Graham Hancock is a British journalist and author who has gained worldwide fame for his pseudo-archaeological theories. Hancock proposes that an advanced, globally connected civilization existed more than 12,000 years ago and that remnants of their knowledge survived a catastrophic event, informing later cultures around the world.
His Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, amplifies Hancock’s claims, suggesting that mainstream archaeology has deliberately ignored or suppressed evidence supporting his controversial hypotheses.
As Annie Kelly and Fall of Civilizations podcaster Paul Cooper explain to Travis and Brad on this episode, all of this is a hot load of ahistorical rubbish.
But why does this story have enough appeal for two seasons of a Netflix show in the first place? And why is Kenau Reeves involved with it?
Annie and Paul take a deep dive into Graham Hancock’s work, picking apart the fallacies that sustain it and the questionable characters that promote it.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena, Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com)
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Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 318, Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse.
As always, we are your hosts, Travis Few, Brad Abrahams, Paul Cooper, and Annie Kelly.
Hello, my sweet little dumplings.
It's your UK correspondent, Annie Kelly, speaking.
Today, I'm going to take you on a journey into deep ancient history.
Through lost civilizations that once spanned the globe, now so long forgotten that the entirety of academic opinion denies that they ever existed at all.
Only one man possesses the ability to gaze into the shrouded abyss of time and deliver messages from our prehistoric ancestors.
And how lucky we are to be born in the exact era when he could get a Netflix special.
Ancient Apocalypse, a documentary series presenting the theories of the British author Graham Hancock, hit the streaming platform in 2022.
Hancock was already a prolific name in the world of alternative archaeology, often called pseudo-archaeology by its critics, but being unleashed on Netflix took him to a newfound level of fame.
The series must have been a hit, because in 2024 it returned for a second season, this time specifically focusing on what Hancock believed to be evidence supporting his theory, hidden among ancient structures across the Americas.
For those who don't know me, I'm Graham Hancock.
I've been exploring the possibility of a lost civilization in prehistory for more than 30 years.
Archaeology claims that if there were such a thing as a lost civilization, they would have found it already.
Well, I profoundly disagree with that.
In a nutshell, Hancock believes that he has found proof of a highly advanced civilization, much older than any other, which was nearly entirely wiped out in what he calls a global cataclysm 12,000 years ago.
A few remaining survivors of this ancient apocalypse dispersed themselves around the world and bestowed their knowledge to various hunter-gatherer peoples, thus sowing the seeds for new historic civilizations to spring up everywhere.
But he believes much, much more than that.
And just as Hancock's quest for ancient knowledge has taken him all over the world, my quest to understand his cosmic vision of the past has sent me diving through much more of his writing, lectures and interviews than I initially bargained for.
As a humble scholar of the internet, I will admit to being a little out of my depth with all this prehistory stuff.
That's why, to help guide us all through this spiritual voyage of primordial discovery, I've enlisted the help of Paul Cooper, the creator of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, who also happens to be my husband.
Hello. Is this the first husband reveal on the pod?
Like, as a guest?
No, I soft launched him on Man Clan, actually.
Right, okay.
Yeah, it's our first non-paywalled episode as a couple, I guess.
Okay, okay.
It's very exciting.
It's a big step for anyone.
Yeah, welcome to the main episode.
So Paul, this is a rare occasion where my research specialism in conspiracy theories and yours in the rise and fall of ancient civilizations actually overlaps, so it made sense for us to work together on this one.
I think when you agreed to join forces you weren't quite aware of how many episodes of Ancient Apocalypse there actually were, though.
Yeah, it's put a lot of stress on our relationship, honestly.
There are so many.
It's like, honey, time for your Daily brain flattening.
Yeah, when you started pleading to, like, let me give you an ancient apocalypse break in between where we could just watch an episode of good TV.
Can we just watch Severance tonight?
Just one night of Severance.
Did you watch both seasons?
We did, yes.
Yeah, it gets really, really wacky in the second season.
Okay. Yeah, I only watched season one.
Yeah, he keeps it quite cool in season one, but season two really, yeah, really lets his freak flag fly.
It's great.
Also joining us today is Brad Abrahams, this podcast's Outer Earth Correspondent.
No, I'm the Inner Earth Correspondent.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry for misidentifying you.
That could be a whole new conspiracy, though.
Outer Earth.
We don't live on the Earth.
We live outside of it.
I'm so sorry, Brad.
This podcast's Inner Earth Correspondent.
Brad, when I told you I was researching Graham Hancock, you actually told me you read some of his work before, and even been a little bit pseudo-archaeology-pilled in your use.
Is this episode likely to trigger a relapse or do you feel safe to continue?
I definitely feel safe, but I have a disclaimer, which is, you know, I do have a soft spot for the world of forbidden archaeology.
And I think it's just probably thanks to Indiana Jones, like a lot of people when they were growing up.
And alongside like UFOs, cryptozoology, parapsychology, it's really what got me interested in esoteric subjects to begin with.
And, you know, before my slope down into the more skeptical side of Oh my god,
this sounds great!
It's a rough read.
It's a rough read.
I think that's what started my break from Graham.
And then also another disclaimer is I've been developing a mockumentary right now that's about the world of forbidden archaeology, sort of lampooning and riffing on ancient aliens and ancient apocalypse type of programming.
I love that he wrote nonfiction so convincing that it began to convert you, but then a novel so bad it just converted you right back.
That's powerful.
It's powerful fiction.
Let's start with a little more information about the man himself.
The 74-year-old author was an unlikely vessel for the ancients to choose.
He actually spent the first 40 years of his life working as a journalist with a specialist focus on international development.
He was the Economist's Africa correspondent, and his first three books published in the 1980s were based on his experiences working in the region.
They respectively focused on famine in Ethiopia, the emergent AIDS crisis, and international aid.
That last one was titled Lords of Poverty and it made something of a splash since Hancock argued that the entire international aid business was so hopelessly corrupt or useless that it was beyond saving.
For anyone else, it might have been the most controversial book of their career, but Hancock was only just getting started.
In 1992, Hancock dramatically switched specialisms and published The Sign and the Seal, in which he proposed a speculative historical journey of the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred relic supposedly containing the stone tablets inscribed with the original Ten Commandments handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.
According to Hancock's research, the Ark left King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in 650 BC, and after a convoluted journey, ended up in the hands of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Tigray.
The book was a commercial success, even if the reaction to it by most academics who specialise in the history of religion in the region seemed to range from bemused to flat-out hostile.
As Hancock put it in one interview with the Los Angeles Times, the academic reaction's been fury and incredulity, but it's selling like hotcakes.
Yeah, can't argue with the market.
Yeah, lesson learned.
Yeah. So he's kind of given away the game a bit early on then.
Exactly. What's interesting about this I learned is that the Orthodox Ethiopian Church also claims that the Ark of the Covenant is situated in the same church in Tigray, although Hancock's timeline contradicts their own for how it got there.
When visiting the site for his research, Hancock was never permitted to actually see the relic.
It wasn't anything personal, the object is considered so holy that no one but a chosen few holy men are allowed near it.
This is a rule that the sign in the seal portrays with obliging theatricality.
Here's an extract from early on in the story.
The monk looked at me in a way that I found strangely disconcerting, and then said, You must know that there is turmoil and civil war in the land.
Our government is evil.
The people oppose it, and the fighting comes closer every day.
In such circumstances, it is unlikely that the true Ark will be used again in the ceremonies.
We cannot risk the possibility that any harm might come to something so precious.
Besides, even in times of peace, Why do you wrap it?
I remember asking my interpreter to clarify the translation of this last puzzling remark.
Had the monk really meant to protect the laity from it?
Or had he meant to protect it from the laity?
It was some time before I got my answer.
is powerful.
According to the same LA Times piece, however, which spoke with Professor Edward Ellendorf, who taught Ethiopian studies at the University of London, this supposedly forbidden nature of the Ark was, quote, hogwash.
I've seen it.
There was no problem getting access when I saw it in 1941.
They have a wooden box, but it's empty.
Middle to late medieval construction, when these stories were fabricated ad hoc.
Hancock, though, was never one to let a minor correction like this get in the way of a good story.
The monk's attitude of reverence around the mysterious object had a huge effect on him, something he would later recount movingly in a very early appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.
He's appeared on this podcast like seven times or something.
I thought I was going to watch all of them, but I just didn't have time.
Oh yeah.
What does it look like?
Well, mostly it's a box.
And sometimes, actually, they reduce the replica to simply two tablets, which are supposed to represent the tablets of stone inside the Ark of the Covenant.
But the Ark of the Covenant is not a Christian object.
It's a pre-Christian object.
What's it doing in all these churches?
Where does this all come from?
Why do we have the black Jews of Ethiopia practicing their very ancient form of Judaism?
So I really started to dig.
And it was the first time I realized that you don't want to listen to academics all the time.
