Ancient Apocalypse is a Netflix series, where the British writer Graham Hancock presents his pseudoarchaeological[1][2] theory that there was an advanced civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed as a result of meteor impacts around 12,000 years ago.

He speculates that it was destroyed around 12,000 years ago by sudden climate change during the Younger Dryas cool period, but that its few survivors taught agriculture, monumental architecture and astronomy to primitive hunter-gatherers around the world.

[10] Two archaeologists who were featured in the first season, Katya Stroud, a senior curator at Heritage Malta, and Necmi Karul, the director of excavations at Göbekli Tepe, said that their interviews were manipulated and presented out of context.

[17] In the same vein, archaeologist Julien Riel-Salvatore argues that it is simple, from a scientific point of view, to demonstrate that the main theses of Ancient Apocalypse are wrong.

[17][4] Courrier International notes that Hancock's claims are never questioned on screen: in Ancient Apocalypse, he calls the archaeologists "pseudo-experts" and repeats that they treat him patronizingly, but he does not name them nor explains their arguments.

[19] The Guardian opined that Netflix had "gone out of its way to court the conspiracy theorists" with the series, speculating that Hancock's son's role as head of unscripted originals at the company may explain why it was commissioned.

[20] Author Jason Colavito said Ancient Apocalypse was "not the worst show in its genre" but criticized it for "casting doubt on expertise, privileging emotion over evidence, and bending history to ideological ends ... making common cause with the right against academia".

[22] German scholar Andreas Grünschloß describes Hancock as misrepresenting Indigenous traditions to support his ideas, for example the descriptions of Quetzalcoatl as "white", which were a Spanish colonial invention.

[11] Experts in Pacific geography and archaeology characterized Hancock's claims about Nan Madol as "incredibly insulting to the ancestors of the Pohnpeian [islanders] that did create these structures", linking them to 19th century "racist" and "white supremacist" ideologies.