Chapter 27 - Romancing the Past

Summary

This essay grew out of several threads of commentary on Graham Hancock, the author of numerous bestselling books about ancient human pre-history, whose work I had encountered many times over the years. Many millions of people seem to accept Hancock’s radically challenging ideas uncritically, so I thought someone needed to defend mainstream science and put Hancock’s alternative archaeological theories into perspective. What follows is an original essay stitched together from my notes for the show, my postmortem blog about it afterward, my Scientific American column about Hancock’s work, and a few thoughts about the book he published after our studio collision. I like Graham very much as a person, despite our differences over scientific issues, and through correspondence we became friends. He is a warm, thoughtful, caring, generous, and intelligent man whose life’s work I find compelling even while rejecting its central premise, with which this essay shall engage.