Graham Hancock on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1897
SUBJECT: HISTORY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
decades, that civilization began about 6,000 years ago. And before that, there was no such thing as civilization. And they say that the first big megalithic structures were created by societies that were already agricultural societies. So they were generating surpluses, which allowed specialists to have the time to learn how to be architects and engineers and builders. But then suddenly out of the blue, and we've got an episode on this in the series, comes Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which is 11,600 years old.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey is dated by archaeologists to the 10th/9th millennium BC, roughly 11,000-11,600 years ago, a figure Hancock states correctly. Mainstream archaeology has never held a firm, undisputed line that "civilization" is exactly 6,000 years old; that figure refers loosely to the emergence of urban, literate, state-level societies such as Sumer, not to the earliest evidence of large-scale human construction or ritual activity, which archaeologists have long known predates farming and cities. Göbekli Tepe's builders are understood by researchers to have been Early Neolithic hunter-gatherers or incipient cultivators, not survivors or descendants of a technologically advanced lost civilization; peer-reviewed analysis of grinding tools and cereal residue at the site indicates its builders were processing wild and early domesticated cereals, consistent with a transitional foraging-to-farming society rather than an advanced prior civilization. The site is widely cited by mainstream archaeologists themselves as evidence that monumental construction and complex ritual life began earlier than once assumed and among hunter-gatherers, a finding that reshaped timelines within conventional archaeology rather than overturning them entirely. Presenting Göbekli Tepe as proof of a suppressed, technologically advanced lost civilization misrepresents the archaeological consensus, which instead views it as an important but explicable achievement of pre-agricultural or early agricultural human societies.