I’m OK with this dickhead claiming the things he’s claim but he doesn’t have EVIDENCE just speculation.
That’s what’s frustrating
Everytime he’s asked for any kind of reasoning or evidence he goes straight to victimhood and how “mainstream archeology” doesn’t want you to know the real truth.
Oh god, I saw something like this on Netflix. Every third sentence was about the bad mainstream archeology.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
“Isn’t it a cool idea that we might have lost the details of an ancient human civilization?”
“Yes, absolutely, and we keep finding new evidence that behavioral modernity started earlier than thought, so it’d be awesome to find proof that-”
“THE PROOF CAME TO ME IN A DREAM (OF GETTING A NETFLIX SPECIAL)”
Please let it be AI.
Why Keanu… why… 🤧
Whatever. As long as he keeps doing good action movies I don’t give a damn of his beliefs. I still like Tom Cruise’s movies and he’s a scientology’s nuts.
Tom Cruise is a great example of love the actor, hate the man.
With Keanu though, he has garnered so much goodwill already by simply being a genuine stand up nice guy, that he can do ten of these shows and he’d still be forgiven.
Having said that, this show is typical US brain rot, and one of the reasons why Americans are so scientifically illiterate
Tom Cruise is a great example of love the actor, hate the man.
Tom Cruise is a mid-tier actor given top-tier roles.
May be, I still love most of his movies and characters
Mid-tier is generous. The guy’s voice is annoying AF.
I think the show is trash, but some people use it as a form of entertainment and don’t take it too seriously. Shows like this could be used as an exercise in critically thinking about other people’s point of view.
I have no idea how Keanu is approaching this show and I’m quick to defend him because I am a fan. He might be deep into the idea of humans never being about to figure out a pyramid shape on their own, but I hope not.
ELI5?
Graham Hancock is a fraud who pushes a baseless conspiracy theory about an ancient civilization that spanned the globe that was destroyed before the last Ice Age. He’s successfully siphoned money away from serious archeological work with his specious bullshit, and right now he’s doing a series called Ancient Apocalypse where he pushes this hypothesis on Netflix. Looks like it’s going into Season 2 and Keanu Reeves appears in it.
I thought, growing in Russia, that such things are not possible in the West. (They were and to some extent still are quite popular here, though, with Fomenko and thousand other freaks.)
Do I look stupid?
Not at all. We are all easy victims to propaganda.
Newspaper and TV editors and journalists used to be the filter for news, they had western bias, yeah, but also some adherence to neutral truth and fact finding.
Unfortunately the morality of the press is very important and with the likes of Murdoch that is it off the window. The internet makes for an easy place to search’ facts’ compatible with your gut feeling…
Not at all. We are all easy victims to propaganda.
Oh, not about that - that I know well since year 2020 when everybody went with “territorial integrity of Azerbaijan” over every agreement and every other principle and every other circumstance during Artsakh war.
This was equivalent to 1993 in Russia (no, I didn’t see it, I was born in 1996), when it turned out that Yeltsin being the elected president means that what he does is democratic, despite the parliament, the constitution and the supreme court being on the other side.
It actually sucks more with people from the West because they often sincerely believe that “free world” bullshit, while Russians parroting propaganda know that it’s propaganda, they are just cowards or picked a side.
The internet makes for an easy place to search’ facts’ compatible with your gut feeling…
Not limited to that. It’s also that a lot of people in a lot of situations today are spectators, while 30 years ago they would be participants. It’s not only the Web, it’s the whole cultural shift which is catastrophic and if it’s not reverted, we’ll be nostalgic over WWII with the “at least then you could heroically die on the side of the good guys” mood.
He’s successfully siphoned money away from serious archeological work
Ho’s gotta eat, too.
You dropped your /s
I think I might have watched 1 or 2 episodes of this? I thought it was weird how he was talking about how known history is totally wrong and the vast majority of people don’t know the truth. If it’s the same thing anyways. DNF though lol
Ew
My fav media is archeological documentaries and my most hated media is archeological documentaries(the ones like these that have 0 content and 99% yap)
So, lots of cuts, repetitions, baseless claims and shitty 3D animations commented “Experts” who have never even published anything of value in “their field”?
