I don't get the racism argument. Claiming there was an ancient civilization existed that taught early civilizations isn't racist. That an ient race doesn't exist anymore. The early civilizations they claim to have taught don't exist anymore. Modern day Egyptians have as much to do with ancient Egyptians as they do with modern Polynesians. At a certain point, we have to recognize that we're talking about so long ago that race is out of the equation.
Like, don't get me wrong, his claims aren't scientific and he definitely seems like someone with a theory in search of facts. But I seriously do not get the racism claim. It doesn't belittle modern societies because no modern society can really claim ownership of shit that happened over 10,000 years ago. It's insane to think otherwise.
TLDR is: Everything great achieved in africa/ america/asia must have been aliens/ancient civilization (Like Atlantis). Everything in Europe was of course achieved due to the great intellect of europeans.
I recomend the podcast "It's probably (not) Aliens"
They really deep dive into different aspects of ancient aliens/astronaut theories
Exactly, it's just an "evolution" of the whole White Saviour bit they love so much.
On the flip side, there was an article on the BBC website around a year ago. Basically the article was explaining how archeologists had no idea how the ancient folk made Stonehenge so accurately plumb and level, and how they've been experimenting for aaaages trying to figure it out....
Now, I'm a stonemason. And I can tell you exactly what they probably did, but the Big Brain people don't like to ask people who work trades. (Or maybe they are just asking the wrong ones)
If you have figured out rope or string, and you have access to wood and a few stones, then it's incredibly easy to level off an area, to make an accurate circle, and to make the tops of all the standing stones level and the uprights plumb.
A basic plumb-bob is incredibly easy to make, in this instance we would use as straight a piece of wood as we can find, a length of rope tied to the middle of it, with a stone tied to the other end. For the uprights, get straight logs as long as each stone going into the ground. Now we have our standing stone analogues, and a plumb-bob. Dig the holes for the uprights, plop the logs down in the hole, if the plumb-bob isn't pointing straight down between the two logs, one side has to go down.
There, mystery solved. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.
That one, was the BBC being contrarian and stupid, or trying to drum up Stonehenge as an attractive mystery, it has been common knowledge among archeology enthusiasts that Stonehenge is an impressive monument, but that it is nothing that we can't replicate with manpower, a bit of a budget and basic tech available since we have rope.
also note that Atlantis is part of the origin myth for nazis. so this usually is just code for "the white master race taught the brown and black savages how to do civilization", conscious or not.
Wait: you're telling me me the nazi's from 100 years ago, adopted the story of Alantis that is centuries older than them, to reinforce belief in their ideology?
fantasy is an integral part of Nazi ideology. it's not like it has any scientific basis. it uses mythical origins to reinforce the fantasy of the superior aryan race. notice how even Nazis today are obsessed with Vikings, ancient Greece and Rome.
whiteness isn't a real thing; it's based on exclusion, ie defined by what it's not. so they have these disparate cultures romanticized and idealized in order to fake a shared history and culture.
Ok but that's the thing I'm trying to get at. 15k years ago there was no such thing as Europeans. There weren't Africans or Asians or Indians. Thats so far back that there are zero ties to modern races. It's meaningless to try and connect them. It cant belittle one group of people while praising the intellect of another because human migration has made any resemblance to modern humanity from that far back a moot point. Any races from that long ago no longer exist.
It is one of the many arguments that helped Nazism take root. "We were once the great Aryans, but with so many immigrant subhumans and control by the lesser races, we will drown, we need to be rid of them to Make America Great Again, I mean, Rebuild Mother Russia, I mean, bring forth the Third Reich.
Plus, it denies the achievements that many groups have made, and pins them upon this supposed master race, painting everyone outside of the race as dumb idiots who needed to be trained and unable to discover things and progress. And dumb enough to be able to either write or have any oral tradition about them, when many ancient cultures had intricate writing systems, and rich oral traditions spanning back to the era when the megafauna was still roaming.
Yeah, I don't understand the hate that guy gets on Lemmy group think. He's not a scientist, but so long as people dont view his ideas as absolute truth, I don't see what is wrong with pointing at some unexplained mystery and asking 'what if'
And to say it's truly racist to state anything like that there might have been some ancient culture is just absurd.
People have their minds made up so he apparently falls into the heretic camp. I doubt many of the people here have actually read or watched his stuff. There are of course people that take what he says as gospel and that is also problematic.
That said, he's been on more and more of woe is me the victim and it's getting old.
Thing is, he's not really pointing an unexplained mystery.
We know 90% of about how a lot of these sites were built and a good chunk of their history. Some of the older/more recently discovered ones such as Gobleki Tepe, obviously less but still a fair bit. Claiming that Mesoamerican and Asian megalith sites are aliens/Atlanteans isn't really helping work out that last 10%.
Pointing at what science has proven again and again to be a natural rock formation 25m under the water and claiming it's the remains of Atlantean civilisation doesn't advance much either, after all it's been proven wrong before.
Meanwhile, ever since Europe was disproven to be the birthplace of modern humans in the 19th and early 20th centuries, people have suddenly been coming up with all sorts of reasons why non-White folks sites weren't made by locals.
I will give Hancock credit that I don't think he is actively racist, as he does correct himself when he implies that the locals wouldn't have been able to do things like stack rocks.