Professor X and Doctor Y may be very, very impressive people with their credentials, but they have prejudices, they have a...
Fixed view of the past which they're going to stick to come what may and as I started to investigate this this is what drew me out of current affairs and Into ancient mysteries.
I I found that here was a real investigation a story that had never been told Could this remote country in the Horn of Africa really have the Ark of the Covenant?
And if so, how could it have got there and I spent several years of my life trying to answer those questions and by that time I By the time I got to the end of that investigation, I had left Current Affairs behind.
You were hooked.
I was hooked on the past.
Did you ever wonder if you were going crazy?
Like, here I am really investigating if some people in Ethiopia actually have some crazy thing from a book.
No. It makes no sense.
You really thought it was real?
It wasn't that I thought it was real.
I neither thought nor didn't think that.
I was impressed by the Ethiopians themselves and I was impressed by the purity of their belief and the passion with which they held it.
I love that they've essentially done the steamed hams bit from the Simpsons to him.
It's like, you have the Ark of the Covenant behind there and I wouldn't ask it.
Can I see it?
No. No.
Yeah, he writes this whole book about it.
I didn't read that book, but is it also where, you know, there's a conspiracy that the Ark is radioactive and that's why apparently the monks that are there guarding it, they get cataracts at very young ages and like go blind because of this radiation?
Is that from Graham's book?
Yeah, so Graham doesn't actually think it's radioactive, but he thinks it's a piece of advanced technology, which I've got a quote coming up.
Oh, I think I've jumped the gun here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but there are people who do think it's radioactive.
I actually watched an interview with him where he spoke to an Italian who thinks he wrote a book called The Bible is not about God, where he thinks that it's a piece of alien technology and that the whole entirety of the Old Testament is actually about God.
I'm glad Graham is the voice of reason then.
Also, Graham here does things that a lot of like, I guess, like outside scholars do in that they say that basically like historians are, their main job is to like reinforce an orthodox view of the past as if they like, they know that if they really want to make their mark, they say, you know, all scholars that came before me had it exactly right.
No notes.
Yeah. Historians just basically all agree on everything.
That's just what their conferences are.
Yeah, famously unfractious discipline, academia.
One thing I wanted to point out was how, you know when Joe's like, oh, you really believed it?
And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I never said I believed it.
Hancock does this quite a bit in interviews.
He's understandably highly sensitive to being pigeonholed as a crank, and that means that he's often a little bit evasive about the nature of his claims.
A little later in the conversation, though, when he's relaxed a little, he starts talking a bit more about his theory of what the Ark actually is.
It's hugely important.
The Temple of Solomon is built with only one function, and that's to serve, and this is a quote, as an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.
That's the only reason that the Temple of Solomon is built.
It's like at a certain point it's got to be placed out of the public view.
It's always a dangerous object.
As they're carrying it, it strikes people dead.
If somebody touches it by chance...
Actually, Spielberg and the Indiana Jones movie, the way they portrayed the Ark was spot on how it's described in the Old Testament as an absolutely devastating, deadly instrument.
So the Israelites use it in battle.
There's accounts of it flying into the air, rushing towards the enemies of Israel, emitting a moaning sound.
They all fall down dead.
Then there's a later account where the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant.
They take it off to the city of Ashdod.
Thank you.
They're the kind of power source of the Ark of the Covenant.
Now what that power is, I did get into some speculation on this.
It seems obvious to me that at one level the Ark of the Covenant is an out-of-place technology.
It's a strange technology which has presented itself in a surprising context where you don't expect to find it.
You always want Duncan Trestle on your archaeology episode.
Wait, is that the third guy there who's there with him and Rogan?
Yeah, yeah, kind of in the corner.
He's sort of like a comedian and a psychedelic personality.
Right, okay.
Yeah, I did wonder who he is.
It's a super early episode of Rogan.
They haven't like got the red curtains and the whole like classic set.
Yeah. This idea that the Ark of the Covenant was not a religious myth but a real piece of super-advanced technology that had somehow fallen into the hands of a Bronze Age tribe in the Middle East would go on to form the bedrock for Hancock's overarching belief system.
Because if the traditional religious explanation for the Ark's extraordinary powers weren't satisfying to him, that meant it had to have come from somewhere else.
But where?
Hancock would piece together the answer over his next several books, starting with the highly commercially successful 1996 publication, Fingerprints of the Gods.
He speculated that during the last Ice Age there existed a highly advanced, seafaring civilization which was capable of extraordinary works of architecture, technology and art.
This civilization, he later theorized, was also no doubt extremely spiritually sophisticated, capable of feats of telepathy and telekinesis that, as he wrote in his 2019 book America Before, quote, would look something like magic even today and must have seemed supernatural and godlike to the hunter-gatherers who shared the Ice Age world with these mysterious adepts.
Wow. Yeah.
It's like his psychic Neanderthals from his fiction book.
Yeah, it's one of those things where it's just like, yeah, what good are all those psychic powers?
They can't even stop you going extinct.
Tragically though, this lost Eden was destroyed, although Hancock's position has evolved on how exactly.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, he speculates it may have initially been situated in the landmass that we now call Antarctica, and lost as a result of dramatic shifts and displacement of the Earth's crust.
Before the displacement of the Earth's crust, a great civilization had grown up in Antarctica, when much of it was located at green and pleasant latitudes.
If so, that civilization might easily have been destroyed by the effects of the displacement.
The tidal waves, the hurricane-force winds and electric storms, the volcanic eruptions at seismic faults split open all around the planet, the darkened skies and the remorselessly expanding ice cap.
Moreover, as the millennia passed, the ruins left behind, the cities, the monuments, the great libraries, and the engineering works of the destroyed civilization would have been ever more deeply buried beneath the mantle of ice.
And America Before, published 24 years later, he is less convinced by this theory.
A lost advanced civilization of the Ice Age would have had the capacity to establish outposts on every continent, but must also have had a homeland.
Since that homeland has not been found after 200 years of diligent archaeology, most diligent archaeologists conclude, quite reasonably on the face of things, that it did not exist.
But there are other options.
It might be underwater now, The immense Sunda Shelf around Indonesia, for example, submerged by sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age.
It might be under ice, perhaps in Antarctica, if we're willing to accept that some rather extraordinary geophysical events occurred in the past hundred thousand years.
It might await rediscovery in the unexplored heart of the Amazon rainforest.
It might lie beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert.
Or perhaps its homeland has all along remained hidden in plain view, in the very last place that anyone has thought to look.
North America?
It might be standing behind you right now.
Just out of view.
Oh yeah, I quite like these.
Quite reasonably, these archaeologists assume it doesn't exist because then it's kind of one of those things where sometimes he kind of says stuff like that and you're just a bit like, yeah, he understands that it's a bit of an out there theory.
It's a bit out there on a limb.
But then other times he's really, really rude about the archaeologists for not believing his theory.
He seems to have a real disdain for just entire fields of inquiry.
Like geology gets some of his ire as well.
Geologists don't like cataclysms.
Too messy for you.
So the reason Hancock now views his original proposition as, quote, rather extraordinary was because he'd come across a theory he found more fitting.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which argues that the end of the last ice age came as a result of a comet airburst over the Americas.
Whichever way the prehistoric civilisation fell, Hancock thinks we in the West may have an inherited memory of its watery destruction through the legend of Atlantis.
Let's consider an extraordinary possibility.
Could there be a lost civilisation lurking as yet undetected somewhere far back in remotest prehistory?
Could the myths of a former golden age brought to an end by an immense global cataclysm be true?
Plato provides the archetype with the story of Atlantis, for which he's the earliest surviving source.
He describes Atlantis as having advanced architecture, advanced agriculture, advanced shipbuilding technology and seafaring skills, and advanced social and political organization.
It was once a beautiful and generous culture, but in time became arrogant, cruel and materialistic.
In a ringing phrase that should remind us of the behavior of advanced technological societies today, Plato tells us that it ceased to carry its prosperity with moderation.
As though in punishment for this hubris, the universe slapped Atlantis down.
In a single dreadful day and night of fire, earthquakes and flood, it was swallowed up by the sea and vanished.
Mankind had to begin again like children with no memory of what went before I think it's worth pointing out that there's always layers of bullshit to Hancock.
And the Younger Dryas event is a real thing that happens about 12,000 BC, which is a climatic event that sees rapid cooling around the world, you know, various swift climate changes.
And it's a real event that needs to find a real explanation.
And that for a while, the airburst, you know, the comet airburst theory was one explanation for how this might have occurred.
And in a sense, you know, the evidence that was initially brought up for it has since proven to be pretty shaky.
And now it's not a theory that's held in very high esteem, but it's one that hangs out.
Hancock is certain that the survivors, using their superior navigational skills, dispersed across the globe.
Coming across various different hunter-gatherer societies, they would have taught them the secrets to agriculture, monument building, mathematics and astronomy.
In short, everything you need to build a civilisation from the ground up.
