User:BrerRabbit101/New Atlantis and Pseudoarchaeology

New Atlantis and Pseudoarchaeology

This long thread of interpretations dating back to the 16th century has culminated today in what some are calling the "New Atlantis" phenomenon (not to be confused with the work of Sir Francis Bacon). It combines New Age beliefs with "a unique blend of anti- and pseudoscience." They maintain many of the same beliefs of Atlantis; however, the continent has been stripped of the name given by Plato and it has been presented as "new thinking" Writer Graham Hancock’s work is an exemplary illustration the force driving this movement: pseudoarchaeology. This title has been earned from the authors’ inflexible stance toward evidence and their neglect of context, two critical features of academic archaeology.

Graham Hancock

Hancock, in the tradition of Erich Von Daniken and his bestseller Chariots of the Gods, sparked a tremendous revival of alternative interpretations of the past with his 1995 book The Fingerprints of the Gods. This book outlines his theories on the origins of civilization: that there was an advanced civilization that was destroyed at the end of the last ice age, as well as that the elite survives spread to all continents, bringing civilization to the "primitive" indigenous peoples of the world. Hancock, like many other writers on the subject, sees connections between the ancient cultures of the past all over the globe and seeks to tie them together with a universal, hyperdiffusionsist theory. This time, however, the lost civilization did not come from Atlantis, but Antarctica. Taking form Charles Hapwood’s theories of "earth-crust displacement" and Rand Flem-Ath’s interpretations of the phenomenon, Hancock hypothesized that Antarctica had once been at 30 degrees closer to the equator and had suddenly “slipped” in its entirety to its present location, a consequence of a magnetic pole reversal. This new interpretation on the old myth pulls from a wide variety of "evidence" in support of his claim, drawing from a wide variety of disciplines within science, art, and religion; however, with each unsubstantiated assertion comes fallacious thinking (see Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things) and/or contradiction against existing academic knowledge, making this work ineligible for scientific consideration.

Criticism

What scientists have discovered about plate tectonics and paleomagnetism (among other disciplines) rejects the possibility of a "lost continent" without question. Furthermore, hyperdiffusionist theories (see hyperdiffusionism) are equally improbable and contradictory to anthropological knowledge of culture and human evolution. However, while these lost continent myths are now refutable by science, many works like these are still presented as science and some people believe it to be, despite the contradiction, a situation that becomes incredibly problematic. When history is decoupled from rational analysis, it itself is transformed into mythology, which can have extensive consequences.