This morning I read a piece in the New York Times about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. I had never heard of it before. In a nutshell, a group of scientists announced in 2007 that they had discovered evidence of a group of meteor impacts dating to about 12,900 years ago. They believed these impacts explained the sudden cooling period known as the Younger Dryas, which lasted for a little over a thousand years.
It was an intriguing hypothesis, but the geological community fairly quickly poked a whole bunch of holes in it, and it's not widely accepted these days.
But that's not what interests me. The YDIH is an extremely complex theory that involves detailed knowledge of obscure fields. What's more, it obviously has no political valence. It is neither liberal nor conservative.
But about a year ago a guy named Graham Hancock promoted the theory in a Netflix documentary series called “Ancient Apocalypse.” The Times reports what happened next:
Articles rebutting (or ridiculing) the show appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The Nation and a host of other left-leaning publications. Conservative media outlets ran glowing reviews. “The propaganda press may not care about science, but they do care about controlling the public discourse for the benefit of the political left,” a reporter wrote in The Federalist, in an article titled “The Lying Media Told Me Not to Watch Netflix’s ‘Ancient Apocalypse,’ So I Did.” The Daily Caller, the conservative website co-founded by Tucker Carlson, declared the Society for American Archaeologists an “elitist, closed-minded cabal,” linking its unchecked power to the “collapse of the American idea.” The debate over the show focused largely on Hancock’s lost civilization, including his discussion of Atlantis, which was wiped out, he said, during the Younger Dryas.
It's flatly inconceivable that a layman could have an independent opinion about the YDIH. It's vastly too arcane. The only thing you can do is accept the conclusions of people who are experts.
And on that score, liberals generally accepted establishment science while conservatives widely insisted the establishment was corrupt and in service to the left. This despite the fact that there's no plausible way in which a meteor impact thirteen millennia ago could possibly be left coded.
So why the popularity of the YDIH among conservatives? Just a general fondness for conspiracy theories, I suppose. If the establishment is corrupt, then everything the establishment says is corrupt, even if it's just about a flock of meteors thousands of years ago.
Part of it is the near-fetishism of apocalypse on the Right. The whole "storm front" thing -- big among the Nazis as well as today's Republicans -- and the notion of an all-powerful savior cleansing the nation / earth of Bad Stuff -- very much including Those People and their Bad Thoughts -- eg Hitler, Trump, end-times Jesus. It fits with the sense of powerlessness and loss of status, with the never-ending grievance and resentment, and with the propensity to violence. They WANT something like that (which of course will be nothing less than a Total Victory for them), and so of course any know-it-all-elitist "scientists" pooh-poohing the idea that something like that actually happened MUST be a Deep State plot to keep them down, censor their speech, control their minds and brainwash their children, froth, foam, etc.
Fetishism of apocalypse "by the right" seems like a strange thing to claim in the same month that we're being told about the existing "apocalypse" in Gaza and the forthcoming "apocalypse" that will be Agenda 2025...
I’m guessing if you trace it down it somehow leads back to the usual conservative argument that climate change isn’t man made so we shouldn’t do anything about it
You could trace it back to some people enjoying a fun story. But those that just cannot let politics go for a single, sad minute, will code left/right into silly stories about Atlantis. Much as they drag politics into every imaginable topic.
The Federalist managed to draw a parallel between the media's mockery of the Atlantis comet story and the supposed "censorship" of the Hunter Biden Laptop Story™.
Exactly my thought about climate change being the linchpin. If a meteor swarm caused the Younger Dryas, which was a kind of climate change, then it warms the heart of climate deniers who will say "See? It proves that any time the climate changes, it's a natural cycle!"
Same old shit. It never ends.
It's simpler than that. It's cleek's law: "Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily". The parts quoted by KD are literally doing what cleek's law says.
I saw about 1.25 episodes of this series on Netflix. Early into the second episode I de-selected it from my list and reported it to Netflix as quackery. I didn't need to consult anywhere on this. Hancock keeps showing up on screen explaining that the establishment academics rejected him, didn't want anything to do with him, but eventually all came around to see things his way without giving him credit. A complete delusional tour, but one guaranteed to attract those looking to fuel their anger at academia. No surprise news sources reported the same.
I mean, not only is it "not surprising" that a nincompoop like Tucker Carlson can all of a sudden decide to have an opinion on 12,000 year old geology (hold on a sec, isn't quite a few of this crew of the opinion that the Earth is only like 3,000 years old? WTF), its a perfect example of conservative contemporary thinking.
