Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
level, lowest sea level during the Ice Age. Cyprus was always an island. And yet, there's evidence now that it was settled 14,000 years ago, certainly 14,000 to 12,500 years ago. It was settled, in other words, during the Ice Age. And these were large planned migrations. When you're going to migrate to an island, you can't just go two or three people by accident because you'll become extinct. You have to bring in quite a large population. And they reckon that populations of a thousand or so were being brought across that water, across the ocean, across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus near the end of the last ice age.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Hancock's figures track a 2024 peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Bradshaw, Reepmeyer, Moutsiou and colleagues), whose demographic models predict the first human arrival on Cyprus between 14,257 and 13,182 calendar years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age. That study infers 2 to 3 large, organized migration events within under 100 years, each bringing roughly 1,000 to 1,375 people, and concludes the Mediterranean was not a barrier to early seafarers, closely matching his claim of planned migrations of a thousand or so people. Cyprus is a deep-water oceanic island that was never connected to the mainland, so it could only be reached by sea, as a separate 2024 palaeogenomic paper reiterates in describing Epipaleolithic seafaring visits over 12,500 years ago at Akrotiri-Aetokremnos followed by early Neolithic settlement. The main caveats are that the 14,000 to 12,500 window and the group sizes come from demographic modelling rather than direct census, the timing and permanence of the earliest occupation remain debated, and the figures are best read as roughly accurate estimates.