Transcript
Speaker: You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Speaker: Welcome to Digging Up Ancient Aliens. This is the podcast where we examine alternative history and ancient alien narratives in popular media. Do these ideas hold water when examined by an archaeologist, or are there better explanations out there? We are now on episode 80, and I am Frederick, your guide into the world of pseudo-archaeology. This time, we are but back again to tackle ancient apocalypse with the Graham Hancock. Has he mellowed out recently or will things go off the rails sooner rather than later?
Speaker: I won't linger too long here because, well, we're in for a few new sites to visit such as the White Sands and the Amazon Rainforest. I want to thank all of you who support the show.
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Speaker: We are species with amnesia. Or at least, that's what we are according to Graham Hancock. I really wish that this was accurate and that I could wipe away my memory after yet again watching Ancient Apocalypse.
Speaker: Watching this series and looking at the claims is like being Frodo, carrying the one ring, with all of you as my sandbags. A burden I'm taking on so others maybe won't have to.
Speaker: Unlike Frodo though, there is no glorious ending or peace to the shire. There is just a slight relief that the show is over, for now. The keys click-clack whilst I look for answers. Me thinking that not even... Keroak levels of whiskey will bring me to the Amnesia Hancock mansions.
Speaker: So, what are we dealing with in season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse? Was not everything said in season 1? Well, according to us elitist archaeologists, I would say it definitely was. But apparently those in charge of Netflix programming thought otherwise.
Speaker: Netflix canceled great shows like they have a personal vendetta against joy and character development. Still, for some reason... Netflix keeps this show on for some reason. Hey, even the Goop Lab only ran for one season.
Speaker: In Ancient Apocalypse season 2, we now have an overall theme, the Americas. A reason I see behind it is that it allows Hancock to reuse ideas from the previous season to spin a tale with a more specific narrative.
Speaker: And as Penelope, we... need now to unravel this view and look at the facts Hancock presents and how it fits into the historical tapestry.
Speaker: So let's dive into the tangled narratives and step into one of nature's most striking creations. Enter White Sands, a place where the story isn't written with an agenda, but with gypsum.
Speaker: We now look out over the vast, captivating New Mexico desert landscape. The name really says it all. We see dunes that stretch for some 750 square kilometers and are gleamingly white.
Speaker: The color comes from the composition of the sand, gypsum. To make A quick overview of the area's formation. During the Permian era, starting around 298.9 million years ago, this area was, well, underwater.
Speaker: But when the water retreated, it left behind calcium-sulfate-rich area. Tectonic activities would later form mountains, today named Sacramento and San Andreas.
Speaker: Fast forward and rain and other water pulled the gypsum out of these peaks, pouring out in what today is known as the Tularosa Basin. Once a large lake, this later dried out, leaving crystallized gypsum or selenite behind. Some water would travel further to the Hueco Basin, leaving leftover gypsum that would form into the Akali Flat. However, the sand we see in the dunes come from Lake Lucero that that dries up each year, and wind erodes the Akali Flat crystals found here, creating the fine sand that we today see in the dunes. So from a geological perspective, the site is very well understood.
Speaker: And the American National Park Service has a lot of material available to the public. This is not the reason why we are here, really. Now, the real reason is that Hancock thinks that this is an excellent example of where archaeology exists.
Speaker: is wrong. He will use archaeology and geology to demonstrate this. Hancock claims that that a secret has been found here that will overturn the accepted history of the Americas.
Speaker: But something that Hancock leaves out of the series is that the accepted history has already changed. To be frank, Graham is a bit late on the ball here. What's hinted at is that mainstream archaeology thought that there was no earlier entry into the Americas than around 13,500 BCE.
Speaker: We have a slight hint at the Clovis theory that he mentions in the first season and, well, also in his books. Things have changed during the last 30 years as more and more evidence exists for people settling earlier in the Americas.
Speaker: The earliest settlement found ah so far in North America is ah the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon territories. At this location, thousands of animal bones were found with butcher marks and the oldest bone that's been dated It goes as far back as 24,000 years BP.
