The conventional wisdom among archaeologists is that what we consider the first advanced societies arose well after the end of the last Ice Age 11,700 years ago. Early agricultural communities formed during the Neolithic period (approximately 10,000-2,000 B.C.), and then the first civilizations—characterized by cities, centralized authority, and writing—emerged between 3500 and 1600 B.C., which is when the world witnessed the rise of Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Mesoamerican societies, the Indus Valley civilization, and Chinese civilization. 

But what if all of this is wrong? What if the first advanced societies did not emerge thousands of years after the Ice Age? What if there was a civilization that existed during the Ice Age, one with technology so advanced that some of it resembled what humans achieved in the 19th century? What if this civilization was wiped out in a catastrophe when the Ice Age ended, leaving virtually no trace except the scraps of knowledge it passed down to the societies that succeeded it? What if this civilization was… the legendary lost continent of Atlantis?

This is the hypothesis put forward by British writer Graham Hancock. Hancock has spent decades arguing that mainstream archaeologists are stubbornly and irrationally refusing to investigate the possibility that a lost Ice Age civilization existed. “The notion of a lost advanced civilization of the Ice Age is extremely threatening to archaeology because it rips the ground out from that entire discipline,” he says, explaining why his theory is dismissed. As he sees it, archaeologists don’t want the possibility investigated because it threatens the foundations of their work.

Hancock has found massive audiences for his theories, in part because he is the favorite archaeology writer of the world’s most successful podcaster, Joe Rogan. Rogan has had Hancock on The Joe Rogan Experience many times alongside another amateur archaeology enthusiast named Randall Carlson, who specializes in speculations on the location of Atlantis. Hancock has also hosted a Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, which was lambasted by archaeologists, many of whom felt it was irresponsible to put on the air. (Hancock may have been aided by the fact that his son, Sean Hancock, is Netflix’s senior manager for unscripted originals.) While Hancock’s views are roundly rejected by the experts, some evidence suggests that the public is on his side, with over half of Americans affirming, in a 2021 Chapman University survey, a belief that “ancient advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed.” 

Is there a chance Hancock is right? No, because the justifications he puts forth for believing in his hypothesis do not actually make sense and are based on misinterpretations of evidence. There are plenty of videos and blogs debunking Hancock’s hypothesis at length, but you just need to pick up one of his books, like Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization, and analyze it critically to see that it contains little substance. The “evidence” he provides are things like: a map made in 1513 and based on older sources includes what looks like it might be a bit of Antarctica, long before Antarctica was discovered, from which Hancock concludes that Antarctica was once free of ice and the lost civilization may have lived there. (The scholarly consensus is that what looks like it might be Antarctica on the map is, in fact, just a highly inaccurate depiction of South America or a hypothesized bit of land.) Hancock also uses numerological legerdemain, such as suggesting that the dimensions of the Egyptian pyramids demonstrate that they must have known the Earth’s circumference (knowledge passed down to them from the lost civilization):

If you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the earth. And if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid accurately, and multiply that measurement by 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the earth […] and the scale is not random. The number 43,200 is derived from a key motion of the earth, which is called the precession of the earth’s axis. The earth wobbles on its axis very slowly at the rate of one degree every 72 years. And 43,200 is a multiple of 72. In fact, I think it is 600 times 72.

But Hancock is measuring the Earth and the pyramids in feet and miles, which the ancient Egyptians would have had no knowledge of! He’d have to show these correlations in cubits if he wanted us to take them seriously. In fact, they’re just coincidences, and one can use the same reasoning to show that the ancient Egyptians knew the speed of light. (The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, and the latitude of the Great Pyramid in decimal degrees is 29.9792° N. Clearly, they were taught physics by an advanced civilization and encoded it into the pyramids!) All of Hancock’s support for the theory is of this kind. He can’t identify any actual artifacts that are clearly from the lost civilization (in the theory, everything was entirely destroyed in a cataclysm), so, instead, we get misinterpreted maps and multiplications of pyramid dimensions. 

Hancock is a skilled presenter, however, and those who tend to be hooked by narratives of mavericks fighting a hidebound establishment may find it easy to overlook the flimsiness of the support for the hypothesis being presented. If one tries to amass the relevant facts and present them as bullet points, setting aside the narrative about Hancock being canceled, it becomes clear that there is just nothing there to unsettle the consensus that Atlantis isn’t real. Astonishingly, Hancock himself has not even really pretended to be engaged in honest scientific inquiry and seemingly claims that because he is up against the scholarly consensus, it is permissible for him to ignore counterevidence and decline to discuss refutations:

“[I]t's not my job to be ‘balanced’ or ‘objective.’ On the contrary, by providing a powerful, persuasive single-minded case for the existence of a lost civilization, I believe that I am merely restoring a little balance and objectivity to a previously unbalanced situation. […] [I]t's my job—and a real responsibility to be taken seriously—to undermine and cast doubt on the orthodox theory of history in every way that I can and to make the most eloquent and persuasive case that I am capable of making for the existence of a lost civilization.”