Its even better, its almost a perfect case study. The only better case study would be something completely made up, but the YDIH can do as its so obscure its close enough.
Whatever liberals think, they are against it.
Oh for Christ's F-ing sake! About five minutes of googling showed that one of the proponents ties the meteor Apocalypse to global flooding to supporting the take that "Noah's Ark" is factual.
I mean, of course. Sheesh. That's why a bunch of doofus conservatives are in favor of it.
But there's a much more reasonable event to tie Noah's Ark to already. The flooding - dramatic level change - of the Black Sea is pretty well established, right? I mean, there are ruins of human dwellings a hundred meters below current sea level. My understanding of this is that a glacier blocked the Bosporus, and finally when it melted, bam, flooding.
I, for one, think there's plenty of evidence for a Great Flood in the Black Sea region in Stone Age times. It's even remembered in the writings about Gilgamesh.
So, maybe meteor strikes didn't have anything to do with it.
My take is that anything that undermines the science establishment is good in some conservative circles. Because science comes with uncomfortable truths. But the real money pushing this forward is fossil fuel money. Undermine the geologists and all the earth scientists. They don't know nothin, and they are agenda driven.
As a propagandist, this would be good strategy.
It's probably popular for a variety of reasons:
It's an example of climate change that has nothing to do with human activity.
Any opportunity to "own the libs" must be taken.
It's a chance to be uniquely "smarter" than experts.
It involves Atlantis, which appeals to the conspiracy minded. Conspiracists used to be more evenly distributed politically, but have shifted right in recent years.
Because it's so obscure, they can easily "win" arguments about it with liberals they know.
Up until a few years ago it would have bizarre to think disbelief in a virus or the usefulness of vaccines would be widespread on the right, yet here we are.
You can enjoy stories of Atlantis without believing in Atlantis. I certainly do. Up until a few years ago people could also like goofy stories without it being some imaginary right wing code.
Why Atlantis and not Mu? I think I prefer Mu, but only because of this:
https://youtu.be/NZo0JRUyDnw?si=08eeqjaWJVQKNQ4p
This looks amazing! I'm watching it the first chance I get.
I saw the English Language version in a movie theater when it came out in the 60’s. Alas, you probably won’t get a chance to see it that way but it is available to rent at Amazon. I’d love to see the subtitled version.
Because Mu/Lemuria/Kumari Kandam impacted the east and our civilization descends from the west, so Atlantis, Ultima Thule, Hyperborea.
Ugh. I have enjoyed Hancocks preposterous and entertaining books for years. I also enjoy the even more preposterous "Ancient Aliens" on the "History" Channel. I feel like I saw this happen over the years in real time. Because Hancock rubbed some academics the wrong way, they had to deploy the painfully overused "Right Winger" smear. It's just tiring. Let people have their fun and save the endless, performative fights for things of at least some importance.
Some people watch one of the 1000's of Real Housewives, I watch Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse. Those are my guilty pleasures.
There is a TV usually turned to History where I work. Usually it's ancient aliens but yesterday Lawrence Fishbourne was hosting a program on Somerton Man, a real mystery of an unidentified body in Australia from the early 1950s (they think they have id'd him only in the last few years). I was quite surprised!
Atlantis. Really? 12,000 years ago???
Agriculture was just starting around then...
The agriculture that you know of. Not the agriculture of the Atlanteans! They were growing potatoes the size of pumpkins!
I forgot about their outposts in the Amazon rain forest and up into the mountains of Peru...
😉
All the gods of your mythological dramas were from fair Atlantis...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAMYGzwUTK4
Scientists have no head for marketing. YDIH? Really?
How about Big Explosions Earth Fucked! Or Slam Hits Into Terra?
Those will get more traction.
they're not conspiracists; they only pretend to accept conspiracies when it serves a right-wing purpose
a true conspiracist would grab a mix of things from the conspiracy menu without regard to politics
what they have is defiant oppositional disorder:
Temper tantrums
Blaming others for their own inappropriate behavior
Irritable mood
Use of unkind and hurtful words towards others
Vindictive and malevolent intent in words and actions
Physical aggression towards others and bullying
“The Lying Media Told Me Not to Watch Netflix’s ‘Ancient Apocalypse,’ So I Did.”