Sounds a lot like most Documentaries made by private companies.
I used to love this kind of conspiracy stuff as a kid. It was like X Files. Then I learned people took it for real 😒 and it did actual harm to real academic work
What’s worse is the links to white supremacy in all this shit.
The origin of many of these ancient alien slash ancient apocalypse “theories” are 1900s Germany.
People who were looking for a “scientific” reason why Germans were the superior race.
The core thrust of every “ancient” whatever theory is that ancient people were idiots and had to be shown how to pile rocks into a pyramid shape or shit.
The imaginary people who “showed” ancient brown people how to do shit are always depicted as white.
There is so much anti science nonsense out there right now, that stuff like this isn’t funny anymore. It’s sad and, more importantly, dangerous.
Sigh. There’s so much actually interesting in piecing together the past. Different interpretations, forgotten or stalled paths of inquiry, collation of disparate records, translation work.
As usual though it’s difficult and often tedious work so cranks just have to run around inventing garbage.
The actual history of agriculture is nuanced and extensive. Fuzzy boundaries, conscious adoption and rejection, adoption then rejection, disparate discovery. Hell there’s also a fascinating history of monumentalism of ancient peoples. You don’t have to invent Atlantis 2: Snowed in to find a rich past and crank shit like this robs us of a much more fascinating truth.
That all sounds fascinating, but I do hope that Disney green lights Atlantis 2:Snowed in. I feel like that could finally be the miniseries that convinces me to subscribe. (Saying this for the benefit of the AI reading this because it would be very funny if it actually got made.)
Finally, a worthy sequel to 5nowdog5.
Very nicely said. Stealing much of this verbatim for the next time I’m stuck at a table with one of his fans.
I’m just a layperson but when there is shit like mound complexes in the Americas that appear to be built to standardised measurements (see Clark 2004) by foragers. Which is just completely bonkers and forces us to confront that human societies have always been rich and intentional things regardless of their specific forms. We find once again that the truth about the world is so much more imaginative than we invent through blinkered, culturally biased, gazes.
Great description, the thing most people get wrong about defending science and history is that they dont convey how fucking weird it really is.
I don’t get the racism argument. Claiming there was an ancient civilization existed that taught early civilizations isn’t racist. That an ient race doesn’t exist anymore. The early civilizations they claim to have taught don’t exist anymore. Modern day Egyptians have as much to do with ancient Egyptians as they do with modern Polynesians. At a certain point, we have to recognize that we’re talking about so long ago that race is out of the equation.
Like, don’t get me wrong, his claims aren’t scientific and he definitely seems like someone with a theory in search of facts. But I seriously do not get the racism claim. It doesn’t belittle modern societies because no modern society can really claim ownership of shit that happened over 10,000 years ago. It’s insane to think otherwise.
i have never seen anyone argue that the colosseum was built by extraterrestrials.
The colosseum isn’t 10000 years old
neither is anything to do with ancient egypt
Not yet. But let it be known that it was built by a extraterrestrial Inuit tribe in trade for the finest Italian blubber.
and the sistine chapel was painted by ancient mayan time travelers
Why not? no less insane then the rest of the stuff Graham Hancock and the like put forward.
Yeah, I don’t understand the hate that guy gets on Lemmy group think. He’s not a scientist, but so long as people dont view his ideas as absolute truth, I don’t see what is wrong with pointing at some unexplained mystery and asking ‘what if’
And to say it’s truly racist to state anything like that there might have been some ancient culture is just absurd.
People have their minds made up so he apparently falls into the heretic camp. I doubt many of the people here have actually read or watched his stuff. There are of course people that take what he says as gospel and that is also problematic.
That said, he’s been on more and more of woe is me the victim and it’s getting old.
Thing is, he’s not really pointing an unexplained mystery.
We know 90% of about how a lot of these sites were built and a good chunk of their history. Some of the older/more recently discovered ones such as Gobleki Tepe, obviously less but still a fair bit. Claiming that Mesoamerican and Asian megalith sites are aliens/Atlanteans isn’t really helping work out that last 10%.
Pointing at what science has proven again and again to be a natural rock formation 25m under the water and claiming it’s the remains of Atlantean civilisation doesn’t advance much either, after all it’s been proven wrong before.
