It’s important to start strong. That’s true of a lot of things in life, but doubly so when you’re an archaeologist starting off a conversation with Graham Hancock, the famed pseudoarchaeology author, in a venue such as the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
For the last decade, scholars and experts have dealt with misinformation and pseudoscience either by trying to ignore it in order not to amplify it or by debunking it once it has spread far enough. But recent misinformation research highlights the importance of prebunking rather than debunking. An audience primed with real facts is armed to understand the issues with pseudoscientific narratives.
The agreement that I could go first was the main precondition I demanded before sitting down with Hancock on this high-profile event. I’d arrived in Austin, Texas, after writing a viral thread on X and an op-ed critiquing his popular Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse, from its lost Atlantis civilisation as an explanation for human prehistory to Hancock’s many conspiratorial attacks on archaeologists.
My starting slide was aimed at piquing the audience’s interest: ancient Athenian pots painted with erotic scenes, which were exported to Italy. Archaeological narratives are built on patterns found in millions of artefacts based on when they are from and where they are found. Documentaries on TV can’t capture that, instead focusing on a few famous, picturesque monuments. A snapshot not a landscape.
Media and journalism typically focus on the “oldest” or most grand findings. But the truth is in the trash. It’s the enormous quantity of waste we produce that reveals humanity’s activity throughout the ages: the humble remains of meals, discarded tools and abandoned spaces.
It’s the quantity of actual archaeology, an enormous body of positive evidence, that proves the negative. There is no lost civilisation from the Ice Age that was global and used advanced technology to build monuments or grow crops. A civilisation that Hancock has stated was “as advanced as our civilisation was, say in the late 18th or early 19th century”.
He claims archaeologists haven’t adequately explored the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater to disprove the existence of this civilisation. However, in each of these areas archaeologists have surveyed or excavated hundreds of thousands of sites. And the tens of thousands of Ice Age sites found show hunter-gatherer people resiliently thriving in difficult conditions.
It’s the clear timeline for the domestication of plants, determined by the changes in scars from where seeds are attached to plants, that demonstrates there was no agriculture in the Ice Age. In wild plants, seeds fall easily to propagate themselves, but once humans control their reproductive life cycle by harvesting and then planting them, the seeds evolve a tougher attachment (the rachis) to the plant as hanging on tightly is adaptively beneficial. Pollen cores revealing vegetation patterns around the world demonstrate there was no Ice Age agriculture.
The many thousands of explored shipwrecks show the breadth and depth of underwater archaeology. Hancock has often claimed that underwater archaeologists don’t look for the settlements of his lost society buried under rising sea since the Ice Age. But where are the shipwrecks from his global civilisation?
Wooden artefacts can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in the right waterlogged conditions. Ice cores containing pollutants reveal the growth of metallurgical and industrial societies and their impacts on the landscape. There are no signs of major Ice Age metal working around the globe.
The strong start worked. Hancock had few replies to the quantity and quality of worldwide archaeological evidence. An hour and 27 minutes in, Rogan directly asked Hancock: “Can we say there’s no evidence for an advanced civilisation in what they have studied?” Hancock’s reply: “In what they have studied? Yes, we can say there’s no evidence for an advanced civilisation.”
Instead of archaeological evidence, Hancock focused on geological sites with no archaeological relevance and his claim of cancel culture by archaeologists. Both on his Netflix show and in recent comments to the NYT, he’s claimed archaeologists “suppress” these alternative histories.
But from an archaeologist’s point of view, it’s Hancock that is given a legitimate platform. His books are listed as bestsellers in the topic of archaeology on Amazon. His Netflix show is labelled a top docuseries. He’s been on Rogan more than 10 times. But us archaeologists, our interviews are clipped out of context and misrepresented. We are trapped between archaeological fantasies and myopic headlines, unable to share the depth and wonder of 21st-century archaeology with the public.
There were three main reasons I was interested in engaging with a pseudoscientist like Hancock. First, Hancock gave me a new platform to share real archaeology with an interested audience. Second, I could go first to capture their interest with fun stories from human history and set the stage with actual evidence. And third, it was a long-form medium with minimal editing. The perfect mix for sharing the achievements of people long gone and how we study them today.
The response from Hancock’s fan base and Rogan’s audience was most clearly seen in Reddit discussion threads.Chapman University polls show around 50% of Americans believe in such a lost civilization. A surprisingly large number of people have opened their eyes to the real history told from more mundane archaeological artefacts.
In a world filled with people sceptical of science, we need to see these opportunities, not as debates but spectacles. We need to speak up strategically and share our expertise in our post-truth world.
Flint Dibble is an archaeologist at Cardiff University
Lost civilisations make good TV, but archaeology’s real stories hold far more wonder
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28.04.2024
It’s important to start strong. That’s true of a lot of things in life, but doubly so when you’re an archaeologist starting off a conversation with Graham Hancock, the famed pseudoarchaeology author, in a venue such as the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
For the last decade, scholars and experts have dealt with misinformation and pseudoscience either by trying to ignore it in order not to amplify it or by debunking it once it has spread far enough. But recent misinformation research highlights the importance of prebunking rather than debunking. An audience primed with real facts is armed to understand the issues with pseudoscientific narratives.
The agreement that I could go first was the main precondition I demanded before sitting down with Hancock on this high-profile event. I’d arrived in Austin, Texas, after writing a viral thread on X and an op-ed critiquing his popular Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse, from its lost Atlantis civilisation as an explanation for human prehistory to Hancock’s many conspiratorial attacks on archaeologists.
My starting slide was aimed at piquing the audience’s interest: ancient Athenian pots painted with erotic scenes, which were exported to Italy. Archaeological narratives are built on patterns found in millions of artefacts based on when they are from and where they are found. Documentaries on TV can’t capture that, instead focusing........
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