Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #AncientApocalypse

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Göbekli Tepe – The first 20 Years of Research – Tepe Telegrams

This is essential historical context for the archaeology of Göbekli Tepe. It was not the first site at which early T-shaped monoliths were identified over 30 years ago.
#AncientApocalypse dainst.blog/the-tepe-teleg…
“In 1994 [Klaus Schmidt] visited all Neolithic sites mentioned in the literature. Drawing on the experience gained at Nevalı Çori, Schmidt was able to identify the ‘tombstones’ at Göbekli Tepe as Neolithic work-pieces and T-shaped pillars.”
Klaus Schmidt’s “Aha!” moment in the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in 1994:

“One of those heaps held a particularly large boulder. It was clearly worked and had a form that was easily recognizable: it was the T-shaped head of a pillar of the Nevalı Çori type…”.
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It's Final Exam time!

This thread presents the final exam that was used in Prof. Stephen Williams' course "Fantastic Archaeology " (ANTH 139) at Harvard in Spring 1983.

To my knowledge, this was the first college course in the U.S. on the theme of pseudoarchaeology. Image
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A typical #AncientApocalypse fan.

“I’ll start off by saying that I’ve never read any of Graham Hancock’s books. I’ve seen him a few times briefly on Joe Rogan clips, but have never paid attention to him enough to form an educated opinion of his theories” medium.com/@davidhasheart…
The word “civilization” is confusing.

“Their opinion is that civilization first emerged between 6000 and 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley. In fact if you Google search “when did the first civilization develop” you are confronted with the following image:” Image
I wish more people would read Bruce Trigger’s excellent book.
#AncientApocalypse
amazon.com/Understanding-…
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Is this the source of Graham Hancock’s phrase “species with amnesia”? Does anyone remember who Immanuel Verlikovsky was? (This 1982 book was published posthumously.)
#AncientApocalypse Image
Immanuel Velikovsky was a psychotherapist and popular writer of the mid-20th century. He proposed theories about rogue planets whose cycles had major impacts on ancient history. These ran directly counter to science, similar to the work of Graham Hancock.
#AncientApocalypse ImageImageImage
Scientists complained bitterly about Velikovsky, threatening to boycott his publishers (who also published textbooks). The complaints backfired and the public saw him as an underdog challenging “orthodoxy” much as with Hancock. But Velikovsky was wrong.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_…
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Matt Walsh has a bunch of questions about Graham Hancock’s #AncientApocalypse. Can we help answer them?
“What in the world makes it racist?” he asks, and says that’s never explained.

In Episode 2, Graham Hancock suggests that Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha were survivors of a lost civilization who taught “simple hunters and gatherers” how to farm and build pyramids. They became gods.
Although Hancock avoids saying these culture heroes were white in #AncientApocalypse, he made that clear in his book “Fingerprints of the Gods” (1995), the title of which refers to these supposed white saviors of inferior brown people. Is that a racist scenario? I think so. ImageImageImageImage
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Is #AncientApocalypse the World Ice Theory of the 21st century? Are fans of Graham Hancock going to be like the fans of Hanns Hörbiger?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteisle…
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I've been compiling threads, articles, and interviews from skeptics of #AncientApocalypse in the description of my YouTube video on the subject. I'll link them below in a 🧵
Please feel free to share others and I'll add them.
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Many Twitter archaeologists are pointing out problems with the #AncientApocalypse Netflix series, so I also wanted to remind folks that the central premise of the show-- a global comet impact event 13,000 years ago-- has been widely discredited by the Quaternary paleo community.
The Younger Dryas impact theory is popular with a lot of apocalypse preppers, conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience peddlers, and climate deniers, though.
I wish television producers could see that Earth's history is interesting enough that we don't need sensationalism to tell a great story. Or, you know, that the ingenuity and expertise of Indigenous peoples don't need to be explained by aliens or lost civilizations.
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There have been many threads on #AncientApocalypse the @netflix series. And, I have a different perspective. Graham Hancock doesn't know how to dig, or run an excavation/survey. It's like saying I cannot do heart surgery. It's just a fact. Not mean. He's not an archaeologist.
That's the core flaw with the series. Aside from great threads that @FlintDibble @jens2go and so many others have done. Why would you listen to someone tell you why archaeologists are ALL WRONG when they cannot run a dig, or have basic expertise to read an excavation report?
Graham may reply to this and say "I never said I was an archaeologist or claimed to be one I am a journalist." OK, if you're not qualified in basic archaeology 101, don't have training and cannot dig, how can you critique the thousands of us who do?
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Remember when the world was going to end on December 21, 2012?

Remember when we were all going to experience a transformation of consciousness?

It’s been ten years. What happened?

