Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse
Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalyse is a Netflix series, where Graham Hancock walks you through some of his theories about ancient humans.
Hancock is a journalist who has spent his career critiquing "mainstream" archeology in favour of his own theories. I've read the Wikipedia articles summarising more fully Hancock's theories, but this post is going to stick to the series.
Hancock seems to think that it's weird that after the last ice age ( ~12k years ago) there was an explosion of human civilization. Suddenly, humans start building big monoliths and structures, despite apparently being hunter-gatherers. Hancock says something like:
"No-one would wake up one morning and think that they will build a monolith."
Broadly, Hancock's answer to this is that there was an ancient civilization that thrived during the last ice age. The ice age ended with the Younger Dryas period, which was triggered by meteor strikes on Earth (A theory know as the "Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis" - YDIH). During the Younger Dryas the temperatures and, subsequently, sea-levels rose causing major global floods, destroying this civilzation. Some of the people of this civilization survived and then interacted with hunter-gatherers. This often manifested in flood myths, which apparently, can be found in many cultures. Hancock believes that the flood myths are folk stories that have been passed down and are evidence of this older civilization. The older civilization taught hunter-gatherer humans advanced scientific methods including astronomy, engineering, and mathematics.
Throughout the series, Hancock travels to ancient places around the world and has archiologists on-hand that all agree that the sites are far older than anyone wants to admit, because it would cause a complete re-write of human history.
The trouble is that there's not a lot of evidence for these sites being as old as Hancock claims. Each of the on-site interviewees make pretty sensational claims about the age of the structures, but on further investigation it would appear that the theories are somewhat discredited.
At nearly every opportunity, Hancock relates it back to the YDIH. It grows kind of tiresome after a while. He often starts of quite interesting, then you see a mention of the YDIH coming, followed by some other sensational claim.
Hancock addresses the lack of hard, physical evidence of the ancient civilization by saying that they inhabited areas that are now under the sea, due to higher sea-levels. Generally, his theories all sound quite plausible, or certainly not outside the realms of possibility, but don't survive from much scrutiny. It is weird that human civiliztion came out of no-where. It is weird that there are so many flood myths. It is weird that so many cultures build pyramids. They are interesting enough on their own merit without click-bait claims.
One point that was particularly annoying was that Hancock doesn't really say whether his thinks this civilization was actually homo sapiens or someother hominid species. The whole series feels like ad-hoc "reckons" of a non-specialist. Almost like because Hancock couldn't imagine how to make these structures, so had to be some mysterious race of quasi-humans.
The second series becomes even more unhinged. Hancock focuses his "research" on sites in the Americas, and in particular the Inca. He spends a substantial amount of time talking about Ayahuasca, a drink made from serveral jungle plants. The probability of the plants interracting in the partcular way that they do is somewhat remote, so Hancock suggests that there was a long history of science in the region. He then claims it's almost super-natural, so could only be handed down by some ancient civilization.
One particuarly spectacular claim is around some stone buildings that were made by the Inca. The stones are huge, look very shiny, and almost melted together. They are truely strange and mysterious in their own right. Very briefly, Hancock suggests that these stones were actually cut and melted by some ancient, forgotton technology. Technology that could heat rock to 1500 centigrade. I do find the idea of a stone age, rock cutting laser quite fantastic.
The series was quite entertaining. I think that had it been someone else presenting I would have found it more interesting. I spent a lot of time looking up the sites on Wikipedia, and try to make sense of some of Hancock's claims. I think the enjoyment I got out of it was more around spuring me to do some reading and critiquing Hancock himself, rather than his presentation.