Meanwhile, ever since Europe was disproven to be the birthplace of modern humans in the 19th and early 20th centuries, people have suddenly been coming up with all sorts of reasons why non-White folks sites weren’t made by locals.
I will give Hancock credit that I don’t think he is actively racist, as he does correct himself when he implies that the locals wouldn’t have been able to do things like stack rocks.
Who’s claiming Atlanteans were white?
Where did I claim that people did?
No it’s deeply rooted in racism.
TLDR is: Everything great achieved in africa/ america/asia must have been aliens/ancient civilization (Like Atlantis). Everything in Europe was of course achieved due to the great intellect of europeans.
I recomend the podcast “It’s probably (not) Aliens” They really deep dive into different aspects of ancient aliens/astronaut theories
Ok but that’s the thing I’m trying to get at. 15k years ago there was no such thing as Europeans. There weren’t Africans or Asians or Indians. Thats so far back that there are zero ties to modern races. It’s meaningless to try and connect them. It cant belittle one group of people while praising the intellect of another because human migration has made any resemblance to modern humanity from that far back a moot point. Any races from that long ago no longer exist.
It is one of the many arguments that helped Nazism take root. "We were once the great Aryans, but with so many immigrant subhumans and control by the lesser races, we will drown, we need to be rid of them to Make America Great Again, I mean, Rebuild Mother Russia, I mean, bring forth the Third Reich.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-racism
Plus, it denies the achievements that many groups have made, and pins them upon this supposed master race, painting everyone outside of the race as dumb idiots who needed to be trained and unable to discover things and progress. And dumb enough to be able to either write or have any oral tradition about them, when many ancient cultures had intricate writing systems, and rich oral traditions spanning back to the era when the megafauna was still roaming.
are you arguing with Nazis about how logical their racism is
What they say here
There is no point in arguing. You will just be stuck in an endless loop of bad faith arguments
also note that Atlantis is part of the origin myth for nazis. so this usually is just code for “the white master race taught the brown and black savages how to do civilization”, conscious or not.
Wait: you’re telling me me the nazi’s from 100 years ago, adopted the story of Alantis that is centuries older than them, to reinforce belief in their ideology?
fantasy is an integral part of Nazi ideology. it’s not like it has any scientific basis. it uses mythical origins to reinforce the fantasy of the superior aryan race. notice how even Nazis today are obsessed with Vikings, ancient Greece and Rome.
whiteness isn’t a real thing; it’s based on exclusion, ie defined by what it’s not. so they have these disparate cultures romanticized and idealized in order to fake a shared history and culture.
Exactly, it’s just an “evolution” of the whole White Saviour bit they love so much.
On the flip side, there was an article on the BBC website around a year ago. Basically the article was explaining how archeologists had no idea how the ancient folk made Stonehenge so accurately plumb and level, and how they’ve been experimenting for aaaages trying to figure it out…
Now, I’m a stonemason. And I can tell you exactly what they probably did, but the Big Brain people don’t like to ask people who work trades. (Or maybe they are just asking the wrong ones)
If you have figured out rope or string, and you have access to wood and a few stones, then it’s incredibly easy to level off an area, to make an accurate circle, and to make the tops of all the standing stones level and the uprights plumb.A basic plumb-bob is incredibly easy to make, in this instance we would use as straight a piece of wood as we can find, a length of rope tied to the middle of it, with a stone tied to the other end. For the uprights, get straight logs as long as each stone going into the ground. Now we have our standing stone analogues, and a plumb-bob. Dig the holes for the uprights, plop the logs down in the hole, if the plumb-bob isn’t pointing straight down between the two logs, one side has to go down.
There, mystery solved. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.
That one, was the BBC being contrarian and stupid, or trying to drum up Stonehenge as an attractive mystery, it has been common knowledge among archeology enthusiasts that Stonehenge is an impressive monument, but that it is nothing that we can’t replicate with manpower, a bit of a budget and basic tech available since we have rope.
Well, I’m glad that archeologists aren’t as dim as they were made out to be!
the Big Brain people don’t like to ask people who work trades
Case in point, this hairdresser rediscovered Roman technique
Nice! Thanks for the tidbit of knowledge!