I think that sentence right there tells you everything you need to know. The Right wing's never ending need to oppose everything the left does (or who they perceive as being left regardless of if it is true or not), and their complete detachment from any type of rational thought is so extreme, that if tomorrow a bunch of papers started saying that scientists think that humans with flying abilities are a rightwing myth, a whole bunch of rightwingers would start jumping of buildings and other high places.
Now THAT's a good idea. Any takers? WaPo? NYT? The Nation?
BIG headlines about those flying humans!
Because it's a natural system that induced a radical change in the climate. If natural systems alone can effect big, sudden changes, then, anthropogenic climate change is unrealistically irrelevant or at least too tiny to make a critical impact on life.
I've always thought that this argument, that climate change is happening but it's not manmade, is actually worse news, because it means we're largely powerless to stop this apocalyptic thing that is definitely happening. Anthropogenic climate change is actually the hopeful, optimistic, positive perspective.
Regardless of source, one would think that anthropogenic climate change denialists would at least accept the need for mitigation. They do not.
I find this part all the more puzzling; if you know it's coming and unchangeable, you should support mitigation. So I take this to mean that folks are just looking for excuses not to have to pay more taxes and fees.
If God is heating up the planet, who are Men to oppose the will of God?
Where's that flock of meteors when you REALLY need them?
"flock of meteors"
I loved their first album, before they sold out.
Yeah, a lot of it is oppositional defiance in service to their craving for victimhood.
One of the most plausible theories if Trumpism and reactionism in general is the loss of status of its core constituency, white uneducated males. Thus they need to see the world as a fundamentally unjust place where dark forces conspire against the rightful order of things.
of course 'oppositional defiance' is just a clinical term for 'asshole'
in trump's case we can toss in 'lying sack of shit' - gratis
LYing Shithead Oppositional Lunatic? LYSOL disorder?
Just spitballing here ...
i'd wear that hat
Yes, as I keep saying, when tribal identity is aroused to a critical pitch, everything the other side says or does is wrong and everything your own side does is noble and/or justified. This usually involves trust in the leader, whoever that may be. Maybe he is regarded as dominant like the huge beachmaster among elephant seals. Although the human leader can be female, like Margaret Thatcher.
This almost always occurs in major wars, but can also happen in civil breakups, like our Civil War or the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The idea that this kind of hostility could have a mainly economic basis is absurd, although the tribal hostility among the general population can be aroused for economic reasons, that is for the benefit of the moneyed classes.
Ah yes, the Republican meme that both sides are equal. Except for the fact that Science is designed to overcome bias to reveal actual truth, and one side accepts the current well supported Science, and the other side prefers superstitious ancient stories that support authoritarianism.
There is a plausible partisan motive and it does relate to the climate change debate.
At the moment the Younger Dryas event is thought to be the result of melting ice caps. The theory being that the slow but steady melting as we came out of the last period of glaciation caused the formation of a massive lake (Lake Agassiz) which was kept back from draining to the ocean by ice dams. When those dams eventually weakened and collapsed, a massive influx of cold fresh water into the Atlantic off the northeast coast of Canada disrupted the global thermohaline ocean circulation. That stopped a great deal of heat transfer from the equator to Greenland and northern europe, and cooled the global average temperature.
The connection to today's climate "debates" is that there is accumulating evidence that the thermohaline currents are altering and the gulf stream in particular is slowing and there are renewed fears that these long-stable currents may change or stop.
I suppose saying the Younger Dryas was caused by meteors gives the climate deniers another talking point to obfuscate the risk of what will likely be an extremely serious alteration to our planetary environment.
Graham Hancock has been pushing "ancient civilization" nonsense for decades now - the sphinx is older than 4,500 years, the layout of the pyramids was intended to model Orion's belt, there are links between various large structures - everything from Egypt to Angkor Wat - that predate any conventional scientific notions of the onset of civilization, etc. They can actually be quite entertaining, if you just turn your brain off for a while. At no point in my familiarity with Hancock (and other writers like him) did I detect a political bias or affinity - until this, and now, that is. But that only figures. Anti- or pathological-science sentiment was mostly bipartisan (see, for example, antivaxxers) until the past couple of decades, when (in America, at least) the GOP has managed to consolidate most of it under their own ignorant umbrella.
For me, it takes a lot of the fun away, and just leaves me with the nonsensical part of Hancock's schtick.
