Imagining Atlantis

Why there probably isn't a lost Ice Age civilization

The Fall of Numenor by Ted Nasmith.

My main objective when I began writing here was to write more about fencing and HEMA topics. However, this is my blog and sometimes I like to write about other subjects.

Today I’d like to discuss one of my other passions: History and archaeology. I majored in archaeology in university (University of Saskatchewan, graduated 2015). Once I cherished the objective of a career in archaeology, and although my path has taken me in other directions I still have a deep interest in my field of study.

Alas, archaeology is not well served in the popular culture right now.

If you search for archaeology on most of the typical content discovery platforms of the Internet (YouTube, Google, social media, etc), then you will be drowned out in a tide of pseudo-archaeological conspiracy theory nonsense: Giants, angels, aliens, and Atlantis.

The vast majority of archaeological content on the internet today tells a sensational and sensationally wrong account of human history, attributing the Pyramids to aliens and the discovery of agriculture to Atlanteans among other erroneous and unevidenced ideas. It’s a sad state of affairs.

One of the leading purveyors of pseudo-archaeology today is the British journalist Graham Hancock. You may be familiar with him from the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, which drew my ire lately for being yet another instance of a high profile media platform presenting pseudoscience and speculation as legitimate archaeology to an unsuspecting public.

Hancock’s central thesis goes something like this:

Sometime during the last Ice Age, there was an advanced civilization of human beings somewhere in the world (Possibly the Sahara, possibly South America, maybe Antarctica, he has proposed many locations). We shall call this culture “Ice Age Atlantis”. This civilization was advanced far beyond the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers that existed elsewhere in the world. They were capable of monumental architecture; they were capable of oceanic seafaring; they had domestication and agriculture; they had an advanced knowledge of astronomy, and so on and so forth.

Then came the cataclysm: The Younger Dryas event shifted the planet back to a glacial period for a thousand years. This catastrophe destroyed the environmental conditions for this Atlantean civilization, and the survivors were scattered across the globe. They took refuge among the hunter-gatherer cultures, and they brought with them their advanced knowledge. This exchange of knowledge and wisdom from the Atlanteans to the less advanced peoples of the world triggered the Neolithic Revolution with the coming of agriculture, architecture, and everything else the Atlanteans knew. All the earliest cultures and civilizations we know of ultimately derive from Ice Age Atlantis: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, etc.

It’s an evocative and compelling story. Who doesn’t like a good mystery? Who doesn’t love a story about lost civilizations, ancient cataclysms, and forgotten knowledge? It’s like something one might find in J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard.

Unfortunately for Mr. Hancock, it’s also completely unsupported by archaeological evidence.

Hancock is rather notorious for disregarding evidence which doesn’t fit his theories, misinterpreting other forms of evidence, and asserting the existence of evidence which doesn’t exist (i.e: Arguing that natural rock formations are in fact human-made monumental architecture). He’s also quite a fan of arguing that archaeology can’t disprove his theories because not enough has been done. A typical statement he makes is “Well there’s so much of the world that still hasn’t been archaeologically excavated, so you can’t rule out a lost civilization”. Which of course isn’t actually evidence that a lost civilization exists.

Hancock also cultivates a very confrontational relationship with archaeology. He often accuses academic archaeology of trying to silence him, hiding evidence which supports his theories, and other typical conspiracist beliefs about a shadowy plot to silence the truth.

Recently, Joe Rogan hosted a debate on the question of the Ice Age Atlantis theory. He invited Hancock onto his podcast to debate Flint Dibble, a professional archaeologist, on the question. I managed to chew through the four hours or so of this debate, and I was quite delighted that Mr. Dibble did an excellent job representing our discipline and pushing back against pseudoscience in a public forum. I think it is good and healthy that academics leave the ivory tower and sally forth to meet bad ideas and false science on the field of debate. I think Mr. Dibble did our field much good with taking on this task.

After listening to this debate, I found myself chewing over the Ice Age Atlantis theory. I elected to write something about it to compose my thoughts into a coherent form, and hopefully to share some knowledge of archaeology with the public myself in some small and hopefully helpful way.