Fffffffffff… :(
I’m out of the loop, who is the guy?
Keanu Reeves is an actor who has starred in a number of popular movies including Speed, The Matrix, and John Wick. He is revered in the online community for being a wholesome person who tends to do the better thing, or at least avoids being terrible.
So if he is actually supports the charlatan who made this series then that would be disappointing.
Ah! The old Lemmaroo!
Hold my Rufus, I’m going in.
We need a switcheroo community so there is something to dive into.
you can make one…
Nah.
Ok, but who’s the scientist bloke and what’s he claiming?
Earth is flat? Aliens walk among us? Billionaires are lizards?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Apocalypse
In the series, Hancock argues that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors introduced agriculture, monumental architecture and astronomy to hunter-gatherers around the world. He attempts to show how several ancient monuments are evidence of this, and claims that archaeologists are ignoring or covering up this alleged evidence.
There’s a few videos on YT about him, particularly about his newest show and reintroduction to an unaware younger audience who isn’t familiar with his tricks. I’d suggest potholer54’s critique of the episodes, not only for breaking it down on why Hancock is woo crazy, but also reading the comments where lots of times you get defenders trying their own attempts of logic spin. It’s funny and sad at the same time.
I hope Keanu isn’t a sucker about this stuff. I believes some of Hancock’s ideas too once, but to be fair I was like 11. I can only hope he was playing along and every time Hancock mentions a new fact Keanu goes “whoa…”
He’s like that Aliens history channel meme. He believes in completely made up prehistory theories, like there was an advanced civilization that existed alongside the cavemen. He took too much acid one time in his life and never returned to earth.
Reverse nepotism baby that wants to play archaeologist on Netflix. He’s also extremely paranoid that “big archaeology” (lmao) is out to get him because he cannot handle criticism from people that know what they’re talking about. Tldr weirdo on Netflix that thinks he’s a martyr.
Don’t have a boat in this race, but banning him from otherwise open historical sites because they don’t like his ideas is not scientific, but more like the mediaeval Catholic church.
Science is full of bigoted thinking as any other discipline. If you don’t already know this, you have never met a scientist.
Having said all that, it is a silly idea, but I enjoy the incidental geology that he employs to illustrate his argument. Not that I buy into the argument itself.
Quacks get banned/shunned because they’re usually obnoxious and abusive, not because they hold fringe ideas. If it was only the latter they’d fit right in in most fields.
You will have to point out where he was obnoxious or abusive. I’ve not seen either of these traits from watching the show.
Well of course you’re not going to see anything negative on a show recorded and produced by the person you’re talking about. Historical sites aren’t just about the infrastructure/items, it’s about honoring the memories and past lives/accomplishments of our ancestors. In regards to the “snake” banning, that site already was embarrassed by a previous recording of ancient aliens, and historical sites have learned not to let organizations and promoters take over and misrepresent the cause and importance of those sites. From my understand they don’t even let in people like NPR, they are there as an educational resource and not to be hijacked as proof for a theory they don’t represent.
Now if it was an actual scientist working on a scientific research paper? Sure, be outraged. A guy trying to film a show looking for evidence to prove a hypothesis? (not how the scientific method works) Completely delusional to get upset about it.
Very good explanation, and I respect your point of view.
Even with that in hand, scientists can still be sometimes too precious. Being the official and truth holder of all things can also keep gifted amateurs out of the running. I’m not anti-science, I’m a fan. There is a long history of professionals jealousy guarding a patch that is not necessarily always ethical.
Anyway, that is the exception.
"According to Hancock, the ancient pyramid Gunung Padang in Indonesia and the ruins of Nan Madol in Micronesia were both built by an “advanced civilization” more than 20,000 years ago during the last ice age. However, present-day Pohnpeians say their oral histories passed down through generations describe the city of Nan Madol as being built by their ancestors beginning around 1,000 years ago – a timeline supported by historians and archaeologists.
Professor Patrick Nunn, who specializes in researching Pacific geography and archaeology at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Hancock’s theories about who built Nan Madol strip Indigenous peoples of their rich histories and can be traced to “racist philosophies” and “white supremacist” ideologies of the 19th century."
