Graham Bruce Hancock (born 2 August 1950)[1] is a British writer who promotes pseudoscientific[2][3] ideas about ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands.

[4] Hancock proposes that an advanced civilization with spiritual technology existed during the last Ice Age until it was destroyed following comet impacts around 12,900 years ago, at the onset of the Younger Dryas.

He speculates that survivors of this cataclysm passed on their knowledge to primitive hunter-gatherers around the world, giving rise to all the earliest known civilizations (such as ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and Mesoamerica).

[5] They define his work as pseudoarchaeology[6][7] and pseudohistory[8][9] because they consider it to be biased towards preconceived conclusions by ignoring context, misrepresenting sources, cherry picking, and withholding critical counter-evidence.

His ideas have been the subject of several films, as well as the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022), Hancock makes regular appearances on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss his work.

[26] In Hancock's book Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith,[27] co-authored with Robert Bauval, the two put forward what sociologist of religion David V. Barrett called "a version of the old Jewish-Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists.

[29] A contemporary review of Talisman by David V. Barrett for The Independent pointed to a lack of originality as well as basic factual errors, concluding that it was "a mish-mash of badly-connected, half-argued theories".

In it, Hancock examines paleolithic cave art in the light of David Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological model, exploring its relation to the development of the fully modern human mind.

On the contrary, by providing a powerful, persuasive single-minded case for the existence of a lost civilisation, I believe that I am merely restoring a little balance and objectivity to a previously unbalanced situation.... [I]t’s my job—and a real responsibility to be taken seriously—to undermine and cast doubt on the orthodox theory of history in every way that I can and to make the most eloquent and persuasive case that I am capable of making for the existence of a lost civilisation.Pseudoarchaeologists mislead their audience by misrepresenting the current state of knowledge, take quotes out of contexts, and withhold countervailing data.

[49] To explain the disappearance of his ice age civilization, Hancock embraces the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which has little support in the scientific community.

[12] He argues that the civilization was destroyed around 12,000 years ago by sudden climate change during the Younger Dryas cool period, which he attributes to an impact winter caused by a massive meteor bombardment.

[48] Hancock claims that the few survivors of the catastrophe arrived in places like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, where they shared their knowledge and superior technology with primitive hunter-gatherers; introducing them to agriculture, monumental architecture, and astronomy.

[52][53] Scholars Olav Hammer and Karen Swartz write that Hancock's works are "based largely on an imaginative reinterpretation of artifacts and myths that divorces them from their immediate cultural and religious contexts."

Hancock suggests that the teachings of Atlanteans to later civilisations were "geometric, astronomical and spiritual" in nature, which were faciltated by the use of psychotropic plants (such as ayahuasca and peyote) used to access the Otherworld, allowing them to commune with souls and "powerful nonphysical beings".

[48][59] Hancock has distanced himself from this claim, yet failed to explain how a fully competent local population could serve as evidence for a lost civilization that transferred superior science and technology to them.

[48] The Maya were described by Hancock as only "semi-civilized" and their achievements as "generally unremarkable" to support the thesis that they inherited their calendar from a much older, far more advanced civilization.

The programme was critical of the theory, demonstrating that the constellation Leo could be found amongst famous landmarks in New York, and alleging that Hancock had selectively moved or ignored the locations of temples to support his argument.

The authors go on to suggest, using computer simulations of the sky, that the pyramids, representing the three stars of Orion's Belt, along with associated causeways and alignments, constitute a record in stone of the celestial array at the vernal equinox in 10,500 BC.

They state that the initiation rites of the Egyptian pharaohs replicate on Earth the sun's journey through the stars in this remote era, and they suggest that the "Hall of Records" of a lost civilisation may be located by treating the Giza Plateau as a template of these same ancient skies.

[72] In the series, Hancock outlines his long-held belief that there was an advanced civilization during the last ice age, that it was destroyed following comet impacts around 12,000 years ago, and that its survivors introduced agriculture, monumental architecture and astronomy to hunter-gatherers around the world.

The SAA also stated: the series repeatedly and vigorously dismisses archaeologists and the practice of archaeology with aggressive rhetoric, willfully seeking to cause harm to our membership and our profession in the public eye; ... the theory it presents has a long-standing association with racist, white supremacist ideologies; does injustice to Indigenous peoples; and emboldens extremists.

[79][80]Hancock gave a TEDx lecture titled "The War on Consciousness", in which he described his use of ayahuasca, an Amazonian brew containing a hallucinogenic compound DMT, and argued that adults should be allowed to responsibly use it for self-improvement and spiritual growth.