Thanks for the question! Our knowledge of Graham Hancock’s work is currently limited to a few internet searches (Dan) and a few episodes of his Netflix show (Constantin), but we wanted to make sure we got around to answering this.

A first important point is that our own work focuses on catastrophes that occurred much further back in time: many millions of years rather than tens of thousands, and way before humans even evolved as a species. So our own technical knowledge is still rather different than that needed to evaluate archaeological claims about past civilizations, and to productively wade into the debate surrounding his work.

The events themselves are also rather different in scale: any extinction that may have occurred during the Younger Dryas is still relatively minor in the grand history of life (if otherwise, this would have been observed in the fossil record), while some of the events we’ve been considering genuinely wiped out a large fraction of species present at the time.

On the whole (and speaking now more generally), we do think that questions of past climate changes and societal collapse are interesting ones that deserve to be looked at. Beyond pure intellectual interest, better understanding whether/how climate changes caused collapse in the past seems quite important for humanity’s future.

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This is the only question…shame to have it ignored like this. Why waste our time with an AMA?