A Lost Civilisation?
A while ago while enrolling at Manchester University, I was asked why I wanted to study Egyptology. My answer was simple: I’ve always loved ancient history, especially Egypt's predynastic period. I would easily have studied the Olmecs or the Sabians of Harran instead but as those courses weren’t available, I took what I could get. "Oh", I added, "and I really enjoy the work of Graham Hancock.”
That probably wasn’t what Joyce Tyldesley — a warm and patient egyptologist with four decades of experience and an impressive body of scholarly work behind her — wanted to hear, and I was aware that by throwing Hancock's name about I was risking my chances of being accepted. Despite my concerns, however, I was thrilled when an acceptance letter arrived and my course began under her tutelage.
I would soon come to realise that both she and my other instructor, Nicky Nielsen, were not only familiar with Hancock but also with students magnetised towards a study of Egyptology because of him. And to my surprise, both proved refreshingly open on the subject.
To explain my surprise for those unfamiliar with Graham Hancock, it’s fortunate that your introduction hasn’t been tainted by the often hostile academic world, press, or internet. While critics often label him as a ‘pseudoscientist’ or a proponent of ‘ancient aliens,’ these claims are misleading. And as someone who has followed Hancock’s work for nearly a decade and read all his books on the subject almost a dozen times, I feel I can clarify a few things.
Who is Graham Hancock?
Hancock is a journalist who over the last 30 years has developed a hypothesis that a large chapter is missing from human history. Indeed, his proposal is that a great civilisation of antiquity was wiped from the historical record, and that the world and its cultures as they exist today are to a large extent a fragmented, dizzied re-emergence of what went before.
It’s important to clarify that he is not a scientist and has never claimed to be one. Likewise, he does not and has never proposed that ‘aliens’ or ‘atlanteans’ built the pyramids, nor that they were responsible for any of Earth’s various ancient megalithic structures or cultures. He does not think his theoretical lost civilisation was more technologically advanced than ours. And for good measure, let’s add that there’s no mention in his works of prehistoric hyper-futuristic crystal-powered shark-people creating the modern delight that is deep-fried ice-cream, either.
On a serious note though, it's not alright that tags like ‘anti-science’, ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, or ‘misogynist’ are routinely thrown about in order to rip the chair of legitimacy from underneath him. Clearly, this is done so by parties who are either ignorant, or duplicitous, or both, but I am happy to inform you that Graham is none of those things.
In brief, Hancock’s main concern is the human story as we know it — a story he believes has been mishandled. And this hypothesis isn’t mere whimsy but the result of three decades of research in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geology, astronomy, and paleontology, among others. It’s been gleaned from combing through journals like Nature and PNAS. It’s the result of travelling the world, diving the oceans, talking to tribal leaders and storytellers, of scrutinising archaeological sites and studying the skies. Indeed, it’s the result of finding a scattered handful of pieces of a grand puzzle and slowly drawing them together to form the most logical image he can make.
So…is he right?
Right now, thanks to a certain TV show which we’ll return to shortly, Graham is facing an army of ‘debunkers’ and critics who seem hellbent on discrediting or flat out ‘cancelling’ him. But the question we should be asking isn’t whether Hancock is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but whether his ideas merit consideration.
Personally, I think they do. In fact, his works have persuaded me that the core of his argument is on the money, and that although greatly derided and thrashed by critics and sceptics alike, Graham will eventually be vindicated by the slow and steady build-up of supporting evidence.
This has already begun. Graham first introduced his ‘lost civilisation’ theory in his 1996 novel Fingerprints of the Gods, in which he stated that a cataclysm around 12,900 years ago killed off America’s megafauna, drove sea-levels up by around 120 meters, and almost wiped humanity off the face of the planet.
At the time of publishing he was unable to prove that a cataclysm had in fact happened and what form it had taken, even though all the signs he’d found pointed to one. This lack of a ‘smoking gun’ resulted in all kinds of ridicule and scorn from the media and academics. However, recent research suggests that a cosmic event, possibly comet fragments, did impact Earth around that time, causing massive floods and global upheaval. This lends credibility to Hancock’s ideas, even if the fine details of the event remain disputed.
We should not for a moment imagine that hostile reactions to new ideas are uncommon in academia. Time and again, pivotal characters in various fields who follow evidence and construct novel explanations are disbelieved, even attacked, before their claims are vindicated and they end up making grand contributions to science. J Harlen Bretz, for example, argued all his life that cataclysmic floods scoured the North American landscape and was treated awfully by colleagues for 50 years before he ended up getting the Penrose Medal (the Geological Society of America's highest accolade).
Where's the evidence, then?
One of the sticking points for Graham's opponents is the lack of physical evidence. Why can't he show us any ancient cities or structures or remains from this seafaring, technologically capable civilisation of his? And it's a fair question.
But let's not forget that if this catyclism did happen, then continent-sized icecaps melted down and vast tidal surges periodically claimed the seas as they rose by around 120m (and a great deal more happened, as well). In the event, a landmass equivalent to roughly 10% of the earth's total land area was lost, and any great sea-faring civilisation of the deep past along with almost all remnants of its coastal cities and activities would be extremely difficult to find. We might expect, however, that anything that did survive would be large and solid enough to withstand that punishment, or be buried underground, enduring the slow march of millenia afterwards. Graham's work often focuses on places and structures like these.
