Archaeological research has helped us understand the complicated story of our species’ past, from the earliest hominins to the dawn of civilisation and beyond. But some people are convinced that it has overlooked an important chapter. They believe there was an advanced global civilisation some 20,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, often referred to as the ice age – but that it was mysteriously destroyed, with its impressive settlements and monuments drowned by rising seas.
, an archaeologist at Cardiff University in the UK, is doing all he can to make it clear that such ideas aren’t supported by the evidence. Earlier this year, he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast to take part in a high-profile debate with Graham Hancock, a writer who has spent years arguing for the existence of this forgotten society and who discusses the idea in his Netflix show, Ancient Apocalypse.
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Dibble spoke to 91av about the reasons for the enduring appeal of mythical lost civilisations, why belief in them can be so harmful, and how to persuade people to reject the ideas promoted by Hancock and others through the use of “truth sandwiches”.
Colin Barras: Why do you think the myth of an advanced lost civilisation generates so much interest?
Flint Dibble: That’s a tough one. You have to appreciate that Graham Hancock’s idea isn’t new: it stems directly out of . And Atlantis has had an enduring appeal for centuries – it is written about more often in English-language books than Stonehenge, than the Sphinx, than any major archaeological site.
Why is that the case? After three years of researching this, I don’t have a great answer. But I can speculate. I think the current interest maybe ties in with our obsession with catastrophes. We’re very worried about our own civilisation ending due to climate change, an impact from space or a nuclear disaster. Atlantis – and Hancock’s story of an advanced ice age civilisation that was destroyed in some sort of cataclysm – feeds into those concerns.
That makes these myths sound relatively harmless. Are they?
Some manifestations are harmless. I mean, right now a Lord of the Rings spin-off – The Rings of Power – is watched by millions on Amazon Prime Video. In his letters, J. R. R. Tolkien acknowledged that Númenor, an island that’s really central to that world, is inspired by Atlantis. But I think it becomes more of an issue when an advanced lost civilisation is believed to have been real.
In Hancock’s version, survivors from this civilisation are claimed to be responsible for monumental architecture around the world. That narrative is stripping Indigenous people of their heritage. It’s saying that great ancient monuments across the world were not designed and built by local communities.
It sounds like a bizarre idea. Can you explain how it works?
Well, for instance, Hancock will juxtapose images of pyramids from different areas of the world. And it has gut-level appeal: these monuments look similar to the viewer, so the conclusion they reach is that they must be related. That leads to another conclusion: that there was a global diffusion of ideas because survivors of this lost civilisation spread around the world carrying their advanced knowledge with them.
But we know that it’s far more complicated than that. For instance, we have material findings from Mesoamerica that tell us the pyramids there are thousands of years younger than the pyramids in Egypt. They’re not only separated by an ocean, they’re separated by millennia. They can’t be related.
So belief in this lost civilisation is only possible if you reject the archaeological evidence?
Yes – belief is viewed as proof that the experts are wrong. We’ve seen this phenomenon a lot over the past decade or so, this rising trend in anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise.
What can archaeologists do to push back against that?
Let’s be honest: academic literature is difficult to access. And some of it might be free, but it’s difficult to read and understand because it’s filled with jargon. So I think scholars should be trying to do more outreach. It’s why I’m active on YouTube and social media.
And that’s why you chose to debate Hancock on The Joe Rogan Experience. Wasn’t there a risk you would do more harm than good?
Well, several of my close friends and colleagues thought I was making a giant mistake, that I was walking into a trap. Hancock has appeared on Joe Rogan’s show many times already, and the two of them have a good rapport. All the cards were in his favour; I went in knowing that. But I also went in with a strategy to try to defuse the situation, based on the latest research into tackling misinformation.
What does that research look like?
In past decades, scientists came off badly in debates with pseudoscientists. The old playbook was to put the burden of proof on the pseudoscientist. The problem is that as soon as you do that, you give them the floor. Then you’re stuck responding to it and trying to debunk it after the fact. And research has shown that debunking usually doesn’t work.
It's time to take back the airwaves and share what we actually know about the past
What’s the alternative?
Pre-bunking is key – getting the first word in. One of my preconditions for appearing on the podcast was that I talked first. Misinformation research also helped me decide how to use that presenting time. Most of us have short attention spans, and what sticks in our brains is often the first thing we hear. So, if you begin a presentation by outlining an idea you want to debunk, it’s that misinformation that the audience remembers.
