Okay, y'all know I can't resist a hack having a go at archaeology.
So I'm gonna watch Ancient Apocalypse so I'm prepared to rant about everything that's wrong with it when somebody inevitably tries to talk to me about it.
So here we go.
What's wrong with Ancient Apocalypse, episode by episode:
Episode 1
Gunung Padang
7200 year-old cultural layer is 4 meters doen, but the basalt column architecture is on the surface.
These are not the same culture! The more recent (2300 ish BP) culture built the basalt structures on top of the older settlement.
This guy is intentionally misrepresenting the nature of the site and ignoring the first rule of archaeology.
At the lowest levels they tested they're not even proving people lived there, just that they could carbon date a hill.
Chances are, this was a hill, people lived on it for several thousand years, and in the last 2-3 thousand they built it up into the structure we can now see the ruins of.
It's a cool site, but not disproving the archaeological record. If people 7200+ years ago built the structures, why are they on the surface while the cultural layer for these people is 4 meters down? That's not how stratigraphy works.
Nan Madol
Very different architecture than Gunung Padang. They stacked basalt columns like Lincoln logs while Gunung Padang stacked them all in the same direction.
The underwater footage here is laughably bad. Are those even structures? They're much narrower than the ones on land.
Those pillars could be natural, there's no way to tell without scraping some of the muck off and taking a closer look.
Even if they are constructed, they could have been used for breakwaters or piers. There's no proof whatsoever that these were built on land and then submerged.
Nobody is claiming that flood myths can't be remembered stories from the ice age. That isn't something archaeologists reject.
The real question is why he thinks they needed to have a vast, advanced civilisation to remember stories, when we've demonstrated again and again that stories hold a huge amount of cultural and historical memory.
And some final thoughts:
He doesn't seem to think humans are capable of very much? Why is "advanced civilisation" required for humans to have constructed megalithic sites or tell stories?
The research at Gunung Padang is extremely controversial. In a quick google I found a bunch of stuff about how the president at the time was throwing them a lot of funding to "prove" that it was the oldest pyramid in the world and put Java on the map. The dude who did the coring work seems to be pretty unpopular with reputable archaeologists.
Love the way the host goes "archaeologists don't seem to like me!?!" While also yelling "I can't believe you people are so dumb! You never even looked here!" About fairly well-studied archaeological sites.
He doesn't understand the most basic principles of archaeology. For instance, stratigraphy.
"archaeologists won't talk about flood mythologies!" That's right I noticed that in the ENTIRE CLASS we spent talking about flood mythologies in our northwest archaeology course. Spot on.
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This is Jen. They are an alien and also my main oc. I haven’t used them in a while for anything. They aren’t necessarily an undertale / deltarune oc but it’s so fun to like yk.
I’m not a new artist or anything but I’m very new to tumblr.
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just rewatched space sweepers (2021) on netflix and realized something which i don't think is ever actually addressed in text & am not sure if it was supposed to be obvious (bc it didn't even occur to me until now) but - spoilers ahead! -
are james sullivan's occasional body horror episodes a result of a nanobot treatment gone wrong/gone right? like it may be what's keeping him alive well beyond typical human life expectancy, but it's also putting him through excruciating pain. bc we see the veins on his face receding as the hydrogen bomb goes off, and we know that the heat output from an h-bomb explosion is the only thing that can kill nanobots (except the langrangian ones apparently), so.....?? is the reason why sullivan showed up out of nowhere at the last minute bc he was already supposed to be there, trying to get away from the bomb as well?
anyway. the film's been out over a year but i don't remember seeing anything about this particular aspect before. would be pretty interesting if it's actually canon!
also. i hate sullivan's backstory and the bizarre anti-semitic implications; it puts a v significant dampener on an otherwise good film (aside from tiger park's dreads jfc). my proposal for an alternate backstory (developed with my sib) goes:
push back the timeline. make it the 2100s or 2200s. doesn't really matter
following this, sullivan would have been born some time in the first half of the 2000s
instead of a war orphan who turns to eugenics (bruh???), he's instead born into privilege and his dad is basically elon musk. uts corp starts out as basically spacex
keep the nanobots bit! they're injected into him at some point - to cure a sickness, just for the hell of it, whatever. whether or not his dad has a hand in it depends on how heavy-handedly we want to draw the parallels with kot-nim and *her* dad. in any case, seeing how kot-nim's nanobots protect and help her, unlike his, will fuck sullivan up and contribute to why he so badly wants to destroy her after he's done exploiting her
this sullivan is a man obsessed with legacies (and not the "purity" of the human soul holy shit). he struggles at first to uphold his father's legacy. when he surpasses it by building eden, it's a slippery slope. now he wants to leave *his* own mark as flashily as possible, collecting orphans (including tae-ho and captain jang) & "raising" them in his own twisted version of parenthood to be "geniuses"
i think captain jang should have been more sullivan's protégé than tae-ho, which could also explain why she's more reluctant to "parent" kot-nim bc she doesn't know what a healthy parent-child relationship is supposed to look like. would have also given more weight to the revelation that she's tried to kill him multiple times. i like to think tae-ho had a mentor he was close to in the space guard - the closest thing he had to a parent, maybe the one who actually found him first before sullivan literally carried him in his arms to uts. maybe they died just before the mission where he found su-ni, and that's partly why he decided to save her
this film has everything - anti-capitalism, the juxtaposition of blood ties with found family, breaking cycles of abuse, nanobots!
this is A Lot of backstory though - which is why i wish space sweepers had been a tv series instead, so we could also have gotten more on everyone else. in any case, it's still a p good film with a lot of heart and great rewatch value! two hours just fly by!
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