Ancient Apocalypse (2022) is an eight show series, purportedly about archaeology but devoted to arguing the crackpot theories of its presenter, an Englishman named Graham Hancock. The show's episodes are short, about 25 minutes, and the series is attractively photographed, but the premise is hogwash and the Hancock's arguments are deeply dishonest. This sort of thing might be mildly amusing if it weren't presented with the trappings of scientific argument. Probably, people will believe Hancock's theories are plausible and many will likely accept his argument that academic archaeologists are engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Of course, it doesn't really matter -- Hancock is perpetrating a fraud about something that supposedly happened 12,000 years ago and, therefore, his deceit isn't exactly relevant: he isn't a charlatan promoting ideas about election fraud or health care. But it's the tone of his series that concerns me: first, it's "fake news" (he claims to be an investigative reporter) promoted with no concern for the truth -- this is always pernicious even though he's lying about events supposed to have happened in the Younger Dryas, a geological period of environmental catastrophes that occurred after the last Ice Age; in the law, there is an idea that if you will intentionally lie about one thing, you will lie about everything else too and Hancock's brutish disregard for the facts is concerning. (I'm not going to enter into the controversy -- pronounced in this show "cuntroe - versee" -- about Hancock's apparent racism: the wise tutors that Hancock posits as the culture-heroes of Younger Dryas are all apparently White with blonde hair and blue eyes: this is what critics who have read Hancock's screeds assert -- of course, I don't know what's in his wretched books.) Second, Hancock epitomizes conspiracy theory -- you can't promote an idiosyncratic concept without contriving a whole cast of villainous opponents seeking to conceal the truth. Conventional archaeologists serve the "straw man" role here as bigoted, close-minded fools who have conspired to ignore evidence that is unmistakably right before their eyes. (As the show progresses, conventional geologists also incur Hancock's ire -- they are also supposed to be in league with the pernicious archaeological institutions.) In fact, everyone who opposes Hancock's nutty ideas is a conspirator against the truth and, frankly, I don't know how many leaps it would take this guy to reach the idea that arithmetic is a lie and that the Elders of the Protocols of Zion are behind the cabal to conceal the our actual prehistory. (In fairness -- and I don't pretend to be even-handed here -- there's an aspect of conspiracy theory in a book that I admire on this general topic, Wengrow and Graber's The Beginning of Everything, an infinitely better presentation of some of Hancock's propositions.. Those writers, proceeding from an anarchist viewpoint, also vehemently denounce "conventional" archaeological models for the development of urban societies with their concomitant socio-economic inequality.)
I won't address most of Hancock's problematic assertions. His overarching theory is that there was an ancient culture that was technologically advanced and very wise existing around the end of the last Ice Age. This culture has left no traces -- at least as far as academic archaeologists are concerned; the paucity of evidence for this presumed superior culture is due to the manifold calamities of the Younger Dryas: volcanoes, floods, glaciers, and comets striking the earth (sky-serpents is how Hancock characterizes these lethal projectiles). The few survivors of the apocalypse traveled around the world teaching the savages agriculture and how to build pyramids -- hence the existence of pyramids in various disparate places (Egypt, Mexico, and, surprisingly, Vanatu and Indonesia). For some unknown reason, institutional archaeology has conspired to conceal the traces of these wise elders from the public. Hancock never supplies a motive for this cabal -- every archaeologist that I've ever encountered, of course, would give his or her left testicle to discover signs of a lost civilization and, so, the entire conspiratorial premise makes no sense. But if the truth is hidden, then, someone must be hiding it. Hancock's approach is to present impressive drone footage of colossal megalithic monuments -- indeed, the world is full of these things dating from Gobekli Tepi (9000 BC) through Stonehenge and the monuments at Malta (5000 BC). Hancock visits a monument and interviews one of its archaeological caretakers. The interviews are cynically manipulated. From my interaction with archaeologists, I've learned that these scientists are extremely reticent about making interpretations of artifacts that are thousands of years old. The easiest response to get out of an archaeologist is "We don't yet know what this means." In fact, this is the default position of professional archaeologists: here's an object, look at it carefully, see if it similar to other objects, and, then, state that the meaning of the object is presently unknown. Hancock gets his interview subjects to admit that they don't know certain things -- that is, who first built on this site or why or, even, when. Then, he immediately cuts to himself filling in the gaps in knowledge to which the unfortunate archaeologist has just admitted. The point is that the professional archaeologists don't know the truth (or know it and are concealing it); Hancock takes admissions as to what is unknown and, then, fills in the blank spaces with his own speculation. This makes the hapless subjects of Hancock's interviews appear to be agreeing with him, although, of course, it is no such thing.
