Somewhat tongue-in-cheek

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Here's my comment to the self-absorbed, over long (1hr 45min) and out-of-touch rant of Dan Richards and Mike Collins on how heritage managers (not, as they falsely claim, "archaeologists") make archaeological monuments available to the public ("Hiding Our Past Right in Front of Us: Live with Wandering Wolf"). I'm guessing, neither of them actually know anybody who work in the US conservation services and have never discovered the library-worth of books, journals, conference procedings, articles in the professional literature, workshops and other sources of information on precisely the whole range of issues surrounding this phenomenon. I wrote, somewhat facetiously, I admit:

Threats to the world's archaeological heritage are an increasingly important topic in these times and do need wide and informed discussion. You should write a book on this based on your experience and publish it as a voice in the discussion. The Getty Institute or the American Institute for Conservation or some other historical preservation society might be interested in publishing it. You cannot really approach UNESCO as the current isolationist policies of the USA have shut that door for Americans.

If you feel so strongly, why not crowdfund a campaign to fight the way archaeological sites often get transformed into tourist attractions - to stop heritage tourism and heritage trail type schemes. But that would be rather hypocritical, given that so much of your own YouTube activity ("been almost everywhere on the planet it seems") is based on this - showing people those sites. Perhaps you could persuade Mr Richards to be the public face of suchg nba campaign, he has a suitable gravitas, eloquence and presence for such an effort.

There is a question here, why these people are NOT writing books but just indulging in muckraking hate-filled ephemeral videochats. I guess it's easier and pays better than the academic publishers.

Smoking the Dead in Prehistoric SE Asia

"Stuff keeps on getting older" crows Graham Hancock referring to an article in 'Phys.org.News': Adithi Ramakrishnan, 'The oldest mummies in the world may hail from southeastern Asia and date back 12,000 years' 'Phys.org.News' September 15, 2025


A new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [of the USA] pushes tha date of the oldest known mummies in the world to examples in southeastern Asia dating back up to 12,000 years.

Researchers found human remains that were buried in crouched or squatted positions with some cuts and burn marks in various archaeological sites across China and Vietnam and to a lesser extent, from the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Studying the bones further, scientists discovered the bodies were likely exposed to heat. That suggested the bodies had been smoke-dried over a fire and mummified by hunter-gatherer communities in the area.

Despite Hancock's enthusiam, Ramakrishnan notes criticism emerging that the dating methods used on the mummies could have been more robust and that from the actual evidence we have, it is not yet clear that mummies were consistently smoke-dried across all these locations in southeastern Asia. Today, indigenous communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea smoke-dry and mummify their dead and ethnographic evidence is used in the interpretation of the excavated remains from nine sites with confirmed mummification. The Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene remains relate primarily to hunter-gatherer groups and were stored in caves and rock shelters. The practice of mummification allowed people to sustain physical and spiritual connections with their ancestors, "bridging time and memory", as the paper puts it. The development of a distinct smoked mummification tradition is what would have been needed in humid East and Southeast Asia. These burials, often lacking grave goods, involved smoking corpses to preserve them, with evidence of tightly bound, flexed postures and occasional cut marks suggesting postmortem manipulation to aid binding or fluid drainage. Ethnographic parallels from the Dani and Anga peoples in Papua New Guinea show similar practices of smoking bodies over fires, with mummies displayed or stored rather than buried immediately. The archaeological evidence, including partially blackened bones and disarticulated remains, suggests a complex mortuary tradition involving smoking, delayed burial, and possible ritual defleshing.

The text proposes that smoked mummification may reflect a shared cultural tradition among early Homo sapiens populations across Southeastern Asia, New Guinea, and Australia, potentially dating back to their migration out of Africa. Genetic and craniofacial evidence supports a connection between these ancient hunter-gatherers and modern Indigenous groups, suggesting cultural continuity. Similar flexed burial practices are noted in Northeast Asia (e.g., Jomon Japan, Korea) and Australia, indicating a widespread tradition that may have persisted for millennia, linking physical preservation with spiritual beliefs.

Reference: Hung, Hsiao-chun et al (+22), Earliest evidence of smoke-dried mummification: More than 10,000 years ago in southern China and Southeast Asia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2515103122. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515103122

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Bearded Moaner Gets Graham Hancock Seal of Approval

 He calls it "the fight for the past": 

Graham Hancock (@Graham__Hancock) 15h
Dan Richards takes down another of the sneering snobs who claim to represent real archaeology but whose cheap tactics bring only shame to the profession. There's a fight for the past. In the long run the truth will out:

youtube.com
Stefan Milo Lies About Graham Hancock: Hypocrisy vs Atlantis Stefan Milo attempted to criticize Graham Hancock's latest video, but in doing so Stefan proves he's an ideologue and a hypocrite.

Milo was responding to a talk in which Dan was an invited speaker (Debunking the Debunking Industry) at the Sedona Performing Arts Centre 19 April 2025 as part of an event themed "THE FIGHT FOR THE PAST" held there over Easter weekend 2025 and organized by World ViewZ Media.

