Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock is a British writer and former journalist who reported for publications including The Times, The Guardian and The Economist. From the 1990s he turned to alternative ancient history, with bestsellers such as Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and Magicians of the Gods (2015), and the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022).

His central claim is that an advanced civilization existed during the last Ice Age and was destroyed by comet impacts around 12,900 years ago, at the start of the Younger Dryas cold period, and that survivors passed on knowledge to later cultures in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas. He links this to flood myths, to Plato's date for Atlantis, and to Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which he presents as a legacy of that lost culture.

Many archaeologists reject these arguments as pseudoarchaeology, saying he selects evidence and misreads sources and that no trace of such a civilization has been found. The Society for American Archaeology publicly criticized Ancient Apocalypse. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis he draws on is itself heavily disputed among scientists.