Hancock believes that many of these real encounters have over the years become memorialised and myth, with the visitor from the old civilisation being remembered as a deity of some kind, and the advanced knowledge as a supernatural power.
In Ancient Apocalypse, these civilisational myths are lovingly artistically rendered and juxtaposed with the appropriate dramatic music.
This region was once struck by a great cataclysm, a true ancient apocalypse.
After it passed, a stranger appeared from the waters of Lake Titicaca.
They named him Viracocha, Foam of the Sea.
He and his band of followers taught the survivors the secrets of farming, showed them advanced skills in stonework, and how to track the heavens.
*Rainful music*
Fundamentally, he is teaching the gifts of civilization to demoralized and devastated survivors of a cataclysm.
These stories resonate with stories from all around the world about beings, entities, deities, people, I think, who survived that cataclysm, who attempted to restart civilization.
In Egypt, it was Osiris who taught his people how to till the earth, reap crops and make laws.
For the Aztecs in Mexico, It was Quetzalcoatl, the bearded wanderer, who first brought them the gift of civilization.
And on Rapa Nui, King Hotu Matua and his chosen men echoed this theme...
...
of travelers from a far-off lost land...
...
arriving by sea to restart civilization.
He bakes so hard with these myths, it drives me nuts.
It's just like, it's just QAnon baking, but for these indigenous textual records.
He's just doing creative writing, you know, that's all it really is.
He leaves out things that, you know, anything that contradicts his theory, like, you know, the Inca god Viracocha is a classic creator god, you know, he carves mankind out of stone and breathes life into him and Yeah, But that doesn't fit with Graham's ideas.
So it's just completely left out.
you really get the sense lots of stuff's being cut and edited here, do you know, to make it all kind of fit neatly?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it sounds like he's, I don't know, just assuming that there's a real material historical basis to cultural myths.
You know, it'd be like all, it's like, you know, the North American people did not know how to farm timber until Paul Bunyan came along.
This mysterious entity.
Before I started watching Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock's theories were totally unknown to me.
And honestly, they felt kind of silly and fun.
But that wasn't the case for my poor husband, who was all too wearily familiar with Graham's work.
Yes, I'm Paul Cooper, the writer and host of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, a show that looks at the stories behind the collapse of many of the great human societies throughout history.
As well as being on all the usual podcasting platforms, I'm also on YouTube, which means I'm exposed daily to the firehose that is the beautiful and diverse pantheon of human thought.
Frankly, the flat earthers and the Jews-control-the-worlders have become pretty dull to me.
Even the mud-flooders and the no-trees-on-a-flat-earth lot have begun to lose their flavour, and I only really sit up when I get something a bit tastier.
One listener told me recently that he thought that all the world's rock had once been the flesh of a vast living creature, now petrified, and he called this theory flesh-earth.
Flesh-earth is a totally new one for me.
Yeah. That was a spicy one.
Yeah, I had found a where YouTube had served up a video to me called, um, the mountains are made of meat.
And oh, yeah.
Have you seen that?
This is the juice this guy is huffing.
Yeah, yeah.
And he in throughout the whole video, he's he's, you know, trying to show you the little the marbling of the of the fat in this rock face.
And you hear his his poor child off screen, just like screaming and crying for his dad to come home.
Please, I'm hungry.
Please stop making flesh earth content.
No, the people must know terrible stuff.
Yeah, but it's the impulse that underlies so much of Graham's work as well.
If something looks like something, then it must be that thing, you know.
Another said he had a treasure map and wanted me to go hunting for gold with him.
Another recently told me he was in possession of what he believed to be the Holy Grail.
I'm not sure what he wanted me to do about it, he just wanted to let me know.
So anyway, by now I've seen it all.
But By far the most tedious and sanctimonious of the lot are the users always clogging up my comments with their endless insane diatribes.
The fans of one man whose name I see day in and day out and have begun to truly hate.
Graham Hancock.
Harsh. The worst thing is the constant whining that his community engages in.
They're obsessed with their own sense of persecution, always like, Oh, you're not willing to engage on the facts.
You just hate Graham.
And I want to go on the record right now and say, yeah, I fucking hate this guy.
I hate his weepy little eyes.
I hate the way he hovers around archaeological sites like an uninvited ghost, looming like a rheumatoid praying mantis over the stones.
I hate the way he tricks indigenous historians who often speak English as a second language into appearing on his show, manipulates them during interviews, and then selectively edits what they say.
So yes, I am a true hater.
If Graham Hancock has one hater on this earth, it is me.
If he has no haters, I have left the earth.
And despite the insistence of his fans that they just want to debate, there's a kind of pointlessness about approaching Graham's work with the aim of debunking or disproving it.
The whole exercise feels like boxing with a cobweb.
His theory is so obviously farcical that it can be dismantled by anyone with any archaeological experience, even pedestrian historical knowledge or just a vague sense of how the world works.
And anyone who wants this kind of meticulous takedown of his ideas should watch his debate with a real archaeologist, Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan.
I'm sorry, but Flint Dibble, that's not a real archaeologist's name.
Yeah. Talk about nominative determinism.
In my mockumentary, I'm gonna name someone Flint Dibble.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a classic British professor name.
I mean, it drives the Hancockites nuts, actually.
They always call him Flint Dribble.
Oh, they're so mean!
It's like weirdly, like, schoolyardy.
But I think the fact that their bestie was, you know, completely owned by this guy with a slightly comical name just absolutely sticks in their craw.
Graham, by the end of this debate, had admitted that he had not one shred of real evidence pointing to anything he claims, but that he just really, really thought it might be out there somewhere.
The problem with Graham is just that, that his theory is mercurial and by design impossible to disprove.
You can confront him with the fact that we actually have a vast amount of evidence for hunter-gatherer peoples throughout the Ice Age, their dispersal around the world, and huge collections of their material cultures, in the form of artefacts, cave paintings and carved bone, and knapped flints, and all manner of everyday items.
We have meticulous research tracking the steady domestication of everyday staples like grains and pulses, as people moved from hunting and gathering to sowing crops.
But I probably don't need to tell you that there's not a single piece of evidence pointing to any highly organised city-dwelling civilisations during the Ice Age, and much less one that spanned the globe or used its shamanic mind powers to move and melt stone.
But when presented with all this evidence, Graham's theory melts away like smoke.
The evidence Must be at the bottom of the sea, he says.
But when it's pointed out to him that underwater excavations of Neolithic hunter-gatherer sites number in the many thousands, and are ongoing all the time, his theory melts away again.
Perhaps all the evidence is neatly tucked away beneath the Sahara Desert, he suggests.
And until we excavate every inch of Northern Africa, his theory has found a safe place to hide, beneath the sands of the Sahara and in the fortress of his mind.
Very poetic.
Graham's theory is just one example of countless alternate timeline historical conspiracy theories, and his particular branch is called hyperdiffusionism.
That is, the idea that all the world's advances came from one single great civilisation, who taught them to the rest of the world.
And it actually has a long history.
One prominent advocate of it was Frank Joseph Colin, who in the early 20th century was a political activist for the American Nazi Party and a convicted child molester.
God, just pick a struggle.
You should have led with that one, actually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, he's not winning any popularity contests.
He wrote a book called The Destruction of Atlantis, compelling evidence of the sudden fall of the legendary civilization.
And perhaps the most famous proponent of this theory was Adolf Hitler himself, who believed that all the advancements of civilisation had come from the mysterious race called the Aryans, who he supposed to be the ancestors of the German people.
While I'm willing to extend Graham Hancock the benefit of the doubt that he himself is not particularly motivated by a racist agenda, he is astonishingly naive on that point, and it's no surprise that his theories resonate with white supremacists and right-wing commentators.
Part of the reason for this is just a simple right-wing desire to tear down experts, and the fancy academics who look down on them, as well as a desire to make of history a blank slate that they can rewrite as they please.
Another is that Hancock has claimed that the citizens of his Ice Age precursor civilization were white-skinned, using the tendacious myth of Quetzalcoatl to back it.
And the clear implication is that without their help, the other peoples of the world would never have built their great pyramids, never have decorated their pots, perhaps never have achieved anything at all.
Graham Hancock is actually the latest in a long line of Europeans who wanted to take away the achievements of indigenous people around the world.
When the Spanish friar Marcelo de Ribonera came across the ruined site of Angkor in Cambodia in 1601, he wrote that the marvellous stonework he saw could not be the work of the local Cambodians.
There are the ruins of an ancient city there, which some say was built by Alexander the Great, or the Romans.
It is amazing that no one lives there now.
Yeah, it's so funny.
He just, he finds it more plausible that the Romans somehow got to Cambodia than to just imagine that...
The Khmer people who lived there had built this site.
But if his, you know, theoretical super civilization taught everyone the knowledge that, you know, was the basis of their own, who taught the original?
That's what I always say to Hancock people when I kind of descend into my comments.
