I’ve been enjoying the thought provoking and accessible Ancient Apocalypse series on Netflix, and so was taken aback (but not surprised) when I read the Guardian article entitled “Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix”. The title is more than a little sensationalistic and it offers an unfair, sneering, and dismissive summation of what Hancock is actually trying to present.
Unlike that author, in this article I’ll use facts and reason to explain why Ancient Apocalypse is a show you should definitely watch if you have any interest whatsoever in ancient history, because when you consider honestly the facts presented, you’ll have to admit that perhaps we’ve gotten something wrong.
There is ample physical evidence at many ancient sites all over the world that simply cannot be explained by what we know of the technology possessed by ancient peoples. Moreover, some of these same sites could not be replicated by us even today. So this leaves us with a bit of a conundrum as to how they got there. To demonstrate this, I want to focus on just one among dozens of anomalous structures. Baalbeck in Lebanon is truly mind-boggling and you don’t need an advanced education to understand it. If this site didn’t actually exist we would say that its construction was impossible.
In Baalbeck there is a Roman temple built upon an earlier platform of 24 gigantic megaliths laid down together. It is generally accepted that the megaliths are Roman as well — primarily because we have no one else we could attribute them to. 21 of these megaliths are estimated to weigh about 300 tonnes each (already an amazing feat), but there are three together, known as the Trilithon, that weigh in at a whopping 800 tonnes each. At the quarry, nearly a kilometre away, there are three other cut stones. One is 1000 tonnes, and this sits on top of one that is thought to be about 1200 tonnes. A third stone recently discovered in 2014 is estimated at 1650 tonnes.
I’ve thrown around some numbers that are a bit abstract, because they’re not part of our everyday experience. So, how much weight are we able to lift today? It turns out there are stationary cranes that can lift 20,000 tonnes. So these stones would be no problem using those devices. But the cranes are enormous, fixed in place, and built of steel with precision engineering. Nobody thinks or has evidence in recorded history of the ancients possessing that kind of technology. The bigger problem, though, is that the stones not only had to be lifted, they also had to be transported and carefully placed. The best modern analogues I could find for that kind of thing was for the movement of a roughly 300 tonne boulder meant for an art piece, and a 770 tonne engine. Both required massive vehicles with dozens of wheels over paved roads, with computerized controls, moving at a snail’s pace. And these feats were only performed once. So moving something as large as 800 and up to 1650 tonnes several times has never been attempted, and based on the above is likely impossible with even our most powerful moving equipment. Proponents of these stones being of Roman origin would say that you could use thousands of people with ropes to pull these things with logs underneath. There are problems with that idea, and one of them is that logs of any size would be ground to splinters under such a load and/or sink into the earth before the stone could be moved a single metre. And there are other technical/logistical problems with regard to even quarrying the rock that we do not know how to solve. Yes, the Romans were accomplished engineers and did some amazing things, but given that our technology is derived from theirs, and even we don’t know how this was done makes the claim rather weak. The truth is no one has a credible explanation for how these stones were quarried, moved, and placed, and it seems unlikely to have been the Romans.
Regarding the movement of the Baalbeck megaliths, in doing research for this article I went to Wikipedia for the Baalbeck entry and was gobsmacked at the sheer audacity of the following statement: “A fifth, still larger stone weighing approximately 1,200 tonnes (1,300 tons) lies in the same quarry. This quarry was slightly higher than the temple complex, so no lifting was required to move the stones.” (emphasis mine). This must be one of the most absurd and willfully deceptive statements I have ever read, and it’s emblematic of the kind of mental gymnastics that some people are willing to engage in in order to protect their beliefs. I don’t know if it’s an archaeologist who wrote that, but many people have read it and have apparently accepted it or it wouldn’t still be there. It’s this kind of willful blindness that Graham Hancock is referring to when he remarks on the ossified nature of the archaeological establishment.
So, these stones exist. We know where they were quarried from (but not how), and we know where they were moved to (but not how), and we know the precision with which they were placed (but not how). We don’t know how either because we couldn’t do it ourselves if we wanted to or can’t attribute the necessary technologies to any peoples of recorded history.
At this point we’re left with two possible explanations: 1) aliens, 2) a previously unknown advanced civilization with technology surpassing or significantly different from ours. Graham Hancock has always steadfastly rejected the need to invoke an alien deus ex machina and works hard to distance himself from that fringe notion. As Sherlock Holmes would say, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Not to say that aliens are impossible, but Occam’s Razor surely points us at option 2 as the probable truth. As well, it provides very simple explanations for numerous other observations which I won’t get into here, but which Graham Hancock addresses in his Netflix series and many books.