I don’t want to repeat Flint Dibble’s arguments, those are better found by listening to his debate on the Joe Rogan Podcast . Nor do I want to engage in a point by point refutation of any of Graham Hancock’s specific claims. Hancock ranges across the world to rally evidence for Ice Age Atlantis, claiming sites and events from the Mississippi to the Euphrates for his theory. Being a humble Bachelor of Arts in my field, I don’t have the relevant breadth or depth of experience to refute each and every mistaken claim or unevidenced argument he advances for each specific site or archaeological culture.

I would like to take more of a broad view here. Let us instead imagine what the world might look like if Ice Age Atlantis did exist. That is my topic for discussion today. I would like to imagine what this civilization might have been like, if it had existed, and therefore imagine what evidence we would find archaeologically.

In doing so, I aim to demonstrate why this theory can’t actually be true.

In terms of the characteristics of this imaginary Ice Age Atlantis we shall discuss, I shall hew as closely as I can to the attributed characteristics of this proposed civilization that Graham Hancock presents.

We shall imagine this Atlantis as a relatively advanced civilization, something comparable to the Early Dynastic or the Old Kingdom periods of Egypt, or to the Bronze Age city-states of Sumer. It existed during the Last Glacial Maximum and the Late Glacial Interstadial period, and was destroyed by the Younger Dryas. We shall imagine it existing on the coastal regions of the Americas, most likely in equatorial South America. It is a civilization with domestication and agriculture, with knowledge of architecture capable of monumental structure building, and with an in-depth knowledge of astronomy.

It is also, necessarily, a civilization with the capacity to cross oceans. Hancock states that his Atlantis was the progenitor of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, and really of all early advanced civilizations, and so the Atlanteans must have oceanic seafaring capabilities.

Other attributes of this civilization I will determine by reasoning and comparison to historical examples known archaeologically. For instance: If this civilization is capable of complex architecture and astronomy and mathematics, we can reasonably suspect it has also some capacity for written language, like the Sumerian cuneiform. We could also safely suspect that they would have industries such as ceramics or metallurgy, given that similar civilizations also developed these industries and how inherently useful they are.

If such an ancient civilization had existed, then what archaeological evidence would we reasonably expect to see? What material record might such a civilization leave behind? By imagining what evidence an Ice Age Atlantis would leave behind, I will demonstrate to you the lack of evidence that such a civilization did exist.

Archaeogenetics

One of the biggest developments in archaeology of recent decades is the ongoing proliferation and expansion of archaeogenetic research. This is typically referred to as the “archaeogenetic revolution”.

Archaeogenetics is the study of the human past via genetic evidence. By collecting and analysing ancient DNA from archaeologically excavated human or hominin remains, archaeogenetics allows us to see human history at a genetic level. This allows us to see, for example, that modern humans share DNA with Homo neanderthalensis.¹ The genetic evidence shows us that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis interbred, that our populations intermixed and exchanged genes, and that modern humans took Neanderthal DNA with them forward into the future. These are the kinds of insights that only archaeogenetics can really deliver firm evidence for.

Here is the really relevant point for the Ice Age Atlantis theory: Archaeogenetic evidence can be used to demonstrate the movements of genetic population groups in the ancient past. For instance, archaeogenetic evidence can demonstrate for the modern archaeologist the genetic presence of continental northern European individuals migrating into the British Isles in the post-Roman period². This approach is used to chart events for which the archaeological evidence is often very ancient, such as the peopling of the Americas circa 15-20 thousand years ago³.

The Atlantean population will be presumably made up of human beings, H. sapiens, with an identifiable genetic structure. People who live in the same place for centuries or millennia will tend to reproduce mostly with their close neighbours and become more genetically similar to each other than to other groups of people, so we can safely imagine that the Atlanteans would be a distinctive genetic population.

Part of Hancock’s thesis is that after the catastrophe which destroyed this Atlantis, the survivors scattered across the globe and mixed with the less advanced hunter-gatherer populations of the world. This is how they became the progenitors of every early civilization. If that occurred, then we would reasonably expect to see some genetic indications that it occurred. When people move into a new area and intermarry and reproduce with the pre-existing population, then the children of those unions carry genes from both their native and their immigrant parents.

What would this look like? With their society falling apart, we can imagine Atlantean survivors seek refuge among the hunter-gatherers around 12,000 years ago. Some end up in Mesopotamia and Egypt and eastern Asia and apparently all over the world. We would expect to see human remains from these other regions from the period following that Atlantean collapse to show an anomalous admixture of DNA from that Atlantean population originating in coastal South America. You would see genetic similarities between American ancient human remains of circa 12kya or younger with Egyptian and Mesopotamian human remains of the same period, if indeed the Atlanteans settled in these places.