It's just, I don't believe your ancient civilization built those things.
I think my even more ancient civilization did.
In the Mayan lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, European visitors who first saw the soaring temples of their civilization in places like Tikal and Calakmul were similarly confused by how indigenous Mayan people could have achieved such grand works.
Some said that ancient Egyptians, Indians, Chinese or Norse explorers must have somehow crossed the Atlantic from the Old World and built these towering pyramids.
Others speculated that the builders may have been the mythical Lost Tribes of Israel, or even, like Hancock, the inhabitants of Atlantis.
By now, this kind of thinking should have disappeared from mainstream thought, but it's clear that Graham Hancock, his supporters, and the executives of Netflix think otherwise.
Ancient Apocalypse The haters will say that Graham Hancock only got his Netflix show because, in a coincidence presumably preordained by the intervention of some ancient Ice Age god, his son happens to be Netflix's senior manager of unscripted original content.
Oh really?
Oh wow.
Yeah, which does make a lot of sense.
Still, there's no denying that Ancient Apocalypse looks great.
It's a feast of lavish shots of modern-day cities and ancient monuments all over the world, and of course, striding around and peering at everything, there is Hancock himself, who in his linen shirt and glasses comes across as something of a mild-mannered, affable professor.
I hate these parts the most.
It's such a cliche of documentary making that you have the walking around the site making the hmm face, all the monuments, but at least with a professor on the BBC, you know, they're actually having educated thought.
Hancock's just walking around just thinking some nonsense.
Annie, you mentioned it looks great, but it's also, it's like the most, like, Netflix paint-by-numbers schlock that you could, you can imagine.
Like, it's just, it's high quality, but it's the, it's like frenetic editing, like speed ramp at every cut, uncomfortable close-ups, gratuitous, like every, every cut there's like a whoosh or a boom, like ominous music, and, and like every episode starts and ends with a hook and a promise that never pays off.
I don't, I don't know what to tell you.
That stuff works on me.
It really does.
I mean, there's a reason why, you know, the algorithm has designed it.
Yeah. But, you know, it might not even be that Graham wanted a format like this, but it's just, it's forced upon, like, I know a lot of documentary filmmakers who have worked on Netflix shows and they're just forced into this format, unfortunately.
Yeah. I can really believe that.
Yeah. Annie was getting a bit, um, a bit sick of me while we were watching it because I make video The documentary format is also a great visual medium for Hancock to display what he considers the uncanny similarities between ancient cultures which supposedly never had any contact with one another.
Something which I'll admit doesn't always come across quite as strongly in his books.
Here he is, for example, arguing that it's no coincidence that so many cultures came up with the idea of a big pointy building.
The fact that these ancient pyramids, whose builders supposedly had no contact with one another, have so much in common is a mystery.
Is it just coincidence?
I don't think so.
The general view that archaeology puts forward is that pyramids around the world were built in the form that they have because that's the easiest way to make a high building.
The problem is that these structures are universally associated with very specific spiritual ideas.
What happens to us after death?
This is always connected with pyramid structures.
And that's the case whether you find them in Mexico or whether you find them in ancient Egypt or wherever.
Man, picking the pyramid shape as the reason why all cultures are...
Connected is like that's one of the weakest like if you just pile some stuff on top of each other.
I think I think our one year old has been contacted by this Ice Age civilization when he plays with his blocks.
He's always building pyramids.
I don't know how they got to him.
I also like the idea is like, but it's not just that it's like coincidentally, all civilizations play spiritual significance on the biggest buildings that they had.
Right, yeah, exactly!
It's just sort of like, of course they, yeah, of course they're like, yeah, the biggest building that they're going to build is going to be for a reason, and what better reason than for huge religious significance?
I mean, yeah, it almost feels like tautological.
But if that doesn't convince you, how do you explain that a lot of different people in different places, whose entire societies lived and died by the seasons, were extremely concerned with the position of the sun in the sky?
Charco Canyon bears the fingerprints of a culture of highly sophisticated astronomers.
Their intense focus on the regular cycles of sun, moon and stars And on the wider majesty of the cosmos, it wasn't just an idiosyncratic quirk of their own.
It was shared in the same way, using eerily similar symbolism, art and architectural alignments by many other ancient cultures all around the world.
The way Malta's megalithic temple of Manidra is precisely aligned to capture the equinoxes and the solstices.
Or how the axis of the great temple of Karnak in Egypt targets the winter solstice sunrise.
Or the precision with which the central tower of Angkor Wat in Cambodia aligns to the rising sun on the equinoxes.
There seems to have been a worldwide architectural project to reproduce the harmony and directions of the heavens in monuments on the ground, to bring heaven down to earth.
Still not convinced?
Well, what about the fact that both people living in the Amazon and the ancient Greeks thought it would be cool to decorate their pots?
Archaeologically, tell me what you do find inside the earthworks.
From Ticino we found 40,000 shards of ceramics.
These shards were around 2,000 years old.
The earthwork itself was dated to around 2,500 years ago, but the pottery was unexpectedly sophisticated.
Most of it is of high quality.
Right. And polychromy.
Right. Ceramics.
So the polychrome is rather advanced.
Yeah, normally polychromy ceramic is considered to be part of civilization.
The multicoloured ceramics raise an unexpected parallel.
With another far-off culture, known for their deep knowledge of geometry.
The ancient Greeks.
Generally, historians and archaeologists say that, you know, the Greeks were amongst the first to create geometry, but clearly we have to reconsider that view.
I think that you are right because this geocliff culture is exactly the same time when the Greek culture had The fact that two cultures so far apart were making geometric art and producing sophisticated pottery at around the same time seems more than a coincidence.
It's fascinating that we're seeing this parallel development of ideas between cultures that are completely unconnected.
Exactly. I'm not suggesting the Greek and Amazonian cultures were in contact, but could both perhaps have shared a legacy of knowledge inherited from a vastly older civilization?
One that traveled the earth in the night of time, leaving traces of its wisdom wherever it went.
Well, it sounds like he's really reaching even further in this second season.
Yeah, you're right.
That is the second season.
He doesn't have enough material.
To keep it compelling.
The part bit had me levitating off the sofa.
Yeah, for those listening at home, those parts do not bear anything more than the most superficial resemblance.
They both, I guess, have slightly zigzaggy patterns.
I don't know, it just speaks to the whole failure of imagination about what ancient people were like.
They liked beautiful things too.
Once they built something useful, they wanted it to look nice.
Just like we do.
It sounds like what he's doing is that he's finding things that are just the byproduct of human psychology and claiming that there is some sort of like uniting historical source to all of them.
It's not just, you know, civilizations that don't have contact with each other might both enjoy seeing parallel lines just because that is a pleasing design to the eye.
It's really funny that you should say that, Travis, because the exact next clip is him doing something that he does a lot, a specific rhetorical construction, where he brings up the obvious explanation for the mysteries that he's proposing, then lazily dismisses it.
A bit like, you know, with the, you know, archaeologists say that people just build pyramids because it's the quickest way of building a high building.
But I thought this one was particularly egregious, actually.
Now, the way that archaeology explains this is to say, well, look, we all have the same human minds, and so we're all going to do the same things.
And the fact that they did them at the same time in widely separated geographical locations It's just explained by that shared neurology.
I'm afraid that just doesn't work for me.
Consider yourself owned, Travis.
There also feels like there's something of a bait-and-switch going on as you watch the series.
Netflix seems to have made the quite deliberate editorial decision of keeping some of Hancock's obviously kookier ideas under wraps until later in the series, once the audience is invested.
So, for example, he will talk a lot about how advanced and sophisticated the long-lost Ice Age civilization is, but if you've watched normal history documentaries before, you'll know that historians will say that about society that's just learned a slightly more efficient way We're looking at natural bedrock here,
but clearly the tunnel is the result of human workmanship.
Is that characteristic of the oldest style of construction here, that they work with the natural bedrock and shape it?
It was like a mold technology.
You can see that they have been working with the stone as if it was soft.
Yes. Because all kinds of things were pressed into the rock.
So when you say mold technology, you mean softening of the stone and then pressing down the shape into the stone?
We think that the stones were soft at the moment of construction.
But how were they made soft?
Jan believes the walls of this tunnel are the key to the mystery.
So inside of this tunnel we can see a lot of reflection.
I see it shining like a metallic sheen.
If you touch it, it's very smooth.
We think that it's been treated with heat and this heat caused like a layer on the stone and that's why it's this shiny.
Geologists call this effect vitrification.
Any idea how much heat would be involved?
Bitrification, it means turn to glass and that means that we need like 1400 degrees celsius.
Which is a colossal amount of heat.
Yes, of course we don't know how they did it, but we know that they did it.
This is where it sort of turned around a little bit for me because you know I like to watch kind of crazy out there sci-fi style documentaries.
I watched Ancient Aliens and enjoyed it.
Yeah. I love people just coming up with like, just mad nonsense and spraying it around the television.
