Ever since I gave up on the Ancient Aliens show every once in a while I get me the feeling for some good old fashion scientific muckraking. And Netflix obliged by dropping a series called “Ancient Apocalypse.” The host is an author of myriad books on his conjecture, namely that there existed in our past an advanced civilization that was capable of great feats, feats beyond what more recent civilizations were capable of. Think of super Egyptians, back in or before the last ice age.
What is clear from the get-go is the host has a hard on for “academic archeologists” who have not given enough attention to his conjecture. He constantly bemoans the fact that the academic archeology community isn’t investigating the sites he thinks are telling.
I have only watched the first two episodes, in Indonesia and Mexico, but the pattern has been established. The two sites he says have been ignored by archeologists were discovered by archeologists and at least to some extent, investigated by archeologists. Apparently they just didn’t do it right.
The host keeps using phrases like “academic archeologists have turned their backs on this new evidence” and his conjecture is “extremely threatening to mainstream archeology,” his conjecture would “undermine the current paradigms the academic archeologists have invested their careers in.” That kind of stuff.
Now I haven’t gotten very far in the series, but it should be clear to anyone who understands how field sciences work and that is that archeologists who have found an interesting site to investigate spend years seeking funding to support those investigations. So, just because some academic archeologist wants to do a study is almost irrelevant. He needs to find a supporter who will pay for the process. So, really, if someone out in the general public wants an archeological dig to take place, all they need do is raise several million dollars and put out a request for proposals and they will have archeologists crawling up their ass.
If the Mexican or Indonesian governments want those sites excavated, all they need do is pony up some cash and they have archeologists in country that will be drooling to do that work.
But no, these sites aren’t being investigating because archeologists are turning up their noses on the possibilities. Archeologists are known for turning their noses. Or, maybe, just maybe there is personal animus between the academic archeology community and the guy who constantly excoriates them.
Now, as to the content. I can believe that in spots around the globe an isolated culture managed to marshal the manpower to perform amazing feats of construction. After all we are still arguing about how the pyramids were built, and Stonehenge, etc. and we haven’t discovered all of the sites in existence.
The show host uses pyramids as an example of why he believes that there was a global advanced civilization involved. I mean, look at the similarities! There are pyramids all over the planet, often oriented to the stars in much the same way. There must have been a global planning element involved! Oh. really?
First of all, pyramids are clearly symbolic and artificial mountains. They get the priests involved closer to the sky and certainly far above the hoi polloi down on the ground. In every case so far, the pyramid builders started from a sacred site, often a source of water in the form of a well or spring. Since water is needed for life, it is easy to see why such would be “sacred.”
Then a smaller construction was formed, then larger ones, often on top of the smaller ones. Gosh, do you think some of those priests were ambitious?
And, the question is asked in the show “How could a hunter-gather culture create such things?” Well, hunter-gathers have a lot of free time. Hunting and gathering take far less time to support a group than does farming, which is far more labor intensive. So, having far less time, they would just need to have leadership . . . oh, yeah, the priests. And then, people learned as they went. The history of pyramid building in Egypt showed how it was learned how to build a stable pyramid of their favored type. The task itself taught the workers and leaders how to do the task. Heavy materials were brought in from far afield. The tasks led to the creation of methods to perform those transport tasks. Oh, one of the similarities needing explanation is the connect of the pyramids with religions. (Really?)
As to the orientation, the host of the show pointed out (in the first two episodes at least) that the primitive cultures of the times were knowledgeable about the night sky and the repeating patterns one can observe regarding the positions of things like the Sun and Moon and various “constellations” of stars with various times of the year.
If you build an artificial mountain and it is round, it can’t have a particular orientation, so since we have eyes in the front of our head, we naturally orient things as being in front of us, behind us, off to the left and off to the right, thus the four points of the compass stem from the placement of our eyes in our heads. Building artificial mountains with four sides allows them to be oriented to the positions of things in the night or day skies and so they were. And it didn’t take global coordination for this to happen.
There is one thing I am really looking forward to in this series. Anyone arguing for a global advanced civilization has to explain how that culture was able to travel to all of the other spots on the planet. The Ancient Aliens people had either the aliens doing the information spreading or providing the transportation. So, aliens solve this communication problem, but create an even larger problem, you know, aliens.
And, if Indonesian people went to Mexico to teach them pyramid building and other advanced technology (or vice versa), the host country would want to show their benefactors a good time, no, so I expect a lot of fucking to have occurred during these visits, so DNA studies will show the mixing, no?
And while the host clearly needs no ego boosting, he did have a “celebrity” join him on the first episode for support . . . Joe Rogan. Joe Fucking Rogan? That was the best he could do? You know Joe Rogan, who blithely uses the n-word on his podcasts, denies the effectiveness of vaccines, and well, he doesn’t claim to be an expert on anything, but has an opinion nonetheless, on everything. His endorsement means nothing, except in that, like the Kardashians, he is popular and nobody quite knows why.
But Steve, surely this is harmless good fun. I wonder? Such shows denigrate the scientific establishments, portraying them as far more conservative than they are. Scientists, too. Most scientists I know would throw their grandmothers under a bus to prove their colleagues wrong in even a small way. And archeologists aren’t ignoring a tantalizing site because they have a stick up their asses, they may not be able to raise the funds, or they find working in some countries to be too arduous. Take, Israel for example. As long as you are supporting the company line, you will get decent service from the Israeli antiquities bureaucracy. But the minute you undermine the company line, they will get you fired from your university job and try to make sure you never get another one. (In Israeli, the company line is the one that supports Israel’s claim that their state was the proper territory of the Israeli people back in history, so that they have a right to that land. Undermine that in any way, and well I warned you.)