Fingerprints of the gods

What Hacker News says

1. zwilliamsonMay 2022
   I would be curious to hear author and researcher Graham Hancock’s take on this. His theories on human history based upon archeological evidence are very interesting. He predicted old new kingdoms were yet to be discovered in Amazon basin. Fingerprints of the Gods was one of his good reads
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2. fwlrMar 2023
   Scott has (naturally) written about this phenomenon, of how he reacts to situations where there’s strong arguments for the position, and only invective against:

   “When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham Hancock wrote about in Fingerprints Of The Gods, sort of a modern update on the Atlantis story. It went something like this:

   “Did you know that dozens of civilizations around the world have oddly similar legends about a lost continent that sunk under the waves? The Greeks called it Atlantis; the Aztecs, Atzlan; the Indonesians, Atala.

   “Various ancient structures and artifacts appear to be older than generally believed. Geologists say that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx prove it must be at least 10,000 years old; some well-known ruins in South America have depictions of animals that have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.

   “There are vast underwater ruins, pyramids and stuff. We know where they are! You can just learn to scuba dive and go see them! Historians just ignore them, or say they’re probably natural, but if you look at them, they’re obviously not natural.

   “Teenage me was impressed by these arguments. But he also had some good instincts and wanted to check to see what skeptics had to say in response. Here are what the skeptics had to say:

   “Haha, can you believe some people still think there was an Atlantis! Imagine how stupid you would have to be to fall for that scam!

   “There is literally ZERO evidence for Atlantis. The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.

   “No mainstream historians believe in any of that. Do you think you’re smarter than all the world’s historians?

   “Meanwhile, I learned to scuba dive and checked out a site where Hancock said there were underwater pyramids. They were definitely there!”

   And then there is a picture of himself in scuba gear, taken by his scuba instructor, and he is floating underwater next to what appears to be an obviously man-made stepped pyramid underwater - exactly like the conspiracy theorist said, and more importantly, exactly like the anti-conspiracy-theorists mocked you for being so stupid as to expect to see.

   Reflect on why that might be convincing for a moment: the conspiracy-theorist camp said “go to coordinates XYZ and you will find an underwater pyramid”, the anti-conspiracy-theorist camp said “you’re stupid”, and when you go to coordinates XYZ you find an underwater pyramid.

   https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fi...

   That dynamic is evinced very clearly by this email (“not provably not-correct” and “the public response has been abysmal”). I feel like that is a better explanation than “if he can’t prove them wrong he has to believe them, he’s weird like that”.

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3. robbiepSep 2020
   Interestingly I was reading about this this morning whilst reviewing my old crackpot hero Graham Hancock (reading fingerprints of the gods at a young age had me fascinated about this mythical ancient civilisation for which exceptional claims are made but very little evidence).

   This is a great rebuttal of the whole YDIH.

   Specifically regarding the possibility of air bursts, (0) says this:

   The firestorm began in 2007 when Richard Firestone and numerous colleagues proposed that it was a comet strike of “multiple ET [extraterrestrial] airbursts along with surface impacts” that occurred at 12,900 years ago that initiated the YD.”23 The paper was full of impressive evidence gathered from 10 sites where a carbon-rich layer (referred to as the “black mat”) marked what they claimed was the end of the Clovis culture in North America: “The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafaunas, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it.” They reported that sediments directly below the black mat were enriched in magnetic grains, iridium, magnetic microspherules, charcoal, soot, carbon spherules, glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds and fullerenes containing extraterrestrial helium. They explained that the soot, charcoal, spherules, etc. were the result of extensive and intense forest fires initiated by the airbursts. Melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet would have dumped copious quantities of melt water into the Atlantic, thereby disrupting the density currents and bringing on the cooling.

   Over the years, however, support for the YDIH has been undermined. Nearly every aspect of the original evidence has been challenged by a host of scientists in various fields. Only one of the indicators, iridium, has been commonly used as an impact marker, and the iridium data have not always been reproducible. The iridium concentrations can also be explained by terrestrial origins.24, 25 Nor do nanodiamonds require extraterrestrial events. The absence of any impact craters at the beginning of the YD worldwide is the most disconcerting evidence against YDIH, as is the lack of control for the age of sediments/black mat at or near the YD boundary.

   Elsewhere it remarks that even should air bursts be the case, from a massive comet breaking up or multiple comets breaking up, there still must be corresponding craters of the size of Meteor crater to correspond to the scale of the proposed devestation

   In addition to these arguments against the YDIH, it is difficult to imagine how an airburst/impact could annihilate the North American mammal megafauna and Clovis culture and initiate huge wild fires, without leaving any evidence in the way of massive flooding or impact features. Vance Holliday and his colleagues argue that “no physical mechanism is known to produce an airburst that would affect the entire continent.”27 They also point out that any comet strike large enough to affect an entire continent would leave a detectable crater even if it struck the ice sheet. To get around this glaring problem, the Firestone group proposed that the comet broke up upon entry into earth’s atmosphere. But according to physicist Mark Boslough and his colleagues,28 that would produce “more than a million Meteor craters” (the size of the crater in central Arizona) based on the comet size postulated by Firestone and his cohorts.29, 30

   While the Firestone group claims that the comet strike was responsible for the disappearance of the 37 mammal megafauna genera specifically in North America, extinctions occurred on other continents, most notably South America, where at least 52 mammal genera disappeared. And not all those genera disappeared synchronously at the YD boundary! Instead, megafauna extinctions on continents and islands seem to correlate with the arrival of humans. The thinking goes that these huge megafauna would have had no reason to fear humans, and were probably easy pickings for the newly arriving hunter-gatherers. Scientists have also been a bit incredulous that a comet strike could wipe out all the megafauna as far south as Patagonia, while leaving mammoths alive and well on St. Paul Island, Alaska until 3,700 years ago

   (0) https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/defant-analysis-of-hanc...

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4. 09bjbAug 2017
   Graham Hancock dedicates at least 10% of his most recent book "Fingerprints of the Gods" to exploring the recent evidence for a cataclysmic meteor impact that catalyzed the precipitous drop in global temperatures we observe 12900 years ago at the "Younger Dryas Boundary." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas#Impact_hypothesi...

   He has some pretty out there theories but that section is pretty convincing.

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