And I think once Graham got into this, I was like, yeah, okay, I'm vibing with this.
Yeah, maybe they melted stone or molded it or something.
This comes like eight episodes into the second season.
Right up until this point, they've really been masquerading as like a serious show, like a guy who has a serious idea about things, the way things actually were.
Yeah, which I always just found really, really...
Wound me up.
The way he's hiding all the stuff that he really believes until he's got you.
Yeah, and he doesn't even hint at any of this in season one.
There's nothing beyond just an older civilization, but he doesn't talk about superpowers or advanced weaponry or technology or anything like that.
He's so cautious.
And whether that comes from him knowing that he has to slightly hide his power level to get on Netflix, or whether it's the Netflix editors themselves saying, let's bring some of this back.
Masquerade is a real history show.
I honestly found the first season, like each episode sort of started off like kind of in a benign way where he'd break down a lesser known archaeological site with some interesting info, like some sites I hadn't heard of, you know, like there's there's incredible mounds in North America and a lot of people that live in America don't even know about these things.
Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, like that's just such a fascinating enigmatic site.
The underground cities in Turkey and the crux of what he's talking about is like, yeah, these might be a little bit older than we think and might be A little more sophisticated, but then immediately like a left turn to actually they were built by an ancient, you know, super civilization.
And it's like, wait, like, how did we get here within a few minutes?
Yeah. That's what's so frustrating about it is you actually sometimes forget what show you're watching.
Yeah. Yeah.
Went out to Chaco Canyon and was showing some sites that I hadn't seen.
You know, were amazing sites that were clearly designed to So
in true ancient apocalypse style, I'm back on the moulded stone because I can't get over this one.
The series then immediately gives you the much more likely answer as to how this stone got supposedly moulded, before dismissing the idea as stretching credulity.
When you look at it closely, you have to ask yourself, is that heat source the explanation for the peculiar melted-together appearance of the gigantic megaliths of Saqsaywaman?
The First thing skeptics would say is that the very shiny effect inside the tunnel is caused by people brushing against the sides of the tunnel.
What's your reaction to that?
So a lot of people say, yeah, of course.
It's been done by all the hands going through this tunnel, touching it there.
But you can see it's also on the roof and the whole wall of the tunnel.
So it won't be lots of So what about the other argument, that it's caused by volcanic activity?
Okay. For Jan, the only viable explanation is that we're looking at the results of some kind of ancient scientific process, one perfected by a civilization that predates the Inca.
There's a very funny visual element here at play that our listeners, hampered by the audio-only podcast format, may not be aware of.
The man who Graham's speaking to in that clip, Jan Pieter de Jong, is your archetypical seven-foot-tall Dutchman.
The final shot of that last clip shows him and Hancock in the tunnel they're talking about, with both men, but De Jong in particular, having to half sit, half lean on a tunnel shelf just to be able to fit in the shot.
It's really amusing to me that he, of all people, might find it difficult to believe that generations of people would have placed their hands on the roof of the tunnel as they walked through it to prevent hitting their heads.
Like, he must do that all the time!
I also found Jan's blog and it appears that as well as being a total acolyte of Hancock's, he also has some interesting theories about gravity.
Ancient human history could have been much different than what we are supposed to believe.
Darwin was right in parts, but there has been major influence on biology in the past that is largely overlooked.
Namely, gravity.
According to Alfredo Gamara, it also had its influence on human history.
Less gravity has much to do with the history of the Earth.
Earth was smaller in the past, which meant less gravity and a geology that was also different than what you are normally told by the orthodox geologists who believe in the model of plate tectonics.
So wait, does he not believe in plate tectonics?
He does not, no.
And he also believes, yeah, so the moldable stone is actually kind of on the less kooky side of what Ian believes, which is that the pyramids were built at a time when there was literally less gravity.
So the stones were literally lighter than they would be now.
Yeah. Do you guys remember, like, Before we go too far, I made a note about how Graham, he's banned from that archaeological site in Ohio called Serpent Mound.
They don't let him there because they find his...
He calls it, he says it's because it's for ideological and personal reasons, but you know, they just think he's like...
He's getting too close to the truth.
He's just disrespecting the...
The cultures that built it, basically.
Yeah, I also saw that actually.
They don't let him on site.
Yeah, I also saw that for their second season, they were planning, I think, on filming at the Grand Canyon.
And yeah, there was basically, I think, the Native American groups that, are they the Hopi?
Is that how you pronounce them?
Yeah, that's right.
Yes. Yeah, they protested, essentially, and were like, you know, we don't want him here.
You know, this site is sacred to us, and he's going to kind of come here and perpetuate his theories, which are insulting to us and our ancestors.
Um, yeah, he actually had to change his filming plans.
They didn't film there in the end because of that.
Yeah. And, um, also I mentioned this to you after watching the final episode of season one was, you know, he's, he interviews a lot of archeologists, local archeologists, some are, you know, respected archeologists, but then his final interview, his final expert, quote unquote expert is Joe Rogan.
And it's Joe Rogan in like a much too tight hoodie.
And his only commentary is that's interesting.
No, it's a mix because sometimes he finds a genuine archaeologist working in one of these areas and has slightly manipulated them, lied to them about what the show is about.
And then, you know, it's kind of leading them in questions like, oh, this stonework is so advanced, isn't it?
It's so sophisticated.
Of course, this person who's worked on, you know, trying to get appreciation for the Inca, for instance, for their entire academic career is saying, yeah, this is really great stonework that they did.
And Graham, you know, cuts the clip right there.
He's like, ah, so sophisticated that it couldn't be done by human hand.
Then the guy will be like, maybe, and then it cuts again.
Other times he has literally just found a Graham Hancock fan in the local area and is interviewing them.
That's when you get the melted stone stuff.
Graham's Quest.
I'll admit it, despite never having been all that interested in this particular sphere of fringe ideas, I found myself gradually becoming fascinated with Graham Hancock over the course of researching this episode.
He feels like a deeply mysterious figure to me, and yet I often have the tantalising feeling that if I just concentrate hard enough on him, he's someone I'll come to fully understand.
The initial greatest mystery, though, I have to confess, was how anyone could possibly find any of this persuasive at all.
Hancock's a gifted writer and a hard worker too.
He's published a truly impressive number of books, into which he's obviously poured a great deal of research and fieldwork.
And yet it's pretty easy to watch Ancient Apocalypse, the culmination of his life's work, and an unparalleled opportunity to present his research to a vast new audience, and think, this is really the best you can come up with?
Reading his books is a similar experience.
He'll leap from one piece of evidence to the next and connect them in ways that seem contradictory, saying we should take an indigenous culture's origin myth as a matter of historical record in one paragraph, but also suggesting that we can't necessarily trust those same cultures to accurately record much more recent details in their past.
He'll often bring up scientific objections to his theory and claim that the method of science or its practitioners are flawed, only to go ahead and employ it shamelessly if it backs up what he's saying.
And he often does something I find deeply frustrating, where the lack of evidence for his theory becomes a kind of evidence in itself.
There's no artefacts from the supposed lost civilisation?
Well, of course not.
It was totally wiped out in a cataclysmic event.
I wondered if perhaps the problem was me.
Perhaps my background in academia meant I'd gotten used to reading the work of historians who had all been trained in a particular method, and now I was blind to the appeal of other kinds of epistemology.
I'd read enough by now to know for a fact that that is what Hancock would say.
He's pretty regularly scathing about the way that academic training has shuttered off our minds to all but the most narrow, mundane possibilities.
And this leads, you know, this leads to, it certainly led me to conclude that...
Yes. That those
who were specialists in this field would welcome some new ideas.
They might throw them out in the end, but they would want to see whether there was any merit to the ideas.
And so, initially, I was really shocked that the attitude is, oh, this idea doesn't agree with us.
We are going to destroy this idea in any way we can.
And not only that, we're going to destroy the individuals associated with this idea.
We will attack the man and the idea.
Ad hominem attacks.
Exactly. Exactly.
In a very dirty tricks kind of way.
It's only later on, actually, that I came to realize That academics all treat each other this way as well.
They're all very territorial, they're all ego-driven, they have their power base in a particular view, and they defend that view to the death.
Yeah, I mean, he is right on that.
Academics are also very mean to each other as well.
Yeah, we are dreadful.
Yeah, it's so funny the way he views everything through that kind of personal lens.
It's just all about his relationship to the academy and that they're all kind of personally slighting him.
You know, he has Almost like no sense of how science works, how the scientific method works in relation to archaeology, how, you know, you may produce evidence such as the evidence that was brought forward for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and then people try to replicate your results.
They do the same tests, they take the same samples.
A writer who had no background whatsoever in this.
So I can understand maybe he's upset that his views aren't getting mainstream attention, although now they are.
But he shouldn't really have a vendetta against archaeology as a whole because of that.
Yeah, that's the thing.
I mean, it's a little the same with the vaccines cause autism guy.
