Years ago there was a thread on the old less-moderated /r/science about "Are there any of today's 'kooks' that you think might eventually be vindicated?" Hancock was one of the most popular answers, along with the two 'water weathering on the Sphinx' folks (forget their names).

Some of Hancock's ideas are a little wacky, but the core idea that civilization is older than we think probably has legs. Unfortunately the modern scientific establishment with its roots in the monastic system (academia as we know it is a direct evolution of the monastery and medieval guild systems) still persecutees heretics and tends to dismiss all works from those who espouse heresy. Having even a few "out there" ideas trashes a person's entire corpus and leads to a kind of excommunication.

The general trend I've noticed has been this: the more we learn about our history, the further back the dates go. I've seen this for both hominid evolution and civilization.

That and the standard narrative is just weird. We know from the fossil record that humans have had large craniums and by extension complex modern brains for at least hundreds of thousands of years. What the heck were we doing for all that time? Saying civilization is only ~10k years old is like saying "birds have had wings for millions of years but they only recently started flying." Huh? Really? This to me strains credulity more than the idea of lost civilizations and forgotten epochs. The latter seems like a straightforward possibility, especially if the end of the ice age involved catastrophic climate shifts that would have ruined agriculture, drowned coastal cities (we like to build on coasts), and dispersed people everywhere.

Even among recent ancient civilizations, only those that built massive stone megaliths are really remembered. We know little about native Americans that lived here only a few hundred years ago. There could have been massive and complex antediluvian civilizations and if they didn't happen to be in the habit of stacking up a lot of big rocks they'd have left almost nothing of themselves.

It's funny to me how much resistance this idea gets. I don't find it that hard to believe at all. I wonder if it conflicts with some residual "young-Earth creationism," even among some nominally secular folks. Even though most scientists no longer believe the Earth to be young, there still might be a kind of implicit bias against the idea that history might go back astronomically far into the past and that there might be forgotten epochs of history. None of that stuff is even hinted at in the Bible. I mean it talks about a big flood -- which if the ice age ended catastrophically would be somewhat accurate -- but has little if any detail about what came before.

> That and the standard narrative is just weird. We know from the fossil record that humans have had large craniums and by extension complex modern brains for at least hundreds of thousands of years. What the heck were we doing for all that time? Saying civilization is only ~10k years old is like saying "birds have had wings for millions of years but they only recently started flying."

That's nonsense, brains don't exist to enable globe-spanning civilisations (nor do globe-spanning civilisations require it as argentine ants demonstrate).

What the heck were we doing for all that time? Surviving at all was a big one (and there's suggestions of serious population bottlenecks before we got out of africa), then there was spreading throughout the planet, and then the ratcheting of ideas requires that people who could have ideas have the leisure to have and apply them so you need a certain population density and preexisting social complexity.

You could just as well wonder what we were doing for the first 10000 years of civilisation (or whatever) and why it took so long to invent computers so there must have been something fishy going on. Or look at the Antikythera mechanism and wonder what the hell we've been doing with those complex computery brains that we didn't get to programmable automation and computers for 2000 years.

The reason people resist the idea of super-advanced ancient civilizations is because, quite simply, it fails Occam's Razor hard. The strongest evidence for such an idea is rooted in anthropological evidence, which is among the weakest historical evidence you can produce. There is instead a noticeable lack of evidence in the form of concrete archaeological evidence (it should be noted that it's possible even to see signs where wooden or earthen structures once existed, if you know what you're looking for) or suggestive genetic or biological evidence. It's also well-known that technological progress is in no sense inexorable--the Chinese printing or Roman steam engines went absolutely nowhere, for example, and even the bow-and-arrow was lost by some aboriginal tribes for unclear reasons.

It is certainly more plausible to suggest that human populations were too thin and nomadic to sustain technological innovation prior to the development of the sedentary lifestyle that arose during the Neolithic Revolution (itself caused probably either by some sort of climate change or overpopulation).

I should also point out that your view that larger cranial capacity early on means that humans had to develop civilization earlier has an uphill battle to explain why modern humans are Homo sapiens and not Homo neanderthalis (who had a larger cranial capacity than Homo sapiens and were probably even more physically fit).

Well, there's two things.

It has been this warm for about ten thousand years. Before that there was a hundred thousand year ice age. The previous warm period that lasted about ten thousand years was called the Eemian.

It would be natural to try to search for marks of civilization from the Eemian period. But so far, only very simple stone tool artifacts have been found.

http://www.christopherkellen.com/posts/eemian-civilization/

I don't feel that ancient forgotten civilizations make the narrative any more credible.

We know that civilization moved from bronze tools to rockets in several thousand years. If there were ancient civilizations that started much earlier than we think, what the hell were they doing all those years? It's exactly the same as your birds-and-flying analogy, except that now being birds mean having a civilization.

The Australian aboriginies mentioned in the article never invented the wheel, you know. It seems that technological progress is only a ratchet after a certain amount of momentum has built up, and that it can just "fail to start" or "start and then fizzle out" near the beginning, going on that way for millenia.

I'm just hearing about this stuff for the first time, and I've never felt a stronger "I want to believe" urge about anything.

That being said, I think the emotional appeal of discovering long lost civilizations is SO enticing that it merits extreme caution when reviewing the science. It's so easy to chain a few mysteries together into a pattern that you have to be very wary of somebody who has proven themselves less than careful in their reasoning. So I understand the scientific community's reticence, even if I share your hope that we can examine the evidence rather than the person.

The first step is actually compelling mainstream archeologists to look at the evidence rather than dismissing it outright. There's a fine line between caution and willful ignorance, and its becoming increasingly clear that the latter has been holding up an argument that is increasingly becoming obsolete. That said, I understand the process is a long one and process is important.

If you subscribe to Graham Hancock's Facebook page you'll see a nice stream of mainstream news articles that he's been compiling as of late. Exciting times, like a domino effect. And since you're just becoming familiar, I would recommend reading Fingerprints of the Gods first to get an air of the controversy, and then his new book Magicians of the Gods. Lots and lots of references to look into, and very beautiful, compelling writing, too.

i watched joe rogan's episodes and their ideas also intrigued me. i have no knowledge base of these facts so these ideas are just scientific entertainment for me, and for someone like me there's huge value simply being that.

one quote that struck me is (paraphrasing): "it's like we've all had collective amnesia for a million years and are just now waking up asking ourselves wtf just happened and how did we get here?"

On the topic of building, rock is a pesky material to work with compared to wood. But wood do not last relative to rock. Tokyo was a mostly wood buildings before WW2 for example.