Not again

In this Retro age when you can buy little Kodak 35mm cameras and Victrola record players at Black Friday discounts, it is no surprise that enterprising journalists are recycling popular mythological theories from the 1970s and repackaging them on Netflix.  The latest effort is Ancient Apocalypse, an 8-part mockumentary that has all the heavy-handed production qualities of In Search Of... although Leonard Nimoy made for a much more engaging host.

Graham Hancock is not interested in conventional theories of early civilizations.  He believes these pyramids are all interrelated.  This was a view held by Thor Heyerdahl, who was determined to see if the Egyptians could have sailed to the new world centuries before Columbus or the Vikings on a papyrus boat he called Ra.  He was convinced the Egyptians provided the technology to the early Meso-American cultures, as the pyramids of Mexico were so similar in design.  He tried to cross the Atlantic on his Ra Expeditions in the early 1970's.  As I recall, his boats didn't hold up on the voyage but no matter.  He figured the Ancient Egyptians were better boat builders.

Whereas Heyerdahl saw the Egyptians as ground zero of civilization, Hancock seems to believe there was an earlier civilization that predated the Egyptians by several Millennia and that these intellectual giants traveled the globe imparting their great knowledge to primitive cultures, spurring them to do great things.  He bases this superhuman race on the overlapping mythological tales of distant cultures that he believes was no coincidence.  Not surprisingly, there is a captive audience for such theories as it blends together religion and mythology in a way that appeals to our sense of a godhead.  After all, these cultures all held strong spiritual beliefs.

Blending these beliefs with science is another matter.  I watched his episode on the Aztec pyramid at Cholula, which was reviewed in Slate.  Hancock starts out well enough by having a renown archeologist Geoffrey McCafferty lead him through the chambers of this ancient pyramid.  Turns out it is not one pyramid but three, each layered over the top of the other, and capped by a Spanish mission following the conquest of the Aztecs in the 16th century.  Rather than let McCafferty offer an explanation for this, Hancock goes off on his own tangent failing to mention the earlier Olmec and Toltec civilizations of Mexico, which the Aztec modeled their civilization upon.  

Hancock has bigger fish to fry.  He wants us to believe there was a much earlier voyager who spurred the Aztecs.  None other than Quetzalcoatl, referenced in Aztec mythology as the great plumed serpent.  The plumes of course referred to sails and hence Graham believes this ancient god was actually an emissary of some great culture long since disappeared from earth that may have come to the Americas many millennia ago and survived down through mythological tales.  

Our intrepid investigative journalist firmly believes that this great civilization existed before the Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years ago.  After this ancient apocalypse the surviving inhabitants were scattered around the globe.  The problem with this theory is that the oldest pyramids in the world only date to about 4600 years ago.  Ziggurats are slightly older, 5200 years at best.  That's a mighty big gap between the time this superhuman civilization came to an end and when their secrets manifested themselves in such far flung places as ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mexico and Indonesia.

He doesn't labor very hard nor does he offer a very compelling argument to this fanciful tale.  He just wants us to put more stock in ageless mythological tales than in archeological science.  For him, archeologists are a wet blanket, taking all the fun out of investigating our past with their prosaic interpretations of these ancient sites. God forbid the Olmecs and the Egyptians could have come up with the idea of these pyramids independently, given the vast body of water that separated them.  They were simply trying to model mountains.    

We have a very good example of this in North America. The Mound Builders built similar pyramids out of earth. Their mounds are believed to be as old as 5000 years, putting them in the same time frame as the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Some of these mounds were enormous, with an angle of repose of about 40 degrees, dwarfing the pyramids of Mexico, which have an angle of about 50 degrees as they were built of stone.  These are very stable structures that can survive millennia. Hancock does expound on this in his episode on the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, which he has touched on before, but it is filled with the same empty sense of wonder that embodies this series.  

It reminds me of the time I visited Chaco Canyon during the Harmonic Conversion that took place in 1987.  This conversion was the result of ancient calendars meeting on the same year. People were gathering at ancient sites all around the world to make their final pleas to the ancient gods to save the planet before it was too late.  As the story went, we had 25 years to make things right otherwise the gods would unleash a torrent of floods and other natural disasters upon us very similar to the "ancient apocalypse" Hancock imagined.  

I admit it was a lot of fun.  People were in a good mood, gathering in the ancient kivas to send out their interdenominational prayers. There were plenty of hallucinatory drugs floating around.  It was kind of like Burning Man without all the festive trappings.  I hung around for a couple days and then went on my way.  I had college to return to.

Judging by Graham's dour tone, he believes we failed.  His is more an autopsy of ancient civilizations, reminding us again and again of all the magic we destroyed in our pursuit of science and technology.  These civilizations were tied into the cosmos in a way we could never possibly understand.  At least that's the gist I got after one episode.  I don't have the patience to watch any more.

The reality is these civilizations destroyed themselves.  They reached a point where they could no longer sustain themselves, resulting in famine, disease and internecine warfare, leaving behind just enough traces that a subsequent civilization formed from its ruins.  This explains why Cholula is not just one pyramid but three, relating to the earlier Meso-American civilizations which the Aztecs not only built upon but adopted much of their mythology, making it into their own. 

Who is to say how old civilization is?  The earliest known is Mesopotamia, but I suppose one could make the case for earlier ones in Africa or China or India.  They may not have built something as grand as the later Mesopotamians and Egyptians, but what is civilization really?  Margaret Mead described it as someone helping another person through a difficult time. This was how she felt in discovering the remains of a 15,000 year old human whose femur had been fractured and healed.  It meant that someone had probably reset the broken bone and tended to the person until the fracture had healed.  Compassion is the cornerstone of civilization not ancient pyramids.

However, we aren't left awestruck by simple little acts of human kindness.  We prefer the monuments of the past.  Here in lies the power of civilization.  One that has haunted us for millennia.  So much so that societies have grown up around these ancient mythologies, believing themselves to be the standard bearers, like the Freemasons, who tap into this ancient power.  

Maybe Graham Hancock can take a lesson from Thomas Stuart Ferguson?  This guy firmly believed that the Mayans were the lost tribe of Nephites referred to in the Book of Mormon and set about to prove this conclusively in the 1950s by setting up an archeological department at Brigham Young University.  He used this department to explore the Yucatan for scientific evidence.  Years were spent combing the ruins for any such signs but sadly came up with nothing.  He concluded that Joseph Smith "had not the remotest skill in things Egyptian-hieroglyphics."  This quest ended in 1975, but the work he and his trained archeologists and students did laid the groundwork for further archeological work in the region.  The program he established at BYU is considered one of the most rigorous in the country.  

Unfortunately, Graham doesn't have that same level of introspection or patience.  He is just trying to capitalize on our cognitive biases by offering us yet another flimsy theory of how these great pyramids were built.  In that sense, he is no better than Erich von Daniken.