Graham Hancock

Graham Bruce Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer who promotes pseudoscientific ideas about ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. Hancock proposes that an advanced civilization with spiritual technology existed during the last Ice Age until it was destroyed following comet impacts around 12,900 years ago, at the onset of the Younger Dryas. He speculates that survivors of this cataclysm passed on their knowledge to primitive hunter-gatherers around the world, giving rise to all the earliest known civilizations (such as ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and Mesoamerica).
Born in Edinburgh, Hancock studied sociology at Durham University before working as a journalist, writing for a number of British newspapers and magazines. His first three books dealt with international development, including Lords of Poverty (1989), a well-received critique of corruption in the aid system. Beginning with The Sign and the Seal in 1992, he shifted focus to speculative accounts of human prehistory and ancient civilizations, on which he has written a dozen books, most notably Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods.
Experts have described Hancock's investigations of archaeological evidence, myths and historical documents as superficially resembling investigative journalism, but lacking in accuracy, consistency and impartiality. They define his work as pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory because they consider it to be biased towards preconceived conclusions by ignoring context, misrepresenting sources, cherry picking, and withholding critical counter-evidence. Anthropologist Jeb Card has described Hancock's writings as being paranormal in nature, and his idea of an Ice age civilization as a modern mythological narrative that due to its emphasis on alleged secret and spiritual knowledge (including psychic abilities and communing with souls and "powerful nonphysical beings" via the use of psychedelics), is incompatible with the archaeological scientific method. Hancock portrays himself as a culture hero who fights the "dogmatism" of academics, presenting his work as more valid than professional archaeology and as "a path to truly understanding reality and the spiritual elements denied by materialist science", though he often cites science in support of his ideas. He has not submitted his writings for scholarly peer review and they have not been published in academic journals.
He has also written two fantasy novels and in 2013 delivered a controversial TEDx talk promoting the use of the psychoactive drink ayahuasca. His ideas have been the subject of several films, as well as the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022), Hancock makes regular appearances on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss his work.
Graham Bruce Hancock was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1950. He moved to India with his parents at the age of three, where his father worked as a surgeon. Having returned to the UK, he graduated from Durham University with a degree in sociology in 1973.
As a journalist, Hancock worked for many British papers, such as The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian. He co-edited New Internationalist magazine from 1976 to 1979, and was the East Africa correspondent of The Economist from 1981 to 1983. Before 1990, his works dealt mainly with problems of economic and social development. His book Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, And Corruption Of The International Aid Business (1989) was based on his experience writing about international aid for The Economist. In the book, Hancock critiques the international aid system, stating in the book "aid is not bad ... because it is sometimes misused, corrupt or crass; rather, it is inherently bad, bad to the bone, and utterly beyond reform". Critics agreed that Hancock's work was a powerful critique of the international aid system, though a number disagreed with Hancock's thesis that aid was inherently bad.
During his time as a journalist, he was criticized for being on what he described as "friendly personal terms" with dictator Siad Barre of Somalia (according to The Independent, "he set up a company to publish government-approved coffee table books about Somalia as a multi-racial paradise") as well as having links to then dictator of Ethiopia Mengistu Haile Mariam, which caused controversy when Hancock wrote a favourable profile of Barre for The Independent, as, by his own admission, "various aspects of my trip were facilitated by the [Barre] regime". He admitted that he "definitely made a mistake" by establishing links to Mengistu.
Since 1990, Hancock's works have focused mainly on speculative connections he makes between various archaeological, historical, and cross-cultural phenomena. He has stated that from about 1987 he was "pretty much permanently stoned ... and I felt that it helped me with my work as a writer, and perhaps at some point it did", while an article published in The Independent in 1995 claims that in 1989 he shifted from working for Barre to investigating the Ark of the Covenant (on which he wasn't able to enter due to being blocked by Ethiopian guards), which resulted in his 1992 book, The Sign and the Seal. Other books include Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis (released in the US as Message of the Sphinx), The Mars Mystery, Heaven's Mirror (with wife Santha Faiia), Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, and Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith (with co-author Robert Bauval).
In the 1997 book The Mars Mystery Hancock speculated based on the low-resolution Viking lander images, that the supposed face on the Cydonia region of Mars, along with a purported "five sided pyramid" may have been the work of an advanced civilisation on Mars that was later destroyed by a cataclysm. In Hancock's book Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, co-authored with Robert Bauval, the two put forward what sociologist of religion David V. Barrett called "a version of the old Jewish-Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists." They suggest a connection between the pillars of Solomon's Temple and the Twin Towers, and between the Star of David and The Pentagon. A contemporary review of Talisman by David V. Barrett for The Independent pointed to a lack of originality as well as basic factual errors, concluding that it was "a mish-mash of badly-connected, half-argued theories". In a 2008 piece for The Telegraph referencing Talisman, Damian Thompson described Hancock and Bauval as fantasists. Hancock's Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, was published in the UK in October 2005 and in the US in 2006. In it, Hancock examines paleolithic cave art in the light of David Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological model, exploring its relation to the development of the fully modern human mind. In 2015, his Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization was published by St. Martin's Press.
