Keanu Reeves teams up with leading pseudo-archaeologist in controversial Netflix series
The second installment of a popular alternative history “docuseries” gets a celebrity infusion.
It’s often disappointing when you discover what an actor thinks (cough cough Mel Gibson). You see them portray a compelling character with a good script and assume they possess a healthy amount of intelligence. No doubt many actors are perfectly smart and capable thinkers. Others, as we sometimes learn, are distinctly the opposite.
Enter Keanu Reeves.
Reeves, star of The Matrix and John Wick franchises, is set to appear in the second season of Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse. In a trailer released September 18, Reeves appears alongside Graham Hancock, the show’s creator and protagonist narrator.
Hancock, a British journalist and author, is a veteran of controversy. His first season of Ancient Apocalypse received harsh criticism from the world of science. And before that, his books and attitude toward archaeology regularly provoked pushback from scientists.
After the first installment of Ancient Apocalypse, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) wrote an open letter denouncing the series for its poor reasoning, vitriol directed at archaeologists, and acceptance of long-discredited and sometimes racist ideas. The SAA recommended Netflix reclassify the series as “science fiction” and “balance the show with scientifically accurate information about our human past.”
Stuart Heritage, a journalist writing for the Guardian in 2022, described the series thusly:
Hancock travels to Malta, to Mexico, to Indonesia, and to the US, purely so he can look at remnants of old structures and insist that they prove his theory. Which isn’t to say that is all he does, of course, because a great deal of every episode is spent railing at the buttoned-up archeological institutions that fail to listen to him (because, according to them, the whole theory doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever).
So what does Hancock believe? Heritage again provides a nice summary:
Hancock believes that an advanced ice-age civilisation — responsible for teaching humanity concepts such as maths, architecture and agriculture — was wiped out in a giant flood brought about by multiple comet strikes about 12,000 years ago.
According to Hancock, it wasn’t the innovations and ingenuity of native populations, from Mesoamerica to Indonesia, that spurred the development of pyramids, temples, and other monumental architecture — it was a mythic Atlantean society for which there is conspicuously no direct evidence. (To explain this curiosity, Hancock claims his society was expunged from the historical record by the comet deluge and resulting flood. How convenient!)
Contrary to his earlier writings, Hancock’s newer work avoids references to the whiteness and Atlantean nature of his hypothesized society. Likely realizing these two elements are no longer fashionable and tie his ideas to historic racists like Ignatius Donnelly, a pioneer of the Atlantis myth, he quietly reshaped his exposition to modern sentiments.
Hancock’s show has an easily discernible appeal to a layperson audience with little knowledge of archaeology (or for an audience whose knowledge of archaeology comes solely from people like Hancock.) His shows are lavishly produced and visit legitimately interesting places.
Hancock’s upcoming series will focus on the Americas as the potential birthplace of this mythic civilization. These archaeological sites, according to Hancock, are “often overlooked by historians of humanity’s origins.”
According to John Hoopes, an archaeologist who specializes in prehistoric Latin America (and who refused to debate Hancock on grounds that it would legitimize his views), the trailer features several well-known archaeological locations in the Americas, including sites from Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and New Mexico. We see shots of the famous Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, and witness Hancock stand awkwardly beneath a stone doorway in Sacsayhuaman, the former seat of the Incan Empire in Cusco, Peru. (I think I have posed awkwardly beneath the same doorway.)
Hoopes also anticipates a few sites not shown in the trailer that will likely get covered in the upcoming show, including the so-called “lost cities” of Upana Valley in Ecuador and cave art from a location in Serrania de la Lindosa in Colombia.
While these sites have not been studied with Hancockian assumptions, they certainly have been studied. Many of these locations see their research published in the most prestigious science journals. The reason they are never framed in Hancock’s perspective is because there is no reason to suggest the sites came from — or are in anyway related to — an elusive super-race.
It isn’t just scientists who dislike Hancock. Back in June, Hancock and his team abandoned a filming location in the Grand Canyon after public outcry from local communities. Native American groups like the Hopi protested Hancock and his team filming at their sites and tried to deny them access to filming permits. (A similar thing happened during season 1.)
It’s unclear Reeves’s role in the show. Deadline reports that he “will join Hancock throughout the series, discussing, among other things, his insights into storytelling as an act of preserving culture.” I’m unsure what insights Reeves’s will offer here, since he’s not a scholar of oral traditions, an enthographer or a linguist. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
Whatever his role, Reeves is doing his part to put a celebrity affiliation behind the views of a man who admitted on the Joe Rogan Experience, in a debate with archaeologist Flint Dibble, to having “no evidence” for his hypothesis (see around 1:27:00). Moreover, his endorsement is likely to push susceptible people further from the world of actual science into one of myth making and conspiratorial thinking — something I think we can agree the world has enough of.