You would also expect to see these genetic signs occur first in the Americas (or wherever the Atlantis is) and later in the areas to which the Atlanteans migrated. With good archaeogenetic evidence, you would be able to reconstruct a chronological and geographical account of how certain genes had travelled over time. We are able to do this to a fairly high degree of accuracy using both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA evidence with events like the peopling of the Americas⁴.

If Ice Age Atlantis had existed and had contributed to all these geographically dispersed cultures via migration after some kind of civilizational collapse, there would be some genetic evidence of this fact in the human remains of the cultures they moved into. The only way they wouldn’t leave genetic evidence is if the Atlanteans were, every single one of them, celibate.

Trade Goods

Frontiers are interesting places, in archaeological terms.

There are places in the world where different societies rub up against each other, with potentially very different economies, lifeways, social and political structures, and levels of technological sophistication. These borderlands are often sites of sophisticated and complex exchanges between cultures: Trade, war, religious exchange, intermarriage, and other such things. As a result, they are very rich places to explore archaeologically.

When a more technologically or economically sophisticated society shares a frontier with one less sophisticated in those particular areas, we often see the penetration of material goods from the more quote-unquote “advanced” culture into the archaeological assemblages of the other culture. For instance, Roman coins and glassware and metal vessels appear in burials in Iron Age Scandinavia, far from the actual political borders of the Roman Empire⁵. A more recent example would be the spread of European trade goods in the interior of Early Contact North America⁶: Archaeologically we see European goods like metal tools and cooking ware appear in the material assemblages of indigenous sites in advance of Europeans actually penetrating the interior of North America.

These goods move away from their points of origin by many of those same processes we mentioned above: As trade goods, as plunder taken in war or raids, carried with people marrying or travelling across the borders, and so forth. “Middleman trade” can move goods over vast distances, as the more advanced culture trades with its immediate neighbours, who themselves trade those desirable goods with their neighbours further away.

If there was an Ice Age Atlantis in the Americas (or elsewhere), it would be reasonable to look for evidence of trade with them in the material assemblages of the non-Atlantean hunter-gatherers which they lived alongside.

Trade and exchange is one of those human cultural near-universals. Almost every single culture we know of archaeologically shows some signs of trade and exchange with their neighbours. Valuable commodities like obsidian were often traded over long distances as far back as the Paleolithic⁷, and the elaborate economies of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia relied on long distance trade in tin and copper.⁸

The Atlanteans would in all likelihood seek out valuable goods and commodities around the world. Their hunter-gatherer neighbours would most likely desire goods that the more advanced Atlanteans could produce which they had not the means to produce themselves. These could be metals, glass, beads, clothing, tools, weapons, ceramics, and other such manufactured products. The hunter-gatherer peoples living immediately adjacent to the Atlanteans would also be expected to economically exploit their middleman position, trading their Atlantean-obtained goods to their hunter-gatherer neighbours to obtain other desirable commodities.

If this were the case, then we would expect to see identifiably Atlantean artifacts and goods appearing in the artifact assemblages of hunter-gatherers in contact with these Atlanteans. In terms of dates, we would reasonably expect that hunter-gatherers in contact with the Atlanteans would have the most access to Atlantean goods at the height of this Atlantean culture during the last glacial period. If the Atlanteans migrated into hunter-gatherer populations after the Younger Dryas, we would also expect them to carry goods from their homeland with them and we should be able to identify them archaeologically.

Domesticated Crops and Animals

Hancock states that the Atlanteans were the teachers of agriculture to the hunter-gatherers of the world, and thus the original progenitors of the Neolithic revolution. Let’s accept that proposition. Our Atlanteans are an agricultural society.

What crops were domesticated by the Atlanteans then? How did the Atlanteans sustain themselves?

The origins of agriculture are something of an obsession for us archaeologists (At least speaking for myself). Agriculture lies at the foundation of basically the entirety of human civilization since the Neolithic. There’s a lot of archaeological work done seeking to understand when and where and how and why humans first came to domesticate plants and raise our own crops rather than gathering from wild resources. On a related note, many archaeologists also work intensively seeking to understand the domestication of animals.

