The problem is not Hancock, he is who he is and honestly he produces entertainment not different from the alien series on HC or the endless stream of pseudohistory or pseudo science, that can be fun taken with a grain of salt. The real problem with Hancock are the kinda white supremacists books.
The problem is that we have a real problem: we teach kids things we don't know for sure.
I swear I am not 300 hundreds years old and they thaught me in school
- science unequivocally says that - the Neanderthal men were the ancestors of the Sapiens, we have proof, we simply miss the link between Lucy and the Homo erectus and we're done, we explained everything!
Turns out there were 12, no wait 14, no wait 15, no wait 21 different species of hominids and many of them were contemporary to the sapiens and 90% of the humans bear Neanderthal DNA.
Just like there were no baby dinosaurs because we thought the smaller ones were different species.
Archeologist and historians need to go out and say loud: we don't know anything about human history, but we have many good theories! please help!
According to mainstream, Göbekli Tepe should not exist.
I was thaught in school that there were no settlements at the time, absolutely impossible, scientific truth (tm)
Any investigatory process must necessarily go through periods of updating understanding in light of new evidence. As such it’s not unexpected that older things thought to be correct turn out to be wrong. That’s part of learning and refining knowledge.
Sorry you had shit school teachers that didn’t help you understand that. I can understand the feeling of being betrayed when something you thought was an irrefutable fact turned out to be wrong by advances in the same field.
> As such it’s not unexpected that older things thought to be correct turn out to be wrong. That’s part of learning and refining knowledge.
Of course.
Now imagine me at 8 learning one thing "said to be taken for granted because <<science>>!" and me at 20 wondering how was it possible that everything was completely wrong and ancient history as we knew it wasn't much different from reading Nostradamus.
It all literally radically changed in 15 years, we got it completely backwards, it wasn't simply "a period of understanding", everything was simply wrong.
Everything, not just something.
One example among too many: we thought and we were taught and students at university were taught that the size of the brain mattered and was unequivocally linked to intelligence (we know now it's simply a correlation), so Sapiens obviously had the biggest brain among humans and hominids.
That was false too!
Neanderthal had bigger brains.
Does it mean they were more intelligent?
*we don't know!*
Another example: many dinosaurs had feathers, when we discovered it, I was already a young adult.
And not just some of them, but hypothesis (is) that many, if not all non-avian dinosaur species also possessed feathers in some shape or form.
Stonehenge and all the other cromlechs were believed to be built by the druids until the 60s of 20th century!
There are 3 thousands years difference between the construction of Stonehenge and the first records of the druids, still the knowledge of them being "magical places" is still the most common among people.
> Sorry you had shit school teachers that didn’t help you understand that
Don't be so dismissive, if you read papers from the 80s, when I was a kid (I-m actually from the 70s), you'll see it wasn't my teachers, it was scientifically accepted, you could read about that in every book you could lend your hands on.
No one contested that knowledge in public, it was "the truth".
The only ones contesting those theories were the religious people, my city hosts the Vatican, you can imagine they were quite vocal about it.
It wasn't so easy to shed some light on the topic even putting some effort into it.
We were simply sitting on bogus knowledge, everything prior to 6-7 thousand years ago is obscure and cloudy, everything could either be and not be, except maybe aliens.
We don't know, Hancock is obviously not a scientist and his theories are laughable, but could a civilization have existed before the ice age and have survived it?
We don't know!
We even miss a billion years of Earth geological history, it's almost a quarter of its entire existence.
It's easy to understand why people can believe to crook theories about Atlantis and the saviour from the sea, it's actually interesting and if mainstream theories can be proven utterly wrong every 2 decades, who can say they are not true?
It's the reason why religion still goes so strong, we need to be upfront and say that we don't know anything and the things we know are probably mostly wrong or we risk that history in the future will be taught by the Hancocks.
But the actual scientists, historians and so on are super careful in my experience to say “we don’t know” or explain the limits of their understanding so I don’t really understand what you have a problem with beyond poor teaching and poor lay interpretation. Even in popular media appearances, for example I enjoy the long running radio show ‘In Our Time’ which covers a lot of this ground with a lot of academic guests who are almost infuriating in their care to spell out the limits of what we do and don’t know.
The point also should also be made that the burden of proof should be on the claimant. It’s perfect reasonable to take crackpot theories and say “there is no evidence to support that this is true” rather than “we don’t know”. And again in my experience it’s crackpots like Hancock that try to dissemble about how much we actually know.
> historians and so on are super careful in my experience to say “we don’t know”
True, but they are now.
When Evans discovered (and named) the Minoans in Crete, he did not know that they probably made human sacrifices, so in his eyes they were all modern and elegant like "la parisien" *
The problem is that we have a real problem: we teach kids things we don't know for sure.
I swear I am not 300 hundreds years old and they thaught me in school - science unequivocally says that - the Neanderthal men were the ancestors of the Sapiens, we have proof, we simply miss the link between Lucy and the Homo erectus and we're done, we explained everything!
Turns out there were 12, no wait 14, no wait 15, no wait 21 different species of hominids and many of them were contemporary to the sapiens and 90% of the humans bear Neanderthal DNA.
Just like there were no baby dinosaurs because we thought the smaller ones were different species.
Archeologist and historians need to go out and say loud: we don't know anything about human history, but we have many good theories! please help!
According to mainstream, Göbekli Tepe should not exist.
I was thaught in school that there were no settlements at the time, absolutely impossible, scientific truth (tm)