My chat with @KurlyTlapoyawa and @tlakatekatl
#AncientApocalypse
talesfromaztlantis.com/?episode=episo…
Graham Hancock was a huge booster of the imaginary Maya Apocalypse prophecy, dedicating many pages to it in “Fingerprints of the Gods” (1995), which contributed to a counterculture mythology that began in the 1960s and 1970s.
#AncientApocalypse
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/realit…
This excellent book, edited by Joseph Gelfer, was finally published in 2011, but hardly anyone read it. Most of it had been written in 2009, but publication was delayed.

The #AncientApocalypse is yet another #CountercultureApocalypse, but on Netflix.

amazon.com/2012-Countercu…
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For those interested in Egyptology, especially the dating of the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, here are some recommendations of reliable web resources and publications, starting with archaeologist Mark Lehner’s AERA website.
#AncientApocalypse
aeraweb.org
“Who Built the Sphinx?”, an article by archaeologist Mark Lehner.
#Egyptology
#AncientApocalypse
aeraweb.org/wp-content/upl…
As for debunking claims about water erosion and weathering on the Sphinx by John Anthony West & geologist Robert Schoch in the 1990s, as boosted by Graham Hancock, here’s Mark Lehner’s response:

'Notes & Photographs on the West-Schoch Sphinx Hypothesis'

academia.edu/36580864
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From Alan Landsburg to Graham Hancock.

Yes, it’s about aliens.
#AncientApocalypse
To my knowledge, Graham Hancock has never retracted his claim for the original, really, really #AncientApocalypse: the one that destroyed a civilization on Mars, causing the surviving refugees to flee to Earth, where they founded an Ice Age civilization.
science.nasa.gov/science-news/s…
The great Carl Sagan addressed the nonsense about the Face in Mars in his brilliant book published in 1995, the same year as Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of the Gods”.
amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-…
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For filmmakers, journalists, and pop culture and television historians:

Graham Hancock’s #AncientApocalypse is the direct, lineal descendant of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” (1968), created by Alan Landsberg, the grandfather of #RealityTV.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Land…
Alan Landsberg also created the “In Search of…” series, narrated first by Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery) and then by Leonard Nimoy (of Star Trek).

It ran from 1977 to 1982.

The series presented pseudoarchaeology and pseudoscience.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search…
Alan Landsberg’s successful #RealityTV genre of speculative documentaries and contrived situations led directly to the creation of The Apprentice, which ran from 2004 to 2017.

I blame Trumpism on “reality TV,” a lie even in its name.
#AncientApocalypse
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Appre…
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In our critiques of Graham Hancock and his fans, the role of Ancient American magazine doesn’t get mentioned often enough. Hancock, like the magazine, is hyperdiffusionist.
ancientamerican.com
The banner on the Ancient American website features “American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West”, a book by the extremely racist 19th century author Josiah Priest, whose name few people recognize today. Image
You can find digital facsimiles of Josiah Priest’s book in the Internet Archive. It went through multiple editions in the early 1800s. In It, Priest attributes archaeological sites and artifacts to anyone *but* the ancestors of living Native peoples.
archive.org/details/americ…
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What troubles me the most about Graham Hancock is that he is metaphorically nodding and winking to white supremacists who know the tropes and phrases, ones that have been used over and over and over again in the worst possible ways, from British Israelism to Nazis.
British Israelism is the belief that the people of Great Britain are "genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendants" of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.”

It was the ideological milieu within which pyramidology was born.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_I…
Graham Hancock is a pyramidologist. Pyramidology figures prominently in #AncientApocalypse
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidol…
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At the beginning of the first episode of #AncientApocalypse, Graham Hancock uses the phrase “species with amnesia.” It’s repeated over and over again.

Surely he knows this is the title of a book by the repugnantly racist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, author Robert Sepehr. ImageImage
In the second episode of #AncientApocalypse, Graham Hancock relies upon the interpretations of Italian businessman Marco Vigato, whose frankly white supremacist book on Atlantis (published by Inner Traditions) is a racist wet dream. It is laughably bad. Image
This is an illustration from Vigato’s book, in which he uses illustrations of crania from a Homo erectus, a hydrocephalic child, and a Paracas mummy to argue for a race of alien-human hybrids. It’s absurd. Yet this is who Hancock chooses to interpret reliefs at Xochicalco. Image
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In his new Netflix “documentary” #AncientApocalypse, @Graham__Hancock has declared war on archaeologists

His rhetoric sows distrust in experts, and #Atlantis conspiracy theories promote white supremacy

Buckle up, it’s time for an #ARCHAEOLOGY THREAD 🧵
/1 Screenshot from Ancient Apocalypse episode 1, “Once there
This thread will examine

1)Hancock's lack of evidence
2)How Hancock’s narrative recycles 19th century ideas on #Atlantis
3)The rhetorical tools Hancock and similar conspiracy theories use

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Why trust me?

No idea. I’m just a dude who won’t pay for a checkmark

But I am a real archaeologist. I’ve excavated at sites spanning tens of thousands of years of human history & prehistory

Trust my credentials or don’t. But I’ll present real evidence why this show is crap
/3 photograph of me working on archaeological material from a S
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