The “apocalypse” in Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse is a hypothetical global catastrophe of biblical floods and continent-wide conflagrations. It was supposedly triggered by the impact of tens of thousands of fragments of a broken comet that burst in the air like bombs or exploded when they slammed into the ground. No spoiler alert is necessary. Hancock serves up a not-so-subtle animated shower of descending comets that graces the opening title sequence of every episode. The story’s narrative arc puts it on a trajectory that makes an impact hypothesis inevitable, even though Hancock avoids the word “comet” until the final episode teaser.
The supposed cataclysm’s timing coincides with the beginning of the Younger Dryas, an interval of cold climate at the end of the last ice age in much of the northern hemisphere that lasted about 1,200 years. Its year of onset is not the same everywhere, but its beginning is best discerned from an abrupt drop in temperature recorded in isotope data from Greenland ice cores in an annual layer that fell as snow about 12,920 years ago. The Younger Dryas is the latest in a series of 26 similar cold periods that took place over the last 120,000 years, called “Dansgaard-Oeschger events” (named after Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger) that paleoclimatologists attribute to changes in ocean circulation caused by the influx of fresh water from melting ice sheets.1