Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2051

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Sea level rose roughly 120-130 meters after the Last Glacial Maximum (about 21,000-19,000 years ago), submerging large areas of continental shelf that had been exposed dry land; published estimates of the total area exposed globally during the Ice Age range from roughly 15-20 million square kilometers in some studies to higher figures in others, so Hancock's 27 million figure is in the plausible range of scientific estimates for shelf exposure, though on the high end. Marine and underwater archaeology of these submerged landscapes is real but geographically uneven: systematic surveys have located Paleolithic-era stone tools, hunter-gatherer camp sites, and even submerged freshwater springs at depths down to roughly 150 meters in regions such as northwest Australia and the Bering Land Bridge corridor, and coverage is acknowledged by specialists to be far from complete relative to the shelf's total area. However, everything recovered from these submerged shelves to date is consistent with the archaeological record of small-scale hunter-gatherer societies already documented on land; no site, artifact, or genetic evidence anywhere has indicated an advanced, technologically sophisticated "lost civilization" of the kind Hancock proposes. Mainstream archaeological organizations, including the Society for American Archaeology, have explicitly rejected Hancock's Younger Dryas comet-catastrophe and lost-civilization thesis as unsupported by more than a century of archaeological investigation of Ice Age sites, both on land and, increasingly, offshore. The claim is misleading less for its geological figure, which is roughly defensible, than for the inference drawn from it: an absence of exhaustive seafloor survey is not evidence for an advanced civilization, and the sites that have actually been found offer no support for one.