Daily conspiracy

[Fake Messiah]

Typical crank's mo:
1. Invent a big ridiculous lie and mix them with other well-known lies and hoaxes, especially those lies in the Bible.
2. Claim that all of the evidence for the lie is on the bottom of the ocean, under the ice on Antarctica, on Mars, and destroyed, so that no one can check your lies.
3. Go full persecution complex mode and invent a paranoid claim about how there is also a giant network of powerful people who are making sure to keep your ridiculous lie (that you call truth) a secret, and are hiding or just not seeing the "evidence". Use words like "mainstream", "government", "science", and "priests" all in one or two sentences. It is not that you are lying but you are being persecuted.

With Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, Graham Hancock has declared war on archaeologists

Netflix’s enormously popular new show, Ancient Apocalypse, is an all out attack on archaeologists. As an archaeologist committed to public engagement who strongly believes in the relevance of studying ancient people, I feel a full-throated defence is necessary.

Author Graham Hancock is back, defending his well-trodden theory about an advanced global ice age civilisation, which he connects in Ancient Apocalypse to the legend of Atlantis. His argument, as laid out in this show and in several books, is that this advanced civilisation was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.

The survivors of this advanced civilisation, according to Hancock, introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy, arts, maths and the knowledge of “civilisation” to “simple” hunter gatherers. The reason little evidence exists, he says, is because it is under the sea or was destroyed by the cataclysm.

“Perhaps,” Hancock posits in the first episode, “the extremely defensive, arrogant, and patronising attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility”.

In the opening dialogue of Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock rejects being identified as an archaeologist or scientist. Instead, he calls himself a journalist who is “investigating human prehistory”. A canny choice, as the label “journalist” helps Hancock rebut being characterised as a “pseudo archaeologist” or “pseudo scientist”, which, as he puts it himself in episode four, would be like calling a dolphin a “pseudo fish”.

From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilisation. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.

Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which Hancock is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.

Hancock argues that viewers should “not rely on the so-called experts”, implying they should rely on his narrative instead. His attacks against “mainstream archaeologists”, the “so-called experts” who “practice censorship” are strident and frequent. After all, as he puts in in episode six, “archaeologists have been wrong before and they could be wrong again”.

Hancock claims in his book Magicians of the Gods that as the “implications” of his theories “have not yet been taken into account at all by historians and archaeologists, we are obliged to contemplate the possibility that everything we have been taught about the origins of civilisation could be wrong”. However, archaeologists have repeatedly addressed his theories in academic publications, on TV and in mainstream media.

These are the reasons why archaeologists will continue to respond to Hancock. It isn’t that we “hate him” as he claims, it is simply that we strongly believe he is wrong. His flawed thinking implies that Indigenous people do not deserve credit for their cultural heritage.

https://theconversation.com/with-netflix...sts-194881