I don’t get the racism argument. Claiming there was an ancient civilization existed that taught early civilizations isn’t racist. That an ient race doesn’t exist anymore. The early civilizations they claim to have taught don’t exist anymore. Modern day Egyptians have as much to do with ancient Egyptians as they do with modern Polynesians. At a certain point, we have to recognize that we’re talking about so long ago that race is out of the equation.
Like, don’t get me wrong, his claims aren’t scientific and he definitely seems like someone with a theory in search of facts. But I seriously do not get the racism claim. It doesn’t belittle modern societies because no modern society can really claim ownership of shit that happened over 10,000 years ago. It’s insane to think otherwise.
Yeah, I don’t understand the hate that guy gets on Lemmy group think. He’s not a scientist, but so long as people dont view his ideas as absolute truth, I don’t see what is wrong with pointing at some unexplained mystery and asking ‘what if’
And to say it’s truly racist to state anything like that there might have been some ancient culture is just absurd.
People have their minds made up so he apparently falls into the heretic camp. I doubt many of the people here have actually read or watched his stuff. There are of course people that take what he says as gospel and that is also problematic.
That said, he’s been on more and more of woe is me the victim and it’s getting old.
No it’s deeply rooted in racism.
TLDR is: Everything great achieved in africa/ america/asia must have been aliens/ancient civilization (Like Atlantis). Everything in Europe was of course achieved due to the great intellect of europeans.
I recomend the podcast “It’s probably (not) Aliens” They really deep dive into different aspects of ancient aliens/astronaut theories
Ok but that’s the thing I’m trying to get at. 15k years ago there was no such thing as Europeans. There weren’t Africans or Asians or Indians. Thats so far back that there are zero ties to modern races. It’s meaningless to try and connect them. It cant belittle one group of people while praising the intellect of another because human migration has made any resemblance to modern humanity from that far back a moot point. Any races from that long ago no longer exist.
It is one of the many arguments that helped Nazism take root. "We were once the great Aryans, but with so many immigrant subhumans and control by the lesser races, we will drown, we need to be rid of them to Make America Great Again, I mean, Rebuild Mother Russia, I mean, bring forth the Third Reich.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-racism
Plus, it denies the achievements that many groups have made, and pins them upon this supposed master race, painting everyone outside of the race as dumb idiots who needed to be trained and unable to discover things and progress. And dumb enough to be able to either write or have any oral tradition about them, when many ancient cultures had intricate writing systems, and rich oral traditions spanning back to the era when the megafauna was still roaming.
also note that Atlantis is part of the origin myth for nazis. so this usually is just code for “the white master race taught the brown and black savages how to do civilization”, conscious or not.
Wait: you’re telling me me the nazi’s from 100 years ago, adopted the story of Alantis that is centuries older than them, to reinforce belief in their ideology?
Exactly, it’s just an “evolution” of the whole White Saviour bit they love so much.
On the flip side, there was an article on the BBC website around a year ago. Basically the article was explaining how archeologists had no idea how the ancient folk made Stonehenge so accurately plumb and level, and how they’ve been experimenting for aaaages trying to figure it out…
Now, I’m a stonemason. And I can tell you exactly what they probably did, but the Big Brain people don’t like to ask people who work trades. (Or maybe they are just asking the wrong ones)
If you have figured out rope or string, and you have access to wood and a few stones, then it’s incredibly easy to level off an area, to make an accurate circle, and to make the tops of all the standing stones level and the uprights plumb.
A basic plumb-bob is incredibly easy to make, in this instance we would use as straight a piece of wood as we can find, a length of rope tied to the middle of it, with a stone tied to the other end. For the uprights, get straight logs as long as each stone going into the ground. Now we have our standing stone analogues, and a plumb-bob. Dig the holes for the uprights, plop the logs down in the hole, if the plumb-bob isn’t pointing straight down between the two logs, one side has to go down.
There, mystery solved. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.
That one, was the BBC being contrarian and stupid, or trying to drum up Stonehenge as an attractive mystery, it has been common knowledge among archeology enthusiasts that Stonehenge is an impressive monument, but that it is nothing that we can’t replicate with manpower, a bit of a budget and basic tech available since we have rope.
the Big Brain people don’t like to ask people who work trades
Case in point, this hairdresser rediscovered Roman technique
i have never seen anyone argue that the colosseum was built by extraterrestrials.
Not yet. But let it be known that it was built by a extraterrestrial Inuit tribe in trade for the finest Italian blubber.
Fine by me. I enjoy a good hypothesis. And I enjoy getting academics all riled up over theory.
Lay on, MacDuff!
You’ll love Milo Rossi’s MiniMinuteman
Here’s his series on Hancock’s last “special”
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bMHRoGKM7yD2phvUV59_Cvb
And the shorts are a good quick “riled up session” about some of the stupid things people “postulate” online
Why Keanu… why… 🤧
Whatever. As long as he keeps doing good action movies I don’t give a damn of his beliefs. I still like Tom Cruise’s movies and he’s a scientology’s nuts.
Tom Cruise is a great example of love the actor, hate the man.
