The Dangers of Mainstream Conspiracy

        Graham Hancock’s docuseries Ancient Apocalypse, released on Netflix in 2022, is the culmination of his career pedaling a conspiracy theory regarding both events and civilizations in human prehistory (time before writing), and the modern day field of archaeology. His thesis for Ancient Apocalypse and the heart of his conspiracy theory is that humans are a “species with amnesia” (Hancock 1:20) and that what we have forgotten is a lost, advanced civilization from the ‘Ice Age.’ Additionally, he argues that “mainstream archaeologists” are trying to silence him because he is challenging their view that all prehistoric people were “simple hunter-gatherers.” While there is a lot to unpack in each episode of Ancient Apocalypse, I’m going to be focusing on episode one, titled Once There Was a Flood. The contents of said episode clearly display the concerning ideas implicit in Hancock’s theory and rhetoric, and how dangerous it is that he’s been given such a large platform with which to promote it. To talk about this in my essay, I’m going to be drawing on writing by Timothy Melley, John Reider, Charles Wolfe and others, along with interviews regarding Ancient Apocalypse given by those who were interviewed by Hancock for the show.

        Once There Was a Flood opens with Hancock going to introduce himself, and cutting away to a montage of interview clips with him where he’s described by others as a pseudo-archaeologist, and pointing out that the numerous books that he’s written have been widely discredited by academics. Hancock shows a clip from Joe Rogan’s podcast where Hancock is described as ‘picking a fight with academics’ (Hancock 0:40), then cuts back to himself, saying “I don’t claim to be an archaeologist or a scientist. I am a journalist.” (Hancock 0:50) This initial framing of himself is intentional in order to set the audience up for how he wants them to receive the rest of the episode. By positing that he is “enemy number one” (Hancock 2:45) to archaeologists and arguing that he’s being censored by academia because they’re threatened by his ideas, Hancock sets himself up to the viewer as the underdog who is fighting to get the ‘truth’ out into the world. Victimizing himself and introducing himself to the audience as a censored journalist is intended to work as giving himself inherent credibility, but as Susan Neiman points out, “Victimhood should be a source of legitimation for claims to restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether.” (Neiman 17) Victimhood does not inherently grant academic credibility, and Hancock is vying for that credibility through victimizing himself because his claims, when one gets down to it, are incredibly unscientific and more than a little colonialist.

        The reason that Hancock claims archaeologists want to censor him is because they don’t want to acknowledge that their view of “simple hunter-gatherers” could be diminishing and wrong. They don’t want to acknowledge that ancient peoples were more advanced than both the public and academia believe them to be. The issue is that, for his claims and theory to make sense, all ancient prehistoric people must have been “simple hunter-gatherers” except for his theoretical advanced society. This hypocrisy is why Hancock puts so much effort into convincing his audience that “mainstream archaeology” is the enemy, reinforcing the idea multiple times throughout the episode. Because if one doesn’t take his victimhood as credibility and digs into the claims that he’s making, his hypocrisy is glaring. He actively builds a conspiracy against himself in order to dispute the discrediting of his work and to try and give himself ground to stand on. This may not seem like a typical ‘there are people trying to take control of the world’ conspiracy, and it isn’t one, however it is still a conspiracy. Specifically, what Michael Barkun describes as an ‘event conspiracy,’ where “the conspiracy is held to be responsible for a limited, discrete event or set of events.” (Barkun 6) Those events for Hancock seem to be the repeated discrediting of his work. Why, though, is Hancock being discredited as such? Barring the hypocrisy, his theory is based on unscientific conclusions and relies on a colonial narrative that archaeologists and related fields of research—despite Hancock’s claims—have been trying to dispel because it’s based on Eurocentric and bigoted ideologies.

