Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2136
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
But the fact of the matter is, round about 1% of the Sahara has been excavated and 99% hasn't. So to say that there's no possibility of any traces of a lost civilization in the Sahara seems to me a bit premature, particularly since during the African Humid period, and there were several of them, the Sahara was green and fertile and was a very attractive environment in which to live.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The paleoclimate half of the claim is well established. NASA and peer-reviewed research confirm that during the African Humid Period (roughly 11,000 to 5,000 years ago) the Sahara was far wetter and greener, with vegetation, wetlands, rivers and large lakes, and that these humid intervals recurred many times (one study documents over 230 green Sahara periods in the last 8 million years), driven by cyclical changes in Earth's orbit. Hancock's specific '1 percent excavated, 99 percent not' figure is a rhetorical estimate with no identifiable primary source, though the underlying point that the Sahara is vastly under-surveyed is supported: even at Gobero, the largest early cemetery yet found, only 67 of at least 182 known burials had been excavated, and remote sensing keeps revealing thousands of previously unmapped structures. The green-and-fertile framing is accurate, while the precise excavation percentage should be treated as an unverified figure rather than a measured statistic.
Who Benefits
Hancock promotes his lost-civilization theory through his books and the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, giving him a professional stake in the claim that unexplored regions could hide traces of such a civilization.