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I think if you dig deeper into his tomfoolery, graham believes that the ancient super civilization's technology was spiritual. If there's magic in play, there's even less evidence that we can find.

My experience is with Earth Science and often they put out adverts for students to study specific topics. They actually have to apply for funding with the topics before even looking for a student.

If you had a topic in mind you would have to convince a professor or supervisor to then pitch that in a funding round. Often they have their own topics they want studied so it would have to be a convincing topic.

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Curious what field you study, as my understanding of PhD research is that it is highly personal and interest driven. Now, I do know people who chose their research based on grants (oh hey, saw-whet owls are getting extra funding, I can eat more than ramen while doing my thesis and similar stories exist) but it’s still a choice/topic of interest in the end

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Yeah I've never heard of anyone having a topic for a PhD in History chosen for them. If someone has ended up in that situation they really didn't try hard to find a supervisor.

Typically how this works is you recognise an area where there is a gap, this is typically something that comes up during your MA research, or otherwise something you've been thinking of for a bit before then. You build up a good base knowledge of the historiography surrounding that topic, and then reach out to those working on or around that topic and see if they would be interested in supervising.

Sometimes it's an outright "sorry, no" for a variety of reasons, and usually there is some discussion and debate about how the project will go, "have you thought of this, have you read this, this has already been done but if you approach it from this angle then..." etc. but not outright "you do this project instead".

There are research projects that professors may be looking for help in that are specific, but that's not PhD level. I.e. "I need a summer researcher to go through these coins and look for x, y, z; build a database that filters a, b, c" or whatever. But that's a different area completely.

Do you have a mute button?

I want to watch it for the site visits, but it's so hard to listen to him drone on about himself.

I actually don't know how History or Arts etc are taught or where you are but here, it's the supervisors that pick the topic for the student (99% of the time anyway). It would often be in the field that the professor is studying usually supporting their work. Maybe in a highly resourced university there may be some blue sky research but as far as I'm aware here, they're all funded to support the work of the professor with topics chosen or suggested by them.

I realise it may vary from country to country and field to field though.

Yeah, I understand having a beef with anthropologists and their hyper-narratives, but anthropologists are not the only people looking back at the past, as you said.

It's easy to mock the subset of cultural anthro's who think every ancient site or artifact was tied to a "fertility ritual" at the "dawn of agriculture," but they don't speak for everyone.

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He's also much better-known and much more profitable than most academic researchers ever will be, so the martyr complex is just a marketing tool.

First strike was 'I'm not an archaologist or a scientist, I'm a journalist'

Second and third strike was Rogan.

I hate how it's presented. It insults one's intelligence. There's a lot of interesting archaeological and geological features but instead of focusing on that, they're having this guy jetset to vacation spots, look at some shit that vaguely resembles a road or whatever, and jump to a conclusion that "it must be manmade." Why? What is his evidence? Because it's obvious, just look at it.

I wish there was a little PSA that says “it’s fun but also not fact. Enjoy at own risk”. I really enjoyed the series mainly for the rabbit holes I get reading into established academia. I like the imagination in these theories just for thought experiments but would never actually believe them without some more balance and peer review. Interesting stuff tho. Wish there were more funding in the sites he does ask about, especially gobleke tepe and more sub saharan sites.

You do not get Netflix money by going with the narrative.

This is how I approach both. I called Ancient Apocalypse "Hancock's Batshit Crazy" because while entertaining and fun brain fodder, it's crap. But it was cool seeing local geography when he was in the scablands.

After watching the show in a complete suspension of disbelief, I have concluded from the evidence that ancient snake men taught people how to farm and build. See what happens when you take scattered evidence and draw a false parallel?

This is why reviewers of PhD theses (and sometimes MAs, it depends) are people outside of the department, outside of the university, and often anonymous. It's also why it's highly discouraged that people work at the same universities that they got their degrees at (although it's not unheard of). We don't care if you can make your supervisor happy. We don't care if you can repeat what your department head likes. We need to show that you can work with the wider academia, and that you can tread water in groups outside of your safety net.

My supervisors and I regularly disagreed on things. But it was my work, and they only stepped in to strongly discourage if they knew for a fact that I was wrong -- and could show it. If I had the evidence to back up my points that's what mattered in the long run.

There is no grand conspiracy to keep people all thinking the same way, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how academia works. If your idea has no basis in reality then yes, it's going to get shot down, but that doesn't mean that the department isn't open to new ideas, it's just that that idea sucks.

Yeah, we know quite a bit about the Hittites; they’re by far the best attested of the Late Bronze Age powers after Egypt, though the distribution of sources is decidedly uneven in terms of location, date, and contents. I discussed Hittite archives in this post.

I recommend starting with Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites by Trevor Bryce, essentially a greatly condensed combination of his earlier books (The Kingdom of the Hittites and Life and Society in the Hittite World). The Hittites and Their World by Billie Jean Collins is also a pretty good introductory overview, especially the chapter on Hittite religion.

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But they have to actually defend it, with evidence, through peer-reviewed works. They can't just say "ain't it slightly suspicious that.... therefore advanced race of early humans is obvious".

Two sides, usually more, are constantly arguing one way or the other, and as time goes on there are shifts, sometimes definitive ones. That's academia in a nutshell. It's fluid, it's constantly changing, but it has strict baseline requirements for evidence.

One that is commonly used for undergrads is: tell me when and where the trireme was invented. The ancient sources don't seem to agree, and the one that really comes out swinging is written long after the others. The archaeological evidence is a bit clearer, but still hard to say as ships don't tend to preserve well in the long-run. So throughout the 19th and 20th centuries historians were looking all the evidence they had and arguing one way or the other, all with some fantastic points of view and interpretations -- academia ENCOURAGES this. This is what we do.

But you do need evidence to back up your interpretation.