Speaker: The study was published in 2017 and the authors Lorianne Bergon, Ariane Burke and Thomas Higham suggest a small standstill population lived in the area during the last glacial Maximus.
Speaker: they estimate that the female population would have been around 1,000 to 2,000 people and probably never extended to more than 10,000 peoples.
Speaker: As the glacier melted around 13,000 BCE, those living at the Bluefish Cave started to move down. While it's among the oldest confirmed dates, many more sites exist dating from 16,000 13,000 BCE.
Speaker: A site that is controversial in a sense is Toca da Tierra Peia, a rock shelter in Brazil. Stone tools have been found at this site. Unfortunately, there has not been any hearth or other objects found to date that can be dated.
Speaker: dated A team led by Christelle Lahaye performed thermal luminescent dating on the stone ah found in the third layer at the site indicating a date around 22,000 BP before present.
Speaker: As we have discussed previously in this show, thermal luminescent dating is a very valuable tool but... sometimes dates that's been uncovered with this method can be unreliable.
Speaker: Without other dating methods such as carbon dating there will remain question marks regarding this initial date by La Haya's team. But as always more data will hopefully show whether this initial date is correct Or is not? This particular study was published in 2013.
Speaker: Even further south in South America, we have dates at a site called Monta Verde, which has secure dates that goes back to around 14,800 BCE.
Speaker: But why Graham Hancock is at White Sands is due to a rather fantastic find. Footprints of humans and megafauna are preserved in the gypsum at White Sands. For thousands of years, this area has witnessed the footsteps of people walking, running, hunting, leaving behind a rich tapestry of human history.
Speaker: The paths they trod are etched into the landscape telling stories of survival, exploration and ah connection to the land. A story that might go as far back as 23,000 years before our time.
Speaker: In 2022, Matthew Bennett et al. published an article in Nature arguing that some footsteps preserved in the gypsum could be dated back to 23,000 before preston This data is based on the surrounding animal tracks and radiocarbon dating of macroscopic seeds from the aquatic Rupia kerosae.
Speaker: These seeds were found in Suito within the tracks, suggesting they had been there since the creation of these footsteps. It's also here in this episode I start to sense a shift in Hancock's demeanor. He seems to be softening to a sense compared to the aggressive persona we encountered in the show's inaugural series.
Speaker: He tries to sow the idea that there is this significant attempt to dismiss the find. We get a quote, quote, The carbon dating of the seeds were challenged, but the team confirmed the results using other samples of pollen and sediment, quieting their critics.
Speaker: Now, what Hancock describes here is the scientific process, TM. You publish something and others will look at it and start to ask a lot of questions. In this case, the team behind the original study returned and completed more tests, which could provide ah even better support for their initial claim. Criticism isn't always bad. Sometimes people do find flaws in your study, but if your theory is sound and you have proper evidence, you can use these criticisms to build an even better case for the theory. Hancock, however, isn't used to the scientific process. Instead of looking at the criticism, he takes it as a personal insult.
Speaker: Instead of addressing the flaws of his arguments, the archaeology mafia is just out there to get him. It sounds odd, but to some extent, science is about disproving your theory.
Speaker: We don't aim to do that out of maleficence, but to test if the theories and the methods that you use are sound. If you only seek to prove an idea, it's easy to meet things and i get sort of...
Speaker: sort of a tunnel vision, by trying to disprove your theory, you will end up with a stronger argument for your case if it holds up. That's why a hypothesis ah scientists ask need to be stated in a way that it can be either confirmed or dismissed.
Speaker: White Sands may be an important site since it shows that some managed to get past the glacial maximus up north and walk down south. They were not part of this standstill population at the Bluefish Cave. A question I have that later got an answer is why Hancock shoes White Sands of all places.
