Graham Hancock has written a large number of very long books which have made him immensely wealthy. According to his publisher, he has sold over seven million copies, which have been translated into over 30 languages. His Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse was watched by millions around the world, and a new series is in production. Hancock’s lofty claims thrill his many followers but infuriate historians and archaeologists alike; he seizes every opportunity to insult and disparage his critics. His frequently repeated charge is that archaeologists, inexplicably, are covering up material evidence that would prove his claim that survivors of a lost ice age civilisation, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe, seeded the emergence of civilisations from Asia to the Americas.

The first point I want to make is that while Hancock presents himself as a foe of ‘conventional archaeology’, his work is not original. He is a recycler. The idea of a unitary origin of civilisation draws on – with little or no acknowledgement – antiquarians such as Ignatius L. Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World and Ragnarok: the Age of Fire and Gravel, both published in the 1880s. It is no coincidence that these fantasies about the ancient origin of civilisations first emerged in the age of the European empires: it was a colonialist version of the past. Hancock’s lost civilisation inevitably has the musty odour of high Victorian imperialism. Archaeologists and historians have long moved on from what academics call ‘hyper diffusionism’. Hancock’s thinking is, by definition, reactionary. He is a kind of globe-trotting ‘New Victorian’ funded by royalties and Netflix.

Hancock has admitted that he can offer no hard, direct evidence that this lost civilisation ever existed. He frequently implies that such evidence has either been ‘covered up’ – why would it be? – or that ‘conventional’ archaeologists have refused to look for it – why would they not? Instead, he seizes on supposedly unexplained ‘mysteries’ about ancient sites, such as the Egyptian pyramids. He uses these puzzles to imply that they can only be explained as the relics of his ice age civilisation. Evidence is replaced by inference. This is sophistry as Aristotle defined it: ‘Wisdom in appearance only.’

Hancock has an explanation for this perplexing lack of direct evidence: some form of cosmic catastrophe that engulfed this ice-age civilisation. It is typical of his methods that purported evidence of this extinction event is used as if it provided evidence of the ‘lost civilisation’ itself. In other words, even if this extinction event took place, which is doubtful, it doesn’t follow that a previously unknown civilisation was destroyed. Since 2015, Hancock has latched onto a controversial theory known as the ‘Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis’, which proposes that a cometary or meteoritic body or bodies hit and/or exploded over North America 12,900 years ago. For Hancock, the impact would, first, explain the disappearance of a sophisticated civilisation and, second, the dispersal of any survivors who bestowed their wisdom on ‘savage’ hunter-gatherers elsewhere in the world. Among scientists the impact hypothesis is contentious, but this doesn’t matter much to Hancock. He has adroitly set a trap. Evidence for impact is not evidence that a lost civilisation was destroyed and its survivors dispersed around the world. By associating his theory with a genuine and unresolved scientific debate, he pilfers the trappings of genuine research.

The Greek philosopher Plato invented the myth of Atlantis, an iniquitous city destroyed by a devastating catastrophe, as a kind of thought experiment. Hancock tips his hat to Plato, but his recycling methodology feeds not on Plato but Ignatius Donnelly. Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, first published in 1882, is the progenitor of all later pseudo histories. Donnelly proposed that Plato’s Atlantis story was not a fable but the story of a real civilisation destroyed when a comet crashed into the Earth causing a ‘Great Flood’. (Donnelly also believed that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon.) Building on this Platonic scaffolding, Donnelly proposed that survivors of this cataclysm voyaged hither and thither blessing lesser peoples with the gifts of civilisation. Donnelly’s Atlantean myth is, of course, colonial: his Atlanteans were doing in his imagination exactly what English, French, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish (and later American) colonists did in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Donnelly’s Atlantis was the product of the age of empire. His superior Atlanteans resemble white-skinned European colonisers, who bestowed culture on the ‘primitive’ peoples of Africa and the Americas. By recycling Donnelly, Hancock recycles the ethos of colonialism.

Donnelly inspired, among others, the Swiss huckster Erich von Däniken, who popularised the idea of ‘palaeo contact’ – updating Donnelly’s wandering Atlanteans with technologically advanced ‘ancient astronauts’, who came to earth with the gift of sophisticated technologies.

Hancock has leant heavily on Donnelly and Von Däniken. He visited many of the same ‘mysterious’ archaeological sites as his predecessors: the pyramids of the Giza Plateau, the Maya city of Chichen Itza, and Tiwanaku in Bolivia. Hancock refashioned ‘Atlanteans’ and ‘ancient astronauts’ with the ‘survivors of a lost civilisation’. From a marketing point of view, this was an astute move. In 1977, Von Däniken had been discredited by two BBC Horizon documentaries that tested his ‘evidence’ to destruction. Hancock’s ‘lost civilisation’ is so nebulous that it can easily slip beyond the reach of hard-nosed investigation.

