thank you for posting this! I loved Ancient Apocalypse, very entertaining. It has been frustrating trying to find refutations of some of the theories/questions posed by it.
When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
Can recommend this channel as well run by an American professor, just did a video on the techniques Graham uses to fool people but has a lot of other debunking and visiting the pyramids etc. https://youtu.be/IeIj_rNYhCU
Graham and a real historian recently did a debate on Joe Rogan where Graham did not come off well.
It doesn't help that Graham Hancock levels his own ad hominem attacks, claiming that archeologists don't take his ideas seriously to protect their own egos and jobs.
Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established.
This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book)
>At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago.
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>the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička
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>throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis
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>The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified.
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>Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points
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>Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years.
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>a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper
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>because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets
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>Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago.
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>Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.
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>Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
> When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn
Because you're trying to 'learn' from an unreliable source spouting fiction. It's like someone learning homeopathy being frustrated that doctors dismiss it with passion.
When the subject is brought up anywhere with experts it is usually dismissed with a bunch of ad-hominem attacks which is just not helpful for anyone trying to learn