I forget his name.
Andrew Wakefield.
Yeah, yeah.
who was also, you know, he was a heterodox thinker.
You know, he believed this to be the case and he brought his evidence forward.
And science needs those kinds of people to bring left field hypotheses forward so that they can be tested.
But the crime is then not accepting when your hypothesis is disproved, which Wakefield did and Hancock definitely did.
It's funny that he complains about ad hominem attacks here because he's kind of presenting his own ad hominem explanation about why he's being contradicted.
It's like, why do academics disagree with me and say I'm wrong and they subscribe to a more orthodox view?
Well, Well, because they're all corrupted, they're all ego-driven, they're all clinging to their career.
Obviously, people like that wouldn't provide the correct answers.
Yeah. The more I researched Hancock, the more I think I began to understand him.
He is using a method of sorts to approach the past, but it's an impressionistic one.
At one point in Fingerprints of the Gods, he writes, I go on intuition again, not evidence.
And it's true.
His writing places a great deal of value on feeling and instinct, and in his view it's academia's narrow-minded insistence on historical materialism that cuts us off from truly connecting with what happened.
What you have here is just the telling of a story.
It is, in fact, much, much older.
So perhaps what's sadly lacking in archaeology is an archaeology of ideas.
Perhaps they focus too much on the dates of a particular construction and don't consider the ideas that it's expressing.
Right. If we're willing to look back beyond the artificial horizons that archaeology sets, then the myth at once begins to make sense.
Not as a fanciful account of imagined events, but as a true record of a lost and forgotten past.
Archaeologists reject any such suggestion.
But I find it impossible to ignore how widespread these tales of civilizing heroes are.
That's some EDM music there.
And the camera, for our listeners, the camera is like orbiting around the horizon as he walks backlit in the sun.
Yeah, he's turning your perception upside down.
It's mirrored in the camera work.
No, it's amazing.
If you enter Graham's world of imagination, anything can become anything.
It's an exciting place.
It's, Annie, you called it vibes-based archaeology, which I think is very accurate.
It's clear that this vision of history as something that we can feel somehow, if we stop letting the work of respected historians cloud our minds, is also what makes Hancock's work so appealing to his many, many fans.
This came across really strongly in Hancock's conversation with one of them in season two, who is also the famed actor Keanu Reeves.
Yeah, a bit of an upgrade from Rogan.
This broke my heart.
So, Keanu.
Graham. Let's talk about the past.
OK. Why does the past matter to you?
Well, you know, I remember as a young child just being inquisitive, and as I have grown up, it comes to the question of a fundamental sense of who are we?
Yeah, and what's driven me on this quest of my own for more than 30 years is to try to get back to some sort of source.
Source of what?
The source of who we are.
And the timeline.
Timeline's all wrong.
That's why those footprints in White Sands were so significant to me.
We're going to go back much further than that.
Yeah, I have that feeling, too.
And we are just at the edge of rediscovering so much of our lost past.
And in a way, America is the place where that story is unfolding.
Well, that's an exciting idea.
I think you're on a quest, Graham, to teach and to bring understanding, perhaps.
Well... The issue about the Americas is that there is so much of our past that we've forgotten.
And my role, such as it is, has been to try to recover some of that lost memory.
When I think of the past like that, it sounds exciting.
Absolutely. For me, the past is all about mystery.
It's not about what we do know.
It's about what we don't know.
The huge areas that have not been explored or investigated, the possibilities that haven't been explored.
Yeah. He fell down that staircase too many times in John Wick.
What is the point of that appearance beyond just, like, a celeb?
I know, that's literally...
He does come back again for another conversation, which is pretty much exactly the same, just like, yeah, that's kind of just, like, strange, awkward, weird.
Meeting on a mountaintop somewhere.
Yeah, I mean if you can get Keanu for like anything, you may as well.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
You've got it.
You can't pass up that opportunity.
No, if I made a documentary, I'd just want a scene where Keanu told me I was doing a great job.
Listening to this made me think that I can relate to why people like Hancock's theories after all.
It's, yeah, what I said to Brad, a vibes-based approach to the past, which feels romantic, intuitive, and, as Keanu puts it, exciting.
Crucially, there's an anti-elitist appeal as well.
If you've experienced, or even just fear experiencing, some haughty academic sneering at your innocent curiosity and saying you can't possibly know as much as they do until you've completed several degrees and read a zillion books, then Hancock's philosophy suggests that your inexperience is actually a plus.
Anyone is welcome to become a historical detective like him, travelling the world, or more likely the internet, and piecing together the clues and just kind of feeling them out.
He's pretty coy about it for Netflix, but what's underwriting Hancock's insistence on the primacy of intuition and instinct for comprehending history are his spiritual beliefs.
He is very vocal about his support for hallucinogenic drugs like ayahuasca, which in America before he claims to have taken over 70 times since 2003.
Wow! Oh, that's a lot.
That's a lot.
And that was published in 2019, so it's probably more now.
That'll blitz your brain.
Yeah, we had a joke when we were watching an ancient apocalypse where just any minute he was just going to turn to camera and be like, I'm on ayahuasca right now.
Yeah, that's my secret.
I'm always on ayahuasca.
In the same book, you discuss shamanism and the use of altered states of consciousness to connect with the non-physical world.
Such a method of knowledge acquisition seems absurd and fantastical to the rational Western mind.
And indeed, underlying the whole notion of soul journeys to the other world is a model of reality that is diametrically opposed in every way to the model presently favoured by Western science.
This remotely ancient shamanistic model holds our material world to be much more complicated than it seems to be.
Behind it, beneath it, above it, interpenetrating it, all around it.
Sometimes symbolized as being underground, or sometimes in the sky, is an other world.
Perhaps multiple other worlds.
Spirit worlds, underworlds, netherworlds, etc.
Inhabited by supernatural beings.
Whether we like it or not, we must interact with these non-physical beings, which, though generally invisible and intangible, have the power both to harm, Although he's ostensibly describing someone else's model of belief, I think it's also pretty much what he believes too.
And I don't say that to ridicule or diminish him, I actually think his descriptions of his personal spiritual journey are pretty compelling.
In his book Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, he writes very movingly about his experiments with the psychoactive drug Ibogaine, which in some cultures is said to let you contact the dead, and his increased desire for communication with these long-lost ancestors after losing his father to cancer.
For Hancock, the therapeutic properties of hallucinogenic drugs are so powerful because they really do give you access to the spiritual world, or the other world as he calls it.
He is discussing openly in an interview his experience of contact with a deity during an ayahuasca ceremony.
Have you been in direct contact with a higher power through your experiences?
Yes, on psychedelics.
Particularly on ayahuasca, I have felt the presence of the entity that I call Mother Ayahuasca.
You felt the mother?
I felt the mother.
And I felt her teachings.
And I felt grateful.
What was that like?
In the most compelling case, she took the form of an enormous serpent who wrapped herself around my body.
Serpents, always coming back to serpents.
Always coming back.
And Mother Ayahuasca often takes the form of a serpent, sometimes takes the form of a jaguar, sometimes takes, not the motor car, the puma, and sometimes takes the form of a human being.
Was there any fear?
No, I didn't feel fear.
The circle was wrapping around.
No, I felt enormously comforted.
And again, I got a message that I've had many times, is that you won't be good at giving love to others if you don't love yourself, if you're constantly hating yourself.
And I've gone through long periods of my life where I have felt very negative about myself.
The title of that clip, though, is Graham Hancock's Wife Attacked During Ayahuasca Ceremony.
Did you listen to that part?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah. So, so basically she was psychically attacked.
They were doing ayahuasca in like a, in a ceremony.
And apparently there was someone there who was, yeah.
He sort of said that like later on, the person sort of said that like, Oh, we actually, yeah, he, we should, we shouldn't have let him in or something like that.
He apparently was, I forget the exact term.
He had this kind of like, um, psychic parasitism where he was, he was, yeah.
Psychic vampirism they call it.
Yeah, that's it.
He was trying to leech her good energy.
I think she was the youngest in the group, so he wanted to use her energy.
It's a bit of a clickbait title, I guess, if you're thinking it's a physical attack.
She just got mugged or something.
What's more, Hancock believes that the ancient survivors of his lost civilisation are literally trying to communicate with us.
This appears several times in metaphor over the course of the series.
Here he does it when seeing geoglyphs in a recently deforested part of Brazil from a plane.
The perfect geometry is only visible from hundreds of feet in the air.
And yet somehow, this was all created by people with their feet stuck firmly on the ground.
you This, to me, raises a feeling of deep respect.
How do they have the perspective to see how they would look from above?
It's a powerful experience.
I've visited many temples and pyramids and sacred sites around the world, and this has a very special feeling.
You know, very special.
I mean, it touches my heart.
I'm looking at something majestic.
It's as though the curtain is being pulled back from the Mona Lisa.
