Thoughts On Graham Hancock?

The most annoying was his swallowing hook, line, sinker, rod and reel about Hapgood's Piri Reis misrepresentation.

I'd say the most annoying thing he made up was his story ( I believe it GH or was it another creative writer?), created to give more substance to the idea of drowned civilizations, that "ancient man lived on the coast line like modern man", which is false and we see that brought out as fact regularly on this forum.

originally posted by: MadhatterTheGreat
Personally, he's been my favorite personality and author on this subject since I was a child (I'm 30 now) and I've always enjoyed his theories and for the most part, I agree with him because I also have always thought civilization was far older than we assume it is currently. I think he was always looked at as an alternative journalist/theorist on history, but it appears a lot of what he first put forth in Fingerprints of the Gods is starting to become less alternative theory and more mainstream as more and more archaeologists and scientists are starting to agree with what he's been saying for many years. Just curious to know others' opinion on him.

I need to go back and look at the evidence or not for his ideas. However, I absolutely loved the book "Fingerprints of the Gods." Amongst "alternative" historians, Hancock stands out as being very intelligent and methodical.

A site with an alternative view ...

Not everyone is "controlled opposition." And, many people, especially well known authors, have the money to go around the globe. It doesn't take more than certain thousands of dollars per year to do what he has done. I have travelled like that too. And, if you focus your career on international work (international business, international development, etc), it often is paid for in some form.

originally posted by: 131415
Controlled opposition all of them.



Who pays for his books? Who publishes them? Why can you buy them in Barnes and Nobles? Amazon? Where's he getting the money to gallivant around the globe?



Its fun to believe that the most powerful institutions in the history of mankind - would help someone "uncover" great "secrets" that have devastating real world consequences - is simply fiction.

a reply to: Hanslune

Oh darn, that one you've got me on. I honestly forgot he brought that up. OK, I hope to God he's really that gullible or it hurts my enjoyment of the idea a little.

Yeah, that is what is intriguing. There are out of place things. For example, almost no one is taught in K-12 grades about the stones of Balbek in Lebanon. Most people when I've talked about them have never heard of them. That's odd. But the fact remains, even now we would have difficulty moving and placing 800-1000 ton stone blocks.

originally posted by: The Vagabond
a reply to: Blue Shift

That's the thing though, we do have bits of it- mostly huge bits that couldn't be washed away by glacial melt and were lucky enough not to get run over by the glacier itself. Why is the sphinx water damaged and the head small enough to have apparently been recarved into its now familiar egyptian form? How did structures get built on land that hasn't been above sea level at any point in the history of known civilization? How did primitive hunters without government or the wheel pull off something like Gobekli Tepe?

If a city is abandoned as the icesheet advances, or flooded when the icesheet melts, you're not going to get a neat little city to unearth with lots of potshards and other stuff together. You're going to get the occasional out of place artifact wherever nature brought it to rest, or wherever the first person to rediscover it carried it to.

originally posted by: Hanslune

The most annoying was his swallowing hook, line, sinker, rod and reel about Hapgood's Piri Reis misrepresentation.

I'd say the most annoying thing he made up was his story ( I believe it GH or was it another creative writer?), created to give more substance to the idea of drowned civilizations, that "ancient man lived on the coast line like modern man", which is false and we see that brought out as fact regularly on this forum.

Please explain your point about the coastline. We've found submerged ancient coastline civilizations, even if they are primitive. Second, there is an entire body of economic historical research about how civilizations with coastal or navigable river access fare better than those without. Before cars, trains, and airplanes, the best way to travel and trade was factually through water travel.....

a reply to: Quetzalcoatl14

I actually do see the point there. Pre-agriculture and pre overseas trade there is less incentive to build right next to the river delta or a natural harbor. But we are then assuming parameters for a civilization that we can't even agree existed at all. If we are talking global civilization yes, there should be inland settlements for sure, but any number of plausible circumstances could explain why the first civ might have developed one or just a handful of centers on the coast, whether they arrived at their environment by boat (which apparently is one piece of technology the mainstream is willing to put way further back than your average person would probably expect) or just liked fish, or was trying to get away from inland predators or barbarians... also assuming parameters on my part, just saying it still could have happened, even though it's true that to a less ocean-dependent culture such as the Native Americans, an ideal modern location such as the San Francisco peninsula is nothing special and wouldn't necessarily demand to be where the city got built.

Fish are plentiful in rivers as well, and you can drink the water.

Not to mention the dangers of storms and waves for coastal villages.

That said, some coastal settlements have been found that were (eventually) swamped by the Ice Age melt. The Jomon culture, in particular, had some now-undersea settlements that have been found.