In addition to writing Hancock has been involved in a number of television documentaries about his pseudoarchaeological theories. 1996, he appeared in The Mysterious Origins of Man. He also wrote and presented the documentaries Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age (2002) and Quest for the Lost Civilisation (1998). In 2022 he presented Ancient Apocalypse, a Netflix documentary series that was widely viewed but panned by critics and academics.
His first novel, Entangled: The Eater of Souls, the first in a fantasy series, was published in 2010. The novel makes use of Hancock's prior research interests. He has noted: "What was there to lose, I asked myself, when my critics already described my factual books as fiction?"
Experts consider Hancock's pseudoarchaeological work to be based on cherry picked information, and strident opposition to "mainstream archaeology". They suggest it superficially resembles investigative journalism, but is neither accurate, consistent or impartial. His ideas are built with references to myths, pseudoscience, outdated scientific models, and cutting-edge science depending on what suits his claims. Hancock aims to erode trust in known facts and archaeological expertise, and responds to criticism with accusations of censorship. Many of his supporters echo his rhetoric and label critics as disinformation agents.
Pseudoarchaeologists mislead their audience by misrepresenting the current state of knowledge, take quotes out of contexts, and withhold countervailing data. Garrett G. Fagan pointed out two typical examples in Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods (1995):
Hancock's main thesis throughout most of his work is that there was an advanced civilization during the last Ice Age, which was destroyed as a result of a widespread natural disaster, causing the small number of survivors to travel the world, spreading their knowledge and giving rise to the earliest known civilizations. He does not accept that these civilizations could have arisen independently or that faraway peoples developed the same ideas, arguing that they all came from one advanced ice age civilization. It is a form of hyperdiffusionism based on Ignatius Donnelly's book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), an influence Hancock has cited. The idea lacks concrete evidence, is biased towards western civilization, and oversimplifies complex cultural developments.
To explain the disappearance of his ice age civilization, Hancock embraces the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which has little support in the scientific community. He argues that the civilization was destroyed around 12,000 years ago by sudden climate change during the Younger Dryas cool period, which he attributes to an impact winter caused by a massive meteor bombardment.
Hancock claims that the few survivors of the catastrophe arrived in places like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, where they shared their knowledge and superior technology with primitive hunter-gatherers; introducing them to agriculture, monumental architecture, and astronomy. He believes the monuments they built encode astronomical data to warn future humans. The narrative assumes that the advanced civilization lacked a writing system that enabled them to leave a less ambiguous message. Hancock does not explain why this warning is not uniform across different cultures and so hard to decode that generations of researchers missed it.
Hancock believes that these events are preserved in various myths, such as Plato's story of Atlantis, and that the Atlanteans were remembered as "magicians and gods".
Hancock has accepted the fringe theories of other Atlantis proponents regarding several historic sites. For example that of Robert M. Schoch, who contests that the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved over 11,500 years ago, based on claims of the Sphinx having been eroded by water or that of Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, who believes Gunung Padang to be a 27,000 year old Atlantean structure.
Scholars Olav Hammer and Karen Swartz write that Hancock's works are "based largely on an imaginative reinterpretation of artifacts and myths that divorces them from their immediate cultural and religious contexts."
Hancock believes that the technology his lost Ice Age civilization possessed was primarily spiritual. According to anthropologist Jeb Card, in America Before (2019) Hancock describes his advanced Ice Age civilisation as a "global-sea based society comparable with the late pre-industrial British Empire" with knowledge "that would seem like magic even today", with this knowledge suggested by Hancock to include psychic capabilities. Hancock suggests that the teachings of Atlanteans to later civilisations were "geometric, astronomical and spiritual" in nature, which were faciltated by the use of psychotropic plants (such as ayahuasca and peyote) used to access the Otherworld, allowing them to commune with souls and "powerful nonphysical beings".
He also proposed that they were able to move and shape large stones with the help of meditation and psychoactive plants, and asserted that granite blocks of the Great Pyramid of Giza were moved by "priests chanting", suggesting a form of acoustic levitation.
Archaeologist John Hoopes has described Hancock's claims as effectively religious in nature and rooted in New Age beliefs. Jeb Card stated that attempts to critique Hancock's work "using the criteria of professional archaeology is doomed to failure, as his goals are outside the goals of the materialist practice of scientific archaeology", describing Hancock as part of the paranormal milieu, and the idea of the ice age civilisation as a mythic narrative rooted in opposition to materialism, describing Hancock as "not a failed version of an archaeologist" but a "successful mythographer of a post-science age". Olav Hammer and Karen Swartz, both primarily scholars of new religious movements, have also concurred with interpretation of Hancock as a creator of myths, describing him as a "bricoleur who creates a myth from a motley selection of cultural elements".
Archaeologists and the author Jason Colavito have criticised Hancock for the origins of some of his claims being drawn from racist sources. For instance, Hancock draws from the work of Donnelly, a proponent of the racist "mound builder myth", with Donnelly suggesting that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were not capable of creating sophisticated structures, attributing their creation instead to white Atlanteans. Hancock has distanced himself from this claim, yet failed to explain how a fully competent local population could serve as evidence for a lost civilization that transferred superior science and technology to them.
