The Forest

Since the 1990s, the journalist, Graham Hancock, has fuelled the story of Atlantis told in Plato’s Timeaus and Critias. His argument claims that a civilisation with something like advanced technology flourished during the last ice age, until it was destroyed abruptly in a period of cataclysmic upheaval that scientists now refer to as the Younger Dryas (around 12,900 to 11,700 BC). The dates of Hancock’s story far exceed the traditional narrative. Human civilisations are usually thought to begin with Mesopotamia towards the very end of the neolithic.

Specifically, Hancock draws on the work of the Comet Research Group, who argue that the Younger Dryas was caused by the earth colliding with fragments of a giant comet. Its remains we now know as the Taurid meteor stream. We still experience the Taurids twice a year and we will next pass through the centre of the stream in 2032. The possibility looms, therefore, that the contended trauma in our remote past may not lie entirely behind us.   

A small number of survivors from this ancient cataclysm, he speculates, spent their time travelling the globe, trying to restart civilisation by working with hunter-gatherer communities. Some of the most famous, mysterious and indisputably fascinating megaliths that descend from the ancient world – among others, the pyramids and Sphinx on the Giza plateau, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, the disputed ‘pyramid’ at Gunung Padang in Indonesia, Sacsayhuaman in Peru  – provide the crux of evidence in the sophisticated but anachronistic engineering they exhibit.  

I have no idea whether this claim stands up to scrutiny. Many academic archaeologists, historians, classicists, egyptologists and so on are clear that it does not. Some dismiss it as little more than a species of popular entertainment rather than a credible theory. This has led to the label – still applied to him on Wikipedia – that Hancock practises a form of pseudo-archeology, which all right-thinking people ought to shun. The strength with which this judgement is felt moved The Guardian to describe Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse series on Netflix as ‘the most dangerous show’ on the channel. A group of archeologists also urged Netflix to reclassify the documentary as science fiction. 

Among the many talks and media appearances Hancock has made, he was invited recently to defend his thesis on the ‘Piers Morgan Uncensored’ Talk TV show. In the course of this grilling, Morgan let slip that he was intrigued to interview Hancock in part because The Guardian had anathematised his show. The viewer was left with the impression that, as much as anything else, Morgan was enjoying the tilt against ‘we think so you don’t have to’ liberal piety. 

Except Hancock is not new to this sort of cultural space. Much of his recent visibility comes from appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience, where he was one of the podcaster’s first guests. Since 2011 he has been invited to unpack different aspects of his research and defend his position against detractors. Joe Rogan is no stranger to embracing ‘wild’ ideas and individuals, including the full cast of bad boys who have drawn on the spirit of political disaffection to govern the United States: Elon Musk, JD Vance, RFK Jr, and, of course, Donald Trump. 

It is curious, therefore, that Hancock’s thesis appears to find the most traction in a similar place to the vanguard of political realignment that has been the cause of so much liberal hand-wringing. For his critics, this connection is plain enough because he has pitted himself against ‘mainstream archaeology’ where many consider his position beyond the pale. By going head-to-head with the academic world, he risks entering the ‘post-truth’ badlands. At times he even insinuates that a cabal of academics are conspiring to control our narrative of the past. A whiff of conspiracy theory, a touch of apocalyptic millenarianism – isn’t all of this questionable, albeit fertile, cultural space?

As I say, I am not qualified to judge Hancock’s argument but two things occur when you engage with it as a lay person. First, it’s hard to not feel ashamed of yourself for engaging with it at all. There is a palpable sense that we should doff our caps to the experts and face the hard reality that this is just Indiana Jones for adults who should know better. Second, when you actually start to look at some of the evidence, you have to suppress the impression that some of it seems credible and reasonable. 

Göbekli Tepe, for example, has been carbon-dated to between 9,500 and 9,000 BC. Given the apparent sophistication of the site, that fact alone hints that there is more to the origins of human civilisation than the traditional narrative allows. The hanan pacha style of architecture that occurs throughout South America and relies on a mysterious process of vitrifying stone appears to pre-date the continent’s known civilisations and challenges our capabilities today. The claims about Gunung Padang are more controversial. First a research paper was published arguing that soil samples from the oldest interior part of the pyramid date to more than 20,000 years ago. Then, under pressure from archeologists who questioned the samples, the paper was withdrawn. But this spat between specialists seems to only disguise debate over a position advanced by qualified researchers.  

And these are a few sentences that draw from books that run to hundreds of pages. The evidence, if you are prepared to engage with it, is plentiful. It comes from many different parts of the world, different disciplines, and is open to interpretation in its own way. Listening to Hancock’s debates you would be hard-pushed to immediately think that this is someone deliberately massaging the facts, or spinning a narrative to exploit a gullible majority. As one person commented online, those taking part usually just sound like ‘massive dorks’.

If there is evidence, if it has a basis in research, why then should it be considered ‘pseudoscience’, which is basically an academic euphemism for lunacy? And why is Hancock expelled to the fringes where anyone who dips guiltily into his work is made to feel that they have joined a fundamentalist cult? It’s clear that Hancock is angry about it and angry in a way that draws on the same vocabulary as those who claim to be politically disenfranchised. Hancock’s expert critics, like the liberal establishment, are ‘arrogant’, ‘patronising’, ‘controlling’, ‘elitist’. 

One explanation might be that, by his own admission, he is prepared to look for evidence in places that stretch academic respectability. For one thing he is working on an epic scale, at a level of antiquity and ambiguity that can too easily drift into credulous speculation. He also runs with the idea that mythology, in obscure and embellished ways, encodes memories of historical events. And, in the same spirit, he explores the meaning and patterns of astrology and astrological numbers in the megalithic sites he examines. 

All of this departs from methodological orthodoxy and leads many to cast an eye of suspicion over his work. Yet the rigid character of this orthodoxy may also explain the cultural terrain in which he thrives. The norm for the standard of scientific truth since the eighteenth century comes from the pioneering work of thinkers and natural scientists like Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Hobbes. Knowledge requires us to doubt what we can intuit, or question the values conferred by tradition. Instead we must look for a more reliable and analytically exact, rational foundation for what we can know. Empirical science became the loosely agreed way of building that foundation. Truth exists at a fixed and objective point that empirical method can reveal and which is indifferent to the circumstances and personal intuitions with which we meet it.

Archeology, it seems, aspires to this standard. The order of global social and economic liberalism that has been the norm for the last forty years has similar ambitions. If a version of empiricist positivism is the only respectable way of finding things out, then it automatically accrues to an elite of technical experts who by their nature stand aloof from the experience of most people.

This sort of standard has clearly served us well, as many distinguished brains are apt to point out. But is it an inflexible and purblind posture to always think about the truth in the third person? Politics and ethics are fraught with problems when they chase the standards of exact science. The strong-man, political fundamentalism to which we bear witness finds momentum in a natural retreat from the inflexible and patrician cast of liberal principles. Might a similarly rigid rationalism applied to the study of the past push alternative theories like Hancock’s into a similar space? The effect, when you look at it from the outside, is to produce a very black and white, elites-and-the-masses, ‘them and us’, or dare I say it, simplistic view of how things stand. Most people will have an easy sense of how the world as we know it breaks on either side of this divide. To the extent that Piers Morgan can immediately recognise someone who has fallen into his demographic and serve them up with a flourish of barbs about The Guardian. Anyone who has studied anything closely must, surely, be suspicious of any method that produces such a machine-like and neat effect. 

To be clear, I am not saying that Graham Hancock is correct. I have no real idea one way or the other. But it seems possible that he could be shrouded by a programmatic mindset at work in our culture that has a distorting effect on how we get to the truth.