Despite the fact that expecting to find remains of anything after 12,000 years is a long-shot, I think Graham has cobbled together a solid body of potential leads across the 6 books he's written on the topic, from sunken coastal complexes to odd megalithic achievements and even potential remnants of shared knowledge and belief.
Debunking, Dedunking, Destructing
Hancock is no stranger to having his ideas pilloried, and the latest example was a contentious debate on Joe Rogan with archaeologist Flint Dibble. Sadly, what could have been a really wonderful debate which brought both sides to a constructive discussion was reduced to a spectacle, as Dibble came in guns blazing and did his best to discredit and cast Graham as a deceitful loony.
As mentioned, this is nothing new and to be fair to Dibble, there is a lot of looney out there. In the past few years alone a deluge of books has flooded the stores, all jostling for a piece of Graham's market-pie. Their blurbs utilise Graham-esque language, their themes are similar, often clearly influenced by his work but always with more sensationalised claims. Most are pale facsimiles, uninspired and lacking intellectual polish, and not worthy of serious study.
Then there's the 'ancient-aliens' community, including adherents of Zecharia Sitchin and various YouTubers claiming to be ‘alternative historians’, none of whom seem capable of – or flat out ignore – proper and responsible research. ‘Ancient Architects’ and such channels are prime examples. All of this serves only to muddy the waters and makes it hard to find genuine, sensible and credible sources for information. They are on the rise, and it is very concerning that poor scholarship creates such entertaining content.
Still, it's all too easy to lump Hancock in with this crowd, either out of ignorance, or the intention to destroy the value of his work, resulting in armies of experts (and non-experts, alike…) feeling some primal need to eliminate a 'threat' to their coveted fields of study. Indeed, the now infamous series Ancient Apocalypse presented by Graham himself was recently named 'the most dangerous show on Netflix'.
Curious, really, as I hadn’t felt reframing our ancestors as smarter than we realised was that bad…
But is it dangerous?
I hardly think so, even though in my opinion Ancient Apocalypse did very little justice to Hancock’s work. The show was clearly designed and produced to appeal to a mass-market and it utilised the same, awful approach that destroyed the Discovery Channel and National Geographic over a decade ago, throwing credibility out the window with dramatic music, flashy CG and a few sped-up crash-zooms. It placed spectacle, sensationalism, and commercial success above respect for the audience’s intellect, and drew attention to Hancock for all the wrong reasons. In short, this show was, in my view, akin to transmuting numerous doctoral theses into a children’s cereal advert.
(Perhaps I am alone there, however, because audiences loved it. The show’s Rotten Tomatoes score is currently sitting at 85%. But that is another post entirely…)
Why It All Matters
The debate around Hancock isn’t just about who is right or wrong. I certainly don't agree with everything he says. But I don't have to. It’s about the importance of questioning established narratives and exploring alternative explanations.
Archaeology is a painstaking, difficult, convoluted discipline which must rely on interpretation of material remains to draw conclusions. And the operative word there is interpretation, because so much hangs on context and inference and opinion. The result is that we change things frequently, tossing aside one theory and digging up others as new evidence comes to light.
Indeed, with almost 400,000 years now allotted for anatomically modern humans to roam the planet, the mainstream narrative simply can’t be the only one. How can anyone possibly say that they know for sure what happened over that length of time? Or that no great civilisation existed in prehistory? It would be ludicrous and foolish to do so. The truth is that what we call ‘history’ is simply the best guesswork of events over the last 7,000 years and as stated earlier, we’re not sure about most of it.
Surely, therefore, as long as there is evidence to support an idea and good reasoning behind it, it should be permissible to hypothesise? Given the limitations of our knowledge and that fact that our understanding is expanding all the time, remaining open to new ideas — especially if they challenge the status quo — is vital. It's exploration itself which allows paradigm shifts to happen.
Hancock’s work is therefore valuable not because it is infallible but because it breaks the mould and encourages us to think about our past with fresh eyes. And there's another reason. Discovering his work rekindled an almost extinguished childhood passion for studying the ancient world in me. It spurred me to go out and explore the topic far more thoroughly than I even would have otherwise, seeking out and reading works from a wide range of authors. I've since delved into texts from Toby Wilkinson, Rosita Forbes, Flinders Petrie, Walter Emery, Thor Heyerdahl, Joyce Tyldesley, Robert Bauval, Arthur Posnansky, Kara Cooney, Charles Hapgood, Robert Fuson, and Christina Riggs, just to name a few. And these authors aren’t all ‘alternative historians’. Many are thoroughly mainstream and even then, all of them have a slant of their own.
Graham’s work slots readily into this corpus of interesting ideas and research. He’s not a ‘threat to science’ or ‘dangerous,’ but a person with compelling ideas, who challenges us to look again at what we thought we knew.
Whether you agree with him or not, I encourage critics to read his books with curiosity, rather than dismissing him out of hand. You may just fall in love with the excitement and awe Hancock holds for the human story anew, just like I did.
I hope you’ll forgive this self-indulgent and rather enormous post. Sometimes, it's important to add a little counterweight to the abundant and oft ill-informed criticism out there.
A list of Graham Hancock's books on the lost civilisation hypothesis (A = available as an audiobook):
• “Fingerprints of the Gods” (1995) - A • “Heaven’s Mirror” (1998) • “The Message of the Sphinx” (1996) • “Underworld” (2002) - A • “Magicians of the Gods” (2015) - A • “America Before” (2019) - A
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