Misinformation research has instead honed in on this idea of a truth sandwich. You start off by saying: Hey, this is something that’s real and true. You set the context. Then you introduce and debunk the misinformation. And finally, you end with some more truth that you can build on.
Did your truth sandwich work?
It did. It was really clear from the reaction afterwards. Joe Rogan’s fanbase in general was sort of like: wow, archaeology has its shit together. I must have read several hundred, if not thousands, of messages from people who told me that they had previously just loved what Hancock had to say, but that they now realise he’s wrong.
What sort of real archaeological truths did you focus on?
As an example, I brought up Göbekli Tepe, this really cool, roughly 11,000-year-old site in Turkey. A lot of people in the public think it was built by a society with farming – and actually that’s what the initial excavators thought. But then a careful study of the animal bones and seeds at the site showed they were all from wild species. The monuments at Göbekli Tepe were built by hunter-gatherers.
Which argues against the idea that survivors of a global ice age civilisation were involved?
Yes. And on that idea, we can look for a signature of that global civilisation. I mean, it’s hard to prove a negative: the absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence. But I strongly believe there are times when we can prove a negative by working from the known to the unknown. For instance, we know from later time periods that if a society is practising large-scale metallurgy, that creates an atmospheric signature that is recorded in ice cores. But there’s no signature like that in ice cores from the ice age. That’s also my argument with agriculture: it should show up in ice age pollen samples as a spike in grain pollen. Again, there’s nothing.
In fact, there’s one more reason archaeologists know Hancock is wrong. His idea is that a disaster destroyed evidence of this advanced civilisation. But we know disasters actually preserve archaeological evidence. When a volcano erupts, or an earthquake levels a town and it has to be rebuilt, that locks a phase of occupation in the stratigraphy. Pompeii is a great example of that.
Hancock used some strategies of his own during the debate. One was to point out that scientists can sometimes be dismissive of new ideas. For instance, some of the first archaeologists to argue that the peopling of the Americas occurred much earlier than we thought were ridiculed. But today, many researchers are willing to accept those early dates.
It’s true that archaeologists like Jacques Cinq-Mars and Tom Dillehay were treated badly by some people. But at the same time, they were not dismissed by everybody. I think that that’s a really important point. We’re not talking about renegades from outside archaeology who had uncovered the truth and were being dismissed by academics. We’re talking about researchers within the field presenting new ideas – which is what we’re all doing.
That said, I think the field has changed in the past couple of decades in the way it reacts to new ideas. Hopefully, most of us have now realised we need to be a little more positive and receptive. Because working in archaeology is tough enough, and we need to recognise we’re all on the same side.
Hancock also pressed you on some of your previously published comments. He claimed they would encourage people to view him as racist.
I’ve never called Graham Hancock a racist. But the thing is that if you trace the history of his ideas, they go back to colonial times. There was this common trope of white-skinned cultural heroes arriving in the Americas in the distant past and bringing civilisation. Those ideas were used to justify claiming lands in the Americas for the Spanish crown. Now, skin colour isn’t referred to at all in Ancient Apocalypse. That’s good, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Hancock should acknowledge that his ideas have a clear and problematic history to them. Having said that, this was never the main point of my criticism of his work.
But it’s an important point, right?
Yes. For instance, I was in Florida for another podcast just a couple of weeks ago and the taxi driver taking me to the studio told me he was from Peru. When we began talking about the podcast and how I’m trying to explain that these monuments across the Americas were built by Indigenous people, he got very excited. It was just so obvious that he felt it was his heritage, but that it has been taken away.
There's an appetite for real archaeology
What have you learned from your debate with Hancock? How will it help you continue to push back against pseudoscience?
Well, I’ve now been invited on more of these large-audience podcasts. That tells me there’s an appetite for real archaeology. And, in fact, I’m helping organise an online archaeology festival in October with that name, Real Archaeology. It’ll involve a bunch of YouTube channels, different podcasts and blogs. We’re going to put out content at the same time with the same hashtag, and we’ll be advertising everything at
Could you give some examples of real archaeology that excites people?
The reality of being human involves looking at material culture: what we do, the traces we leave as we alter the world around us. And we can find all of these interesting stories there. For instance, we can analyse the weight and style of a set of ancient footprints to forensically start putting together the story of a journey taken by a mother and child across a dried-up lake bed. Or we can tell the story of ancient potters – their age and sex – just from studying the fingerprints they left in the wet clay. That’s the goal of archaeology: to take something that has no words attached to it and then tell its story. And when people hear these stories, they are always impressed. They do find them really cool.