Speaker: As I mentioned, we have an earlier date up in Bluefish Cave. A boon for Hancock would also be that Jacques Kink Mars was one of those who worked at the site. And Kink Mars was one of those who early on started to question the Clovis first theory and got, to put it mildly, a lot of flack for it. The objections to his work were sometimes both harsh and unfair, and he was only proven right about his theory that the cave predates Clovis after his death, unfortunately. I mean, from Hancock's perspective, this should be a gronmine.
Speaker: He could go to town on the toxic Clovis first propolllment proponents that set an unreasonable high bar of the burden of proof. But why didn't Graham bite this?
Speaker: Well, the site can't be connected to his Younger Dryas impact theory. Evidence also suggests that species the community here at the Bluefish Cave relied on were hunted to extinction. A point that will become more important in just a moment. Why White Sand is the example is that it's older than the previous versions of the Behringer Stray Theory, as I mentioned. It's now...
Speaker: Fairly accepted that people came to the Americas pre-13000 BCE. It also contains extinct megafauna. We are presented with the fact that those large animals hunted by this land's early inhabitants, according to Hancock, went extinct within a very narrow time frame.
Speaker: Such a brief period that it could be only attributed to a meteoric impact drastically changing the environment and wiping the animals out.
Speaker: As you might know, Hancock is one of those who suggests that a comet hit Earth some 12,000 years ago. And this impact caused, according to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,
Speaker: the younger dryers cooling of the northern hemisphere. This caused an enormous catastrophe and destroyed an extensive advanced civilization.
Speaker: Some remnants of this lost bygone society then traveled the world spreading warnings and knowledge wherever they went. Hancock seems to argue that white sand in this case is evidence of this meteoric impact. The issue here is that while there is no credible evidence of this event even taking place or this civilization existing, the extinction of animals took place over um quite a quite long time here.
Speaker: Some species died out before this hypothetical impact took place and others linger around until... much well after the impact would have taken place.
Speaker: And it's worth noting that the extinction of megafaunas does not look the same across the world. Here in Europe, for example, we have an extensive timeline for the cessation of megafaunas living here.
Speaker: If we look closely at how the megafauna start to go extinct, we see that it was not simultaneously. Now we see that each species has a unique pattern.
Speaker: Some survive, while others don't, Stuart put it in a 2015 paper. The reasons for the different extinctions hard to map and differs ah depending on what region you're looking at. There are a few different suggestions to why different animals went extinct, like the overkill hypothesis that humans hunted the animals to extinction, or the environmental change hypothesis that ecological changes took place, changing the animals' and environment,
Speaker: to an extent they could no longer thrive and survive. Both of these different hypotheses has their pros and their cons and none can really explain to a satisfactory level the extinction that took place so alone.
Speaker: A hybrid hypothesis could be a more adequate explanation. That environmental changes put a strain on the different animal populations and humans basically killed off these smaller, weaker groups.
Speaker: And this could explain why pockets of these animals lived through the Paleolithic up to the Metholithic era. Then we have a few more far out ideas such as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
Speaker: But it's been at this point fairly disproven. I recommend reading Vance Holliday et al.' 's paper titled Comprehensive Refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis for a more detailed explanation. I'm also quite sure that we will return to this subject for a deep dive into the argument at a later point. We also have the hyper-disease hypothesis.
Speaker: The main issue being that no known disease would only affect large animals as far as we know today. Another problem is how would it spread globally at this point in history and only spreading through ah certain type of animal.
Speaker: We also have the solar flare hypothesis. It's similar to the Younger-Droja's impact hypothesis in that a catastrophic event took place to causing this mass extinction.
Speaker: And it suffered from the same problem as the Younger-Droja's impact hypothesis. The extinction patterns we see are staggered. This was not an event taking place at one point in time. And another issue is why megafaunas like giant ground slots are affected and mammoths are affected, but not polar bears, bears, rhinos, humans.
Speaker: As you can see, the extinction of large animals roaming the earth is more nuanced than Hancock's explanation. In the program, Hancock also brings up the overkill hypothesis as the only alternative cause for what might have happened here. In an attempt to disarm that argument, Hancock simply knows that, quote, humans won't hunt animals to extinction.