In fact, when Hancock did debate an actual archaeologist, Flint Dibble, on an episode of the Rogan show, it didn’t go well for Hancock’s theory. While Hancock spent a great deal of time lambasting the archaeological community for its insularity and its hostility to his theory (he has said he is “enemy number one to archaeologists”), he was forced to admit that there is, in all of the vast archaeological work that has been done so far, “no evidence for an advanced civilisation.” Hancock backtracked to the position that he is “just injecting the idea [of an advanced ice age civilization] into the discussion.” That he has successfully done, because many of Rogan’s millions of followers undoubtedly now take Atlantis seriously and think there is an interesting debate to be had on the issue. But we know plenty about life in the Ice Age. Archaeologists have done the work. They’ve looked all over the world. And as Dibble noted in an interview with me, Hancock “completely ignores all the evidence [about] humans at that time. […] We've explored the deserts. We explored the rainforest. We have lots of evidence. Nothing for his stuff. So he's saying there's these black holes in our understanding. And that's just not true.”

When I first learned that Joe Rogan took the idea of Atlantis seriously and had Atlantis-promoting guests on his program, I was just amused. Rogan is credulous and poorly read, and this is typical of the caliber of intellectual seriousness on the program. Who could be surprised that a person who promotes ivermectin, whose idea of researching a topic is to ask his producer Jamie to Google something, also believes Atlantis was real? This seems like one of Rogan’s more harmless beliefs, since promoting quack COVID-19 cures and vaccine hesitancy might actually have led to preventable deaths.

But as I looked more into Hancock’s work, pseudo-archaeology came to seem like a useful case study of how what looks like healthy skepticism and independence can, in fact, be paranoia and a rejection of the scientific method. Believing that there is a conspiracy of archaeologists to cover up Atlantis strikes me as the reductio ad absurdum of the conspiratorial mindset. To be sure, many conspiracy theories have an element of plausibility to them. The theory that Big Pharma has covered up the evidence that vaccines are dangerous is at least plausible—corporations are sociopathic profit maximizers, so they are capable of doing terrible things in order to serve the interests of investors. And while 9/11 conspiracy theories make a little less sense—it’s never quite clear how the Bush administration was supposed to have orchestrated a massive false flag operation—I understand why people don’t trust the government. A lot of what U.S. presidents have done is just as bad as any conspiracy theory would suggest! 

But the archaeologists? Really? These mild-mannered excavators and bone collectors? These underfunded, underappreciated pursuers of details about the human past? They’re systematically suppressing knowledge of the human past because… it would require them to adjust their theory of the past? They’re all refusing to engage in the very basic activity (examining the evidence about past civilizations) that they’ve been trained for and devoted their lives to? In order to extend the “experts are lying to you” view to archaeologists, you have to have a very cynical view of institutions indeed. That’s where a lot of people have ended up, though. Scientists are not to be trusted, and the very word “expert” confers not an extraordinary degree of knowledge but arrogance and elitism. 

Part of the problem here is that it is rational to mistrust large institutions, and experts can be wrong. The fact that someone has a PhD doesn’t necessarily mean they know what they’re talking about, and there have been lots of instances where a theory that turned out to be true was not accepted by the mainstream of an academic community at first. Continental drift, the germ theory of disease, evolution by natural selection, and quantum mechanics all met with resistance at first. (Economists, for their part, took decades to turn away from the once-dominant view that the minimum wage is harmful.) But scientists eventually do tend to reach a consensus. As David Gorski, a physician scientist and blogger, puts it, science involves “self-correction that brings us closer to an understanding of” how things work. In the case of a rejected hypothesis, Gorski explains: “[O]nce a hypothesis is roundly falsified by multiple lines of evidence (or, as in the case of the autism/vaccine link, numerous studies fail to find support for a link), scientists will indeed, even if very reluctantly, admit that the hypothesis was incorrect, form a consensus, and then move on to test other hypotheses.” Graham Hancock, in contrast, admits that there is no evidence for his hypothesis yet insists on promoting his hypothesis. This is not the work of a serious scientist.

At the same time, the fact that the archaeological community overwhelmingly thinks Hancock is a crank is not proof that he is. (For the same reason, I’m always a little ambivalent about citing the consensus among climate scientists in order to prove that climate change is real.) That’s why everything should be about the evidence, not about the experts themselves or their personalities. Hancock may be considered a crank, but what proves something is the fact that he has no compelling evidence for his position. Likewise, the fact that the website of a reputable institution like the Mayo Clinic says that Joe Rogan’s COVID-19 treatment recommendations are bogus is not itself dispositive. In order to reach a conclusion, we have to dig deep into the studies, which is time-consuming and tricky. Ultimately, most of us don’t have the time or educational background to do the deep reading and thinking necessary to evaluate all claims, which is why we have to be able to trust experts. I am not going to go out and get a PhD in atmospheric science so I can make sure every statement I make is grounded in research that I have personally done. I am going to have to depend on there being a community that is doing the work and whose findings I can trust.

