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Comment by bulatb | Hacker News Reader

World of Antiquity[0] on YouTube does a good job filling in the context around claims like this. He did one on the Netflix series[1] and has others about Hancock's take on flood myths[2], Plato's account[3], other Atlantis claims, and many other alt-archaeology topics in his Myths of Ancient History[4] playlist.

He keeps it pretty civil, but he makes it clear when takes are bad or purposely misleading.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@WorldofAntiquity

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9PpokN1b58

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhMGVLUSB0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjhctHjnIbUgvin0ZlrsH...

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The word that comes to mind watching any of those is "disingenuous". He very carefully avoids mentioning anything that might call into question what he wants to assure us he knows all about.

Obviously Hancock is wrong. But he is right to be proposing answers that this smug seatwarmer is failing to even look for. His job is to present a strong case for something else, but he has none.

Could you give an example? It's been a bit since I watched them (except the last one) but nothing jumps to mind.

Does he ever mention the helical groove in the tube-drilled core at the British Museum? Does he ever mention that the very oldest stonework is the most dumfounding? Or that nobody is bothering to get surface luminescence readings on any of it, since the few samples in Egypt came out 500 years too old?

He picks the easiest topics, and never mentions that historians know vanishingly little of our 300,000-year past.

He's said (I'm paraphrasing) that he goes for popular myths, especially when there's a single video or series promoting them. I've never heard him mention the groove or the dating thing, but aren't those pretty specific? I've never heard of them at all. Maybe he'd reply if you left him a question.

He does address the stonework point in [1] at 6:36[^]—though he says it's not true. He also says at 3:43[*] that archaeologists can make mistakes and don't know everything.

Anyway, I'm not here shilling for the channel. I just found the background info relevant and useful.

[^] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU&t=396s

[*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dHNq8SURTU&t=223s

This is why I say "disingenuous".

Finding a place with a course of smaller blocks under the largest ones is not addressing the question, it is purely dodging. Similarly, repair work is almost all radically cruder than the original work, so finding a place where it measures up is another dodge.

These cores? https://youtu.be/n_NguZUDku4

Which stonework?

Three and a half hours? Just the first half hour exceeded my tolerance for whiny disingenuity.

The stone boxes in the Serapeum suffice to show that the copper tooling presented is laughably inadequate. Pretending otherwise, apparently just to avoid admitting ignorance of the real method, is disingenuous.

We really don't have any clue how they could have done that work. Certainly nothing found has been up to the job. What would be so bad about admitting that? It would be much better than lying.

At 1:27, thought I linked to the correct place.

2:09 for the boxes in the same video

Are archeologists suggesting that they used copper chisels for very hard stone?

At issue is that the surfaces are perfectly flat and parallel, the rims exactly 90 degrees. Archaeologists won't even discuss it.

As shown in the video they are not perfect 90 degree angles.

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