Atlantis and the Amazon

In a new Netflix series, Brazilian indigenous peoples get the old "they couldn't have done it by their own" treatment that pseudo-archaeologists are used to give the Incas and others

mayan pyramid black and white

A new Netflix "documentary" series has just included the indigenous peoples of the Amazon in the list of human groups that, according to modern pseudoarchaeology, are unable to invent or discover things by themselves: just as the ancient Egyptians supposedly needed help — from ETs or survivors of Atlantis — to design and erect the pyramids, the Amazonian peoples received the secret of the dark earth and the ayahuasca brew formula from wise foreign civilizers. The series, "Ancient Apocalypse - The Americas", in six episodes (classified by the producers as non-fiction), premiered in med-October, just in time for Halloween.

"Ancient Apocalypse - The Americas" is the second season of Ancient Apocalypse. Like the previous season, the series is based on the work of (and presented by) Graham Hancock, a veteran author of pseudoscientific bestsellers on archeology.

This new season takes its cues mainly from the book "America Before: The Key to Earth Lost Civilization", published by Hancock in 2019. Both book and series deal with a lot more than Amazonian indigenous peoples (Easter Island and the Incas are also featured, among others), but I’ll use the Brazilian case as my main sample.

The book has a section of almost a hundred pages dedicated to Brazil. As a Brazilian myself, it’s weirdly funny — and a little unsettling — to see the indigenous peoples of my country receiving the same treatment that Hancock, Von Däniken and others dispense to the ancient Egyptians, the Maya and other brown-skinned civilizations: morons that had to be taught how to build things and to survive in their environment by wise, all-knowing aliens (coming from lost continents or far-away planets, you choose).

I went to elementary and middle school at a time (the late 1970s, early 1980s) in which the standard view of the indigenous populations still oscillated between two opposite myths — one, that of the naked, brutish savages who should be oh so thankful for the benefits of European civilization, like Christianity, gunpowder and smallpox; the other, that of Nature’s own supermen, priests of Mother Earth and dispensers of unfathomable wisdom.

Both myths were just that — myths, each one with its own ideological biases and pseudoscientific baggage —, but research conducted in the last decades showed that, in the Amazon rainforest and in its surroundings, there really were sophisticated societies, including cities and roads, before the arrival of the Europeans; more, that the peoples who lived in these societies had found a modus vivendi with nature, a way to tame parts of the rainforest, to use its resources and to coexist with it, that was way less damaging to the ecosystems than the European, or Western, predatory model. It wasn’t “harmony”, but it was low-impact exploitation.

As Brazilian journalist Reinaldo José Lopes wrote in his book about Brazilian prehistoric past, “1499” (the title refers to the year of the first arrival of Portuguese sailors in the Brazilian coast, 1500):

“Somehow, the Xinguans and the early inhabitants of Marajó, Altamira and other places found ways to transform the environment they occupied — and which they exploited in a relatively intense and planned way, by the way — without messing everything up”.

Hancock goes to some of the same sources used by Lopes, and like him shows admiration for feats such as the development of the so-called indigenous dark earth — an "anthropic", or artificial, soil of high fertility. But for Hancock these were not technological achievements of indigenous peoples and their ancestors, but gifts from master-civilizers from somewhere else (the word "Atlantis" is not mentioned in this second season of the Netflix series, but it shows up in the first, and in the “America Before” book). The list of indigenous technologies that Hancock attributes to the Atlanteans in the book also includes curare, ayahuasca and the process to make bitter manioc edible.

Chicken vs. egg

An important part of Hancock’s non-sequitur argument“indigenous people had such-and-such technology, therefore Atlantis was real” is really a rehash of that old chestnut, the "irreducible complexity" of the Creationists. It assumes that a technology — such as the ayahuasca brew recipe, or dark earth — can only be useful in its present, or final, form.

In the series, Hancock repeatedly hits the dark earth theme. That’s an indigenous invention that makes agriculture viable in the soil of the Amazon rainforest, which is naturally very poor. Dark earth is a kind of compost, so it requires debris produced by human beings. There the author sees a “chicken and egg” scenario: it takes a large population to generate the dark earth materials necessary to sustain a large population. But without the dark earth, how could there be a large population? And without the population, how was the dark earth made?