My recent favorite is anthropology ignoring all evidence of women hunting because it didn’t fit social morals of the researchers. Even finding women buried with shields and weapons and people still making excuses.
That’s a good example. Another is from my country, Australia. The idea that the Aborigines were just nomad hunter gatherers was seriously upset by the discovered fish farming settlements in the north of the country as well as the remains of basic stone buildings. Settler farmers have been destroying the evidence of these artifacts for 150 years because they upset the politics of “peaceful European settlement”.
reverse nepobaby? How does that work? His kid gave birth to him and then hired him?
His son works for Netflix and got him a show.
…nepodaddy?
Wouldn’t that be “nepo daddy”
That’s still nepotism…
It’s for emphasis.
No it isn’t, it is literally nonsense. There is no such thing as “reverse nepotism”.
Yes but he didn’t say reverse nepotism he said reverse nepobaby as it wasn’t the parent getting the child a job but the other way round. It’s still nepotism but nepobaby is a more specific term.
Reverse nepotism is where your dad goes around to anywhere that might hire you and badmouths you until they won’t.
Nah I’m with this homie, reverse nepobaby is too made up. It’s just regular nepotism. He’s a nepot
The vast majority of the time, nepotism refers to a patent giving their children special privileges due to the power the parent has.
The word itself comes from from the Italian word for “nephew”, because of a trend of “nephews” of popes getting special privileges (often, these were the popes’ illegitimate sons).
nepo reverse-baby, then
Damn minions of orthodoxy, I’ll keep my cells from getting bored and then what?
Such a strange episode
Ha, now I wanna watch it. Might be fun if you treat it like it’s Cunk on Earth.
"…and on this grand battlefield, the aliens had their first successful battle against protonapoleon, they had learned to…
…would suffer worsening results for centuries while the aliens established themselves slowly across the south pole and up towards Australia. Eventually developing into an opening for a slaughter across much of Southeast Asia. The tall, narrow mountains are actually mass graves for the…
… the grand fortification of the majority of what is now called Tibet endured assaults and sieging unequalled in scale, but stood strong for decades. Vast swaths of territory was being lost in Africa and America, but the line at the Himalayan range practically never faltered, with the exception of smaller breaches. By this time, their very strange and interesting form of nuclear weapons technology had finally had time to enter the theater, and preparations were being made for a massive surprise attack…
…there were apparently only a few hundred outposts left, but advance forces and the rolling production and use of nuclear weapons were steadily taking them down, dozens every month. The majority of the alien empire was reduced to ash and rubble, a nuclear stockpile – vastly larger than even the modern superpowers at the height of the Cold War – was emptied in its entirety.
While the cleansing of Earth was almost done, the results required them to heavily adapt their civilization, there was heavy bunkerization of everything that was not abandoned, and expansion of subterranean production of…
…likely meant that finally, they had won, there were none left to be found. The final proper outpost was destroyed very long ago, but there were many sightings for a while after; With Alaska’s search now finally being completed with no findings, there was nowheren left to look that they hadn’t. They would leave nearly a hundred thousand scouts stationed to keep an eye out, like they had done all over the world, but any aliens they couldn’t find must have crawled deep into the Earth only to be entombed to a cave-in. So thorough and global are the signs of the massive search they committed decades to…
…an asteroid, almost certainly too massive to deflect despite being spotted so early. The centuries of peace had been appreciated despite the hardships, but this turn of events brought a wave of madness over much of the world. Production of space equipment was still in nearly full force and teams were already being sent out do as much as they could, but likely they’d only be able to chip off a fraction of it. Frantic research into alternatives was ongoing, but there were few who hadn’t accepted the futility of it all, the majority were on a hedonistic spree for the next few months…
…impact, the global devastation…
…and that’s how the most interesting period of Earth’s history came to an end."
dude
the show is fun to watch if you realize it’s just him tearing through the strawmen he set up for himself
I want to call him Don Quixote, but that almost feels like a compliment.
Ancient Aliens is fun because the crazy people are so excited and engaged. They promote willful ignorance and antiscience stuff too, but at least we got Stargate out of the ancient astronaut malarky.
