Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #872
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Just a year ago, at the bottom of the Sicily Channel, at a depth of more than 120 feet,
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The reference is to the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank Megalith, a roughly 12-meter, 15-ton limestone block found on the seabed of the Sicilian Channel at about 40 meters (approximately 131 feet) depth, consistent with the "more than 120 feet" figure cited. Its discoverers, geophysicists Emanuele Lodolo and Zvi Ben-Avraham, proposed in a 2015 study that the block's regular shape and three hole-like features indicated it was shaped by Mesolithic humans before the site was submerged by rising sea levels around 9,350 years ago. That anthropogenic (man-made) interpretation has not been independently confirmed: no stone tools, cultural artifacts, or other unambiguous archaeological finds have been recovered from the site, and no professional underwater archaeologist verified the claim at the time. A 2023 peer-reviewed follow-up study by the same research group, examining separate but nearby stone ridges in the same bank, concluded that the available data "do not conclusively reveal either a natural or anthropogenic origin" for those features, underscoring that claims of human construction in this specific location remain scientifically unresolved rather than established. Describing the structure outright as a proven man-made megalith therefore overstates the current evidence; its origin is best characterized as disputed, with a natural (erosional/depositional) origin not ruled out.