Thanks to all this work, we have very strong evidence both archaeologically and archaeogenetically that wheat began its domestication process approximately 13,000 years ago, evolving from a wild form under human cultivation in the Fertile Crescent region, to one with fully domesticate traits by around 9,000 years ago⁹.

If there was some Atlantis on the coasts of the Americas in the last glacial period, and it was sustaining itself by agriculture, then necessarily it must have had domesticated crops with which to do so. Human cultivation and harvesting exerts an evolutionary pressure on plants: Certain traits are more amenable to survival and reproduction under human cultivation than in strictly wild conditions. Humans also themselves select for desirable traits. These pressures of selection are why domesticate plants end up very different from wild species. We would expect that whatever the Atlanteans were cultivating to live on would end up displaying domesticate development as well.

If the Atlanteans were the progenitors of agriculture, then we would expect that their domesticate crops would develop first during the Last Glacial Period in wherever their coastal homeland was. We would have genetic evidence for this domestication at that early period.

We would also expect to see an early centre of origin of agriculture centering on Atlantis. Archaeologists know pretty well where the first agricultural societies developed: The Fertile Crescent, the Mediterranean basin, Mesoamerica, the Andes, the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China, and so forth. If there was an agricultural Atlantis at an earlier date, then that would show up in the archaeological record: We would have charred plant remains from cooking, we would have pollen showing genetic signs of domestication, we would have agricultural tools in the assemblages of the period.

We would also expect an earlier diffusion of agricultural methods into the hunter-gatherer populations. As I said in that trade and exchange piece above, the neighbouring peoples to the Atlanteans would interact with them and would learn by exchange and by imitation. Historically, the emergence of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent led to its gradual spread in all adjacent lands until agriculture was practiced from the Euphrates to the Atlantic. Similar things occurred around other early origins of agriculture. Why would this not occur with Ice Age Atlantis as well?

Hancock’s theory holds that the Atlanteans scattered across the world’s oceans after the downfall of their civilization, becoming the progenitors of these historically known agricultural civilizations. If that were the case, then we would also expect to see the Atlanteans take a crop package with them. We know that people do this: Domesticate wheat emerges in the Fertile Crescent, and Neolithic farmers take wheat into Europe. Later on, Europeans crossing the Atlantic bring wheat and other Old World crops to grow in their settlements in the Americas. The Columbian exchange was one of the most significant events in human history. If Atlanteans from the Americas were settling in Egypt or Mesopotamia after the Younger Dryas, then where are the New World crops they would have brought with them?

Industries and Production

Human civilization produces a lot of physical stuff. Archaeology is in many senses a study of materials. We study the human past through physical remains, especially artifacts: Tools, pottery, clothing, weapons, building materials, architecture, and so forth.

I said earlier that for the purposes of this article I would imagine an Atlantis comparable in technological sophistication to the Early Dynastic or Old Kingdom periods of Egypt, or to the Bronze Age cities of Mesopotamia. This would I think fulfil Hancock’s theory of an “advanced” civilization in the Last Ice Age, because a society like unto the Old Kingdom of Egypt during the Last Ice Age would be far and away the most sophisticated and advanced culture on Earth at that time. There is no evidence anywhere during the Upper Paleolithic of any culture coming even close to that in technological or economic terms.

Even in comparatively early periods of civilization, these agriculturally-based societies produced huge amounts of objects for human life. Archaeological excavations at the site of Kültepe in Turkey, known as the city of Kaneš in Antiquity, discovered 23,500 clay tablets¹⁰ with Assyrian texts recording the activities of the merchants of Kaneš. That’s just clay writing tablets at one particular city which, while well-preserved, is not an exceptionally large city so far as Bronze Age metropoles went. The British Museum alone today has a collection of over 72,000 cuneiform tablets¹¹, and again that’s just tablets with cuneiform writings on them and that’s just one museum.

When I was in university, we had a joke about North American archaeology versus Middle Eastern or Egyptian archaeology: If you’re digging in Canada and you find a sherd of pre-Contact pottery, the whole dig stops and celebrates. If you’re digging in Egypt or Mesopotamia and you find a sherd of pottery, you throw it in the pile because it’s garbage.

Even in the early Bronze Age, we see evidence for modes of mass production for goods like pottery. An example of this is the presence in Bronze Age sites of large kilns, capable of firing large batches of ceramics simultaneously¹². This attests to a mode of living which produced large amounts of human-made goods and objects, and had a high level of demand for those goods.

