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If you don’t fancy turning back to dusty cable again, complete with adverts every 7 minutes, then Netflix have you covered with its latest psuedo-science show, Ancient Apocalypse. Although Graham Hancock (our narrator and host we follow through this show) labels himself more of an investigative journalist, pseudoscience is literally translated to consisting of statements, beliefs or practices that claim to be scientific and factual but don’t actually have methods or facts to back up those claims.

Across the 8 episodes, Hancock and his team jet across the world to various different heritage locations, pointing out and highlighting potential evidence of ancient civilizations that have been around since before our hunter-gatherer ancestors, showcasing ancient civilizations that were here way before them.


While the show is interesting, it’s worth pointing out that it’s highly biased and skewed in one direction. The only mention of scientists or those in the community are in back-handed digs or bad-mouthed retorts, pointing out how scientists don’t know what they’re doing.

It’s actually a shame because Hancock presents some pretty interesting findings but the ripples of mean-spirited ribbing against science doesn’t do his cause any favours. The first episode, for example, looks at Gunung Padang, a site that seems to be evidence of an ancient civilization operating in Indonesia thousands of years ago.

As I said before though, this is a very addictive series and it’s one of those that’s easy to get lost down the rabbit hole, scrambling from mystery to mystery. One episode that’s particularly good for this looks at the Bimini rock formation, that many have pointed to as evidence of the road to Atlantis. This is actually shown off with sonars and equipment to measure the rocks, reinforcing the ideas and really sucking you into the mystery. In fact, I’d argue this is the best episode of the bunch.

However, other chapters go from the compelling to the bonkers with one chapter looking at “Poverty Point” in North America and immediately jumping into believing that the entire site is part of something much bigger, using a lot of “ifs” “maybes” and “I don’t knows” to piece together a civilization fascinated by the sky, and potentially hinting at an apocalyptic climate event.

How much you get out of Ancient Apocalyps depends on what you’re looking for. You won’t get much in the way of balanced viewpoints but tumbling down the rabbit hole and looking deeper at ancient monuments and theorizing that they could be part of something larger is undeniably moreish. This is certainly not a show to take as scientific fact but if you’re looking for more Ancient Aliens and pseudoscience entertainment, this show absolutely has you covered

As an amateur archeologist, I find these things rather laughable, but they are fun to watch.

Not a show I've watched yet, although I have thought about it for the comedy value.

Although it's not quite the same subject as this topic, I saw an interesting YouTube video that said the best evidence that exists for advanced pre-human civilizations having dwelled on this planet is the strange fact that the geological record shows about 75,000,000 years ago there was a spike in carbon levels on Earth that matches anything we have today as a result of our industrialized society. This level of carbon far exceeds anything that nature has ever been known to produce, and the presence of this carbon spikes seems to have been confined to a period of about 20,000 years.

I know there are still probably lost cities out there somewhere.  The book The Lost City of the Monkey god talks about one that was found in the rain forest using basically deep sea scanning techniques.  But the problems with shows like this is they present the lost civilizations as super advanced even beyond what we have now, in a time when the rest of the world was still discovering agriculture and inventing the wheel.  IF there are lost civilizations, they would be most likely offshoots of already existing ones who either never amounted to much or folded back into larger ones.

Ain't the OP just a spammer? 

It's a fun docu series, but it gets bogged down after the third episode. I think the narrative was overly stretched, compensated only by the short running time per episode and the need to exploit the high expense of shooting on location.

Also, I would have concentrated more on reasonable points of investigation that were not pursued, like failure to find out what was beneath the mound in Indonesia or explaining why parts of the tunnels in Mexico were kept locked.