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FOREWORD: ROMANCING THE STONE

The book you hold in your hands by my friend and colleague Donald Prothero is one of the most captivating you will ever read. Once you start in, you won’t be able to put it down as you will be constantly amazed by what strange ideas people have about our planet. I’ve been studying weird beliefs for over a quarter century, and in reading this book I was still stunned by what some members of my species think about earth, including that it is at the center of the universe, that it is only six thousand years old, that all those dinosaur fossils are faked, that it is a giant magnet, that it is flat, that it is hollow, that it is constantly expanding, that we never visited its moon, that there are mysterious ley lines around it directing the planet’s energies, and that there was once an ancient advanced civilization on it called Atlantis.

On this last claim, on May 16, 2017, I spent nearly four hours on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast debating an alternative archaeologist named Graham Hancock, who believes that long before ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Egypt there existed an even more glorious civilization that was so thoroughly wiped out by a comet strike around twelve thousand years ago that nearly all evidence of its existence vanished, leaving only the faintest of traces that he thinks include a cryptic warning that such a celestial catastrophe could happen to us.

Hancock has put forth variations on this general theme in numerous well-written and best-selling books, including Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995), The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind (1997), Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization (2002), Magicians of the Gods (2015), and most recently America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization (2019). I listened to the audio editions of Magicians of the Gods and America Before, both read by the author, whose British accent and breathless revelatory storytelling style is, I confess, compelling. But is it true? I’m skeptical. As I explained in my June 2017 column in Scientific American: “First, no matter how devastating an extraterrestrial impact might be, are we to believe that after centuries of flourishing every last tool, potshard, article of clothing, and, presumably from an advanced civilization, writing, metallurgy, and other technologies—not to mention their trash—was erased? Inconceivable.”¹

Second, Hancock’s impact hypothesis comes from scientists who first proposed it in 2007 as an explanation for the North American megafaunal extinction around that time and has been the subject of vigorous scientific debate. It has not fared well. In addition to the lack of any impact craters dated to around that time anywhere in the world, the radiocarbon dates of the layer of carbon, soot, charcoal, nanodiamonds, microspherules, and iridium, asserted to have been the result of this catastrophic event, vary widely before and after the megafaunal extinction, anywhere from ten thousand to fourteen thousand years ago. Furthermore, although thirty-seven mammal species went extinct in North America (while most other species survived and flourished), at the same time fifty-two mammal genera went extinct in South America, presumably not caused by the impact. These extinctions, in fact, were timed with human arrival, thereby supporting the more widely accepted overhunting hypothesis.

Third, Hancock grounds his case primarily in the argument from ignorance (since scientists cannot explain X, then Y is a legitimate theory) or the argument from personal incredulity (because I cannot explain X, then my Y theory is valid). These are “God of the Gaps”–type approaches that creationists employ, only in Hancock’s case the gods are the “Magicians” who brought us civilization. The problem here is twofold: (1) scientists do have good explanations for Hancock’s Xs (e.g., the pyramids, the Sphinx), even if they are not in total agreement, and (2) ultimately one’s theory must rest on positive evidence in favor of it, not just negative evidence against accepted theories.

Hancock’s biggest X is Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, with its megalithic T-shaped seven- to ten-ton stone pillars cut and hauled from limestone quarries and dated to around eleven thousand years ago when humans lived as hunter-gatherers without, presumably, the know-how, skills, and labor to produce them. Ergo, Hancock concludes, “At the very least it would mean that some as yet unknown and unidentified people somewhere in the world had already mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civilization more than twelve thousand years ago in the depths of the last Ice Age and sent out emissaries around the world to spread the benefits of their knowledge.”² This sounds romantic, but it is the bigotry of low expectations. Who’s to say what hunter-gatherers are or are not capable of doing? Plus, Göbekli Tepe was a ceremonial religious site, not a city, as there is no evidence that anyone lived there. Furthermore, there are no domesticated animal bones, no metal tools, no inscriptions or writing, and not even pottery—all products that much later “high civilizations” produced.

Fourth, Hancock has spent decades in his vision quest to find the sages who brought us civilization. Yet, decades of searching have failed to produce enough evidence to convince archaeologists that the standard timeline of human history needs major revision. Hancock’s plaint is that mainstream science is stuck in a uniformitarianism model of slow, gradual change and so cannot accept a catastrophic explanation. Not true. From the origin of the universe (Big Bang), to the origin of the moon (big collision), to the origin of lunar craters (meteor strikes), to the demise of the dinosaurs (asteroid impact), to the numerous sudden downfalls of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, catastrophism is alive and well in mainstream science.

The real magicians are the scientists who have worked this all out.

On this final point about scientists as magicians: as someone with zero training in geology, when I read about the work that professional geologists like Donald Prothero have conducted to determine the age, nature, and processes of the earth, I feel exactly the same way I do as when I see the magicians Penn and Teller catch bullets in their teeth or when the magician David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear. When you don’t know how the trick is done—or in this metaphor, how the science is conducted, understanding, say, how geologists determined that the earth is 4.6 billion years old—it feels like magic to me. But once geologists like the author of this book reveal how the secret of science is done, you understand that it’s not real magic, as in paranormal or supernatural forces at work. It’s scientific magic.

Romancing the stone we call earth through all these alternative theories may appeal to our fantasies and imaginations, but ultimately we want to know what is true. So as you read Weird Earth, I hope the scales will fall from your eyes as they did mine when I read it, understanding fully why all those crazy ideas about our planet that people have concocted over the millennia are wrong and why science really is the best tool we have for understanding nature.

MICHAEL SHERMER is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. For eighteen years he was a monthly columnist at Scientific American, and he is the author of a number of New York Times best-selling books, including Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due.

1. Michael Shermer, “Romance of the Vanished Past,” Scientific American 317, no. 6 (2017): 75.

2. G. Hancock, Magicians of the Gods (New York: Griffin, 2015), 32.