Graham Hancock Gone with the fairies or Visionary?

The author Graham Hancock has continuously challenged the prevailing view of how human history has unfolded by openly questioning the time line given to man's emergence from ignorant semi civil upstanding ape who lives in small dispersed groups to civilized homo sapiens employing agriculture, building techniques, mining and most importantly, the writing of language or at least its depiction whether by means of symbols, pictograms or words. In so doing, he encourages us to think 'outside the box' because the facts do not fit the theories and conclusions that are the basis of what is considered to be academically proven.

The usual example given is of the age of the Sphinx in Egypt where Geologists (with no axe to grind) have conclusively proven that the date accepted is far too young as the weathering pattern of the Sphinx and its surround must have occurred at a far earlier date. The tiresome response of the Archeologists is to both ignore this factual quantifiable and verifiable information and dismiss the Geologists as ignorant of the complexities of Archeology as they have not qualified in this discipline. But the facts stubbornly remain the facts! So we continue to learn and use useless information .Without doubt, this holds us back from defining the emergence of various abilities that humans began to employ in respect to historical time lines. Mr. Hancock has come up with many troubling pieces of information for the Archeologists who continue to refute them resolutely.Most,if not all 'professionals' will do their damndest to protect their positions and this always means the accepted academic information which is treated as irrefutable gospel. But this inevitably leaves us with profoundly wrong conclusions and therefore wasted time when this basis is used to provide the starting point for further research, discovery and innovation. He has produced many other examples to back his theory that our earliest knowledge and tangible aspects of civilization has been handed down to us from an unknown and unidentified earlier civilization which predates us and was possibly destroyed in a cataclysm of some kind.His weaving of the facts to fit the theory does not differ from that used to create and define what passes for knowledge in the currently accepted version. However he raises many questions regarding the emergence of civilization including where to look for it and how to account for the sudden and often almost overnight appearance of knowledge that can only gained by dint of time spent developing it by hard experience or by it being passed on educationally by those who either learned themselves or gained it over a long period of time spent experimenting and refining. This is obvious to any thinking being but we continue to allow the accepted version to hold sway even though there would have had to have been countless 'Eureka' moments if we are to account for these miraculous leaps in man's knowledge. To be fair, he is an ardent discounter of the aliens providing this knowledge or any of the other fanciful theories used to account for the minimal amount of time taken for the quantum leaps in man's knowledge to occur given the fact that for 2 to 3 hundred thousand years we did nothing of great import. And then over a period of 4 to 5 thousand years, we advanced spectacularly in all fields. In this respect, he is close to the mark as it just does not add up. It would mean that if we continued at this rate, we should by now have conquered the Cosmos or at least the Milky Way. There are many more examples of historical dating being wrong yet stuck in regard to archeological dating from Gobelki Tepi in Turkey to the underwater cities in the sea off the coast of India and the sites in Indonesia. But the archeologists resolutely refuse to alter the dates as this would call into question many other seemingly proven early historical facts regarding man's climb to civilization. Science and more generally knowledge cannot grow and inform us so we can evolve as positively as we are able (given our penchant for self destruction in all its forms). He is a vitally necessary voice raising the bar by openly challenging the status quo even if the result is a re-examination leading us to a more defined and factually based view of the subject. Far from being out with the fairies, he is a very useful and entertaining provider of both information and alternate viewpoints. Knowledge cannot grow if challenges to the accepted facts are dismissed out of hand or ignored. Only by constantly re-appraising what we know to refine and update our meager overall knowledge can we hope to grow and improve our condition.