Debunking the Debunking Industry 149,226 views Aug 28, 2025 [Post-production: Luke Hancock https://lukehancock.com/]
A presentation by Graham Hancock on the sneering arrogance and restrictive practices of a publicity-hungry group of archaeologists . These self-styled "debunkers" do no original work of their own and contribute nothing to human knowledge but instead spend their time attacking and seeking to destroy the work of others who don't share their limited view of the past. The presentation is followed by a dialogue between Graham and Youtuber Dan Richards ‪@DeDunking‬ whose Dedunking the Past channel has turned the tables on archaeology’s increasingly toxic “debunking industry”.

. The result is a very introverted "he-said-that-Graham-Said,-but-I-say-Graham-said..." that is light on presenting any dociumentationm aside from a pastiche of over-long clips of somebody else's videos. And yet the #Hancockian haters lap it up, tens opf thousands of views fror these folk drawling on how the establishment is getting it wrong and making them into victims.

Of course this whole thing by Richards is a plug:

"Join me this December 5th through 7th in Scottsdale, Arizona for the "Quest for Ancient Civilizations" Conference. I'll be speaking there as will Jimmy Corsetti, Mike Collins, Gary Bucler, AJ Jen Thiel, Hugh Newman, and many, many other people. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be in the warm part of the country and the cold part of the year. Come check it out. Hope to see you there".

Transition to Cultivation in Central Asia 9200 BP

 Another discovery stereotypically depicted by the sensationalist media as "overturning the fixed narrative" 9,200-Year-Old Cave Find Challenges Theories on Farming’s Origins" Max Planck Institute of GeoanthropologySeptember 6, 2025

Excavations in Toda Cave in the Surkandarya Valley of southern Uzbekistan have yielded a material that indicates the roots of farming in the Old World extended far beyond Anatolia, North Africa and the Fertile Crescent. The interdisciplinary study of the results of this project reveals that by at least 9,200 years ago, communities as far north and east as southern Uzbekistan were also harvesting wild barley using sickle blades. This evidence was discovered by an international research team led by Xinying Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, working under the guidance of Farhad Maksudov, director of the Institute of Archaeology in Samarkand.

Excavation of the cave’s oldest layers produced stone tools, charcoal, and preserved plant remains. Archaeobotanical analysis, led by Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, confirmed that the cave’s inhabitants gathered wild barley from nearby valleys. Other recovered plant remains included pistachio shells and apple seeds. Examination of the limestone tools and flakes revealed wear patterns consistent with cutting grasses and other plants—patterns that closely match those found at sites associated with early agricultural activity.

There are several problems with this type of journalistic narrative. Firstly grasses grow pretty widely all around the globe, and they have edible seeds. Lots of mammals survive on a basic diet of grass and grass Early hominids almost certainly was not ignorant to what could and could not be eaten in the environment surrounding them. So it is not really all that surprising to find evidence of the collection, storage, consuption, and perhaps even propagation of this resource. So evidence is known from the "Fertile Crescent" (the archaeology of which is a product of European colonialism, and then  imperialism in the area of the former Ottoman Empire), Southern Anatolia (Catal Huyuk and the Tas Tepeler sites), quite a lot of sites right across North Africa (Sahara, Maghreb) that tend not to be noticed that much in the anglophone literature. Quite a lot of these sites are associated with hilly regions (and caves) so its not really all that surprising to see examples of sites producing such evidence to the east too. Probably it's fairly predictable where we could look for more in this part of the world. Its a matter of doing the fieldwork.   

Reference: “9,000-year-old barley consumption in the foothills of central Asia” by Xinying Zhou, Robert N. Spengler, Bahediyoh Sayfullaev, Khasanov Mutalibjon, Jian Ma, Junchi Liu, Hui Shen, Keliang Zhao, Guanhan Chen, Jian Wang, Thomas A. Stidham, Hai Xu, Guilin Zhang, Qingjiang Yang, Yemao Hou, Jiacheng Ma, Nasibillo Kambarov, Hongen Jiang, Farhod Maksudov, Steven Goldstein, Jianxin Wang, Dorian Q. Fuller and Xiaoqiang Li, 25 August 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2424093122.

"It looks Like": (mis)Reading the Monuments

Chamala Harris ( @Axetrax) producer of hip hop from Arizona knows how the Egyptians did it:

Matt you you agree that the glyphs on walls are pressed into geopolymer that lightly coats the walls? Where the glyphs exist you can see it chipping off leaving grey wall under. Could the great pyramids have been full of those too but they were chipped off completely?

[the alleged 'geopolimer' is the stones from which the walls were built, what Mr Harris takes as the original wall is porous gap-filler, deliberately set off below the face of the inscrition to make clear what is original work and what has been added - a fairly typical technique in the conservation of monuments].

The photo shows part of the wall of the Gateway of Hadrian at the Philae Temple Complex in Egypt. This is a late-period cultic building built between 117 and 180 CE to honour Emperor Hadrian. The part shown in the photo is the latest known inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The relief depicts the god Mandulis. At the bottom, a text in Coptic is written in demotic script. The Originally located to the west of the Temple of Isis, it's one of the many structures of the Philae complex that were moved to a new island, Agilkia, to save them from flooding by the Aswan Dam. Hence the gap-filling made during the re-erection of the original elements.