As people settle down and become sedentary agriculturalists, they are no longer limited to only possessing such goods as they can easily transport with them across the landscape in the constant pursuit of food. They build more permanent dwellings, and these dwellings require building materials like timber and bricks. The production of those materials and of those dwellings require tools. Agricultural labour also requires tools. Food needs to be stored in some way when not being consumed, and that demands storage vessels, which then leads to the production of ceramics.

Everything about an agriculturalist, sedentary lifestyle leads people to demand more and more material goods, and that creates bigger and bigger industries for the production of those goods, which creates more and more material artifacts in the archaeological record in comparison to earlier hunter-gatherer societies.

The large scale, monumental building projects of these complex Bronze Age societies are perhaps the clearest example of their enormous productive capabilities. Consider the sheer scale of the pyramids at Giza or the ziggurats in Sumer and think about what that means as a logistical reality. The First Dynasty of ancient Egypt constructed a large military fortress at Elephantine, to guard their kingdom’s southern frontiers. The construction of this fortress required approximately 465,000 mud bricks.¹³ Imagine the logistics involved in the production of this fortress: The organization of the workers and the planning of the project, the labour involved, the necessity to feed this workforce, all the tools and objects that would be used in such a task.

Hancock alleges that his Atlanteans were a sort of tutelary civilization, teaching the other early civilizations of the world how to use agriculture and build monumental structures and all these other complex skills. If that were true, we would expect the Atlanteans themselves to make use of these things and have a similar lifestyle. And if that were true, then the Atlanteans would necessarily have had to have similar productive industries as we see in other early Bronze Age cultures, as in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

If Atlantis did exist at the level of advancement alleged, then wherever Atlantis was located we would find settlements. Within those settlements, we would see dwellings, public spaces, temples, governmental centres, monumental structures, possibly fortifications, and most definitely there would be evidence of agricultural production.

We would also see the evidence for the massive economic production necessary to sustain a sedentary lifestyle with high demands of material goods: Pottery in vast quantities, agricultural tools, jewelry and personal adornments, building materials and the associated toolsets, and so on and so forth. There would be smithies, pottery kilns, granaries, mills, textile manufacturing. As with the trade goods argument above, the lack of such materials is pretty deafening evidence against Hancock’s Atlantis theory.

Seafaring

One of the key pieces of Hancock’s Ice Age Atlantis theory is that the Atlanteans were seafarers. The first major seafarers in human history.

Their attributed achievements in seafaring are no small feats either. If we take Hancock’s word that this civilization was based in South America and spread its ideas to Egypt and Mesopotamia and everywhere else in the world, then we’re looking at a culture capable of trans-oceanic seafaring during the Paleolithic.

Seafaring across the immense distances of oceans is a considerable challenge and a considerable accomplishment for a culture. It requires strong capabilities in shipbuilding, the ability to preserve and store food and water for prolonged voyages, and extraordinary ability in navigation.

There also has to be a reason for people to develop these skills in the first place. The typical reasons are commercial: Between the 15th and 19th centuries, Europeans developed large wooden sailing vessels capable of long distance voyages. They did this in pursuit of maritime trade routes with India, China, and later the Americas. In Antiquity the most famed seafarers in the Mediterranean were the Phoenicians, who developed these skills while pursuing trade routes from Iberia to the Aegean.

Economic opportunities are often followed or accompanied by settlement. If you are going to sail for long distances to pursue trade, then when you arrive at your destination you will need some port in which your ship can be safely anchored or docked. You will need to rest and resupply for your return voyage home. You need a consistent meeting place where the locals can meet you to trade. You will need spaces and equipment for offloading what you have brought and loading up with what you have purchased. All of these needs push towards the establishment of permanent trading posts, which of course mean that people need to live in that place for the long run, leading to the development of settlements.

The most recent historical example of this would be the European colonies that were established all over the world during the early modern period. European states founded these colonies as they pursued their mercantile interests: Sugar in the Caribbean; Timber, fish, and furs in Canada; Tobacco, cotton, and foodstuffs in America.

A similar pattern existed in Antiquity as well. Phoenician colonies were established all around the Mediterranean basin, for similar commercial and practical reasons. The most successful of these became the mighty city-state of Carthage, which eventually became an empire in its own right.