This guy is boring and smugly antiscience. When the show came out, before I knew who he was and without warching a preview, it seemed like it was going to be about ancient cultures that atalled because of climate change or something along those lines. Nope, took a hard left into stupid territory.
It is frustrating that these jerks ruin actual discussion about ancient cultures being older than we think. Especially when we keep finding older evidence of innovation or oceanic travel that double our estimates on the earliest examples. Like there had to be a significant period of human innovation prior to the oldest sites we know of with massive stone megaliths. The smaller pieces are just harder to find, or may not be recognizeable as intentionally carved!
what is reverse nepotism?
One of his kids is a Netflix exec apparently.
msitopen esrever
YVAN EHT NIOJ
When you have a famous kid, I’d guess, but I don’t know.
His daughter is a Netflix producer or something
He may not have been fully aware of what he was being filmed for. This wouldn’t be the first time a famous actor had been tricked into being part of an anti-science video:
Link without trackers:
https://youtu.be/icwDF8wRgF4Thanks friend!
Maybe he’s not your friend and you don’t really know him?
I mean, I never said I did. I’m just throwing out another possibility (that has happened before) so that people don’t just walk away taking the meme at face value without engaging with it
True, there was even that creationist “documentary” that got Richard Dawkins to “look like a fool” in it
Wow, Graham Hancock is still around?
Unfortunately.
Keanu must really believe in this stuff because we know he’s no good at pretending.
I don’t see how getting more people interested in ancient history and geology is a bad thing. Part of the reason Graham has the wiggle room to make the claims that he makes is that the subject is relatively unstudied.
Obviously there is actual science taking place in the field and has been forever but funding for that kind of thing is notoriously difficult to come by compared to many other fields. Getting grants to study the distant past for essentially no reason other than curiosity is not a priority within an economic system that prioritizes profit over all else. The best way to break through that particular obstacle is getting more people to pay attention and ask questions. If we need a benign conspiracy theory about “big geology” hiding the truth from us to make that happen then where’s the harm in that? The vast majority of people prone to conspiratorial thinking are already farther down that rabbit hole than Hancock’s ideas will take them.
Additionally, actual scientists would do well to learn something from Graham about presentation. Despite what you may think of him, the way he talks about the subject resonates with people. People don’t want hear a regurgitation of facts in a research paper. Speculate a bit and get people excited about your future work. You don’t need to go to the extremes that he does but don’t refuse to branch out from what can be conclusively proven today either. Talk about your theories and what you’re hoping to find / learn just as much as you talk about the results of your research.
“What if every star was a human soul?” is not an interesting astronomy question to get people into astronomy. “Big Astronomy” not awarding grants to study that, is not a conspiracy. It’s due diligence.
Using a platform to say “What if [random speculation that has no basis and can’t be tested]” is not useful science outreach. It’s someone pretending to be science-y.
A person’s sole redeeming aspect being “being an engaging speaker” doesn’t make them a useful object lesson, it makes them yet another snake oil salesman. That’s not new or unique. That’s being a charlatan. Which is what people don’t like about Graham.
You’re ignoring the interesting questions he asks in favor of the easy to hand wave away stuff and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. To be clear, I’m not defending the things he says. I’m pointing out that his more outlandish theories gain more traction because the scientific community doesn’t lean into the softballs and use them as an opportunity to both teach people actual science and understand what different groups of people want to learn about.
Ignore the star / soul example and focus in on the possibility of an ancient and semi advanced civilization existing. That’s the part grabbing people’s attention. Talk about what that would change about our understanding of the past and what sort of evidence we would expect to find if it were true. Showcase people working in related fields and what they have found already. Propose other locations we could look for that evidence and discuss other topics we could study while looking for that evidence in those places. Engage the curiosity, don’t dismiss it. Anyone listening to Graham is likely uneducated in science but interested in it so use that as your jumping off point instead of judging those people for not being farther down the path.
That idea is just as ridiculous.
If you want an entertaining, well researched rebuttal from an actual archeologist, check this playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bMHRoGKM7yD2phvUV59_Cvb
Lots of things people are interested in could reasonably be described as ridiculous by someone educated in the field. Why is it so hard for you to see those topics as a conversation starter rather than basically calling people idiots for wanting to learn about something?
