I’ve started watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix by Graham Hancock. Hancock is a journalist that believes that civilizations have bern around since the last ice age. To some up a few of his premises:

• There were full civilizations around 11-12 thousand years ago, at the end of the ice age.
• The ice age end ended abruptly with meteor(s) causing a mass melting which caused massive flooding.
• That flooding destroyed a lot of the early civilizations that nestled themselves on shorelines and coastal areas.
• There was a significant loss of knowledge during this mass flood, a flood which almost all ancient cultures have stories about.
• The Sphinx by the Egyptian pyramids are far older than the civilization that built the pyramids close to 5 thousand years ago. So that was not the birth of great civilizations as many believe.

I am not an archeologist, but I think there is something to these claims. The discovery of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, believed to have been built around 11,500 years ago, throws conventional beliefs about early civilizations out of whack. And this isn’t the only ancient sight doing this. More and more evidence suggests that perhaps there were civilizations far older than previously thought possible.

This is science that’s definitely on the fringe, challenging what’s known, and creating very plausible hypothesis. I think in the next 50 years we will consider a very different agreed upon history of civilizations than what we have today.

The challenge is that many people like Graham Hancock tend to be the same people who believe in fringe science. I heard a podcast with Hancock where in addition to ancient civilizations he was also talking about telepathy and moving Egyptian pyramid stones using mind power. The extrapolations seem far fetched and more based on pseudoscience than actual science.

It’s hard to sieve through a lot fringe science to find the science on the fringe… the science that isn’t necessarily conventionally believed, but has significant evidence and merit based on growing bodies of knowledge, as opposed to crazy speculation. This is challenging with people like Graham Hancock, as well as others like Deepak Chopra.

But I think when it comes to ancient civilizations lost to an ancient apocalypse, Hancock really is on to something, and we are going to see this science on the fringe make it into conventional science fairly soon. Our textbooks of tomorrow will tell a very different story about the birth of civilization compared to the history books of today.