A hypothesis is an educated hunch that must do two things or it’s useless as a scientific tool. First, it provides a unifying potential explanation for a set of observed phenomena. Second, it provides a framework for predicting other as-yet-unobserved phenomena. This latter bit is key, because what it means is that you can say “If my hypothesis is right, then I should be able to observe or find this other thing.” Then you look for that thing. Each thing you find that was predicted by your hypothesis serves to give it more credence. Each thing you find that opposes the prediction forces you to reconsider and tweak your hypothesis or ditch it entirely. This is done iteratively until the hypothesis is proved or disproved – or at least generally accepted as probably right until a better idea comes along. Note that just because you don’t find any evidence either way doesn’t mean the hypothesis is wrong. Thus, the standard refrain “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
One problem with the standard narrative around the rise of human civilization is that archaeologists are so convinced that they’ve got it right, that they don’t bother to look for evidence that contradicts it. When someone finds contradictory evidence for well-established theories, they can run into real problems with the establishment (not just in archaeology). The reason for that is that when egos, status, and incomes are involved, some scientists can become mighty unscientific in trying to protect the integrity of the reputation they’ve worked so hard to build. That’s called being human, and there’s no reason to think that scientists are above it.
Graham Hancock is no stranger to cries of charlatanism, along with many scientists and researchers who have tried to challenge the status quo. Perhaps you’ve heard of Galileo. That kind of thing isn’t relegated to the distant past. A modern example is the relatively recent overturning of the “Clovis First” orthodoxy regarding when the Americas first became populated, but not before many whistleblowers were pilloried for bringing forward contradictory evidence. Max Planck once wrote “Science advances one funeral at a time,” meaning that it is only after the old guard dies off that new ideas are allowed to take root. The point is that science is not the cold, calculating, logical, rigorous pursuit that people tend to think it is, and old ideas die hard.
Graham Hancock has looked at places like Baalbeck and other anomalous structures all over the world and has realized that certain things just don’t add up. He has proposed a new hypothesis, he has made predictions that will let him test it, and he has gone out and doggedly searched for the evidence to support it. Moreover, new discoveries and independent scientific studies have emerged that also lend credence to his ideas. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is one of these. This is still contested and being researched, but there is evidence that point to the possibility that the Earth and its ice sheets were indeed struck by comets at the end of the last ice age. We’ve all been told since we were children the story of Noah and the great flood. Non-religious people (including me), of course, thought the idea of taking this story at face value was preposterous. A global flood in a matter of days? Torrential rain for forty days and forty nights? Where would all the water come from? It was just a weird story concocted by ignorant ancient people to explain marine fossils on mountain tops. But the impact hypothesis provides a credible cause for exactly such a flood, and we do now know that sea levels rose a hundred metres very quickly at that time. An event like that would be burned into the collective conscience of every surviving society on Earth, and indeed it is — in their myths. Also consider this: as humans, we tend to build most of our settlements and cities near the ocean. Anything near the ocean and vast areas of land would have been wiped out and buried by tidal waves that dwarfed anything we know of today, washing far across the landscape destroying everything in their paths, finally settling down with anything below 100m elevation buried forever. With that destruction would have gone a tremendous amount of accumulated human knowledge, quite literally knocking us back to the stone age.
So, now, is it so ludicrous to think that maybe there was an advanced civilization that had arisen before that event and was wiped out by it – or very nearly — and that that civilization is responsible for the distinct and inexplicable styles of megalithic architecture that we see all over the world? Is it necessary for our egos to believe that there has only been one rise of humans and that we just happen to be at the pinnacle of that succession? Is it so insane to consider that maybe this is not our first kick at the can? A lot of puzzle pieces suddenly fit into place when you allow for the possibility that civilization has arisen before, such as the raft of eerily similar ancient myths throughout all cultures on Earth. Anatomically modern humans have been around for over 300,000 years, yet we have the arrogance to think that nothing of consequence could have happened prior to about 6000 year ago.
I would encourage you to engage your faculties and watch Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. If you find it intriguing, read his books, too. This topic is a deep well that weaves together and makes sense of many modern mysteries. To be sure, there are a lot of quacks out there, and the archaeological establishment likes to conveniently lump Graham Hancock in with the fringe wackos and then dismiss them all as a piece. But I assure you, Hancock stands apart and is entirely credible.