Let me provide an example: Hancock devotes an episode to "secret subterranean cities" in Turkey. I know something about this first-hand because I've actually visited one of these places and crawled around in its claustrophobic bowels. Hancock focuses on Derinkulu and a sister underground city, Kaymakli. First, he lies about the discovery of the underground labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. He claims someone discovered the tunnels while remodeling a building in 1963. This is untrue. The locals knew about the underground chambers but just had sealed up their openings. (This is due to certain morbid aspects of Turkish history -- the tunnels and buried rooms were largely associated with Turkey's Greek-speaking Christians. But in 1923, in a spasm of ethnic cleansing, Turkey expelled its Greek population -- while Greece booted-out its Turks. Therefore, Turkish sites associated with the Greeks were simply shut down, abandoned, and the well-known underground refuges were closed. The Turks are, by and large, a highly xenophobic and chauvinistic group and, so, they really had no use for anything associated with the lost Greek towns -- that is, until tourists began to arrive and it became lucrative in these dusty and remote Cappadocian villages, to open up the underground cities for the inspection of foreigners.) Hancock likes drama and he can't resist the notion of someone stumbling onto a epoch-shaking discovery, but, of course, none of this is true. Hancock, then, gets a Turkish archaeologist who has studied these bunkers to say that he doesn't know exactly when they were first created. Talking to the camera or the side of the camera -- the show features irritating profile shots of Hancock pontificating, apparently, to spiff up the visuals -- the presenter tells us that probably the cities carved into the soft pyroclastic tufa were dug around the era of the Younger Dryas, a proposition for which there is zero actual evidence at all. (The archaeologist says that he doesn't know exactly when the refuges were dug -- that is, he can't tell you that they were created on Tuesday afternoon, March 14, 922 BC. But, of course, he knows generally that the tunnels date back to about 900 BC, that Herodotus mentions them about 400 BC in his Histories and that later people added to the complex, making the spider-holes deeper and longer and, further, installing all sorts of infrastructure -- for instance, air shafts and wells and even stables. Indeed, the Greeks were adding to the underground bunkers up to 1923 when they were unceremoniously thrown out of the country. Hancock's claims that the bunkers date to 9000 BC is based on these arguments: the oldest layers of the tunnels, closest to ground, have chisel marks that seem to suggest the use of stone tools -- of course, this flies in the face of the idea that lithic tool use would be inconsistent with a mentor sophisticate civilization. And what is the real proof that the stone chisels were used? Hancock shows us some hand-axes dating to about 50,000 years ago but he provides no convincing evidence on this subject. Hancock's other proofs are even more ludicrous -- the site is 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe (so what?), the badlands in Cappadocia with phallic-looking naturally occurring fairy columns look like some carved rocks at an ancient site (circa 9000 BC) near Gobekli Tepe -- again, so what? A blocked off tunnel in Kaymakli, another series of bunkers of this sort five miles away, is speculated to run underground to Derinkulu -- this is sheer, naked surmise. Obviously, a five mile tunnel hacked through the tufa would be evidence of profound technological sophistication -- again, completely contradicting the assertion that the upper (oldest) levels were carved with Paleolithic hand axes. The Turkish archaeologist can't tell you when exactly the complex was made and, therefore, it could have been carved nine-thousand years ago. Without asking my mother, I can't say the exact hour of my birth -- therefore, I could be nine-thousand years old myself. Hancock intercuts images of the creepy, narrow passages and tiny tomb-likechambers of the underground town with whirling dervishes. The dervishes are supposed to supply some aura of mystery and the sacred to the claustrophobic holes in the ground -- Hancock doesn't bother to tell us that the Sufi dervishes are a Muslim sect that dates back to about 700 AD. It seems that Hancock wants us to believe that the passageways and tunnels were refuges built to protect the local dervishes from the flood and fire and meteor bombardment of the Younger Dryas. Clearly, the places are, in fact, conceived as bolt-holes -- that is, hiding places for local people besieged by invading armies. The history of Anatolia is a melancholy parade of massacres and invasions -- after all, the place is land-bridge between Asia and Europe. The Assyrians slaughtered Parthians here, the Ottoman's murdered Greeks and Armenians -- there were invasions by the Persians and Mongols and Tamerlane's armies; about every forty years, another invader appeared on the scene to persecute the people living here and this continued until the expulsion of the Greeks in 1923 (and may continue even now with respect to the Kurds). The sites are full of huge millstones that can be rolled across openings in the tunnels to choke-off access. This suggests that the places were primarily defensive. (Hancock bizarrely claims that the huge half-ton millstones were used for "privacy" and as fire-walls.) The presenter doesn't want to admit that the underground cities are refuges into which people would flee in times of invasion -- although there is copious documentary evidence to this effect. Instead, he wants these nasty underground tubes and cisterns to have been the habitations of his imaginary ancient tutors to mankind. I've been in one of these places and I can tell you that if the subterranean holes and tubes are the work of wise elders, these people were extremely primitive, apparently very small (some of passages are only a foot or two wide), skinny dwarfs inured to living in squalid conditions. (If there were 20,000 people crammed into one of these places, something that is theoretically possible, I don't want to imagine what the place smelled like -- I would guess that most people would prefer to take their chances with the barbarian hordes. Of course, as is the case with much archaeology, there's a residue of really bizarre excess to places like this -- they are too big, too elaborate, too complex for their supposed purposed as temporary hiding places. The pyramids in Giza are likewise way too large for any rational intended purpose. (This is true of almost all ancient monuments, structures that are tributes to an eccentric aspect of human activity that once we start doing something we don't typically stop when the job is done but continue with the project for the sheer fun of it. Why is the mound at Cahokia so tall? What is the pyramid at Cholula so vast? We don't exactly know, although it's my theory that people often have too much time on their hands and spend it writing sonnets or novels, solving differential equations or building vast labyrinthine structures when a simple hut or trench would do.)
Ancient Apocalypse is bearable if you watch it without the sound. I'm likely not going to ever see the citadel in Indonesia at Gunung Padang nor am I ever going to wander the maze of tunnels in Puebla under the pyramid at Cholula; I doubt that I will ever visit Gobekli Tepe or the megalithic temples on Malta. (I have seen the Serpent Mound, an extraordinary site in Ohio - and, indeed, very mysterious from an archaeological perspective. The authorities in Ohio, apparently concerned about fall-out from Hancock's racist theories prevented him from venturing on the site -- no worries, his drones thoroughly explore the place from the air.) It's interesting to see these places and rummage around in their guts with Hancock. But I recommend that you don't trouble yourself with his narration.
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