        Graham Hancock’s suggests that the “mainstream” version of history—that our ancestors “suddenly” and “on their own initiative” began farming, keeping livestock, and forming civilizations—is ridiculous (Hancock 3:50-4:13) and, connecting that to his wider theory, implies that there must have been an advanced civilization that ‘jump-started’ these other civilizations. The first megalithic structure that Hancock ‘investigates’ in Ancient Apocalypse is Gunung Padang, located in Indonesia. Despite his claim to be going against the traditional view of prehistoric people, Hancock says, “7,000 years ago, far from being builders on such an epic scale, there’s no evidence that the people of this region were anything other than simple hunter-gatherers.” (Hancock 9:40) This line clearly disregards that Gunung Padang is explicitly evidence that the people of that region weren’t “simple hunter-gatherers” and clearly possessed great skill in building, and had access to at least some trade networks. Additionally, it cannot be ignored that this is a white British man implying that ancient Indonesian people would have needed a more advanced civilization to help them become civilized. This idea is unmistakably similar to the British colonial mindset and ideology of the 18th and 19th centuries. Hancock couches his language so as not to sound as bad as he could, but still, saying that a ‘technologically advanced civilization’ incentivized “simple hunter-gatherers” to build Gunung Padang, and helped those hunter-gatherers build it, really isn’t very different from saying that they needed a more advanced civilization to help push them towards civilization—to civilize them.

        18th and 19th century British colonialism was very tied up in what John Reider calls “The Ideology of Progress” and “ideological fantasies.” (Reider 29, 31) Hancock seems to be projecting these fantasies and ideologies onto prehistoric people, fabricating an advanced civilization to functionally colonize them. There are two ideological fantasies that are projected onto Hancock’s ancient lost civilization. The first is the discoverer’s fantasy, where the “keynote of legal justification of colonial seizure of land…is the idea that natives leave the land itself empty, that is, nonproductive” (Reider 31) This appears heavily in Hancock’s dismissal of the idea that practices of agriculture and keeping livestock arose naturally, and his proposal that a more advanced civilization must have taught prehistoric people around the world who weren’t ‘using’ the land they lived on. The educational bent that comes with that is related to the second fantasy being projected, the missionary fantasy. This is the idea that, although colonization can be disruptive or harmful to those being colonized, the fact that they’re being taught ‘the right way to live’ and to be more ‘civilized’ justifies that harm because ultimately they’re being helped more than hurt. Of course, because this is theoretically happening in prehistory, before written records exist, we can never know what the relationship between this advanced ancient civilization, and all the simple hunter-gatherers around the rest of the world was. We can however point out the obvious parallels between Graham Hancock’s beliefs about ancient cultures and their relation to his theoretical civilization, and the British Empire’s beliefs about those it colonized (people all over the world funnily enough).

        Hancock himself makes a similar comparison, stating, “I think that whoever built Gunung Padang shared our planet with the hunter-gatherers… Even today, the technologically advanced nations of the world coexist with hunter-gatherer societies,” (Hancock 23:20) However it’s important to note that the hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today exist in spite of the numerous attempts of more technologically advanced societies to colonize them. The picture of peaceful coexistence between these different types of societies is blatantly ignorant of the real life power struggles going on in the world today. Additionally, we need to discuss the third ideological fantasy that Hancock himself views modern indigenous and hunter-gatherer societies through. This is the anthropologist’s fantasy, Reider describes it as such: “Although we know that these people exist here and now, we also consider them to exist in the past—in fact, to be our own past…technology is the primary way of representing this confrontation of past and present.” (Reider 32) By comparing modern day societies and cultures to those in the past, Hancock temporally displaces them into the past, specifically a version of the past that he has created. Hancock uses the San people in Namibia as an example of hunter-gatherers coexisting with more technologically advanced civilizations in the modern day. He talks about the San in a voiceover while footage of them walking and presumably looking for animals to hunt plays.

        This depiction of the San, and Hancock’s bent towards the displacement of current cultures into the past, brings us to discussing the colonial gaze in episode one of this docuseries. There is a power dynamic between the different positions of ‘the one who looks’ and ‘the one who is looked at,’ the subject who looks is attributed with power and knowledge, while the object being looked at is denied that knowledge and power. This, Reider points out, produces “a cognitive disposition that both rests upon and helps to maintain and reproduce the political and economic arrangements that establish the subject’s respective positions” (Reider 7) and that reproduction of a colonial vs colonized power dynamic is evident too in the fact that Hancock operates as the “voice of god,” the narrator, for this docuseries. The San do not introduce themselves, Hancock tells the audience their name while footage of them plays and then the episode moves on; we do not know them on their terms, only on the terms of Hancock and his film crew. The shots of the San are meant to look as if they are being filmed going about their everyday lives, when in reality they are being filmed (and hopefully paid) performing the actions that they’ve been asked to do for the series. To paraphrase Reider, ‘their clothing and the technology they’re using draw attention to their cultural difference from an implicitly Western viewer who occupies the position of the photographic apparatus itself.’ (Reider 7) We are not being shown the San’s culture as it is, we are being shown a short glimpse of the western idea of how hunter-gatherer cultures operate, and have always operated.

