Graham Bruce Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer who promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica.
Born in Edinburgh, Hancock studied sociology at Durham University before working as a journalist, writing for a number of British newspapers and magazines. His first three books dealt with international development, including Lords of Poverty (1989), a well-received critique of corruption in the aid system. Beginning with The Sign and the Seal in 1992, he shifted focus to speculative accounts of human prehistory and ancient civilisations, on which he has written a dozen books, most notably Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods. His ideas have been the subject of several films, including the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022), and Hancock makes regular appearances on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss them. He has also written two fantasy novels and in 2013 delivered a controversial TEDx talk promoting the use of the psychoactive drink ayahuasca.
Reviews of Hancock's interpretations of archaeological evidence and historic documents have identified them as a form of pseudoarchaeology or pseudohistory containing confirmation bias supporting preconceived conclusions by ignoring context, cherry picking, or misinterpreting evidence, and withholding critical countervailing data. His writings have neither undergone scholarly peer review nor been published in academic journals.
Early life and education
Graham Bruce Hancock was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He moved with his parents to India at the age of three, where his father worked as a surgeon. Having returned to the UK, he graduated from Durham University with a degree in sociology in 1973.
Career
As a journalist, Hancock worked for many British papers, such as The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian. He co-edited New Internationalist magazine from 1976 to 1979, and was the East Africa correspondent of The Economist from 1981 to 1983.
Prior to 1990, Hancock's works dealt mainly with problems of economic and social development. Since 1990, his works have focused mainly on speculative connections he makes between various archaeological, historical, and cross-cultural phenomena. He has stated that from about 1987 he was "pretty much permanently stoned ... and I felt that it helped me with my work as a writer, and perhaps at some point it did".
His books include Lords of Poverty, The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis (released in the US as Message of the Sphinx), The Mars Mystery, Heaven's Mirror (with wife Santha Faiia), Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, and Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith (with co-author Robert Bauval). In 1996, he appeared in The Mysterious Origins of Man. He also wrote and presented the documentaries Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age (2002) and Quest for the Lost Civilisation (1998).
In Hancock's book Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, co-authored with Robert Bauval, the two put forward what sociologist of religion David V. Barrett called "a version of the old Jewish-Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists." They suggest a connection between the pillars of Solomon's Temple and the Twin Towers, and between the Star of David and The Pentagon. A contemporary review of Talisman by David V. Barrett for The Independent pointed to a lack of originality as well as basic factual errors, concluding that it was "a mish-mash of badly-connected, half-argued theories". In a 2008 piece for The Telegraph referencing Talisman, Damian Thompson described Hancock and Bauval as fantasists.
Hancock's Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, was published in the UK in October 2005 and in the US in 2006. In it, Hancock examines paleolithic cave art in the light of David Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological model, exploring its relation to the development of the fully modern human mind.
In 2015, his Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization was published by St. Martin's Press.