The problem with the idea of ultra-ancient and now-submerged coastal settlements, which are only claimed so that the fringe can explain their lack of evidence, is this: the sea level rise as the last Ice Age ended is well known and documented. It didn't happen quickly enough to surprise anyone anywhere. That is, we should be finding settlements of that age that are still coastal today, unless we wish to posit that the ancient peoples on the coast were stupid enough to stay put until they drowned as the water rose a few centimeters every year.

Harte

originally posted by: Quetzalcoatl14
Yeah, that is what is intriguing. There are out of place things. For example, almost no one is taught in K-12 grades about the stones of Balbek in Lebanon. Most people when I've talked about them have never heard of them. That's odd. But the fact remains, even now we would have difficulty moving and placing 800-1000 ton stone blocks.

Nope, no problem at all moving and placing such a heavy weight. You might want to look at what modern lifting tech can do. The ones that were moved weighed in the vicinity of 800 tons the much larger stones were not moved.

originally posted by: Quetzalcoatl14


Please explain your point about the coastline. We've found submerged ancient coastline civilizations, even if they are primitive. Second, there is an entire body of economic historical research about how civilizations with coastal or navigable river access fare better than those without. Before cars, trains, and airplanes, the best way to travel and trade was factually through water travel.....

Yes when that trade developed which is farther along on the timeline, the first civs developed along rivers: Sumer, Egypt, Harappa, Han, etc they didn't develop along coasts as early agriculture needed lots of fresh water and flood delivered soil to renew the fields. HG ignored that piece of info.

Remember HG is claiming they did so before the other civs. There is no evidence for that or in fact any AGC.

a reply to: Harte

Not to anyone anywhere? There probably wasn't one, but just for the sake of argument, suppose there had been a modern metropolis in what is now the channelled scablands of Washington or anywhere from there to the coast when the icedam broke and unleashed a wall of water carrying air bubbles the size of VWs moving so fast that they blasted hemispherical craters in the bedrock when they hit it... what would be left and where would you look for it?

a reply to: The Vagabond

Just a total lack of evidence for such development. See Harte for a good series of comments.

If you are interested in this question research shell middens and coastal briquetage.

a reply to: The Vagabond

In the rubble where this stuff piled up, in that mess you would find stone tools. But then if a culture was located there and was wiped out it wouldn't have been a AGC but a LNGC!

Take a look at the Missoula rhythmite and varves.

For a AGC to have been obliterated you'd need a massive world wide disaster - and as far as we know now no such thing occurred.

a reply to: Hanslune

I'm basically playing devils advocate at this point. I don't think that's where anything was. I'm just making the point that impossible is a much bigger word than it appears to be, and the mainstream is entirely too comfortable with important unanswered questions connected to their model of how history unfolds.

a reply to: The Vagabond

Which un-answered questions are these?
(there are lots I'm just wondering which ones our of concern to you)

a reply to: Hanslune

Number one with a bullet, since I don't want to continue my overly long and meandering posts, is why it took the vast majority of our species history to figure out exceptionally basic things like pottery, but that immediately after that, in order for things to get the way that we know they were by the time of the Egyptians, there would have to be this unbelievable progression of quantum leaps one after the other starting before the advent of writing (which would of course explain a lot and truncate the period of slow development I propose a little closer to your comfort level if it went back further than is known).

I can kind of see why people say "Aliens" when presented with that puzzle, but such an incredibly unlikely intervention becomes unnecessary if we simply suppose that development was much more gradual but suffered temporary setbacks which eliminated most traces of the early development.

There is a huge profit-driven motive for Fringe writers like Von Daniken, Sitchin, Hancock, et. al. They can make a lot more money publishing pseudo-scientific books than a doctoral student publishing a thesis for no pay, or a professional archeologist who earns maybe 45K a year.

No one wants to buy a book of humdrum real history, they want the aliens and Atlanteans. Hancock has sold over 5 million copies of his books according to himself and his publishers. Sitchin's publisher also claims millions of books sold for the Earth Chronicle series. So there is this huge impetus to keep pushing the fringe. Hancock is no different than any other pseudoscience writer. They find the wiggle room, the gaps in the established theories to extrapolate nonsense, when it comes to ancient history it has become a cottage industry, a cult of fringe writers who build their alternate reality off of one another.

a reply to: The Vagabond

The easiest solution is probably that mankind developed enough resources and people to begin specialization.

Remember too that this 'culturing' occurred only in a few places and many places remained in HG mode until the modern age or developed later., or was later influenced by the original cultures. Some arose independently.

With more people and resources there was a flowering of and probable movement of technology. Once people got the idea of domestication and agriculture and the advantages of a settled life - things really took off.

Could thing have happened earlier then been lost? Yes

Have we found any trace that this happened? Nope

However there are signs of early development of pottery and other technologies well before civs. It was just that in Sumer and Egypt all the factors came together and wallah! However, in most of the world no such thing happened.

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

Certain places and idea become heavily 'fringified' and are re-used over and over again while other sites and cultures are ignored.