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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

I just started watched the YouTube.

It’s hard to take this debunking serious when the very 1st point he makes about Graham is incorrect.

He states that Graham claims to be a researcher.

In the Netflix series, Graham doesn’t not. He makes it clear he’s not a researcher nor archeologist. He clearly states he’s an investigative journalist.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=19&v=DgvaXros3MY&feature=youtu...

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And then the YouTube host roots his show on the scientific method with the question “How do you prove there was an ancient civilians”.

This is the wrong root question.

The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”. Or said differently, “how did civilians not use more advance technology than we believe they had”

(Which is only bronze tools and no existence of the wheel)

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> He states that Graham claims to be a researcher.

No, he doesn't state that at all. This is what Milo says, verbatim: "He is a person that some may call a researcher. I am one of those people. More predominantly than that, Graham Hancock is a writer."

> The root question should be “How did ancient civilians create these structures using the technology we believe they had at the time”.

That's an interesting question, but it's essentially an endless one: we will never, ever know how ancient civilizations created everything they created, because their secrets have been lost to time. Human history is so deep and the evidence so porous that we simply will never run out of questions to ask about how they did what they did. Furthermore, even when we come up with ways they might have created things, we may never, ever know whether that's really what they did, because the evidence is not there anymore. There are medieval and later items which we don't really know how were created, but we do know, for sure, that they didn't have power tools.

For instance, what was Greek fire, exactly? There are lots of good ideas, Wikipedia suggests "it may have been made by combining pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, sulfur, or niter." Will we ever know which? Maybe, but probably not.

His whole premise is that civilizations didn’t exist that long ago (which is his scientific method question).

Yet no one disputes that archeologist have found remains of people from 200,000 years ago.

That right there debunks his “debunk” show.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072867405/scientists-determi....

Of course there were people (or at least very-nearly-human people) 200,000 years ago, and of course there is a very, very long history of humans and not-quite-humans having material culture.

Graham Hancock asserts that there was a globe-spanning single culture with advanced technology ~12,000 years ago. That's a big, specific claim! Of course there were people around during the Younger Dryas, Hancock is making a bunch of claims about what people were doing at that time.

Milo is saying there wasn't a globe-spanning civilization with a shared culture and advanced technology existing during that period, not that there weren't people (are you perhaps confusing the words "civilian" and "civilization"?)

Seriously, keep watching for more than a couple minutes: does he at any point say "of course Ancient Apocalypse isn't real, humans didn't exist back then"? That would be a very short video.

Catastrophism

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valentina-Yanko/publica...

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