Although Hancock has identified the Atlanteans as indigenous Americans, he stated in Fingerprints of the Gods that Atlanteans were "white [and] auburn-haired". Hancock has based some of his work on outdated race science and has argued for the presence of indigenous "Caucasoids" and "Negroids" in the Americas prior to 1492, which he claims are depicted in indigenous American art and mythology.
The Maya were described by Hancock as only "semi-civilized" and their achievements as "generally unremarkable" to support the thesis that they inherited their calendar from a much older, far more advanced civilization.
Hancock has denied that he is racist, and has expressed support for native rights.
One of the many recurring themes in several of Hancock's works has been an exposition on Robert Bauval's Orion correlation theory (OCT). OCT posits that the relative locations of the three largest pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex were chosen by the builders to reflect the three stars of Orion's Belt of the constellation Orion. The pyramids are aligned to the cardinal direction within a fraction of a degree, however they are mismatched with Orion's Belt exceeding five degrees, noted astronomer Tony Fairall.
Hancock and Bauval's Orion correlation theory was the subject of Atlantis Reborn, an episode of the BBC documentary series Horizon broadcast in 1999. The programme was critical of the theory, demonstrating that the constellation Leo could be found amongst famous landmarks in New York, and alleging that Hancock had selectively moved or ignored the locations of temples to support his argument. It concluded that "as long as you have enough points and you don't need to make every point fit, you can find virtually any pattern you want."
Following the broadcast, Hancock and Bauval complained to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, but the commission found that "the programme makers acted in good faith in their examination of the theories". One complaint was upheld: that the programme unfairly omitted one of their arguments in rebuttal of astronomer Edwin Krupp. The following year the BBC broadcast a revised version of the episode, Atlantis Reborn Again, in which Hancock and Bauval provided further rebuttals to Krupp.
The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind (Keeper of Genesis in the United Kingdom) is a pseudoarchaeology book written by Hancock and Robert Bauval in 1996 which argues that the creation of the Sphinx and Pyramids occurred as far back as 10,500 BC using astronomical data. Working from the premise that the Giza pyramid complex encodes a message, the book begins with the fringe Sphinx water erosion hypothesis, evidence that the authors believe suggests that deep erosion patterns on the flanks of the Sphinx were caused by thousands of years of heavy rain. The authors go on to suggest, using computer simulations of the sky, that the pyramids, representing the three stars of Orion's Belt, along with associated causeways and alignments, constitute a record in stone of the celestial array at the vernal equinox in 10,500 BC. This moment, they contend, represents Zep Tepi, the "First Time", often referred to in the hieroglyphic record. They state that the initiation rites of the Egyptian pharaohs replicate on Earth the sun's journey through the stars in this remote era, and they suggest that the "Hall of Records" of a lost civilisation may be located by treating the Giza Plateau as a template of these same ancient skies.
Hancock's theories are the basis of Ancient Apocalypse, a 2022 documentary series produced by Netflix, where Hancock's son Sean is "senior manager of unscripted originals". In the series, Hancock outlines his long-held belief that there was an advanced civilization during the last ice age, that it was destroyed following comet impacts around 12,000 years ago, and that its survivors introduced agriculture, monumental architecture and astronomy to hunter-gatherers around the world. He attempts to show how several ancient monuments and natural features are evidence of this, and repeatedly claims that archaeologists are ignoring or covering-up this alleged evidence.
Archaeologists and other experts say that the series presents pseudoscientific claims that lack evidence, cherry picks, and fails to present the counter-evidence. Other commentators criticized the series for unfounded accusations that "mainstream archaeology" conspires against Hancock's ideas. Archaeologists linked Hancock's claims to "white supremacist" ideologies from the 19th century, which they say are insulting to the ancestors of indigenous peoples who built the monuments. A Maltese archaeologist who appeared in an episode said her interview had been manipulated. The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) objected to the classification of the series as a documentary and requested that Netflix reclassify it as science fiction. The SAA also stated:
Hancock gave a TEDx lecture titled "The War on Consciousness", in which he described his use of ayahuasca, an Amazonian brew containing a hallucinogenic compound DMT, and argued that adults should be allowed to responsibly use it for self-improvement and spiritual growth. He stated that for 24 years he was "pretty much permanently stoned" on cannabis, and that in 2011, six years after his first use of ayahuasca, it enabled him to stop using cannabis. At the recommendation of TED's Science Board, the lecture was removed from the TEDx YouTube channel and moved to TED's main website where it "can be framed to highlight both [Hancock's] provocative ideas and the factual problems with [his] arguments".
Hancock has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast several times. In April 2024 (episode #2136) Hancock debated Flint Dibble, a professor of archeology at Cardiff University, who strongly rebuffed Hancock's unfounded ideas, leading even many of Hancock's backers to see Dibble – and orthodox science – as the victor. Both Hancock and Dibble agreed that continuing archeological research would be a great benefit to humanity.
In 2009, Roland Emmerich released his blockbuster disaster movie 2012, citing Fingerprints of the Gods in the credits as an inspiration for the film, stating: "I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth's Crust Displacement Theory in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods."