The Shape of the Past

Hancock and Hyperdiffusion

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

A triangle is a bad motherfucker.

That’s a nice lttle bit of carpenter folk wisdom that reflects our longstanding affinity for the almighty shape, so useful as a proof in Euclidean geometry and fundamentally sturdy due to the fact that each of its sides support the other two.  Anyone who has ever built a pair of sawhorses or rigged up a sagging overhang with a sturdy corbel knows this. Pythagoras knew it when he devised his famous theorem, which carpenters still use thousands of years later to square up walls and decks. Buckminster Fuller knew it when he designed his famous geodesic domes by stitching together a series of triangles. And undoubtedly the unknown builders of the pyramids and ziggurats of Mesoamerica, Egypt and Mesopotamia knew it as well. But for some reason the ubiquity of these impressive monuments in equatorial societies throughout prehistory seems to be vexing to an increasing number of armchair archaeologists when based on their obvious utility alone. The presence of these structures in seemingly disparate cultures must imply the existence of a pyramidal priesthood that formed the vanguard of an ancient high civilization, one whose existence were it to be uncovered would upend the entire basis of our current understanding of the arc of human progress. These theories range from outright racist conspiracies to more nuanced and complicated ideas that may merit serious consideration, but they all stem from a controversial idea known as hyperdiffusionism: the idea that similarities between diverse cultures across the globe can be explained by the influence of a single prehistoric civilization or cultural horizon.

Humans are meaning making creatures. We can’t help but look for patterns and connections in virtually everything we see. This type of thinking is probably wrapped up in the mechanisms that enabled us to develop language and build coalitions from disparate groups,¹ to create meaningful works of art and design, and is present in the strands of the great tapestry of human religions across the globe. It also lends itself quite easily to paranoia, distrust, and conspiracy theories. We feel powerful when we think of ourselves as part of something larger and more orderly than random scatterings of stardust and debris, and this can be of tremendous psychological benefit to us, but it can also lead us endlessly searching wormholes for connections that aren’t really there. For as critical as it may be for us to build structures of meaning in our lives, it is important to realize that a great many things probably are random, and beyond our ability to control or comprehend.

The idea of cultural diffusion in and of itself is an old one and mostly uncontroversial. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to describe the vector for transmitting cultural knowledge that formed the counterpart to the biological vector of the gene. Beginning with the development of language, which likely only happened once and had both a genetic and memetic component,² we humans began to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom by spreading our cultural knowledge as rapidly and prolifically as our DNA. The deeper we look into our past, the more fascinating and complex the picture becomes, and it seems clear that many of our shared memetic practices are the result of both distinct cultural diffusion and random happenstance that is to be expected from a species with the ability to combine intelligence, physiological advantage, and group dynamics to stumble upon root concepts. The invention of the bow and arrow, agriculture, the development of writing and possibly the controlled use of fire were all innovations that developed independently several times, some of which were arguably forgotten and rediscovered at various points in the history of our species. The closer we look to the dawn of written history, the easier it is to find meaningful and verifiable connections in the transmission of language, religion and culture. The disciplines of archaeology and linguistics evolved to their current form largely within the last two centuries, and both have helped to shape the contours of the otherwise amorphous darkness in which most of the human story lies. 

In 1786, a British magistrate working in India noticed a peculiar similarity between the legal documents composed in Sanskrit and several European languages in which he was fluent. In an oft quoted speech, Sir William Jones laid out the beginnings of the theory of a mother tongue for these languages that would eventually be known as Proto Indo European (PIE):

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident

Although he was not the first to make this argument, his influence brought the field of historical linguistics into the realm of the sciences. PIE is a reconstructed and hypothetical language, there are no written records that could confirm its existence. But so robust is the written record of ancient languages ranging from Vedic Sanskrit to Hittite and ancient Greek that scholars can reverse engineer the progression of the language and combine these methods with archaeological and mythological evidence to hypothesize the existence of a proposed ancient society that broke apart sometime in the late Neolithic and diffused their language, culture, and religion from India to Ireland. We have epics like The Iliad and religious texts like The Rig Veda, both thousands of years old but whose corpus hints at mythological and cultural similarities that reflect a much older shared oral tradition. And in the last decade, ancient DNA has further clarified the genetic relationship between all of these cultures. Though not technically an example of hyperdiffusion, tracing the origin of what is today a worldwide language family and cultural complex to a single hypothetical tribe in Stone Age Eurasia does share some of the mechanics inherent to the theory. There is still considerable debate about the specifics of PIE, most notably the proposed homeland, but there are relatively few scholars today who would deny the validity of the argument altogether the way that the scientific community has come together to combat some of the more outlandish claims made about widespread cultural diffusion deeper into the Stone Age.

These naysayers today will most likely enter the arena to square up against the current heavyweight hyperdiffusion champ, the one and only Graham Hancock. Hancock rose to prominence with 1995’s Fingerprints of the Gods, which elaborated on pseudoscientific claims from the 19th century about the lost civilization of Atlantis whom he posits could have played a role in the dissemination of agriculture and building technology from the Fertile Crescent to the Americas and beyond. While the details of his argument have evolved over time, they are based on a theory that some kind of cataclysm at the end of the last Ice Age was the harbinger for an advanced group of missionaries to spread their knowledge around the world to the hunter gatherers who were present at all of these disparate locations, hence the strange similarities between them. I remember reading it about 20 years ago and being fascinated by his spectacular claims and compelling command of the narrative. It was probably one of the first popular science books I ever read about prehistory and in many ways I owe my love for the deep past to opening its pages many years ago. In the time since, most of what I’ve learned about prehistory has served to disabuse me of the notion of a Pleistocene high civilization, however. And in the past decade, Hancock has taken his theories into mainstream discourse with multiple appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience and his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which was recently released.

I won’t go into a full counterargument to this theory here. Many professional scholars and online enthusiasts have already done so (I like this one, by the excellent Youtuber Stefan Milo). But to be brief, in watching both seasons of Ancient Apocalypse and some of his appearances on Rogan, it becomes pretty clear that Hancock has little to no archaeological, linguistic or genetic evidence to back up his claims, and almost all of his argument rests upon a selective reading of diluvian mythology and oral histories. Great cataclysms and world altering floods are well represented in our mythological tapestry, and could be a reflection of ancient disruptions in the Ice Age or more localized floods and disasters. These stories are often fascinating in their similarities-I’m a bit of a Jungian myself, so I’m attracted to the idea that our rich and complex religious traditions could all draw from some ancient wellspring that permeates our dreams and folklore. There are many theories that use mythology to speculate about our ancient interrelatedness, such as the idea that dog domestication in Eurasia led to a founding myth connecting dogs and the afterlife that spread across much of the globe. A sense of wonder and exploration is fundamental to any student of prehistory, and oral histories are an incredibly valuable tool, but without the use of supportive evidence they form an unstable podium from which to lecture the world.

Given Hancock’s remarkable rise to prominence and the adversarial tone he has taken with the scientific community, it’s no surprise that the debate has become contentious, and the accusations of racism and victimhood that define our contemporary political discourse have spilled over into this one quite seamlessly. While I don’t think it’s fair or helpful to call Hancock a racist, there is a strain of Western chauvinism and perhaps even racism associated with the theories that he draws from.³ And there is a way in which the manipulation of oral histories he has used to support his claims can be quite insulting to the legacies of the indigenous cultures he has used as pawns in his argument, intentionally or not. I found this particularly striking in Episode 2 of the most recent season of his Netflix show, in which he visits the remote Pacific island of Rapa Nui. 

The Moai of Rapa Nui. Photo by Thomas Griggs on Unsplash

Hancock has taken great pains to include the voices of indigenous communities in his documentary, and while I think this is laudable, within the space of a single episode he demonstrates how even with this intention the pressures of confirmation bias can rapidly twist the scope of his claims into a work of great insult to such communities. Marveling at the incredible craftsmanship of the great Moai statues that define the island and its people, Hancock concedes that while the available genetic evidence confirms that the Rapa Nui people are of Polynesian descent and only inhabited the island within the last millennium or so, the existence of some sort of ancient cataclysm in their oral histories is evidence that the statues are much older than that, and conveniently places their construction somewhere around the time of the end of the last Ice Age based purely off of mythological conjecture. He maintains that the horrors of slavery and colonization the Rapa Nui endured could have erased or altered their oral histories, leaving a gap in their knowledge, but he is playing fast and loose with the timeline, throwing in some evidence for the presence of bananas on the island 3,000 years ago that still gets him nowhere near his target dating. The more parsimonious reading of the myth is that the established dating is correct, yet he is willing to accept as gospel an interpretation that pushes the date back by an order of magnitude. The Rapa Nui represent the last wave of the conquest and settlement of the Pacific that their ancestors began sometime in the last 5,000 years at the earliest. If the statues were made when Hancock claims, there would be no reasonable explanation for their oral histories to connect with a period thousands of years before the ethnogenesis of their people. Either he is deliberately interpreting the story in a way that favorably backs up his claim, or he is implying that the Rapa Nui people are not only too primitive to build these monuments but also can’t be trusted to remember their history. It just doesn’t hold up to me, and if we look deeper into his theories they are rife with this type of cherry pickling and confirmation bias.

Hancock has made millions off of his books and his documentaries, so there is obviously a huge audience for his theories. We should always approach the past with a skeptical eye and a spirit of curiosity, and there is a place in our culture for polarizing and charismatic figures to shake up the orthodoxy from time to time. We are living in a time of groundbreaking discoveries about our prehistory and the timeline of our past is in a state of constant flux as more and more data becomes available. And while I think most of the data provided by new technologies like aDNA have done more to buttress the orthodox viewpoint about the development of agriculture and large scale human settlements than to denigrate it, I would not be surprised if future discoveries upend one or more of the theories that Hancock has attempted to dismantle. At this point he has not produced the evidence to support such claims, however, and even seems to backtrack on some of his positions in the face of new research.⁴ I love a grand paradigm shattering theory as much as the next guy, but the Joe Rogan Experience is not the same thing as a peer review journal.

In his writings on Substack about ancient snake cults and the spread of the bullroarer as an example of diffusion,

Andrew Cutler

offers a theory that does not necessarily rely on advanced civilizations as the vector for the spread of ideas and technology but instead posits a much deeper origin, back to the development of language and the dawn of human consciousness. As such he offers what may be a more parsimonious model for monomyth and shared cultural artifacts as well as a valuable insight on the nature of the debate:

Let it be said that diffusion does not presuppose a single invention or racial superiority. All that needs to hold is that it’s easier to share an idea than to invent it, and you get significant diffusion. This could be regional or even worldwide if the data support it.⁵

If the data support it. Cutler’s theories are intriguing to me and certainly warrant further discussion. But even the ubiquity of bullroarers in cultures seperated by great oceans and several millenia is not enough to quiet the endless debate about diffusion vs independent invention. Modern societies that still use bullroarers in ceremonial contexts often have similar taboos about the involvement of women, as Cutler points out, but this could be a reflection of very ancient gender archetypes and not evidence of diffusion. I personally find Cutler’s argument more compelling than one that suggests independent invention, but it seems to me that even with far more evidence than Graham Hancock is equipped with, it is difficult to prove diffusion. It is a vexing and perilous undertaking, and in the end we are trying to know things that are perhaps unknowable. I think it’s worth the journey, though. What lurks in the hearts of our ancestors who dwell beyond the boundary of historical reckoning is cradled in its own opacity, divorced from us by what Werner Herzog referred to as the abyss of time.⁶ We won’t ever be able to cross it, but when we shout across the precipice, perhaps it is more than just the echo that returns from the void.

I would not be as passionate about the deep past if I did not truly believe that every culture on earth is a unique facet of the creativity, resilience and innovation that define the human story. There is a sublime mystery at work in our language, our consciousness and our spiritual yearnings that probably does draw from some ancient primordial wellspring, in my opinion. I want to spend the rest of my life learning more about that, and I realize that there are some parts of that story that science will not be able to answer. And I think that is beautiful, because in that search we may continue to create myths and stories that inspire future generations the way the oral histories of Rapa Nui or the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks compel us to go searching for ancient symbols and connections today. Meaning making and pattern recognition is bound up in the very substance of what makes us human, but so too is the creative impulse. And so it is fundamental to upholding our dignity as human beings to give the unknown innovators of ancient cultures their due without invoking the presence of a messianic messenger each time we see breathtaking works from those our priors may have deemed too primitive to create. When we sleep on the ability of those “simple hunter gatherers” to create vibrant and dynamic cultures on their own, we are falling for the bigotry of low expectations. And we shouldn’t do that.

They were some bad motherfuckers too.

1. This is of course an oversimplification of many of the theories regarding the “Sapient Paradox” and the sudden spike in sophisticated artwork and tools in the archaeological record around 50,000 years ago. Yuval Noah Harari, Noam Chomsky, Colin Renfrew, the aforementioned Andrew Cutler and others all have contrasting and interesting ideas about this process

2. https://news.mit.edu/2014/language-gene-0915

3. The frenzy of condemnation around Hancock’s theories on the grounds that it reinforces white supremeacy I find to be overzealous but not entirely without grounds. Ignatius Donnelly and Thor Heyerdahl are both in the Hancock lineage and all three have at various points insisted that the works of Mesoamericans and/or Polynesians were the result of tall bearded white men based again on subjective mythological interpretations. Perhaps the intent was not to be racist, but particularly in the case of Donnelly, the ramifications of these theories do serve to reinforce stereotypes and colonial narratives of social heirarchy. The accusation of racism is too often used today as a means of stifling debate, but this does not mean the larger problems wrapped up in the historical context of hyperdiffusion should be dismissed.

4. On the Joe Rogan Experience, archaeologist Flint Dibble presents Hancock with a long presentation on the process of wild to domesticated plant development, then questions Hancock on his previous assertion of seed banks. Here’s short clip from the longer debate https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxnuzQfDxMulZL8XTIoFrfGxzEiLv9Z0DH?si=CkU-l2bUVtKm-q-E

5. The Bullroarer: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

It’s worth reading this whole piece if you’re interested in the diffusion debate, which the author weighs in on several times here.

6. See Herzog’s documentary on the paintings of Chauvet Cave, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. If you are a fan of Herzog or prehistory or both, this is a great, great film.