Ancient A-watchalypse

I really have a lot of work to do. I am going to have a rough week wearing gold watches, gray suits, and buttoning the top button of my dress shirts. I have preparation to do to make the show a good one. But of course, I had a better idea: hate watch all six episodes of the second season of Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. The first season had me hurling invectives at the television while fabulist Graham Hancock twirled invented myths connecting, basically everything, to Atlantis.

As an amateur history and archeology buff, I drink in all things ancient. Hancock’s combination of bitterness and arrogance made the first season worth watching, if only to pause the show to point out just how wrong it was, just how many spurious presuppositions were used, or how many leaps of logic formed his arguments. Good times. Arguing with the television. By myself.

I just watched the second season over two nights. I didn’t yell at the television once. My reaction was muted. The experts used by Hancock did not gush about his Younger Dryas Atlantean theory. They just kept it to what they knew. He had to speculate wildly all by himself. (Ok, there is one guy who thinks Incan stone works were molded by high heat. There is always a crank.) He got one to admit that the bananas found on Easter Island pre-dated human settlement by several thousand years but were nevertheless introduced by humans. Cool, the Polynesians made it to Easter Island twice. The Atlanteans did not bring the bananas.

Hancock made a convincing case that human settlement of the Americas occurred earlier than previously thought. Do you know who else made this case? Archeologists, many years ago, the same stubborn archeologists that don’t accept Atlantis as the source of all civilization. I have a pre-Clovis site four hours from where I live. This isn’t a new revelation.

Hancock also mentions the newer genetic findings that link some Amazonian populations to those found in Borneo and Papua New Guinea. As always, he gets his facts directionally wrong. This is an ancient DNA commonality. These populations have been separated for as many as 30,000 years. These genetic markers were not part of any recent migration. He also treats the carbon in the soil of ancient slash and burn agriculture in the Amazon as something miraculous. However, it was worthwhile to see what ancient sites were newly discovered by recent deforestation (perhaps not much of a silver lining, but…). The world is more remarkable than we realize sometimes, and you can see and learn even if your tour guide is an unreliable narrator.

I had an apocalypse of my own, of sorts today. This week I managed to pull out the crown of my mid-1960’s Mido Ocean Star Datoday. Yesterday, I took it to my watch guy and he informed me that it had been repaired with a one piece stem and this required a two piece stem. That’s why I could pull it out. So, a non-original part. Welcome to vintage watches. Well, that’s bad news, but it gets worse.

He showed me a vintage LeCoultre that he wanted me to buy. We popped the back, and I was surprised to see a tank-style movement in a round case with a steel placer. I didn’t think that it was necessarily original and wanted to do more research. Well, it was original. It was a 1935 LeCoultre Duo Date Reference 2701. When I called back the next day it had sold. I am an idiot. I could have had it for much less than it was worth. I am going to soothe myself by telling myself the little lie that I didn’t like that much anyway. It was only a 1935 all steel radial dial pointer date JLC, with original blued handset. I was about here on my daily walk, talking to my watch guy, and feeling stupid:

This is a Quercus virginiana (Virginia Oak, or Southern Live Oak), and from the size of its trunk, I would guess it to be older than my country. In my neck of the woods these are planted in long rows and can indicate an old plantation house nearby. The plantation house is long gone, probably burned by the Union, but there are still four of five of these along this city street as a reminder of the past. The cluster of resurrection ferns (Pleopeltis polypodioides) at the split indicates that we haven’t had rain in a while. I wish that my watch detection skills were as instant as my plant detection skills. I blame the Younger Dryas.