Speaker: While there are much better arguments against that it was overhunting as the sole reason for the extinction, this comment is just plain wrong. A tempting example would be the classical dodo.
Speaker: Still, the demise of this flightless bird previously found in the Mauritius is... Well, it's a bit more complicated. While human hunting of the bird most likely didn't help, the actual death of this species was at the tusks of feral pigs introduced by humans in the 1600s, as argued by Chequet and Paris in a 2020 paper. The feral pigs are known to eat eggs from turtles and would most likely have feasted on the ground-bound birds of offspring too.
Speaker: Combine these three elements we have on the mauritius new agriculture taking away habitats human hunting the birds and a new invasive species eating their eggs altogether is would have been a miracle that the dodo survived not also how how humans are the underlying cause for all these three threats to the dodo A better example of when humans ah hunt the animal to extinction might be found in the case of the zubor, or in English, the European bison.
Speaker: The bison went extinct in Britain around 1100 CE, and in France it was gone by 1300 CE. The animal population survived in enclaves ah in the other parts of Europe until later in history, but around 1100 1800 CE, these population had disappeared almost everywhere from Germany to Transylvania. The only enclave left could be found in the Biawo Wiersa forest on the border of Poland and Belarus.
Speaker: And the reason for the extinction were growing farmlands and Hunting. By 1857, some 1,900 bisons were roaming the Białeva, a number that would quickly shrink with the start of the First World War.
Speaker: While there seems to be a bit of um discussion if the last Zubor was shot in 1919 or in 1921 in Poland, we know the hunter was a man called Bartwomiej Spakovich. Again, while hunting was a huge factor, other human activities such as farming contribute to the extinction.
Speaker: Another example would be Stellar Sea Cow or Hydrodramalis Gigas and it was discovered in 1741 was gone by which is less than years after the initial discovery.
Speaker: White Sands is a fantastic place and an important archaeological site. It gives us a better understanding of the past. The issue here is that it does not support Hancock's idea. As we as we can see, it does not support the idea of a global cataclysm.
Speaker: The only reason to bring this site up for Hancock is to argue against outdated ideas and try to connect it to this cataclysm that he believes took place.
Speaker: The dates for the first people in the America has been moved back and this site is only one piece that fits in a much larger puzzle that will give us the true date of when people start to settle the Americas.
Speaker: I hate to say this, but this would have been a brilliant segment if Hancock only had focused on the site itself and left out this wide-eye IH nonsense. This is why, if I have to read Hancock or another pseudohistory author, I actually do prefer Hancock. However, this little positive comment does not take away anything from all the misinformation we got in this part.
Speaker: For now, we will leave the white sands and go further south, down into the Amazon.
Speaker: Graham Hancock takes us from the US down to Acre, a province in modern Brazil that shares a border with both Peru and Bolivia. and we're told that archaeologists have long refuted the idea of a complex society living in the Amazon. And to a point, that that is correct.
Speaker: As Charles Mann in a 2008 article in Science points out, it was thought to be barren of civilization. And I would prefer to use the term complex society instead of civilization. Both terms are not great, but the former is a bit less loaded.
Speaker: Now, people have lived in the Amazon for millennia, but what has been found is not a culture similar to the Inca or... other South American cultures that built monuments and structure and stones, etc.
Speaker: We are here though because there seems to be a culture creating mounds and geoglyphs that have quite recently been discovered due to the logging in this region.
Speaker: And some of these structures were found in 1977 Alku Ranzi, a pientologist today. as part of a survey. The discovery was not announced until almost a decade later by the National Programme for Archaeological Research, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute.
Speaker: But the announcement gained very little attention and traction and not much attention happened until the early 2000. Today, thanks to a team including Dr. Marti Persinen from Helsinki University, Alku Ransi and Dr. Denise Sjahn, we know a lot more about these earthworks.
Speaker: Some 450 of these sites have been identified so far in the state of Acre. All these earthworks can be linked by a similar ceramic culture that seems to be influenced, according to Persinen, by Western Amazonian formative style.