The idea (which should be astoundingly obvious) that the two processes occurred concomitantly, in mutual reinforcement — a small population, in the distant past, generating a little of something that could be a precursor of the dark earth, which allowed the population to grow a bit; a marginally larger population that went to generate a little bit more of the precursor; and then a larger population; all of it going on as people figure out ways to make the earth even better — seems inconceivable to Graham Hancock, to the point that he goes on to decree that the only viable explanation is "Atlanteans".

Rhetoric

This second season of Ancient Apocalypse is distinguished from the first not by the focus — the New World — but also by the rhetoric. And in two ways.

The first is greater discretion. Most of the time, this time around Hancock refrains from making clearly pseudoscientific statements - a slip occurs when he mentions, in episode 4, "inexplicable technologies" of the Incas, insinuating the use of heat rays and, perhaps, levitation. Instead of openly exposing himself, he appeals, recurrently, to the fallacy of non-sequitur, in which a clearly false conclusion is attached to the end of a series of more or less correct statements. For instance: "the sky is blue, the earth is round, therefore pigs fly".

The trick is popular among conspiracy theorists, who love to play with disparate, isolated facts, presenting them in a way that creates the impression that they would be linked by some hidden connection — and suggesting that, together, they support some unsustainable conclusion.

In the case of Ancient Apocalypse, we have several bits of true information, such as the astronomical alignment of ancient monuments, the geometric shape of ancient drawings in the ground, the existence of indigenous technologies such as dark earth, listed above the — unjustified — conclusion that the deep past of Humanity hides a lost race of civilizing mentors.

The exhaustive use of non-sequiturs has two psychological effects: it tires the reader/viewer, momentarily reducing the capacity for attention and dampening the critical faculties; at the same time, by enumerating truths with which the reader/spectator will agree (because they are, after all, truths), it makes them prone to, by inertia, also ending up agreeing with the absurd conclusion.

The second rhetorical change is a surprising (for those who are familiar with Hancock's usual way of presenting himself) humbleness. Not that he is especially modest: in this second season, we have Keanu Reeves (!!) appearing at random moments to tell us how brilliant Graham Hancock is (and who will dare to test the patience of John Wick?). Also, Hancock does not let us forget that he is "on a mission of more than 30 years" to reveal the true history of humankind.

This time, however, his invectives against "official" archeology — the one made by archaeologists who really understand what they are talking about — are much less virulent.

Hancock is still unable to understand (or pretending to be unable to understand) that the fact that a science changes its verdicts over time and after the accumulation of new evidence is not a sign that scientists do not know what they are talking about, or that science keeps jumping from one "dogma" to another, but that knowledge evolves as new discoveries are made. And he’s still stuck in the illusion that "Scientists may be wrong" is equivalent to "Anything I care to imagine can be right".

But this time, these fallacies are introduced in a much more respectful way than usual. He is even generous to the point of thanking "scientific archeology". Among the sources you hear and see on the screen, there are legitimate scientists, there are legitimate scientists who perhaps care a little too much for wayward hypotheses and there are card-carrying pseudoscientists. Hancock makes no effort to discriminate between them, and I can hardly imagine what the real researchers who agreed to appear in the series will feel, or are feeling, when watching the finished product.

Apocalypse... when?

Hancock also reviews his prediction of the end of the world. In the first season of Ancient Apocalypse, he suggests that the Atlanteans left warnings about some imminent global tragedy. The author has a long history of suggesting dates for the end of the world and then, when the world insists on keep going, acting as if he had never said anything on the subject.

In his 1995 book "Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence for Earth's Lost Civilization", he seems to take quite seriously the supposed "Mayan apocalypse" of December 23, 2012. Quoting verbatim (page 127):

“Suppose they [the Mayans] knew something we didn’t? Most pertinent of all, suppose that their projected date for the end of the Fifth Sun turned out to be correct? Suppose, in other words, that some truly awful geological catastrophe is already unfolding, deep in the bowels of the earth, as the wise men of the Maya predicted?”

In "Magicians of the Gods", from 2015, he disingenuously refers to the belief in the 2012 apocalypse as "nonsense". Hancock adds that, in fact, the end of the world is predicted by the Mayans for an "80-year window" that would extend from 1960 to 2040.

Now, in the second season of Ancient Apocalypse, the 80-year window is moved to the period 2000 to 2080. Born in 1950, Hancock apparently doesn’t want to run the risk of being proved wrong by the facts right on his ninetieth birthday.