        The fact that Netflix gave Graham Hancock a platform with which to spread his conspiracy is very concerning, not just because in doing so they’re tacitly endorsing his conspiracy, but also because they’re tacitly endorsing all the beliefs and assumptions that theory relies upon to be true. All of Hancock’s explicit rhetoric arguing that “mainstream academia” is the enemy who is censoring him, and that he is fighting back to tell people the truth is backed up by the fact that Netflix has sponsored him—they’re such a big company, they wouldn’t help spread misinformation right?—and the fact that the docuseries is primarily done in expository and interactive modes of documentation. Graham Hancock is the narrator of the series, he is the voice of god that guides the audience and leads them to think and feel specific ways about what they’re being shown. Hancock conducts interviews with experts (those being actual archaeologists) regarding the site, but as revealed by one of those experts in a later interview, “he clearly read my answers and incorporated them into what he was thinking, but once my time was done the producer cleverly made me go to a different part of the site at which point Hancock sat down and gave sort of his spin…” (Miniminuteman 43:12) Hancock also took the word of other experts that were interviewed and twisted them, causing pushback from those experts when the docuseries was released. By interviewing experts but twisting and manipulating the things they have to say, Hancock gives the audience the illusion that they are being presented with both sides of the argument about a given site when in reality they are being led by Hancock’s use of both expository and interactive modes of cinema to a conclusion in his favor.

        Netflix giving a conspiracy theory and Hancock himself such a large platform is dangerous, especially in a time when belief in conspiracies has become more and more common. This is not just due to the internet spreading conspiracy theories to more people, but also due to the fact that “Conspiratorial explanations have become a central feature of American political discourse, a way of understanding power that appeals to both marginalized groups and the power elite.” (Melley 7) Conspiratorial beliefs and theories take the focus off of those who do actually have economic and political power and are in fact a tool used by those in power to deflect attention and in doing so continue to oppress the working class. As pointed out by a heated reviewer from The Guardian, Ancient Apocalypse “closely resembles the sort of half-baked filler documentary that one of the lesser Discovery channels would slap-up at 3am between shows about plane crashes and fascist architecture.” (Heritage) not to mention the fact that the name Ancient Apocalypse is almost certainly a play on the name of the old history channel show Ancient Aliens. Spreading conspiracy theories, misinformation, and extreme mistrust in academia can have dire consequences for the people who interact with the media doing so uncritically. It’s not uncommon for one to begin believing in a small, seemingly harmless conspiracy, and then for them to fall down a rabbit hole into the alt-right pipeline. In addition to the ethical concerns of the docuseries as a whole and the dangers of giving conspiracy theorists a large and far-reaching platform, it also should not be ignored that Netflix’s “senior manager of unscripted originals is Hancock’s son. Honestly, what are the chances?” (Heritage)

Works Cited

Barkun, Michael. Culture of Conspiracy Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2013.

Hancock, Graham. Ancient Apocalypse, Season 1, episode 1, Netflix, 2022.

Heritage, Stuart. Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix, Review of Ancient Apocalypse The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/23/ancient-apocalypse-is-the-most-dangerous-show-on-netflix Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.

Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Cornell University Press, 2000.

Miniminuteman, director. I Watched Ancient Apocalypse So You Don’t Have To (Part 1). YouTube, 28 Feb. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A&list=PLXtMIzD-Y-bMHRoGKM7yD2phvUV59_Cvb&index=1&t=1960s. Accessed 16 Dec. 2023.

Neiman, Susan. Left Is Not Woke. Polity Press, 2023.

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana University Press, 1991. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv32bm1p2. Accessed 18 Dec. 2023.

Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Wolfe, Charles. Historicising the ‘Voice of God’: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary. Film History, vol. 9, no. 2, 1997, pp. 149–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815172. Accessed 15 Dec. 2023.