Speaker: The earthworks come in several different shapes and according to Kaloila et al. the most common are trapezoids, rectangle, square, over and circular. Then there are the geoglyphs that are ditches, inside and barkments and we have about 500 of The earliest of these dates back to around 500 BCE.
Speaker: or year zero. Some of those constructed later during the first millennium seems to have been in use until around 1300 CE. One ceramic shard in one of the earthwork has been dated to ah about 1211 942 calibrated BCE. Still the
Speaker: calibrated b c still the authors, Denise Sean et al. are not sure if this piece of ceramic is really connected connected to the construction itself. The other pottery found in the enclosure dates to around 2000 so around year zero.
Speaker: The earlier pottery found within the earthwork are not strange. We we know the sites have been reused of As Pedersen points out in a 2021 paper, there is a contact issue with these ceramics regarding these earlier dates. They are not found within the embarkment walls where most of these pottery that's dated to around year zero can be found.
Speaker: They are often found at other locations that do not seem to be connected with the constructions of these rampart-like monuments. Again, the site is interesting and deserves more attention. But why is Graham Hancock here?
Speaker: Well, it's a good question, to be honest. this the The section is framed around that the site was first ignored and that's a somewhat accurate statement. Remember Hancock loves to use old ideas to show that archaeology does not approve of new discoveries. We try to silence everything to keep the status quo. Something that's frankly is untrue about both of these locations. While the Actual work on these geoglyphs and earthworks didn't start until early 2000. It's out there now, with the benefits of archaeologists being able to look at its structure with the tools and knowledge we have today for the first time. We can discover even more of these with LiDAR and other digital equipment. Then we can apply modern standards to the excavation and get the data people in 1977 could only draw. cream of in a sense. The longer a site is left untouched, the more data we can actually pull out of it. And it's important to remember that as soon as these early 1800s excavation or early 1900s even up to 1950s, they did not really have the same methods and equipment and understanding we have today. So when the sites are excavated, they are to an extent destroyed. We can't
Speaker: go back we can maybe find something they missed if we're lucky but for the most part the longer the site is left where it is nobody touched it the better it is for science and archaeology as a whole and the second part is that hancock sees a connection to greece at the site And recently there might be evidence that this site has been in use since 10,000 before present.
Speaker: And this ancient date comes from a paper by again Dr. Pattersonen that's also a peer himself in the episode. And it was published in 2020 and suggests that there might be evidence of slash and burn agriculture in Acre. Pedersen points out that this potential agriculture practice is not associated with the mounds themselves. They are separated by thousands of years, but the site has been reused and occupied for a very long time.
Speaker: The difficulty here is to prove was it a controlled swaddling of the area or was it just a run-of-the-mill forest fire. And it can be tricky, but it could be done by showing it's in a very confined area, but even then, could be argued it was a local wildfire.
Speaker: However, there are attempts at developing techniques that can show if the fire is done by swaddling or if they're natural occurrence.
Speaker: Dussault et al. published a paper trying to establish a slash and burn baseline back in 2021, in Heidgren et al. published a paper showing that agrarian fires were used in Germany around 9,500 BP. And that paper relied on pollen and charcoal analysis, among other things. It could show that small but frequent fires occurred in the area, indicating that the Balacian used fire to prepare their fields. While Persen's paper that could show agricultural practice in the area date back 10,000 before present, is very interesting. eye
Speaker: I have to agree with what Persundon wrote in the conclusion. Quote, we are aware that the evidence presented here is not yet conclusive and that we require more archaeological data and additional radiocarbon and carbon isotope 13 measurements from the western Amazonia.
Speaker: And as I mentioned before, Hancock is trying to connect these sites that we find in Acre with Greece. Greece here in Europe. Now, he does not claim that the people of the West Amazon had contact with the ancient Greeks. Now, Hancock is not silly.
Speaker: He claims that they got their patterns and ideas of geometry from the same source, the traveling sages of the lost civilization. Hancock tries to make the claim that historians think that the Greeks were among the first to create geometry.