Suddenly I'm seeing something that I didn't know was there and it had an enormous emotional impact upon me.
It was as though the ancients were speaking to me directly.
Look what we could do.
Don't underestimate us.
We were scientists.
And here he does it again when looking at some ancient cave art.
Most compelling to me are the many handprints.
That intimate human contact expressed by the handprints in the rock art.
It's almost as though they were touching the wall and through the wall touching us, sending a message to the future.
I mean, this is very strange because, like, when he finds these ancient artworks, what these people were doing in the ancient world is that they were communicating to each other.
They're communicating to other humans.
Of course, it has an impact on us, too, because we're also human.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, yeah, I think his theories about artwork and cave art, I think, are kind of like interesting, I think, particularly when, like, he connects them with stuff like, yeah, hallucinogenic drugs and altered states of consciousness.
I think he's very deeply influenced by the book The Mind in the Cave.
I don't know if You ever read that Brad in your journey?
No. It's a really great book.
It's one of those things where it's written in the 90s and I think it's a little influenced slightly by New Age, but it kind of suggests that we should like look at cave art as possibly of being done.
You know, can we kind of like reconstruct, I guess, a kind of shamanistic religion through ancient cave art?
Can we kind of like, you know, it's kind of interesting.
I don't really know how like well respected it is in the field.
It's like a, it's a definitely compelling theory.
And I think Hancock is very influenced by that.
But yeah, certainly this kind of a concept of it speaking to us directly is not in there.
But I do understand the feeling.
I do understand the feeling when you see that like handprint on the wall, do you know, of like that kind of feeling of human connection that you get there?
Yeah, for sure.
But Hancock really means it, too.
In the ancient art or hieroglyphs that we often find so impenetrable, he frequently sees a warning from the Atlanteans, specifically crafted for future generations about what it was that wiped out their world.
To the ancients, stargazing would have been the greatest show on Earth.
The most entertaining way to pass their long dark nights.
They'd have known every turn of the Milky Way.
Every bright star cluster, every comet blazing across the sky.
It might explain why, everywhere we look in the ancient world, we find massive structures pointing our attention to the heavens.
But what if it's more than that?
Ancient pyramids and temples all around the world connect sky to ground with precise alignments to the sun, moon and stars.
Why did the builders take such care and on such a massive scale?
Could they have been trying to tell us something, warn us even, that we must at all costs pay close attention to the heavens?
I think that's what's so sad about Graham's shtick is that he he's always leaning towards this kind of universalist message that, you know, he is identifying the fact that across all these different cultures people have Wanted to align their sacred buildings with the movements of the stars.
There's so much that unites us as humans, but he rejects that kind of universalism in favor of this much more literal descendancy from one single culture.
Yeah, and it can't even be, he doesn't even allow for like, that there were two cultures.
Or three.
For whatever reason, it has to be one.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I mean, we don't even have one culture in our modern globalized, you know, extremely highly technological world.
So the idea that there was this one globe-spanning civilization in the Ice Ages, I mean, as I said, it's pointless to go through why it's wrong.
But maybe it's right?
It just tires you out.
It's just weird.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock goes into detail on what he thinks the ancients are actually saying.
As we have seen, this testimony appears to be trying to tell us that a hideous calamity has indeed descended upon mankind from time to time, but on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly, without warning and without mercy, like a thief in the night, and that it will certainly recur at some point in the future.
Obliging us, unless we are well prepared, to begin again like orphaned children in complete ignorance of our true heritage.
Although, as Ancient Apocalypse seems to suggest pretty strongly, if it really was a comet that took this lost civilization out, it's hard to know exactly what its survivors think we should do about it if it happens again.
We haven't even properly developed telekinesis yet.
Yeah, we're trying.
We're gonna mind-meld that comet away.
Yeah, wait till I get my Neuralink chip.
One of Hancock's favourite catchphrases is, we are a species with amnesia.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, he discusses the sad problem of how so many of us are, for one reason or another, quote, death to the testimony of our forgotten ancestors.
His quest, as he sees it, is to show us that we can be cured, if we simply trust our gut and tune into the ancients' frequency, which Ayahuasca will certainly help with, but it's not necessarily required.
There's a really funny, you know, painted pottery, all the pyramids look the same, kind of moment where he says, can it be coincidence that all these cultures around the world all use hallucinogenic drugs?
Yeah, I should have put that clip in there, actually.
It's like, we love getting high, man.
We love the stuff.
The historians of religion, Olav Hammer and Karen Swartz, wrote an article for the journal Nova Religio in which they analyse ancient apocalypse not as a flawed history documentary, but as an artefact of what they call modern myth-making.
In the piece, they identify two mythological narratives that underscore the series.
The first is obviously Hancock's own grand theory of the Ice Age Atlanteans, fleeing destruction and so spreading the seeds of civilisation all over the world.
But the second myth concerns Hancock himself.
As we are repeatedly reminded, humanity suffers from collective amnesia and the great Atlantean Ice Age civilisation is all but forgotten.
A vital part of our history is thus lost to us, especially since there is a message, however vaguely delineated, left behind by the sages of that ancient culture that we need to heed.
One resolute investigator has spent 30 years sifting through the evidence, but assiduously examining various archaeological sites and by comparing myths and uncovering their historical kernel, the subject of the narrative, Graham Hancock, has exposed the truth.
The opponents, the forces of ignorance and darkness in the story, are the dogmatic academics, guardians of scientific orthodoxy.
If the story of the Ice Age people is vague, it is by implication the fault of these pseudo-experts who refuse to investigate the clues he has so laboriously uncovered, perpetuate a false picture of the past, and ridicule him when he points out the evidence they have failed to see.
The Ice Age narrative builds on the assumption that oral traditions from around the globe that tell of culture heroes such as the Titan Prometheus are memories of real events.
In the narrative we have just analysed, Graham Hancock is cast as a present-day Prometheus who brings the culture and insights from Atlantis to her own dark and ignorant world.
Yeah, I really liked that way of analysing him, I think.
It made a lot of sense to me.
It also, I mean, it seems like a very, I don't know, kind of like Western ancestor Ancestor worship.
The idea that our ancient ancestors from prehistory were actually so much wiser than us, and they have something to say to us if we will just listen.
Yeah, yeah.
The concept of ancestor worship has definitely come up to me before as well.
I'm like, is he kind of creating a new...
it has the pretense of being history, but it's actually just like a modern ancestor worship?
I don't know.
Yeah, glad you brought that up.
Yeah, there's a common strain in a lot of Mythology is that there was a previous golden age, you know, like in the Hindu yuga system, that the previous yugas, people were much taller and more beautiful and stronger, that with each age that has passed, people became smaller, more wretched, and we now live in a fallen age, a diminished age.
You get a similar thing in the Bible when, you know, Noah lives for 900 years because he's just part of a heroic age where things were better.
Everything worked.
Nobody ever suffered.
Yeah. And also it's sort of, Graham sort of bolsters that with the examples that some of the oldest structures and sites are the most sophisticated, you know, like the oldest pyramid or the oldest temple in Ekobekli Tepe, that those are often have the best workmanship.
And in his mind, they sprang out of nothing, you know, that there wasn't anything that kind of led up to that.
But at least in Egypt, they did find that there were false starts.
It takes some time to figure this stuff out.
And a lot of the time, you know, people are just like quite relentlessly, you know, they kind of work with what they have in the past.
They don't have our same kind of, I don't know, what's the word, kind of nostalgia or kind of affection for sort of old buildings or stuff like that.
So if something needs to kind of be torn down to make the new thing, that's what you do.
Right, you know, so that's why things look like they spring up out of nowhere essentially, but it's not a case of people just had the perfect ability back then and lost it.
Yeah, it just seems like a universal human feeling that, you know, we're dissatisfied with the way the world is and You know, the world's a mess and the cruelest and stupidest people lead us and everything just seems to be getting worse all the time.
There must have been a time when it was different, when things were actually good and I think Graham Hancock satisfies that need for a new audience.
Yeah. Despite the strain he's put on our marriage in the last months, I'll admit I actually kind of like Graham Hancock.
I think there's something a little charming about how he's stuck so resolutely to his theory in the face of near-unanimous expert opposition and overwhelming evidence.
I didn't even really hate watching Ancient Apocalypse.
It took me on a journey through some amazing ancient sites, many of which I'd never heard of before, and brought up some pretty interesting historical mysteries.
It was just a little frustrating having to figure out which ones were actually mysteries.
Yeah, and he's, you know, out of these types of guys, he's, you know, he's mild-mannered, he's polite.
Yeah. He's got a charm to him.
He's disarming.
Yeah, I will admit, I did think that until I watched the debate with Flint Dibble.
Me and Paul actually watched that.
We watched that like six weeks after having our baby.
It was just like, we just had like, we were so sleep deprived.