Yes - Hancock has always been conspiracism-adjacent, if not actually a conspiracy theorist.
It absolutely tracks that RWNJ are Hancock fans. He's a conman and a hack.
This will confuse them,
Elephants bury their dead,
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-asian-elephants-dead-calves.html
Now that I think of it this implies mammoths may have done so as well so some of those calves that have been found so well preserved in Siberia may have been deliberately buried.
The Federalist was honest enough to admit its motivation for defending Hancock:
Undermining public confidence in science is another part of the overall "chaos" strategy.
The topic of ancient giant floods is covered here,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood#Tectonic_basins
Oh, wait,
https://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/10/13/itsaliens.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg
Of course.
" . . . a reporter wrote in The Federalist, in an article titled “The Lying Media Told Me Not to Watch Netflix’s ‘Ancient Apocalypse,’ So I Did.”
And she sounds like an idiot. Does that rag have any credibility outside of MAGA?
https://thefederalist.com/author/evitaduffy/
You're leaving out the fact that Science doesn't have anything to say about the existence of God and therefore, anything that Science says is not to be trusted and is probably a lie.
But 12,600 years ago is .. um num num . . . 6573 years before God created the universe.
Is what I'm saying.
Ok, I give-up, where’s Waldo the pet Sabre-tooth tiger?
I believe this picture is AI generated (it has that f e e l) and the animal is on the left, rearing up on its hind legs. The title should be The Nanosecond of Awe.
Derp. Didn't read the caption closely enough. Oh course it's AI derived, it's crap.
I don't recall reading that particular ditty in Genesis. Are these guys sure they're Christians?
The guy has been selling his book(s) on this for a long time (and IIRC, he's removed some of the most overt racist material over the years too) The whol upshot of Atlantis stuff to these folk is: we all know brown skinned people couldn't have made these things themselves, a white man must have come along and shown them how!
And why is this on Netflix? Because the man's son is/was in charge of Netflix's "senior manager of unscripted originals."
I swear, look this up, look this guy up, and the racist conspiratorial thinking is pretty easy to find.
Also: Finally! A legit use for GPT-4.
The closer you look at the picture the weirder it gets. For instance, did you notice hat guy?
Yeah, right? And the perspective of the people in the distance - it's all fouled up. And I think there's a boat crashing in the rapids.
And spontaneous ice forming on the left side of the river?
Likely never enough evidence to confirm or reject this theory of a comet impact around that time, the core of science is not to jump to conclusions without a preponderance of evidence (whichever way), although surprisingly more evidence is being found to support this hypothesis.
This time frame roughly correlates with references to Atlantis being destroyed in a flood (although some claim original time reference was exaggerates), but the presence of "Atlantis" isn't hard to really imagine either, considering the amount of coastal land back then fully submerged now, not knowing exactly where to look, and that they were merely described as a particularly dominant sea people and trade culture, not ascribed magical powers and the like (and more sea people kept coming in the following millenia).
The thrust of this article from PubMed is particularly interesting and worthy of deliberation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34986034/#:~:text=The%20hypothesis%20proposes%20that%20the,the%20Clovis%20Paleo%2DIndian%20culture.
We can take just about any issue and ask, "What would an asshole say?" And the answer is almost certain to be the right-wingers response to it.
But about a year ago a guy named Graham Hancock promoted the theory in a Netflix documentary series called “Ancient Apocalypse.”
I hadn't heard of the meteor-Dryas hypothesis until now. But in general, Graham Hancock is a highly successful provider of junk science. A complete crank.
The part about Atlantis is all I need to know that this guy's full of it. We ALREADY KNOW where the legend of Atlantis comes from: the Thera eruption on the island we now call Santorini circa 1500 BC, which destroyed most of the island and the settlement that was located there. Plato's report of the story, from 1000 years later, obviously contains all the usual distortion and embellishments that you'd expect from a story passed down in oral tradition, but the origin of the story is obvious. No alternative explanation is either necessary or credible.
Well, we THINK we know it was Santorini. It's not conclusive.
But yeah, my money's on it either being 100% made up or based on something like Santorini, or even just another version of the ancient flood myth/legend that shows up across the world.
You seem VERY certain about something there cannot be certainty about, especially when the leading theory is that Plato just made it up, and where there is no consensus among those who are considered experts in the field lol. I'm guessing you and your crew took some bong hits one night and figured it all out for us, for which I extend my profound thanks.
Amazing.