I just finished watching the Ancient Apocalypse show on Netflix. I looked back at recent posts and didn't see too much about it, but sorry if it's rehashing it again.
My perspective is from the outside on this one. I have a general interest in the field, but am not actually IN the field. I read interesting things that cross my path and go down the rabbit hole here and there when I have the time. I was attempting to do the same regarding the sites presented in the show. The issue that I seem to be running in to is no where that I look seems to be a rational breakdown of his claims. It's likely that he's been around long enough that it's already been done, and at this point he's worn out his welcome and the field is simply just tired of talking about him - and probably deservedly so.
When watching the show, I could easily pick out when he was more devout/spirit leader about things, with his incessant rambling about the cabal of archaeologists keeping him down! I was able to look past that simple at the (I'm going to call them facts, but they should likely have quotes - I just don't why to have to type quotes that many times) facts that were presented that seemed to raise legitimate questions. Everything I have read so far basically just calls the guy a quack and doesn't actually look in to it. From an outside perspective, this seems like there could be bias on both sides (and I understand why it's likely warranted towards him) that at least at this point in time is blocking what to an outsider is meaningful debate.
I would be THRILLED if someone where to be able to even give a brief synopsis of each site and where he went wrong, or even just a link to an article that goes over it. Hopefully without what seems like instant disregard for the thought. I almost would hope for someone to give his thoughts a fresh look - eliminating them when something factual opposes them (I do understand that this isn't how true science works, but for a layman this is potentially more digestible to more people).
Things that stand out to me that seem interesting without an answer revolve a lot around the common themes between locales that are no where close to one another. From my understanding of the current record, it's assumed that the Americas were populated between the second to last Ice Age and the most recent Ice age. This changes from what I was taught in school regarding the Clovis people that put Americas as post 12k years ago. What is the leading thought for why structures tend to have alignments that, at most, beg some questions. Is it just pure luck that humans in general tended to have nothing better to do and came to the same mythological conclusions regarding stars/sun/moon? Is it something where that might be a hold over that was passed down from a singular population? Both seem very unlikely - but so does his theory. To a point anyway. It's not necessarily impossible for me to see a more advanced civilization doing so, especially when the myths tend to be uncannily similar (this can't just be me right? the fact that myths from different cultures share very similar characteristics is odd and unexplained...right?). The part that tends to bunk that from the start is the lack of infrastructure from that kind of people. My thought there then leads to me saying to myself, "Right but what if they simply had different cultural norms? We as humans now tend to be walking trash cans, but the Native Americans revered nature and were stewards. Is it impossible to think that a society who was influenced by the natural world revered it enough to actually clean up after themselves? Or is that just naivety?".
Long story short, I apologize if this is a (unbeknownst to me) proverbial horse that is beyond life support, but the show was interesting enough that I'm now down this rabbit hole. Any and all conversation about the subject is beyond welcome, although I'd more than love if we kept the disdain for Hancock out - I'm more interested in actual factual information, not hate for a guy I care little about.
1/3 - I wrote quite a bit, so I will need to break this up into a few posts.
Well, I can give this a go, if you excuse that this post will jump around quite a bit. I was compelled to watch a few episodes as we’re discussing a few pseudoscience topics in my classes this semester, and I took notes on a few points to chat about with the students.
Archaeologist here; he is going to real archaeological sites of course, and at least in the first episode he spoke to a few legit folks. But the interpretation is illogical and inconsistent. He is railing against unilineal cultural evolutionism and its misuse by early archaeologists to disregard less complex social forms, but at the same time describes societies according to the same problematic assumptions that early unilinealism supported: ‘advanced’ for state societies, ‘simple’ and lacking for forager / hunter gatherer societies. He is criticizing 19th century-era assumptions about early societies being incapable and inadequate, yet at the same time telescopes his attention exclusively upon state-level features, looking for monumental architecture and authoritative power structures everywhere, seemingly the only types of societies that he cares about. He also criticizes ‘big archaeology’ for disregarding foraging cultures (we don’t).
(Also watch how he talks about Malta: I heard more than a few references to ‘nascent’ or still-developing when he’s talking about early farmers there (“simple farmers”; “simple material culture”). He’s very much prioritizing state level societies and all their impressive trappings, at the same time criticizing archaeology for… disregarding less complex societies?)
He’s looking for state-level societies in the Ice Age, a time when humans’ subsistence strategies the world over were migratory and seasonal because it was advantageous to do so. The Ice Age is a (enormously long) time period characterized by megafauna, wherein humans used hunting strategies and tools (large worked stone tools like Folsom and Clovis points and a flexible, non permanent migratory living pattern, etc) appropriate to said resources. It is only from the start of the Holocene epoch (12kya or thereabouts) that we see the expansion of vegetation when the earth gets warmer, and the expansion and proliferance of smaller, woodland animals like roe deer, red deer, foxes, and other small mammals - and the predominant hunting strategies of humans change as a result (from big stone points to smaller weapons, for hunting smaller animals that are now more abundant).
(Quick note: your dates for the earliest occupation of the Americas aren’t off by much; just push them back to about 15kya rather than 12kya, thanks to more recent evidence, most notably Monte Verde in Chile).
There is a reason that settled agriculture appears only from the start of the Holocene: food surpluses. Rising temperatures and expanding vegetation make it attractive in some parts of the world to begin living in one place and make more food. Despite what we might assume about foraging vs. farming, settled agriculture isn’t the best strategy by a long stretch: we can identify when populations begin farming by a significant increase in stress and disease in the skeleton. These include dental diseases and abscessing from a carbohydrate-rich diet; osteomaladies from disease due to overcrowded living conditions and poor sanitation / food and water quality; increased stress and strain on the skeleton from overwork, and usually also due to violent conflict with neighbors and others. Living in one place, and having to defend land from others, even when the land is overworked and needs to lie in fallow, isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not a mark of civilization- it just indicates an adaptive strategy that people didn’t abandon, despite the difficulties.
Settled agriculture provides a food surplus that is often the basis needed for more complex social formations such as temple construction etc. It is possible for some environments to support settled populations through wild resources, and some do see the rise of complex societies from it (the Pacific Northwest coast of North America is the best example). But this only happens in resource-rich areas- places where wild resources can sustain growing sedentism to begin with. Hancock is also searching for complex societies with -monumental architecture-, all the while presuming that societies want to devote excessive hours to monumental constructions in the first place. In the Pacific Northwest, considerable labor was devoted to highly impressive craft production, ceremonies and ritual, but Hancock is only interested in temples- so… also, we now understand that it is the ideology of a culture that motivates such construction- humans aren’t driven to build things because they can, or because it’s better. There are plenty of examples in the ancient world of cities with large scale constructions that were abandoned altogether- presumably because something went wrong (Cahokia, Teotihuacan, and more).
Continued:
It seems as though a lot of people have been asking about this series lately. Here's a link to one other recent question about it, but there have been more
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yy2e7e/how_crazy_is_the_new_netflix_series_graham
Thanks to /u/Wizoerda for the summons. There is also this recent discussion about Göbekli Tepe, which touches on some themes that may be useful here.