There’s lots of archaeological evidence for the ancient Phoenician maritime trading networks and the accompanying colonies. We can find Phoenician settlements archaeologically as far away as Andalusia¹⁴. We can find Phoenician trade goods showing up in Euboea and Attica in Greece in early Iron Age sites and burials¹⁵. We can find Phoenician shipwrecks, still laden down with the remains of their cargoes.¹⁶

If we imagine this Ice Age Atlantis as a seafaring culture, crossing oceans and exploring the world, then we must also imagine some material reason or motivation for them to do so. Like the Phoenicians, the most likely motivation would be commercial. We can imagine the Atlanteans sailing the world in pursuit of trade. As mentioned above, we would expect to see Atlantean trade goods in the artifact assemblages of non-Atlantean cultures as well. We would expect to see colonies established on coastlines to provide ports and trade posts. We would expect to find shipwrecks.

Of course, maybe the Atlanteans weren’t mariners like the Phoenicians. Maybe they were more like the Polynesians.

The Polynesians too sailed across vast distances, indeed they are arguably the most impressive mariners of the pre-modern world in terms of their sheer achievements. In the Polynesian case, the motivation was subsistence: Living on small Pacific islands, they needed to migrate from island to island to seek out new food and fresh water resources when one island became depleted and could no longer sustain them.

Just as with the Phoenicians though, we are able to track Polynesian seafaring through the archaeological evidence. We have sites and artifacts for these people on far-flung, remote islands. We can trace the archaeogenetics of Polynesian migration across the vast distances of the Pacific from ancient DNA¹⁷. And we even have surviving examples of the voyaging canoes the Polynesians used for their journeys!¹⁸

The point is that seafaring leaves material evidence, as much as any other activity of complex civilizations do. If the Atlanteans were seafarers, we would see evidence of it.

Summing Up:

Let’s conclude this by putting together all the pieces.

Hancock posits an advanced civilization existing during the last ice age. My understanding is that he thinks his Atlantis existed in South America. This civilization was capable of agriculture, monumental architecture, and seafaring. This Atlantis was destroyed in some cataclysm at the end of the last ice age, and its survivors took their skills and knowledge to different cultures as they spread out after the cataclysm, becoming the origins of agricultural civilization all over the world.

If this was the case, we could reasonably expect to see evidence for Atlantean settlements in South America. We would expect to see the physical evidence for their economy, for industries and production of the necessary goods to sustain this level of civilization. We would expect some kind of Atlantean pottery, stone and metal tools, building materials, perhaps jewelry and adornments. We would expect trade goods to move from Atlantean zones into neighbouring cultures. We would expect to find shipwrecks and trading posts and colonies if they were seafarers. We would expect some kind of Atlantean crop package, and we would expect that crop package to have been taken with the exiles across the seas when their civilization collapsed. We would expect to see archaeogenetic evidence linking the places the Atlantean exiles settled after the cataclysm to the Atlantean origin in South America, which means that archaeogenetics in Mesopotamia or Egypt would be linked to South America.

Remember, the last glacial maximum was around 20,000 years ago and the last glacial period is considered to have ended around 11,000 years ago (circa 9,000 BC). So we would need evidence for all of these things, dating back to earlier than 11,000 years ago.

Remember also that highly developed civilizations with agriculture and architecture produce MORE physical remains and archaeological evidence than hunter-gatherer cultures usually do.

Suffice to say, the archaeological record we have doesn’t have this evidence. Unfortunately for Hancock’s thesis, the kinds of evidence that would need to be present to lend credence to his theory just don’t exist.

The theories about Atlantis persist because they make for a good story. Lost civilizations are exciting. Cataclysms are exciting. It’s a compelling narrative, fit for a fantasy novel.

I am left with a question as I finish this piece: How can we make the truth a more compelling story? Because the truth is that Atlantis doesn’t exist and can’t exist, not as people like Graham Hancock relate it. But there’s a voracious demand for archaeological pseudo-theories like Atlantis, as you can see with even a cursory look at YouTube.

Simply telling people there’s no evidence for these theories doesn’t detract from their attractiveness. Indeed, some people seem to believe these theories even more when experts tell them its wrong. I think this is because people WISH it to be true, because the story itself is so cool.

So, then, how can you take the real history and the real archaeology and tell it as a story that also feels cool and exciting? How you can you make the reality feel as exciting and compelling and fascinating to the lay audience as it does to the educated specialist?

That, however, is a question for another day.

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