Have there been lost civilisations? How would we know?
In this fascinating article, the wonderfully-named Flint Dibble – an esteemed archaeologist – effectively rebuts the arguments of Graham Hancock. He writes:
“It’s the quantity of actual archaeology, an enormous body of positive evidence, that proves the negative. There is no lost civilisation from the Ice Age that was global and used advanced technology to build monuments or grow crops. A civilisation that Hancock has stated was “as advanced as our civilisation was, say in the late 18th or early 19th century”.
He claims archaeologists haven’t adequately explored the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater to disprove the existence of this civilisation. However, in each of these areas archaeologists have surveyed or excavated hundreds of thousands of sites. And the tens of thousands of Ice Age sites found show hunter-gatherer people resiliently thriving in difficult conditions.”