There's nothing to do other than just sit and feed the baby who is just like sleeping randomly at all hours and days.
yeah we just we just sat and watched like his three hour debate on the Joe Rogan podcast And I thought he, because I had this impression of him from Ancient Apocalypse as being very kind of mild-mannered.
But I actually thought he came across as a bit like bitter.
He kind of was a bit sort of like rude.
And I don't know, it actually, I was a bit like, oh, they actually gave me quite a polished version of you, I think.
Yeah, he also just has a kind of bunch of acolytes.
There's a guy called Jimmy Corsetti, another guy called Dan the Dedunker.
These are guys that kind of orbit around him and create YouTube content.
and they're more kind of like his outriders his like attack guards And he kind of, like, assents to this and often responds to their stuff, like tacitly encouraging them, but it kind of allows him to keep his hands clean.
Honestly, the campaign of harassment that Flint Dibble has been through since that debate, you know, it shows that these people are actually getting in the way of the work of real archaeologists.
Well, I guess we'll see if they'll come for us after this episode.
Yeah, Dan the Dedunker's got our number here.
Truthfully, I've never really minded conspiracy theories about prehistory or any of the ancient aliens stuff either.
It's always felt to me like a world of difference away from the really nasty political material that we tend to cover more frequently on this podcast.
If people want to dream up ancient telekinetic people who could melt stone and build pyramids with the power of their minds, why not let them?
If I'm feeling really generous, I'd maybe even go as far to say that this kind of material, where history and science blur into fantasy fiction, is a bit like Bigfoot or Flat Earth stuff.
It's maybe an harmless way for people to creatively explore the boundaries of belief and scepticism.
Except that Bigfoot is real.
Yes, yes.
Really, really pushing the boundaries of scepticism on this podcast.
We are a pro-Bigfoot podcast.
Having said that, it feels impossible not to notice that Graham Hancock is beloved with a certain crowd of right-wing culture warriors.
He has by now made countless appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast, who also shows up in the first season of Ancient Apocalypse to big him up.
James Dellingpole, the self-proclaimed red-pilled former editor of Breitbart London, has described himself as a huge fan.
And although he's perhaps less of a prestigious celebrity admirer than Keanu Reeves, Jacob Angelli, known more popularly by his moniker the QAnon Shaman, has professed his admiration for Hancock many times.
He's a friend of the show.
That's a sore spot.
Why is that?
As Paul said, it probably helps that Hancock is particularly vituperative about his critics in academia, who are also a big target for the far right for obvious reasons.
Hancock even sometimes obligingly uses their terminology.
I couldn't help but notice on Twitter that he described British journalists who'd critiqued ancient apocalypse as, quote, woke.
Yeah, I mean, you know, he's a 74 year old white British man.
I'm under no illusions.
Yeah, you can't even say that ancient people melted stone with their brains anymore.
without the woke mob.
Woke mob will call you.
Like overly conservatively dated or the sophistication downplayed.
Yeah, or the general belief that those cultures just weren't civilized or advanced enough to build those sites.
That's not woke.
That's like the opposite of being woke.
No, that's the problem, Brad.
Those were the good old days.
You don't understand.
That's the thing.
Like, I don't think, you know, the useful, like inadvertently buried subtext in the show is I think that, you know, Graham does mention here and there that mainstream archaeology often dismisses the sophistication of ancient peoples or indigenous peoples.
But then he comes around and says, but those people themselves didn't actually build those sites or conceive of those sites in the first place.
It was this unknown group.
So he kind of goes halfway there and then takes it somewhere even worse than historically archaeology had taken it.
Yeah, that's very true.
Annie, you're right.
This is exactly what What archaeology used to be.
This is, you know, just dynamite through 10 layers of stratification.
Yeah. And just say, I found the Tower of Babel or the Garden of Eden or whatever.
Yeah. Fundamentally, even though I find it something of a romantic notion, I think there might be something a little reactionary to this idea that we can access the past through sheer vibes alone.
For one thing, it always seems to end the same way.
When someone presents evidence that contradicts our gut feeling, we inevitably treat them with suspicion and hostility, rather than reflecting on what emotional need that historical narrative was fulfilling for us in the first place.
And unfortunately, aside from the general romance and mystery of it all, I think a big reason why Hancock's theory resonates with so many people from different corners of the right-wing tradition is because it subtly denies the woke concept of universal human potential.
Hancock gets very frustrated when his critics bring up the race angle here, and being fair to him, I can see why.
I think for him and his more liberal admirers, his message is one of unity.
Hancock's vision of the past urges us to put aside our petty cultural differences and focus on our common origin, all beginning with ancient wisdom from one, possibly human, possibly divine, source.
It's a universalist message as they see it.
Ultimately, though, there is a reason why the right-wing political project has been so eager to embrace it.
The political theorist Corey Robin, in his 2011 book The Reactionary Mind, argued that rather than tradition, liberty, or any of the other usual buzzwords, it was in fact hierarchy that described the foundational bedrock of conservative thought.
Hancock's theory of human history, crucially, still allows for historical model of essential human hierarchy at precisely the time this model has fallen out of vogue in nearly every other academic discipline.
Yeah. Human societies, in spite of all of our many cultural-environmental differences, are nonetheless equal in our capacity for ingenuity, curiosity, and progress.
A brilliant class of traveling teachers bestowing the gift of civilization is a soothing fairy tale for people who would like to deny that.
While I've been researching this episode, I've found myself bouncing around the question of whether Hancock's success is down to a failure in academic communication, or whether he himself is creating that failure by constantly misrepresenting and denigrating what academics say.
I think I've landed on the answer that he is offering something fundamentally different that those disciplines can't – a sense of connection and purpose that transcends the rigour and mundanity of academic scrutiny.
Hancock's narratives don't just reinterpret history, they promise access to a hidden truth, a grand design that invites believers to see themselves as part of an ancient, mystical continuum.
Ancient apocalypse might not be as nakedly political or harmful as something like QAnon, but they share a lineage, I think.
They're essentially spiritual stories for the secular age, promising fulfilment and mystery when modern life feels devoid of both.
What I find frustrating about his whole approach is that it actually kind of like cheapens something that I find very enriching about studying history, which is the spark of recognition and realizing that people from all over cultures share something with my experience and how I live life.
You know, even if I were, you know, even if I were someone who lives in a community at like the beginning of the agricultural revolution, my life would probably be a lot more violent and disease ridden.
Other than that, I would still be, you know, Yeah!
not because all of these experience have some sort of shared heritage or shared lineage.
And I don't know, it feels cheaper to say that it feels like all of these characters Characteristics, all of these experiences are actually something that was like deliberately handed down rather than something being core to our human life.
Yeah, the ancient super civilization is just staring him in the face because it's just us.
It's just all people who share like a very unique, you know, mind and neurology.
A way of experiencing the world.
But that's not exciting for a TV show.
Yeah, that's a really lovely way of putting it, Brad.
Like, the ancient Ice Age civilization is the human mind itself.
Yeah. Well, Paul, did you come away from this episode disliking Graham even more?
Or maybe A little less.
Annie's been trying to work me over on this issue for weeks now.
No, one drop of this shit is too much.
Remember stuff in your brain.
You will be counting nubs and measuring vases and talking about the pyramids.
Don't do it.
Not even once.
Well, Graeme, if you're listening, I tried.
I tried my best.
Fascinating stuff.
Paul, could you please tell people where they can find more of your work?
Yeah, you can find the Fall of Civilizations podcast wherever you find podcasts, you can find me on YouTube, and I have a book, Fall of Civilizations, Stories of Greatness Online, coming out paperback soon.
Fantastic, congratulations.
Yes, thank you.
Thanks for having me on the show.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
For everything else we have a website QAApodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
Oh, oh, oh.
We have autocued content based on your preferences.
Let's talk about Atlantis.
I don't believe Bimini is the site of Atlantis.
Or that Atlantis lies anywhere near the Bahamas.
But the legend of the drowned city is intriguing.
Precisely because it offers us the most detailed description of something I believe really existed.
A lost advanced civilization of the Ice Age.
The Greek philosopher Plato is the oldest surviving source for the story of Atlantis, which he describes quite vividly.
Atlantis was a precocious civilization, boasting beautiful architecture, advanced technology, and city planning on a monumental scale.
It also commanded a vast fleet capable of navigating the world.
Projecting its power near and far across oceans.
Until the city was struck by a series of massive earthquakes and floods.
A truly cataclysmic event.
And sank beneath the waves.
Plato tells us that the story of Atlantis reached him through his ancestor Solon.
That Solon visited Egypt, and we know the date of that visit, it was 600 BC.
And during that visit, he visited a temple, and the priests spoke of a lost advanced civilization, which they called Atlantis, which was destroyed in a flood 9,000 years before the time of Solon's visit.
*Rainful music*
So we have a date for the destruction of Atlantis.
9,600 BC.
That's exactly the same time as an episode of global cataclysm and catastrophic sea level rise that occurred at the end of the Ice Age.
