Since November 11, the series has been raging on Netflix At the dawn of our history (ancient apocalypsein English), creation of the sensational journalist Graham Hancock who claims, with the help of special effects, to reveal to the general public the hidden truth about our species.
In this case, he affirms that all the achievements of prehistoric civilizations are the fruit of knowledge transmitted to them by the survivors of an original global advanced civilization destroyed by a cataclysm caused by the impact of a comet at the end of the last ice age, nearly 12,000 years ago. The problem ? There is absolutely no archaeological or geological evidence to support this scenario, which Hancock is not even inventing himself, but rather rehashing in today’s sauce by drawing from a pool of antiquated ideas with racist overtones, some of which are over 100 years old.
From a scientific point of view, it is rather simple to prove that Hancock and his acolytes are wrong. What I want to dwell on here is more about the sad framing of the series and what this implies for critical thinking in our society. Many will surely say that it is only a matter of simple entertainment and that it is absurd to take offense at it. But the fact is that this type of programming, which claims to be documentary, in fact contributes to a net impoverishment of the quality of the general public’s ability to discern the true from the tendentious, the credible from the false.
The main strategy for emissions like ancient apocalypse and others Our ancestors the extraterrestrials (published here on Historia) is to assert repeatedly and on the basis of a few carefully chosen data that scientists are actively hiding the truth from their public. The concrete impact of this posture is to perpetuate the idea of an “us against them”, which splits the discourse between good and bad, without leaving space for nuance and gray areas, which are the cornerstones of a sharp critical perspective.
From there, it is only a short step to jeer at the so-called elites, who despise the “little people”, jeers that ring all the more false since the mediatized apostles of pseudo-archaeology are often wealthy authors, animators television or speakers. This is all the more true for archeology since it is generally the pseudo-archaeologists who enjoy more media visibility; let’s remember that Our ancestors the extraterrestrials is in his 18e season…
A corrupt view of the scientific process
Besides this inherent divisiveness, another element of pseudo-scientific discourse that impoverishes critical thinking is the reversal of the burden of proof. This process consists of asserting something that goes against the scientific consensus and insisting that it is up to scientists to show that it is incorrect, rather than providing a coherent body of evidence or new data. to support this claim.
Pseudo-science is therefore based on a corrupt vision of the scientific process in which one seeks elements, generally partial and highly selected data, to support an idea X rather than developing working hypotheses whose credibility is tested against to all available data.
Needless to say, such an approach undermines the confidence that the general public may have in the scientific enterprise and contributes to creating a fertile breeding ground for credulity in which information of dubious quality and fake news abound. This is fueled by the fact that pseudo-science leaves no room for self-correction, which is one of the central components of science: data and hypotheses must be evaluated and tested by our peers before they are accepted. It is therefore not surprising to see that Graham Hancock’s argument in this new series is almost the same today as in his first books, published almost thirty years ago.
What to do, then, in the face of the full-scale attack on the rigor of thought that these programs constitute? It is important to take as a starting point the observation that extraordinary claims should be based on equally exceptional data, something that is sorely lacking in the Netflix series.
It is therefore necessary to encourage the public interested in the past of our species to find out about the context from which the observations on which the ideas conveyed by these programs are based come. Besides an abundance of popular content available online, courses in archeology and critical thinking are also taught at our universities. However, between Netflix and a baccalaureate course, it’s easy to see which will reach the largest audience. The struggle continues.