The excellent Milo Rossi (Miniminuteman) has uploaded a talk he gave at Virginia Tech about the pipeline from pseudoarchaeological nonsense to more dangerous beliefs. Well worth your time:
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In a way, it’d be fun if they did find evidence of a super-advanced race of ancients, but the DNA evidence proved that they weren’t white.
Of course, they’d just back up and postulate a super-super-advanced race of ancients who taught the super-advanced race of ancients, that were white.
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I saw that the other day too. It’s really good and stresses why having a BS meter is important.
Sure sure, it’s fun to think about Atlantis. I was 14 reading Omni magazine too. But at some point you gotta wake up to the truth.
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The Lost civilization Hancock is referring to is the Atlanteans, even if he never outright says that.
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Obviously, non-white people could never have figured out how to stack rocks by themselves. They MUST have had white saviors from Atlantis or space to teach them!
/s
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I’ve noticed the guys who follow Rogan think they’re doing good, they’re improving their brains or emotional health or something, like it’s yoga and meditation and herbal tea in podcast form for bros.
So, if these Rogan bros are really interested in expanding their minds it’s good someone comes on the show and pushes back. “Critical thinking” does not mean buying into wild theories because it stimulates some pleasure center in your brain.
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Brogans?
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The Empire never ended.
At the bookstore where I work, I’m personally responsible for having moved Graham Hancock’s books from the Anthropology section to the Metaphysics section, where they get to chill next to books about crystal healing and how 7-dimensional unicorns are real. I assume whoever originally categorized them had never heard of him and didn’t know any better.
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Well done!
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A family member who is really into ancient alien nonsense was talking about some ancient civilization malarkey that may or may not have been connected to this, and part of his assumption that this was accepted archaeology was that if you did a search for it, all the web sites talking about it accepted it as true. (He even pointed to a search engine summary, at the top of the search results, which presented it as if it were true and accepted science.) Which, upon doing a web search, was correct - it was actually pretty hard to find anyone debunking the whole thing, even though it should have been easy because there was no actual evidence for what was being claimed. Presumably it was because real archaeologists didn’t want to sully themselves and take time out to debunk something they saw as so obviously wrong, but the result was that the idea was effectively going unchallenged.
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I had a discussion with an acquaintance about Graham Hancock’s nonsense a few weeks back. His take was that of course mainstream archaeologists dispute Hancock’s theories, because it goes against the narrative promoted by established academics who hate to be challenged so if you wanted to publish a peer-reviewed paper on this kind of thing you’d get shut down and ostracized from academia.
The funny thing is that this guy is a reasonbly well-educated fellow studying nuclear physics, but he thinks his field is different because whenever some layperson comes up with a wacky theory about physics they can be proven or disproven with math. He can’t seem to process the idea that the social sciences have similar means of challenging and evaluating long-held ideas when new information comes to light.
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I love how Hancock resorts to all kinds of fallacious arguments, including attacking things that other archeologists have said (not Dibble), and the ever-juicy “I risked my life !”
It’s like, “yah, sure, maybe you do believe your own BS, but I’m still unconvinced.”
Take away the English accent and the posturing-with-the-glasses, and watch his revenue stream drop to half.
I also love Dibble’s choice of headwear. It’s like a sly way of dissing Rogan’s audience. “I know this is what you think archeologists look like…” 
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Archaeology is not usually considered a social science. It’s part of the humanities, but we’re strange jacks of all trades that poach theories, methods and methodologies from everyone, from computational biology to history, surveying to ethnology, quaternary geology to philosophy, analytical chemistry to literary criticism. And we have our own as well, of course.
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The thoughts of an archaeologist who did manage to sit through the entire thing
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Charles C. Mann does a fine job of unpacking the or some LIDAR findings you mention, in these two of his books, which I hope get updated editions (I have the first editions):
Under other circumstances, I’d say go for the audio book versions, but the printed books have photos that really do help the reader get more out of the material.
ETA: clarifiers, punctuation
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What search terms? Not doubting your experience, but this seems like confirmation bias based on skewed search terms…
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I forget the specific search terms, but as I remember, if you searched for the guy who was promoting the nonsense or the name of his “theory,” or even just a description of what was being claimed, you just ended up with a list of (often connected) websites that were promoting the crankery. I had to do some digging just to find someone commenting somewhere that it was all a bunch of nonsense, when debunkers should have been up top. I mean, in part this was surely due to the cranks having done some effective SEO, but…
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this is really something to understand. as many of you already know, IANAA[chaeologist], but my Dear Brother most definitely is.
you are correct in saying that refuting the fringe notions is a waste of their time and is assuredly beneath the effort of actual archaeologists working in reputable institutions.
for all of you posting video of Milo, may i remind you that Mr. Rossi does not hold an advanced degree in archaeology. he is a masters student in the field. both Milo and Dear Brother have done videos together debunking some old and widely held notions of archaeological finds from Iraq - namely the “Baghdad Battery”.
that many of you find Mr. Rossi’s takedown of Hancock so worthwhile, shows how little actual study in the field is needed to debunk his [Hancock’s] premise of ancient, superior [add: white] race is telling.
i will refrain from further comment, as I am not the archaeologist and DB is currently in the field, out-of-country at the ancient Assyrian capitol of Nimrud. has he found evidence of alien involvement? Annunaki interference in the Mesopotamian civilization?
i will ask him on our next connection. likely his answer will be: “shut the fuck up, dude! why you ask me this stupid shit?!”
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