The core story Hancock repeatedly tells his readers and viewers in numerous, verbose 700-page doorstoppers has remained much the same since the publication of his breakthrough book Fingerprints of the Gods: the Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilisation in 1995. It is almost pure Donnelly: a superior culture suffers a cataclysmic fate; its highly spiritual survivors wander the world seeding civilisation among undeveloped primitive peoples. Since Hancock has no direct evidence of this civilisation and its survivors, he is free to fantasise. His Atlanteans have become a wandering cohort of spiritual masters blessed with unworldly powers. In Magicians of the Gods (2015) and, most recently, America Before (2019) Hancock seems to believe that clairvoyance, telekinesis et al were ‘lost technologies’ used by survivors of the lost civilisation to move enormous stones, build pyramids, and other such ‘inexplicable’ feats. Hancock complains that close-minded, dogmatic, orthodox scientists unfairly dismiss the magical, occult powers that people in the past once commanded with ease. Hancock denies that his work is racist – but like Donnelly and his followers, he continues to attribute the rise of civilisation to enlightened, white skinned, god-like visitors. Indigenous people, the actual builders of the Pyramids, Chichen Itza or Tiwanaku, are ruthlessly excluded from the story.

If you doubt that Hancock has some rather cranky views, have a look at an older book he co-authored with Robert Bauval: Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith (2004), republished as The Master Game: Unmasking The Secret Rulers Of The World’ (2011). In the appendix, the authors claim that the 9/11 attacks on the United States were targeting a ‘Masonic-Zionist conspiracy’ with which the US government had been complicit.

Magical powers aside, Hancock has little to tell us about this purported lost Ice Age civilisation. But then how could he? He seems to have no idea about its location, the origins of its inhabitants or its quotidian, material nitty-gritties: the raw material of archaeological investigation. How did these lost civilisers eat, generate rubbish, communicate, make tools, travel, take shelter, or bury their dead? In other words, what might they have left behind? It would, of course, be impossible for anyone to assess evidence of its existence because it has been conveniently obliterated or remains hidden beneath the oceans or the sands of the Sahara. Well, Hancock shows no interest in that conundrum – and he certainly doesn’t want his readers to ask the same questions.

The only solution for Hancock is to resort again to sophistry. His wordy books are crammed to the gills with indirect evidence of the lost civilisation. He knows that real historians use footnotes – and so we get lots of those. But it’s all a game – it’s all sophistry. There are – as any professional archaeologist or historian would concede – ‘mysteries’ about the past and its relics. Scientific investigation is driven by what is not known. There are undoubtedly unexplained aspects of archaeological sites, such as Gunang Padang on the island of Java in Indonesia, or Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. The unexplained is not evidence. Hancock seizes on ‘mysteries’ to conjure up a fantastical pyramid of evidential innuendo. And let’s be clear – Hancock is always a tourist never a practicing archaeologist; he’s an onlooker not a doer; a speculator not an investigator. He purloins and recycles the work of professionals to build his own version of Westeros. But then we all know Game of Thrones isn’t real.

It follows that since he has no convincing means of connecting actual archaeological discoveries with a chimeric lost civilisation, there is simply no joined-up argument in his books. I’m reminded of the story about the physicist Wolfgang Pauli: ‘Somebody showed to Pauli a work of a young theorist being well aware that the work was not too good but still willing to hear Pauli’s opinion. Pauli read the paper and said, with sadness: “It is not even wrong”.’

This logical fallacy at the root of Hancock’s claims has never stopped him churning out a steady stream of bloated books. Hancock is equally adept at provoking the most vicious online assaults on any critics. (I learned this at my cost.) He has admitted that he is an advocate and repeatedly claims he is ‘Just a journalist asking questions’. But what he does is a violation of basic journalistic ethics, since he does not seek to present the facts free of bias. Like an attorney rather than a journalist, he argues for specific interpretations: that all archaeologists are ‘orthodox’, ‘dogmatic’ and busily hiding away evidence of a ‘lost civilisation’ that he imagines was real. Hancock shows no interest in fairly presenting competing interpretations and asks questions that he then proceeds to answer himself, despite having no meaningful expertise.

It is perhaps ironic then that before seeking the fingerprints of the gods, Hancock was a journalist with connections to the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Journalism is both truth-telling and a species of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Hancock was once a serious author and critic of western aid programmes. It would seem that, as the money rolled in from speculating about fantastical pseudo history, the rhetorician overwhelmed the truth-teller. I was once asked whether or not Hancock believed in what he was claiming. I have no idea, and still don’t – but he has a talent for sounding as if he does. For his many readers, the trick seems to work.