Speaker: It's a strange claim since geometry was used in Babylon, the Indus Valley and ancient Egypt thousands of years before the Greeks. It's also an attempt to connect the pottery at the sites in Acre to the geometric period in Greece. Issue here is that the geometric period starts around 1025 BCE and you can clearly see that it's heavily influenced by the Musenian pottery. If you put Musenian pottery and the geometric period pottery together, yeah you can clearly see that these are the same culture that creates them. And Hancock attempts to draw a connection between the ceramics from the acre region and the Greek pottery by positioning them side by side.
Speaker: Yet ah examination reveals that they bear little resembles to one another. Even when scrutinized closely, their difference stands out starkly. While both pottery styles showcase captivating geometric pattern, the influence that inspired them are strikingly divergent, reflecting the unique cultural narratives and artistic sort tradition from which they originate.
Speaker: Hancock also mentioned polychromatic pottery or pottery decorated with more than two colors as evidence of these wandering sages. From the episode, it almost seems as if these styles suddenly appear in the area when the earthworks and the geoglyphs were constructed. In reality, polychromatic pottery begins in Guyana, Venezuela and Venezuela.
Speaker: Upper Madeira around 1500 BCE, so about 1500 years before this earthwork is starting to be constructed. And the early formative period lasts until 300 BCE and it was not until around 50 BCE we got certain proof of polychromatic pottery in the acre region. With the possibility of an earlier date of 350 BCE.
Speaker: bc Still within this 2000 years ago narrative that is supported by the earthworks and the carbon dating that's been done on these.
Speaker: However, this is not based on color by itself. is the earlier date is based on the shape of a vessel rather than the presence of color. Note here that the technology didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere. It developed and spread over a thousand years. Or maybe Hancock postulated the wise sages like light the people in Guyana enough to teach them how they could use more than two colors on pottery, but not enough to build earth wall in geometric shapes.
Speaker: I'm not sure what they're hinting at here. The site is an incredible discovery and it will be interesting to see what comes next. As for evidence for a supposed lost civilization traveling the globe, it's... yeah, it's really a miss.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong, the earthworks are impressive, but they are, in a sense, easy to construct. The layout can be quite simply created with just ropes and sticks.
Speaker: like Like how the Nazca lines were created. Experimental archaeology shows that two people with a string stick and a bit of time could easily recreate geoglyphs that we find on the Nazca plateau. A circular earthwork can be made with a stick, string and then ah short walk around in a circle.
Speaker: Hancock's theory brings forth a compelling inquiry regarding the original civilization, which he himself conceded lacks substantial supporting evidence, as he acknowledged during his discussion on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Speaker: It is intriguing to ponder why this ancient civilization would distribute technology in such an erratic manner. For instance, some groups receive remarkable expertise to construct this monumental structure like the imposing pyramids, the elegant Parthenon, intricate metalwork, and astonishing megalithic structure. And in stark Contracts other there were provided with more basic tools, such as vibrantly colored ceramics and rudimentary instruction for building earthen walls. While the simplicity of this creation does not undermine the remarkable achievements of these people inhabiting Acre, it does cause a shadow of curiosity over Hancock's narrative, raising critical questions that he neither explores nor addresses.
Speaker: And on that note, we will close out this episode and we will return to Ancient Apocalypse later and look at the other chapters in this series. But until then, please spread the word by leaving a positive review on platforms like iTunes, Spotify, or even better, recommend it to your friends. Share an episode you like with them.
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Speaker: And if you want to contact me, it can be done through most social media sites. And if you have comments, corrections, suggestions, or hankering to write that email in all caps, find contact info at the website. This show is created with the support of the Archaeology Podcast Network. You can find a lot of other great shows like the CRM podcast and En My Travel on their website, archeologypodcastnetwork.com. Producer of the show is Ashley Arre, and I, Frederick Trussoham, wrote, recorded, and mastered the episode you listened to. The script was edited by the amazing Michelle Franklin.
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Speaker: Until next time, keep shoveling that silence.
