Here’s the thing with the scientific method. Despite what some may think, it is quite useful. Put any old assertion to the test and the scientific method will throw up all the weaknesses in the argument. Whenever someone says they have a problem with mainstream “scientists’,’ “media”, “academics”, “archaeologists” and so on, you can be sure there’s one gigantic, glaring thing missing in their arguments – the scientific method. It’s not a complicated thing, this method. Basically, it requires some rigour. You can postulate and posture all you like but will your findings ultimately stand up to the fine tooth comb of the scientific method and peer review? The method is like one of those filters in your kitchen sink; it strains out the bullshit.
I was thinking about straining at the edges of plausibility as I watched a wonderful speculative science fiction series by a chap called Graham Hancock on Netflix. It’s called Ancient Apocalypse and in it he claims, on the strength of a brilliant soundtrack, slick editing and a number of compelling coincidences in global mythologies involving apocalyptic floods, ancient stone circles and pyramids, that civilisation as we know it is on its second round. The first was a much more advanced one that left its stone circles and flood myths to our hunter gatherer ancestors at the end of the last ice age. This earlier, smarter civilisation didn’t have writing, but it did leave a big, fat warning in the shape of signs and portents – aligned to Sirius and other celestial features – that doom is, indeed, coming for us all.
It’s a great little theory with lots of cherry-picked evidence that seems to point to some interesting stuff. But instead of submitting it to mainstream science for auditing, Graham Hancock rails against those grim busybodies with their need for proof and evidence and boring stuff like that. If only they would listen to him and weren’t in service to some dark conspiracy against the truth, his truth, then they would see the light (presumably the light the Netflix audience is now privy to).
Hancock is a huge best-selling author along the lines of Erich von Däniken. If you ever studied archaeology you’d know that neither is on the curriculum. Wikipedia calls these guys “pseudo archaeologists” which is a harsh conclusion, but apparently peer-reviewed. Von Däniken’s theory is that there was no way humans could have built the above mentioned pyramids, stone circles etc – they had to be the work of aliens who came and kick-started civilisation for us lowly humans.
All these theories share something in common – a kind of chauvinism about the primitivism of ancient cultures. They couldn’t possibly be responsible for their own shit – some other extraneous older or alien force must have had a hand in kick-starting and creating them. Von Däniken and Hancock share the gift of the gab and the ability to string loosely related facts together to create the illusion of a coherent argument. To be fair, a lot of people who were also archaeologist adjacent, enjoying an untrammelled delight in speculation and repurposing of the facts to suit their theories, hit upon actual discoveries. Take the adventurer and businessman Heinrich Schliemann who excavated what’s now generally acknowledged to be Troy at the ancient site of Hisarlik in modern Turkey. He was driven by his love of the Odyssey and the Iliad and it appears he located the site of the ancient city. He proceeded to destroy most of the archaeological evidence by digging a trench right through the site down to the part he presumed was the Troy of Homer. So it’s swings and roundabouts.
You have to delight in the sheer inventiveness and the pure audacity of sticking to one’s story
It won’t be the first or the last time that somebody has shoehorned their beliefs into physical evidence and succeeded in changing the narrative (Donald Trump springs to mind). I confess to having loved Von Däniken as a child – aliens are always appealing - and I truly enjoyed Hancocks’s Netflix series even as I sat and poked holes in his giant elisions and fantastical assertions. You have to delight in the sheer inventiveness and the pure audacity of sticking to one’s story. I suspect watching Harry and Meghan’s much anticipated Netflix documentary, imaginatively called Harry & Meghan, will be of the same order of things.
I’m fully committed to settling down for an orgiastic marketing fest of self pity and agrandisement as the Duchess and Duke of Hollywood weave a tale of woe, misery, conspiracy, escape and exaltation through a loose interpretation of the facts.
The naysayers have already picked up on the use of footage in the trailer that’s “fake”. I’m shocked! Apparently the shots showing phalanxes of paparazzi in hot pursuit of the hapless royal couple were actually taken at some Harry Potter premiere years before the prince was a glimmer in Meghan’s eye. So I urge you not to look for the scientific method in their docudrama but rather to revel in the fictional nature of a really good fairytale.
