4 HN users recommended this commentary5 months2023–2025score 5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points people to it as an entertaining, thorough takedown of Hancock's pseudoarchaeology whenever his claims come up.
Miniminuteman begins a long, humorous point-by-point debunking of Graham Hancock's Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse and its claims of a lost ice-age civilization. It is part one of a multi-part critique.
“lengthy, point-by-point takedown of the Ancient Apocalypse thing both entertaining and informative” (HN, 2024)
Miniminuteman is a YouTuber who's currently debunking Graham Hancocks Netflix Series with some humour and guest interviews sprinkled through it. It's the first time I heard about Graham Hancock but it was enough for me to not be able to really take him seriously. His whole shtick seems to be to smear others and portray himself as a victim of "mainstream archeology" and just saying things without evidence which could be true if lots of established facts were to simply be ignored. [this video]
Humorous debunking of Graham Hancock's Netflix series with guest interviews.
If you like video essays, I enjoyed this movie-length debunking of Ancient Apocalypse. tl;dr: The evidence is simply not there, and real archeology is much, much more interesting. [this video]
Movie-length debunking showing the evidence is not there.
I think this video is good Ressource on the topic. [this video] Basically Hancock show lots of interesting and fascinating archaeological sites which is great especially since a lot of these are things that most viewers didn't know about before. But sadly he chooses to use these site only to present his theory for which he's doesn't have any actual evidence.
Good resource showing Hancock lacks evidence for his theory.
Miniminuteman goes over "10000 year old Indonesian pyramid" too in his 4h or so debunking of Graham Hancock ancient civilization Netflix series (the usual "big archeology doesn't want you to know about this prediluvian ancient Atlantean civilization"). Link to the relevant section of the video of this debunking series: [this video]
Section debunking the claimed 10000 year old Indonesian pyramid.
The moai are half buried because that's just what tends to happen in erosive environments. Sediment buries things. As for specifically debunking his LGM speculation, there isn't much because no one with public credentials wants to spend time and effort on it in the current academic environment. You can find debunkings in popular media ( [this video] ) and a few scattered "popular" academic publications like the SAA's special edition on Hancock's pseudoarchaeology ( [link] ), but most of the information is buried in papers and books that don't discuss him at all. There's just flat out no actual evidence for (virtually?) all of his speculation and you can't prove a negative. Hancock's MO is to take 1-2 anomalous results and spin out media around "these dates don't line up, so let's speculate about something entirely unrelated". The rapa nui episodes in Ancient Apocalypse S2 talk to one actual archaeologist, who doesn't even support the dates discussed in the episodes. They were just anomalous banana phytoliths that were present from sediment intrusions. Dating is hard and this stuff happens regularly, especially in areas without much active research like Rapa Nui. The standard understanding is post-1200, as documented in papers like [link] and [link]
I just started watched the YouTube. It’s hard to take this debunking serious when the very 1st point he makes about Graham is incorrect. He states that Graham claims to be a researcher. [this video] In the Netflix series, Graham doesn’t not. He makes it clear he’s not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly states he’s an investigative journalist. [link] —- And then the YouTube host roots his show on the scientific method with the question “How do you prove there was an ancient civilians”. This is the wrong root question. The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. Or said differently, “how did civilians not use more advance technology than we believe they had” (Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the wheel)
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