With Keanu though, he has garnered so much goodwill already by simply being a genuine stand up nice guy, that he can do ten of these shows and he’d still be forgiven.
Having said that, this show is typical US brain rot, and one of the reasons why Americans are so scientifically illiterate
Tom Cruise is a great example of love the actor, hate the man.
Tom Cruise is a mid-tier actor given top-tier roles.
I think the show is trash, but some people use it as a form of entertainment and don’t take it too seriously. Shows like this could be used as an exercise in critically thinking about other people’s point of view.
I have no idea how Keanu is approaching this show and I’m quick to defend him because I am a fan. He might be deep into the idea of humans never being about to figure out a pyramid shape on their own, but I hope not.
I don’t see how getting more people interested in ancient history and geology is a bad thing. Part of the reason Graham has the wiggle room to make the claims that he makes is that the subject is relatively unstudied.
Obviously there is actual science taking place in the field and has been forever but funding for that kind of thing is notoriously difficult to come by compared to many other fields. Getting grants to study the distant past for essentially no reason other than curiosity is not a priority within an economic system that prioritizes profit over all else. The best way to break through that particular obstacle is getting more people to pay attention and ask questions. If we need a benign conspiracy theory about “big geology” hiding the truth from us to make that happen then where’s the harm in that? The vast majority of people prone to conspiratorial thinking are already farther down that rabbit hole than Hancock’s ideas will take them.
Additionally, actual scientists would do well to learn something from Graham about presentation. Despite what you may think of him, the way he talks about the subject resonates with people. People don’t want hear a regurgitation of facts in a research paper. Speculate a bit and get people excited about your future work. You don’t need to go to the extremes that he does but don’t refuse to branch out from what can be conclusively proven today either. Talk about your theories and what you’re hoping to find / learn just as much as you talk about the results of your research.
- It’s not understudied.
- It causes us problems when we do try to educate people.
- We’d do better with funding to do these kinds of things. It’s very expensive to do it right.
I’m not one for Joe Rogan, but cannot recommend the interview with Handcock and Flint Dibble enough if you want to see how quickly his narratives fall apart. The real story is a lot cooler anyway.
“What if every star was a human soul?” is not an interesting astronomy question to get people into astronomy. “Big Astronomy” not awarding grants to study that, is not a conspiracy. It’s due diligence.
Using a platform to say “What if [random speculation that has no basis and can’t be tested]” is not useful science outreach. It’s someone pretending to be science-y.
A person’s sole redeeming aspect being “being an engaging speaker” doesn’t make them a useful object lesson, it makes them yet another snake oil salesman. That’s not new or unique. That’s being a charlatan. Which is what people don’t like about Graham.
You’re ignoring the interesting questions he asks in favor of the easy to hand wave away stuff and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. To be clear, I’m not defending the things he says. I’m pointing out that his more outlandish theories gain more traction because the scientific community doesn’t lean into the softballs and use them as an opportunity to both teach people actual science and understand what different groups of people want to learn about.
Ignore the star / soul example and focus in on the possibility of an ancient and semi advanced civilization existing. That’s the part grabbing people’s attention. Talk about what that would change about our understanding of the past and what sort of evidence we would expect to find if it were true. Showcase people working in related fields and what they have found already. Propose other locations we could look for that evidence and discuss other topics we could study while looking for that evidence in those places. Engage the curiosity, don’t dismiss it. Anyone listening to Graham is likely uneducated in science but interested in it so use that as your jumping off point instead of judging those people for not being farther down the path.
That idea is just as ridiculous.
If you want an entertaining, well researched rebuttal from an actual archeologist, check this playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bMHRoGKM7yD2phvUV59_Cvb
Star Trek is attention grabbing. It doesn’t mean we should depend on time travel to save the whales. Not being able to separate fantasy from reality is not a scientific viewpoint. Actual education about any of this would be steering away from it, not into it.
The answer to all questions about advanced ancient civilizations existing is “probably not”. There are interesting examples that push back the earliest evidence of some things, like the Antikythera mechanism, but the only thing that is evidence of is that gears are older than previously thought. “Could there have been an ancient globe spanning civilization that only used wood or was on Antarctica or for some other reason has surviving no evidence?” is the same level of question as “Could there be a Discworld?”. The infeasibility of proving a negative is not the same as “yes this existed”.
Ancient Aliens level speculation on ancient civilizations is religion without a sacred text, inventing fantasies of a utopian past out of whole cloth because of an imagined fragment of a thread.
I’m OK with this dickhead claiming the things he’s claim but he doesn’t have EVIDENCE just speculation.
That’s what’s frustrating
“Isn’t it a cool idea that we might have lost the details of an ancient human civilization?”
“Yes, absolutely, and we keep finding new evidence that behavioral modernity started earlier than thought, so it’d be awesome to find proof that-”
“THE PROOF CAME TO ME IN A DREAM (OF GETTING A NETFLIX SPECIAL)”
Everytime he’s asked for any kind of reasoning or evidence he goes straight to victimhood and how “mainstream archeology” doesn’t want you to know the real truth.
Oh god, I saw something like this on Netflix. Every third sentence was about the bad mainstream archeology.
