about Sirius. Fuck you Graham Hancock. Mind you I don’t think it matters if you have a Ph.D. in archaeology to speculate about or do archaeology, but pretending like someone does have such a credential who obviously doesn’t is a pathetic and ridiculous swindle.That said, Malta is pretty weird place and it aint a bad tourist guide to people interested in old stuff. If/when I visit, I will certainly review this episode and make notes for my trip.

Episode4: Bimini megaliths. This is kind of cool; something I head heard about when I was a 10 year old ancient astronaut nut reading Von Daniken books. Hancock and his pals go diving there and see weird square rocks. Maps are produced alleging there were maps made of the weird square rock place. I dunno I guess Spaniards got maps from flying saucer space nazis. This is foolish. California showed up on maps for centuries as an island. Cartography didn’t have google maps back then so they’d make lots of mistakes. The map is all screwed up … unless you go back in time to the ice age in which case it looks kind of sort of similar (except how different everything else would have been). Or yah, something looks like a shark in the atoll.  Fuck you Graham Hancock.

 

Episode5: Gubekli Tepe. This is a dissapointment in that here is a place where Hancock and friends are spectacularly right about its ancientness. But they then go farther than assert (again) that it must be remnants of a more advanced civilization, I guess because some of the sculptures are weirdly intricate and modern looking. Of course lots of old stone age paintings and sculptures are intricate and modern looking: as I keep saying, people are pretty cool and get up to all kinds of creative things in absence of ipotatoes and television. The monuments there are very creepy and interesting looking, but I bet we find lots of such things in coming centuries, because making stone monuments and walls and such isn’t as advanced as people make it out to be.

Episode6: Mound Builder culture. Originally this was thought to be quite recent; nuts like Hancock and HP Lovecraft turned out to be right that it was much more ancient. We thought it was recent because de Soto met some of the inhabitants in the 1500s. Here’s an unambiguous (I think) win for Hancock: there are stands of trees obscuring the sunrise over some features of some of the mounds. Hancock grouses about it, I think with good reason. Also the people who run the place wouldn’t give him permission to film there basically because he is Graham Hancock: this is far more fascistic than anything Hancock has ever done. Hancock may be a weirdo or even an unreconstructed mountebank; that is no excuse for banning him from a public place. He trots out the usual tribe of weirdos who agree with him, and somehow “ancient civilizations” it, despite it being obviously not as ancient as his younger dryas idea. It’s still a win for the non-conformist Atlantis type people for being closer to correct than the mainstream archaeologists for literal decades.

Episode7: Catacoumbs of Cappadocia. This is something I first became aware of reading Junger’s “Aladdin’s Problem,” and I have wanted to visit since I became aware of it. This is also a particularly moronic subject for ancient civilizations BS as most of it was built in Byzantine days by Christian people who wrote about building it. Sure some of it was there before: it was there because it’s incredibly easy to do in such stone (you can do it with fingers), and there are lots of good reasons to live in a comfy cave dwelling in arid and ridiculously hot Cappadocia before the invention of air conditioning. Gypsies in southern Spain make similar structures in chalk; no ancient civilizations involved, it’s just bloody hot out and caves are cool and comfy and easy to carve out of soft stone. There’s an interesting legend he mentions which may or may not relate to this structure, then he proceeds to relate it to things in the younger dryas which is certainly not true. This is one of those things where the actual history of these catacoumbs is vastly more interesting than Hancock’s ideas. They were forgotten about because of an actual lost civilization which was wiped out: that of Christianity in Anatolia. The Christians had been using these catacoumbs right up until modern times and were forgotten for decades after the population transfers after Greek independence. Fuck you Graham Hancock.

Episode8: Channeled Scablands. This is pretty cool geological place as it is a place with actual catastrophic flooding. There’s really nothing archaeology about it other than noticing past catastrophic flooding occurred in different places. I suppose he’s implying it had something to do with Younger Dryas theory but really that’s not true. Joe Rogan shows up; he totally doesn’t belong there and I wish he stayed home.

 

All in all I found this documentary to be both entertaining and occasionally informative … educational even. I had never seen any of these structures in person, and some of them I had not heard of, despite having a modest interest in this sort of thing (I enjoy hiking to megalithic structures in my adoptive country). It is very bizarre that Hancock’s documentary produced the degree of “muh science” caterwauling it did; I can only guess that it was some kind of artificially drummed up outrage for marketing purposes. The fact that they went so far as to label goofy hippy Graham Hancock as some kind of white supremacist is really inexplicable otherwise. Believing in ancient civilizations, including European ones like Atlantis is absolutely not “white supremacy.” It’s just common sense. It is lame thinking our ancient ancestors were dumbkopfs but of course, “IFLS” ding dongs expressing outrage that Hancock has ideas more consistent with 19th century views are doing precisely the same thing: our immediate ancestors from those days were probably smarter than modern ipotato clutching hobbits are, and they certainly had more contact with hard scrabble reality to understand how things get built and how societies work.

The outrage porn worked on me I guess; I otherwise do not have much interest in ancient alien tier documentaries. If actual archaeologists were secure in their knowledge and positions as experts, they couldn’t possibly be offended by something like this.  Of course it is possible that modern archaeologists really do think Graham Hancock is some kind of contemporary Ahnenerbe, in which case they are deserving of far more scorn than Graham Hancock’s admittedly fanciful ideas.  Should some great archaeological savant actually believe such things, they might consider  actually engaging with the ideas, and showing why their ideas are superior to those of Graham Hancock. Blubbering outrage may get more clicks, but it adds zero to the scientific or educational process and only makes the people who do it look silly.