CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The internet and social media are full of lies and deceit. The reason should be obvious: the truth is often boring and sometimes discomfiting. Lies are better, more interesting, more apt to comfort the fearful.

Some fields of study attract lies more readily than others. Medicine is easy and profitable to lie about – not least because almost everyone is afraid of illness and death. So many medical problems feel intractable, while modern science seems so slow. Science’s emissaries seem so smug and, hence, untrustworthy.

Lying about religion can have a similar effect. The same with lying about war and politics. You can become very famous and very wealthy by spreading fanciful notions about these topics. World War Three is on the verge of breaking out – according to the cesspit of many unruly social media sites.

All of this is obvious and makes sense. Yet another subject could be added to this group. If you’ve not encountered it, it may come as a surprise: social media is full of blatant falsehoods about archaeology and ancient history.

For those who have a passing interest in archaeology, will have seen examples of this. Some of the most famous are widely known. The idea, for example, that all the pyramids in Egypt are connected, part of some immense underground structure left behind by a god-like race that has perished from the earth.

There are also stories about electrical batteries being found from more than 5,000 years ago. Which means that humanity must have experienced something even more technologically developed than today as far back as before the birth of Christ, and our understanding of all history must be rewritten.

And, next, we come to aliens.

For the ancient aliens connection, we must credit Erich von Däniken – he didn’t invent it, but he made it popular. The Swiss archaeologist, who has died aged 90, was probably the 20th century’s most-read author on the subject of an ancient past. But what he wrote was not true. Däniken’s books, most famously Chariots of the Gods, sold many millions thanks to its cocktail of occultism and alien talk.

He said that there were gods from the past who had lived on earth. And in addition to this, they were spacemen. The first book of his was published in 1968, a time of space fever, when the new-age and hippie movements were popular.

Däniken probably never printed a true word in his life. But that doesn’t mean we should dislike or despise him. His books sold millions of copies by giving people what they wanted; he was a novelist, or a spiritualist, dressed in archaeologist’s clothes. It is perfectly permissible to sell fiction in the guise of fact.

Däniken, however, was the progenitor of nastier things that came after him. The biggest social media accounts covering archaeology inevitably traffic in nonsense and lies. Some of the most listened-to podcasts and biggest documentaries talk about ancient aliens or provide narratives that defame real archaeologists as malign fraudsters engaged in a massive cover-up.

There is no doubt that Däniken’s work was an example of the partly-alien, partly-spiritual nonsense that permeates a lot of popular culture.

Many people make millions on the podcast circuit or on social media platforms by saying nothing more than archaeology and medicine are fake; and, by the way, that shadowy figures run the world. The internet is littered with such proliferation.

Däniken showed the shape of media to come. Nowadays, almost all discussion of archaeology on social media is swamped by insane theories, lies, and AI slop – just as “discussion” of politics, and medicine, and technology already is.

Archaeology led where everything else surely followed.