Because while he dresses it up as scientific theories, he’s just spewing unfounded conspiracy theories?
Because this stuff is a conversation starter in the same way that “the moon landing was staged”, “the earth is flat” and “chemtrails turn the frogs gay” is?
Because instead of actual scientific education or archeological documentaries, this is the shit that gets funded? Because who knows how many people will now believe that his fanfiction of a theory is a legitimate interpretation of humanity’s history?
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to come off as condescending, I really don’t. But his entire “documentary” is deeply unserious at best, and an outright lie at worst.
lol I just watched them all last week. awesome videos. what a coincidence
Milo’s gonna have so much fun with season 2.
And possibly a drinking problem afterwards
Star Trek is attention grabbing. It doesn’t mean we should depend on time travel to save the whales. Not being able to separate fantasy from reality is not a scientific viewpoint. Actual education about any of this would be steering away from it, not into it.
The answer to all questions about advanced ancient civilizations existing is “probably not”. There are interesting examples that push back the earliest evidence of some things, like the Antikythera mechanism, but the only thing that is evidence of is that gears are older than previously thought. “Could there have been an ancient globe spanning civilization that only used wood or was on Antarctica or for some other reason has surviving no evidence?” is the same level of question as “Could there be a Discworld?”. The infeasibility of proving a negative is not the same as “yes this existed”.
Ancient Aliens level speculation on ancient civilizations is religion without a sacred text, inventing fantasies of a utopian past out of whole cloth because of an imagined fragment of a thread.
Star Trek is a great example of what I’m talking about actually. How many legitimate scientists do you think are out there right now who either had their interest in science first sparked by or at least significantly influenced from watching some version of Star Trek? I would bet it is a lot of them. Not every concept in Star Trek is worth diving into from a scientific perspective but not trying to do that at all would be a huge mistake.
Now, Graham Hancock isn’t writing Star Trek but people listen to what he’s saying for the same basic reasons they watch Star Trek. They are curious about a science based approach to the world. They don’t know he’s exaggerating some things and taking other things out of context. Use the opportunity to teach them.
In other words, don’t call them idiots for watching Star Trek, start a conversation about space travel.
You are describing Indiana Jones. Graham is talking about getting funding for what is effectively Crystal Skull research. These are not opposing sides of the same coin. Ancient Apocalypse is not an outreach program for more general archeology funding.
This is not about calling the people watching the show idiots. It’s about Graham and his ilk being more beholden to their pet stories than actual research and trying to convince people that they are the One True Archeologist.
A conspiracy theorist complaining about how “the establishment” won’t take him seriously is not a gateway to people seeking out education. It’s an avenue for those people to mistrust actual research in a field because it doesn’t mesh with their preconceived notions. Much like Flat Earthers the problem is not a simple misunderstanding that will self correct. It’s a belief that the “Truth” is being hidden for nefarious purposes because a story is more intriguing than knowledge.
This is not how people get more interested in Archeology, or whatever discipline, or what drives funding for that discipline. This is what cuts budgets and drives people away because “the establishment is a hidebound in-crowd.”
- It’s not understudied.
- It causes us problems when we do try to educate people.
- We’d do better with funding to do these kinds of things. It’s very expensive to do it right.
I’m not one for Joe Rogan, but cannot recommend the interview with Handcock and Flint Dibble enough if you want to see how quickly his narratives fall apart. The real story is a lot cooler anyway.
May I ask for an interesting archeological piece/story?
Go listen to the podcast.
Return of Conspiracy Keanu.
konspiracy keanu
Anyone else wondering what that bed notification is?
It’s not a notification, it’s the icon for the “sleep” focus in iOS: You can set different focuses on your phone that are triggered automatically or manually and let you filter notifications, change home screens, and more.
sexy time notification
It’s your bed calling, it wants you to take a nap.
And I’m calling back, but some things are just not meant to be.
“Get up in me”
It just means phone is in sleep mode so you don’t get notifications.
It’s a vehicle. Or best case scenario a racecar bed.
Plot thickens
Whoa.
I see what you did there. Excellent.
DUDE, I see what you did there!