That’s why it’s so poisonous to society for trust in institutions to break down. If you don’t trust journalists, doctors, climate scientists, archaeologists, or public agencies to have some modicum of honesty, if you think they’re full of careerists trying to silence the uncomfortable truths, how are you going to develop well-grounded beliefs? In a pandemic, are you just going to listen to whichever doctor casts themselves as a maverick fighting the establishment? How do you know that doctor isn’t full of shit? Are you going to believe in Atlantis because you tend to instinctively support outsiders who are fighting institutions?

Last year, there was a UFO scare in New Jersey, as people reported seeing unexplained drones in the sky. All kinds of theories began to proliferate. The drones were from Iran, or they were part of some secret government program. People demanded answers. I remember that people I respect for their intelligence were telling me there was definitely something fishy going on in New Jersey. Heck, I wondered myself why the government wasn’t providing good answers.

It turned out the whole thing was just another in a long line of similar UFO flaps that have erupted periodically in the United States. From time to time, Americans work themselves into a panic about lights in the sky. Reports of sightings lead to more reports of sightings, and soon damn near everyone is spotting UFOs, although what they’re mostly seeing is normal aircraft. There’s now no evidence that the New Jersey drone scare was anything other than people seeing the type of drones that have been flying for years and panicking. (Now, personally, I find drones creepy and hate them, but that’s another matter.)

Carl Sagan, while a proponent of the search for alien life, was a famous debunker of UFO scares, and he returned repeatedly to the theme that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and emphasized that there is so far simply no compelling evidence for extraterrestrial visits, just blurry pictures and unverifiable anecdotes. We don’t realize how easily taken in we can be by popular narratives, hucksters, and pseudoscience, so it’s crucial that we always return to the evidence, examine it carefully, and try our best to figure out what is actually going on. A UFO scare is harmless. Less harmless is the kind of scare that can lead to war, such as the McCarthyite paranoia about communism that led the U.S. to a confrontation with the Soviet Union that nearly destroyed all of human civilization. Demagogues will tell you that you have to be afraid, that there are sinister forces conspiring against you—whether it is the Chinese or the Cultural Marxists or Hamas or whatever—and that we must be ruthless (and surrender our civil liberties) in eliminating the threat. That is when we will need skepticism the most, skepticism of the deep and authentic kind, not the skepticism of people who ask, “What if everything we know about the pyramids is wrong?” and then perform some silly numerology. 

I thought I wouldn’t be interested in the Rogan debate on Atlantis. In fact, I found it fascinating because it was a microcosm of so many issues that are tearing our society apart at the seams right now. The view held by some that cranks shouldn’t be engaged with only leads to the cranks forming insular communities in which they tell themselves they are being canceled because the establishment can’t handle their truths. Then it becomes difficult to talk these people out of conspiracies and to defend experts without being seen as elitist. Meanwhile, there’s a proliferation of superficial knowledge and a contempt for universities in the wider culture, and this, too, ends up devaluing the intensely difficult and unrewarding work of scholars. In this environment, poorly evidenced hypotheses and conspiracies flourish. It’s a vicious cycle.

I don’t entirely blame those who believe the things that Joe Rogan says. I do think our institutions themselves bear a fair share of the blame for not doing a better job of building public trust and teaching people how to tell the truth from bullshit. You don’t really get taught critical thinking in school, or at least I never did, and this means most people aren’t really equipped with the tools to discern whether a theory (like “Atlantis is real”) is right or wrong. If they see a documentary on Netflix, they might assume it’s accurate. 

What we need is more public scientists to explain the work of science to lay audiences. Dibble has said that while many archaeologists refuse to engage with Hancock, he accepted the invitation because he thought he could use the Rogan show as a platform to explain what archaeologists do and how they produce knowledge of history. (Dibble told me that most people can’t name a single archaeologist. I managed to name Louis Leakey, but I couldn’t come up with a second one.) Dibble is continuing in the tradition of scholars like Carl Sagan, who showed the public how one applies intellectual rigor and skepticism to better understand the world and see through charlatanism. 

This is what we need now: real skepticism. The skepticism of MythBusters and great debunkers like James Randi, a skilled magician who spent his life exposing fraudulent claims of paranormal abilities, not the skepticism of someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who looks like an independent thinker but arrives at entirely irrational conclusions, in part because he’s too unwilling to take expertise seriously. 

I’m not sure how we can build a public appetite for critical thinking and reflection. But Dibble told me that professionals like himself have some responsibility: “I think that professionals and experts and scientists and scholars need to work harder at seeding the social media ecosystem. We need to build these ecosystems into something that's stronger so that we can be more accessible.” I am not under any illusion that one can successfully educate Joe Rogan—soon after Dibble exposed Hancock on the program, Hancock returned as a guest and pushed the same nonsensical theories. But I take inspiration from great skeptics like Randi, Sagan, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science author Martin Gardner, Bad Science author Ben Goldacre, the late feminist biologist and columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, George Orwell, “Skepchick” science writer Rebecca Watson, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who have devoted themselves to exposing what Randi calls “flim-flam” and have helped make us a more intelligent, thoughtful species, giving us the intellectual armor we will need to resist authoritarian propaganda in the 21st century.